Dr. Ashenden Swims the Tiber

It's less of a shock on the theological Richter scale than Newman but still a trembler. Dr. Gavin Ashenden who was a chaplin to the queen is going over to the Roman Catholic Church this next Sunday the 4th in Advent. Over the years he's gradually become alienated from of the Church established by law embracing the world as in 'the world, the flesh and the devil'. As he's made clear it's not so much the change of denomination that draws him it's the chance of doing a job and not simply complaining on the sideline. He will find many 'whited sepulchres' over there even ones that are theologically on message. Whatever will they do with him? Will he suffer the fate of Newman and be sent to Ireland to find that the hostility of the Irish is not leavened by Anglican politeness? Best of luck to him anyway.
dialogue

For Such a Time as this

I never read the Old Testament growing up though of course I heard it read at mass. Esther making a fuss and risking her life to save her people I do not recall ever having heard. It is a salient text in this time when in classic doublespeak health means death. His condition is stable, very stable – he’s dead. As in ‘reproductive health’. Dave Brennan references Esther 4 in his sermon for such a time as this. It is significant that the maundering of the Anglican (Episcopalian) Church is indistinguishable from pro-choice rationales when you put the two side by side. The nearest thing to a mega church in Britain is also reluctant to get involved in the pro-life activism of Brephos.
mega church reluctance

13Then Mordecai commanded to answer Esther, Think not with thyself that thou shalt escape in the king's house, more than all the Jews.
14For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?

Dave Brennan’s sermon is here:
for such a time as this

Koestler, Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition

Sometimes the beliefs of hyper-rational men are subject to long held prejudice. Arthur Koestler would have liked to have been thought of as a man who followed the evidence where it led even when it seemed to stray into avenues of unreason according to scientific rationalists. What though are we to make of this commonplace observation about the depredations of religious persecution.

This may sound like a psychological paradox. Yet I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapers, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls.

(from The Ghost in the Machine)

Torquemada would be generally accepted to be the most assiduous Inquisitor. The Inquisition was continued after his death by Isabella and it is interesting that the Queen’s secretary estimated that 2,000 were executed during her reign.

There are various estimates of the number of victims of the Spanish Inquisition during Torquemada's reign as Grand Inquisitor. Hernando del Pulgar, Queen Isabella's secretary, wrote that 2,000 executions took place throughout the entirety of her reign, which extended well beyond Torquemada's death.[15]

(from Torquemada)


That would be a period of 26 years. Now considering the number of capital crimes in that era I would say this was not anything like the slaughter that Koestler assumes.

Pennies for the Black Babies

Well, said the Bishop, visiting our school “How many here are collecting pennies for the black babies?” I piped up (some things don’t change), “My mammy says we have enough black babies at home”.

The bishop talking to my mother later laughed over this. What though were those pennies for the black babies? It was a fund raising idea by the African missions. You got a card with the picture of a rosary on it and for for every penny you donated you punched a hole on a bead. After you had completed a card you sent it off with your donation and a suggestion for an African baby’s baptismal name. That would be now regarded as spiritual colonialism but it built hospitals and provided educational facilities for very poor places.

What are we to say to the Merciless sisters on a deputation from Ireland’s parliament to Nairobi, Kenya - Catherine Noone, Frances Fitzgerald, Katherine Zappone, dr. Rhona Mahony. They were promoting the legalisation of abortion on demand in African countries at a conference.

Is this pennies for the no black babies?

Some Novels

So I’ve finished The Day the Call Came by Thomas Hinde. Excellent deep died noir about which I can say nothing lest I come to the attention of the spoiler police. And rightly so.

Reading The Idiot by Dostoyevsky in the translation by David Magarshack (Penguin). It’s many years ago since I last read it and of course I remember very little only that I thought it a lesser work than ‘Crime’ and ‘Devils’. However lesser Dostoyevsky is greater almost anybody. I realised that when I finished Part 1 208 pages long that it all transpired within a single long day culminating with an outrageous scene of commotion, tumult and money on the fire.

They all want Natasia whom Totsky the libertine is done with after seducing her as a young woman and keeping her from society for his personal pleasure. He wants to marry the General’s daughter and forego the dowry, a splendid scheme in the view of the prospective father-in-law. The General sees that this gives him a chance to take over this beauty if they can only marry her off to Ganya his secretary. Rogojin also wants the proud wounded Natasia. He has brought 100,000 roubles to the party – her birthday party to persuade her to come with him. She accepts it and to taunt Ganya throws it on the fire saying:

"Well, look here, Gania. I wish to look into your heart once more, for the last time. You've worried me for the last three months—now it's my turn. Do you see this packet? It contains a hundred thousand roubles. Now, I'm going to throw it into the fire, here—before all these witnesses. As soon as the fire catches hold of it, you put your hands into the fire and pick it out—without gloves, you know. You must have bare hands, and you must turn your sleeves up. Pull it out, I say, and it's all yours. You may burn your fingers a little, of course; but then it's a hundred thousand roubles, remember—it won't take you long to lay hold of it and snatch it out. I shall so much admire you if you put your hands into the fire for my money. All here present may be witnesses that the whole packet of money is yours if you get it out. If you don't get it out, it shall burn. I will let no one else come; away—get away, all of you—it's my money! Rogojin has bought me with it. Is it my money, Rogojin?"
"Yes, my queen; it's your own money, my joy."

(Eve Martin trans.)

There’s a succession of such marvellous ‘skandaly’ (Ru. ‘scene’) and darkly comic speeches from a dying consumptive.

Mrs. Yepachin, the general’s wife, and her daughters. Here they are:

All three of the Miss Epanchins were fine, healthy girls, well-grown, with good shoulders and busts, and strong—almost masculine—hands; and, of course, with all the above attributes, they enjoyed capital appetites, of which they were not in the least ashamed……..

Mrs. Epanchin had a fair appetite herself, and generally took her share of the capital mid-day lunch which was always served for the girls, and which was nearly as good as a dinner. The young ladies used to have a cup of coffee each before this meal, at ten o'clock, while still in bed. This was a favourite and unalterable arrangement with them. At half-past twelve, the table was laid in the small dining-room, and occasionally the general himself appeared at the family gathering, if he had time.
Besides tea and coffee, cheese, honey, butter, pan-cakes of various kinds (the lady of the house loved these best), cutlets, and so on, there was generally strong beef soup, and other substantial delicacies.

I suspect or at least it’s a theory of interest that at some point these young women will meet their fallen sister Natasia in another skandaly.

Hair Raising

I opened the book at random and read in a description “a shock of white hair”. I took it to be a translation and therefore possibly a forgivable cliché but from an American, native born it’s just lazy writing that should be excised on a second pass. As an image it appears to have been generated via the sheaves of corn set upright and leaning against each other to dry. The Scots and Irish varient ‘stook’ refers to the same practice. ‘Samuel Beckett had a stook of white hair’has a freshness for those who know what a stook was. Did that author who wrote ‘shock’ have a clue where the image came from? Probably not.

How would one retain the surprise of a grand head of white hair.

His white hair seemed too abundant for the size of his head. Over the pulpit of his serene pale brow it stood alert bristling with counsel. ‘The O’Haras always kept their hair’ he would say as if that were an opt in favour to the clan.

His white hair stood up like the pelt of a white cat menaced by a terrier.

He was vain of it. Like a patch of scutch grass it stood thick, white, ineradicable rejecting macassar oil, brylcreem, gel, and that concoction known as brinjal (eggplant) oil from India which he gave up after too many ‘I’d love a curry’ remarks.

I blame the editor really, you know.

Keep Going, no Philosophy to see here.

Life is continuously surpassing old positions. To qualify: there are stages at which you pause maybe for years and then move forward. The sage’s way is to view these stations ironically. There is no terminus, the movement is an illusion. What then is the point of teachings, techniques and theory.

Philosophy that you remember by poring over it and getting it by heart has failed you. In the always new creation of the present moment it is an attention to a previous state, a fixed apotheosis. You have made an idol of it to keep on your mantle shelf.

So why do you continue to read it if not to discover traces of an energy that you can use? We do it to keep up our morale in the way that devotees read the lives of their saints. These were serious seekers. Our dilettantism is abashed, flaneurs that we are.

The Day the Call Came by Thomas Hinde (pub. 1964)

This is the oddest book I’ve read in a long time. The protagonist who seems to be an agent of some kind, deep in spy hibernation, is activated by a call. He is very well prepared with a fluid identity. Memory, which is a benchmark that we triangulate of our sense of self with, changes its shape and location.

When I joined they didn’t have to tell me that for security reasons my memories of the actual mechanics of those early contacts must be suppressed. And this didn’t mean buried where they might be dug up, but set into competition with other memories, a competition which because of their superficial improbability they would lose. I found it fairly easy.
I was able to invent incidents in my past and elaborate them and after a few weeks become genuinely unsure whether or not I was remembering what had happened or what I had thought about so carefully that I now be­lieved. And even when something seemed to obtrude as a real memory, by remembering it and rethinking it I could make it not more but less real because any real memory there might have been was obscured by the process of remembering it.

The note telling him to stand by has been typed on his own typewriter which is kept in a locked up office in the attic that he alone has the key to. How can that be? Is this a Kalfkaesque fantasy set in suburban England? And are the jovial neighbours what they seem to be? He has to keep an eye on them. Their games of golf could be a cover for sharing intelligence out of the range of electronic listening devices.

I have no idea of how this may end even 70% in. My ereader tells me this sort of thing but I keep it offline so that what I read may not disappear into a publisher’s algo or track me in any way. You can’t be too careful.

A Possible Source of Arthur C. Benson's Animus towards John Henry Cardinal Newman

It is interesting to trace the background of Benson’ animus towards Newman. In his attempt to deal with the first of his major depressions he sought the help of John Henry Cardinal Newman. This was in 1882 while he was still an undergraduate at King’s College Cambridge then the reserve of Etonians. With some others he had gone to a Mission in the town for the lols, to sneer at Evangelical enthusiasm. The preacher must have been effective for according to Benson those that came to mock stayed to pray.
David Newsome in the biography that relies on the diaries doubts this account and seems to consider it a self-deluding legend. You can cover your tracks from yourself too. Newsome finds in an early novel by Benson Arthur Hamilton the source of the malaise in homosexual panic. This book which was essentially biographical related the shock of finding low vice lurking beneath the surface of romantic friendship.

Members of the audience, even the cynical and carefree who had come to mock, began responding to the preacher’s invitation to join him on the platform. Arthur himself got up; but he moved against the press of the others, stumbling into the night, returning dazed and sickened to the privacy of his rooms. He slept only fitfully, waking in the middle of the night to the consciousness of self-hatred and abandonment. It was the prelude to weeks of agonising depression, bordering on madness. He sought to escape by relentless academic work, all to no avail. He consulted an eminent Roman Catholic priest, and received a hard remonstrance. He tried to pray. Eventually he made his way to the one person who seemed to be able to see lovingly into his soul, and through his gentle guidance, and the assurance that he was by no means the first to suffer so, he was nursed back into sanity, although he could never entirely heal the wounds.

(from On the Edge of Paradise by David Newsome pub.1980)

Certainly there were aesthetes of Grecian hue who carried the romance to the extent that would have cost them Athenian citizenship.

Arhur C. Benson on Christina Rossetti and Newman

Arthur Christopher Benson will always take the opportunity to depreciate Newman. Christina Rossetti a favourite poet of his he places above even the divine ardour of Newman, whose technical dogmatism and paucity of human experience limited his range. The unspoken charge of tergiversation lies at the core of the ‘national church’ language also used by Matthew Arnold as though the marital difficulties of Henry VIII was a fons et origo of inspiration and the recovery of primitive Christianity.

Then was the crisis: would the wounded life creep on on a broken wing, or would the spiritual vitality suffice to fill the intolerable void? It did suffice; and the strength of the character that thus found repose was attested by the rational and temperate form of faith that ministered to the failing soul.
At such a moment the sensuous spirit is apt to slide into the luxurious self-surrender that Roman Catholicism permits. To me, indeed, it is a matter of profound surprise that Miss Rossetti did not fall into this temptation; but just as she had, with instinctive moderation, chosen the cool and temperate landscape of her adopted country, so the National Church of England, with its decorous moderation, its liberal generosity, its refined ardour, was the chosen home of this austere spirit. The other danger to be feared was that of a bitter renunciation of old delights, a sojourn in the wilderness of some arid and fantastic pietism. An elder sister of Miss Rossetti's indeed sought the elaborate seclusion of a religious house; and had D. G. Rossetti—to use the uncouth Puritan phrase—"found religion," there is no doubt that he too would have reverted to the Church of his fathers. But Miss Rossetti became, as Mr. Edmund Gosse has, in a penetrating criticism in the Century MagazineJune 1893 pointed out, the poetess, not of Protestantism, but of Anglicanism.

(from Christina Rossetti in Essays by A.C. Benson 1896)

Advaitic Suspense

So what does it mean to be suspended over the present moment? As a maxim it represents the aspiration to put off all historical rumination and general mental roaming. There are problems with this strategy, chiefly ontological, because we are in any case actually in the present, the eternal self being known in every state of consciousness. The clearing from the mind of thoughts does not add or subtract from that. Bringing in here the concept of duration a la Bergson, we can experience the condensed past focussed on the present moment mainly through our evil actions in the past. We need forgiveness before we can come to be present or in the Presence. Fortunately we do not have to walk that lonesome valley, we do not have to walk it by ourselves, we have a Friend.

Unwary Sharing

Has the problem that A.C. Benson recognised in 1908 when he published his book of essays At Large, been amplified by social media? Every unwary gush, every dubious spout, just got in from a party and feeling a touch elevated sharing, shall be counted unto you and dragged into the light of day. You may walk on your knees to Jerusalem dressed in chastely cut sackcloth but it will not avail you. You’ve said it and it remains in the akashic of the internet. There is an acute balance between the benefit of flouting the line of official Ireland with rebarbative utterance and the formal apology – ‘Sure I didn’t know what I was saying and even so, though I might phrase it differently, there are questions to be answered’. (American note: Single quotes are conjectural attribution or an inverted perverted comma comment)

The question is whether the modern conditions of life are unfavourable to greatness; and I think that it must be confessed that they are. In the first place, we all know so much too about each other, and there is so eager a personal curiosity abroad, a curiosity about the smallest details of the life of any one who seems to have any power of performance, that it encourages men to over-confidence, egotism, and mannerism. Again, the world is so much in love with novelty and sensation of all kinds, that facile successes are easily made and as easily obliterated. What so many people admire is not greatness, but the realisation of greatness and its tangible rewards. The result of this is that men who show any faculty for impressing the world are exploited and caressed, are played with as a toy, and as a toy neglected.

(from Our Lack of Great Men )

The Way of Allegory in Religion

H.J. Paton reminds us at several points in his book The Modern Predicament published in 1955 based on the Gifford Lectures of 1951/52; that the philosophy of religion continues to revolve around similar issues and stances have a familiar ring. Aldous Huxley had published The Perennial Philosophy in 1945 which would have introduced to a large audience ideas about the source of the religious spirit which are commonplace in Vedanta and Sufism. Atheistic appal at the removal of scientifically dismissible beliefs to the sphere of the symbolic is universal and the saying of Karl Barth –' it does not matter whether the serpent spoke, but what he said' – leaves them speechless.

Ultimately the religious spirit must be left to evolve its own symbolism and ritual, but where it is not strong enough to do so, men have always tried to meet this situation by what may be called the way of allegory: they have interpreted what traditionally seemed to be plain statements of fact as myths or parables which reveal a higher truth.

Those who adopt this course are commonly attacked, or even despised, both by the upholders of orthodoxy and by those who wish to sweep all religion away. They are spurned as half-hearted and dishonest triflers by men who, for quite different reasons, unite in persisting that religious statements must be taken with absolute literalness.

Swedish Extraction

Reading about Malmo and its gangster problems reminds me of the Swedish builder that I met nearly 25 years ago. Like a lot of migrants from the advanced north of Europe he regarded Irish products as rubbish. Wheelbarrows were nonsense and the standard wire nails a deplorable iron age relic. He imported his own nails from Sweden. I used them on a job, a timber framed house with cedar cladding (siding). They are in fact quite good, thinner than wire nails and galvanised fluted that makes them hard to extract, I’m told. They are also more flexible which with seasonal wood movement is a significant strength.

Some years ago he went back to Sweden with his Irish wife and children but only stuck it for a while. Things had gone down badly but they still had the best wheelbarrows. He’s now an Irish citizen. Cead mile failte arais.

Arthur Christopher Benson's John Henry Cardinal Newman

What was his purpose in writing The Upton Letters (pub. 1905)anonymously? The new English Literature fellow at Magdalen College Cambridge since 1904 had a prose style which was unmistakeable. His educational theories were well known and the persona of a teacher in a public school adopted for the letters fitted his own history. Plausible deniability is useful when you wish to controvert certain long established educational practices such as the teaching of the Classics to all boys regardless of their interest and ability.

When the Upton Letters were published, more than a year ago, I meant them to be anonymous, it was a perfectly honest device. I did not want to mystify any one, or to excite any one’s curiosity. I had a number of things I wanted to say, or rather I wished said, because I had no wish to promulgate them as my own opinions. I wanted the book to speak for itself, to be judged on its own merits. I disguised rather carefully I thought, the writing of the book, and my publishers will bear witness to the careful precautions which were taken that the authorship should be kept concealed.

( from the Preface to the Seventh Edition)

Irony I believe this is known as when even the reviewer in the Times spotted his form in the light fog. There are things that he might have uttered sua cuique persona . One letter in particular on the subject of John Henry Cardinal Newman would strike me as a transparent emanation from a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury. I can’t remember the term in rhetoric for the device of initially uttering an encomium and then by gradual declension taking away its force. Is there such?

He begins:

DEAR HERBERT,—You ask what I have been reading. Well, I have been going through Newman's Apologia for the twentieth time, and as usual have fallen completely under the magical spell of that incomparable style; its perfect lucidity, showing the very shape of the thought within, its simplicity (not, in Newman's case, I think, the result of labour, but of pure instinctive grace), its appositeness, its dignity, its music. I oscillate between supreme contentment as a reader, and envious despair as a writer; it fills one's mind up slowly and richly, as honey fills a vase from some gently tilted bowl. There is no sense of elaborateness about the book; it was written swiftly and easily out of a full heart; then it is such a revelation of a human spirit, a spirit so innocent and devoted and tender, and, moreover, charged with a sweet naive egotism as of a child. It was written, as Newman himself said, IN TEARS; but I do not think they were tears of bitterness, but a half-luxurious sorrow, the pathos of the past and its heavinesses, viewed from a quiet haven.

In the same paragraph without a break the defeating parenthesis:

I have no sympathy whatever with the intellectual attitude it reveals, but as Roderick Hudson says, I don't always heed the sense: it is indeed a somewhat melancholy spectacle of a beautiful mind converted in reality by purely aesthetic considerations, by the dignity, the far-off, holy, and venerable associations of the great Church which drew him quietly in, while all the time he is under the impression that it is a logical clue which he is following. And what logic! leaping lightly over difficult places, taking flowery by-paths among the fields, the very stairs on which he treads based on all kinds of wide assumptions and unverifiable hypotheses.

Benson continues :

One cannot help feeling that had  Newman been a Pharisee, he would have been, with his love of precedent, and antiquity, and tradition, one of the most determined and deadly opponents of the spirit of Christ. For the spirit of Christ is the spirit of freedom, of elasticity, of unconventionality. Newman would have upheld in the Sanhedrim with pathetic and exquisite eloquence that it was not time to break with the old, that it was miserable treachery to throw over the ancient safeguards of faith, to part with the rich inheritance of the national faith delivered by Abraham and Moses to the saints. Newman was a true fanatic, and the most dangerous of fanatics, because his character was based on innocence and tenderness and instinctive virtue. It is rather pathetic than distressing to see Newman again and again deluded by the antiquity of some petty human logician into believing his utterance to be the very voice of God.

Go on Benson, give ‘im one!

He had not the stern sense of being absolutely in the right, which is the characteristic of the true leaders of men, but he had a deep sense of his own importance, combined with a perfectly real sense of weakness and humility, which even disguised, I would think, his own egotism from himself.
Again his extraordinary forensic power, his verbal logic, his exquisite lucidity of statement, all these concealed from him, as they have concealed from others, his lack of mental independence. He had an astonishing power of submitting to his imagination, a power of believing the impossible, because the exercise of faith seemed to him so beautiful a virtue. It is not a case of a noble mind overthrown, but of the victory of a certain kind of poetical feeling over all rational inquiry.

find at :
The Upton Letters

Know Thyself

Socrates was the wisest man because he knew that he knew nothing. The Hindu sage knows and makes no bones about it. He views dialectical slicing and dicing to be ignorance because the truth cannot be attained by these routines. γνῶθι σεαυτόν (know thyself) is the injunction of the oracle at Delphi and this is what the sage claims he has achieved. The response to that claim might be ‘ Look in the mirror and say ‘that’s definitely me, no question about it, there’s the scar on my forehead where I fell as a kid’.

the teacher said. “Listen. It is true that the Self and the body are well-known, but they are not well-known to all people to be objects of different knowledges, like a human being and a trunk of a tree. (Question). How are they known then? (Reply)(They are always known) to be the objects of an undifferentiated knowledge. For no one knows them to be the objects of different knowledges It is for this reason that people are deluded about the nature of the Self and of the non-Self, and say, ‘The Self is of this nature’’ and ‘It is not of this nature’. I

(from Upadesa Sahasri by Shankaracarya)

What I take from this is the idea that the Self cannot be separated out from any particular state of awareness. It permeates each state. You realise the Self but you cannot know it as an object of special knowledge. The knowledge that a jnani (knower of the self) knows is that the passing states of awareness are merely transient manifestations of the Self.

Some suss!

Rhetoric's Dilemma

Matching the rhetoric to the audience, that’s the rub. Watching it in action from our media and government’s attempt to persuade us we may catch a glimpse of our reflection in their mirror. How are we seen? A bit thick frankly. Logos is wasted on us other than the framing of the matter in a particular way which occludes the central question, it is left to one side. Pathos is the main instrument used. The continuous repetition of ‘hard cases’ in immigration, abortion or gay marriage induces in the spongiform brain of the populace a volatile conviction. Ethos in the form of an identity parade of respected figures from a variety of worlds tell us what they think. Mary Robinson, on the radio yesterday, with the particular brand of fatuous waffle that she is noted for managed to combine immigration and climate change without mentioning the people who are left behind. They are the ones who have no money to pay smugglers.

Richard Whately in his Elements of Rhetoric refers to the difficult question of whether the truth readily persuades when powerful rhetors champion it.

The former of these questions was eagerly debated among the ancients; on the latter, but little doubt seems to have existed. With us, on the contrary, the state of these questions seems nearly reversed. It seems generally admitted that skill in composition and in speaking, liable as it evidently is to abuse, is to be considered, on the whole, as advantageous to the public, because that liability to abuse is neither in this nor in any other case to be considered as conclusive against the utility of any kind of art, faculty, or profession; because the evil effects of misdirected power require that equal powers should be arrayed on the opposite side; and because truth,having an intrinsic superiority over falsehood, may be expected to prevail when the skill of the contending parties is equal, which will be the more likely to take place, the morewidely such skill is diffused.*

Whately’s footnote:
*Arist. Rhet., Ch. I.—He might have gone farther; for it will very often happen that, before a popular audience, a greater degree of skill is requisite for maintaining the cause of truth than of falsehood.There are cases in which the arguments which lie most on the surface, and are, to superficial reasoners, the most easily set forth in a plausible form, are those on the wrong side. It is often difficult to a writer, and still more to a speaker, to point out and exhibit in their full strength the delicate distinctions on which truth sometimes depends.

Matching pathos with pathos, and ethos with ethos is a losing strategy given a public that is stunned by repetition coming from a craven media all singing the same hymn, ‘onward progressive soldiers on the right side of history against the rebarbative dark of populist right wing elements’.


Dharma or traditional righteousness and the candid hearts that are receptive to it is what we need.

The Next Step

What is the next step? I came across the idea in Sufism and as far I can recollect it signifies the natural opening up of the path that brings us out of the dead impasse of practices which have lost their vitality and are stale arid unprofitable. Good, fine, splendid, yes but what if choice is likely to be of the wrong thing that leads into some other egoic redoubt. I am thinking here of Buzzatti’s fabulous fort in The Tartar Steppe - the next steppe. Quite!

Can we trust the incarnate telos? There is an autogenic drive towards transcendence. Sit with that true north.

The Upton Letters by A.C. Benson

‘Give it a name’ said Jimmy the Saint following that biblical injunction that brought things into existence but generally seeing that it was not good more a vile exhalation. That’s a kind of nominalism which holds that until an inchoate thought has become fixed as a definite concept its existence is so tenuous it can hardly be said to exist at all. Lately I have scouted the metaphysical fairing that states ‘religion’ did not exist until the 17th.C. A related trinket is the bizarre idea that ‘homosexuality’ did not exist until 1892 for it had not come to the attention of the fine forensic mind of the psychologist.

I saw this in relation to famille Benson about whom I have written. Brilliant and quite queer, all of them. A.C. Benson’s excellent Upton Letters pub. 1905 touches on the topic of what he calls ‘impurity’ among public school boys. The book was meant to be published anonymously but when it came out accidentally that Benson was the author then the Eton masters were annoyed. The author taught classics there for 18 years. Eton in American terms might be described as ‘juvie’ with Latin, Greek, cricket, fives, and optional but likely birching and buggery. British officers in Staleg accommodation found it an easy berth after public school.

In the form of a fictional series of letters to a correspondent Benson writes:

It is curious to note that in the matter of bullying and cruelty, which used to be so rife at schools, public opinion among boys does seem to have undergone a change. The vice has practically disappeared, and the good feeling of a school would be generally against any case of gross bullying; but the far more deadly and insidious temptation of impurity has, as far as one can learn, increased. One hears of simply heart-rending cases where a boy dare not even tell his parents of what he endures. Then, too, a boy's relations will tend to encourage him to hold out, rather than to invoke a master's aid, because they are afraid of the boy falling under the social ban.

The social ban comes from what Stephen Daedelus’s father called ‘peaching’.(Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)

And his father had told him that if he wanted anything to write home to him and whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow.

Torridge by William Trevor published in the New Yorker in 1977 is a school story with Benson’s theme.

Benson, it is clear, though fraught by the ‘homo sexual’ (sic) tendency never practised. The Upton Letters went through 14 impressions. So far like the rest of his work that I have read it is brilliant. More anon when I have finished it.

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati

Tim Parks the translator of The Tartar Steppe in his introduction to the novel which I read after I’d read the book as is my usual practice unless the introduction is written by an academic. In that case I forego the deconstructive narratology. Parks agrees with D.H. Lawrence that explanation is the true killer of art.

Now a book lives’, wrote D.H. Lawrence, ‘as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead’. 

What keeps us going back to a book is its residue of mystery. What was it about, what just happened? It’s the spell of the uncanny that draws us back and keeps the book in the canon (pace Bloom). Whatever I say about it is bound to be wrong. Very well let me add to the store of the books puzzlement a simple cliche. Giovanni Drogo in every sense of the phrase is ‘holding the fort’. What is he holding it against? On one level it is the long threatened incursion of the Tartars coming from the north that must take the ancient fortification to pass through to the kingdom. Will they ever come bringing the glory of military heroism to the garrison stunned by boredom and the mechanisms of alertness such as the changing of the guards, the cries of the sentries, and the silent cunning of lapsed hope.

Duration in the work of Bergson is the continuous accumulation of our total past in each moment. This is the fort that is continually adding to its battered walls and redoubts. Your life is given over to practice that is without a rational foundation and seeks merely the perfection of its accomplishment. The routine annihilates time and years pass for Drogo in the precision of correct futility. Noise is the score of his life at the fort, the sound of a leaking cistern coming through the wall, the cries of the sentries, feet along the corridors and the eternal wind.

At that point the ramparts followed the slope of the valley and so formed a complicated staircase of terraces and platforms. Below him, pitch-black against the snow, Drogo saw the various sentries by the light of the moon; their methodical pacing made a creaking noise on the frozen ground.
The nearest of them, on a lower terrace ten yards or so away, feeling the cold less than the others, stood motionless with his shoulders leant against a wall so that it looked as if he were sleeping. But Drogo heard him singing a lament to himself in a low voice.
It was a succession of words, which Drogo could not make out, strung together by a monotonous and unending tune. Speaking, and worse still, singing on duty was severely forbidden. Giovanni should have punished him but instead took pity on him, thinking of the cold and the loneliness of the night. Then he began to descend a short staircase which led on to the terrace and gave a slight cough to put the soldier on his guard.
The sentinel turned his head and seeing the officer corrected his posture but did not interrupt his lament. Drogo was overcome with rage – did these men think they could make a fool of him? He would give him a taste of something..............

At last Drogo understood and a slight shiver ran along his spine. It was water, that was what it was – a distant cascade dashing down the steep sides of the crags. The wind causing the great jet to quiver, the mysterious play of the echoes, the varying sounds of the struck rocks made of it a human voice which spoke and spoke – spoke of our life in words which one was within a hair’s breadth of understanding but never did.

I must stop there in the contemplation of vertiginous battlements for I have added nothing. You must take it up, you who also are captive in the fortress that stands against the implacable enemy.

A remarkable book. Buzzatti was 32 when he wrote it in 1938. It stands.

Co. Mayo Lament

You will have heard that poetry is what is lost in translation but here the poem itself is lost.

Co. Mayo

On the deck of Patrick Lynch's boat I sat in deep despair.
With the crying of the weary night and the weeping of the day;
Were it not that full of sorrow from my people forth I go,
By the blessed sun tis royally I'd sing thy praises sweet Mayo!

When I dwelt at home in plenty, thy gold did much abound,
In the company of fair young maids the Spanish ale went round.
It’s a bitter change from those gay days that now I'm forced to go,
And leave my bones on Santa Cruz, far away from sweet Mayo.

They are changed girls in Irrus now; how tall they've grown and high,
With their top-knots and their hair-bags, sure I pass their buckles by.
For it's little now I heed their airs, for God has willed it so,
That I must go and leave them all far away from sweet Mayo.

It’s my grief that Pat O’Loughlin is not Earl of Irrus still.
And that Brian Duff no longer rules as Lord upon the hill.
And that Colonel Hugh O’Grady should be dead and lying low,
And I sailing, sailing swiftly from the County of Mayo.

Condae Mhaigh Eo

Ar an loing seo, a Phaidí Uí Loinsigh, is ea a bhímse ag déanamh bróin,
Ag osnaíl ins an oíche is ag síorghol sa ló,
Ach anois ó dalladh m’intinn, is mé i bhfad ó mo mhuintir,
Dar m’fhocal, is maith a chaoinfinnse Condae Maigh Eo.

Liostáil mé le sairsint ag dul sráid an bhaile mhóir,
Mar cheap mé go mba bhreá an rud dom é nuair a bhí mé bocht óg,
Ó, thug sé gloine is cárta dom agus claimhe le mé a ghardáil,
Is dúirt sé go mb’fhearr dom é ná in Éirinn go fóill.

Is murach bás mo mháthar nach mbeinnse maith go leor,
Bheadh buidéal ins gach lámh liom, is mé i gcomhluadar ban óg,
Ach murach síor-ól na gcártaí, is an dlí a bheith róláidir,
Ní i Santa Cruz a d’fhágfaí mo chnámha faoin bhfód.

Tá Cnoc na Ceathrún Caoile siamsúil go leor,
Tá coiligh is cearca fraoigh ann, is iad go síoraí ag seinm ceoil,
Tá sméara dubha ar chraobha agus úlla boga buí ann,
Tá géimneach bó is lao ann le teacht do fhéile Muire Mór.

Tá punt is fiche amuigh orm i gCondae Mhaigh Eo,
Is ní rachaidh mé dá íoc leo choíche ná go deo,
Ar fhaitíos go mbéarfaí thiar orm is go dtógfaí i ngeall ar fhiacha mé,
Is go bhfáiscfí boltaí iarainn orm go hiallacha mo bhróg.

Go dtaga Cnoc na Cruaiche ar cuairt go hAbhainn Mhór,
Go dtaga an toimín luachrainn ag buachailleacht na mbó,
Go n-osclaítear na coraí atá ar mhullach Bheanna Beola,
Ach ní scarfaidh mo chumha go deo leat, a Chondae Mhaigh Eo.

Is a chomrádaí na dílse, tá mé cloíte go mór,
Dá bhféadfainn is duitse a d’inseoinn dhá thrian de mo bhrón,
Ach ós tusa is túisce a chífeas a maireann de mo mhuintir,
Ó, tabhair mo bheannacht siar leat go Contae Mhaigh Eo.
Joe Heaney's old style singing of the poem:
Co. Mayo




First of all it is not Paddy Lynch's boat but Paddy Lynch that is being addressed, a common trope in Irish verse and recitation.
My trans:

On this boat, Paddy Lynch, I rest in sorrow
Sighing in the night and forever crying in the day
Since my mind is cast in darkness far from my people
For sure I miss Mayo.

I enlisted with a sergeant as I went down the town
Being poor and young I thought it a fine plan
He gave me drink and hospitality and for to protect me a sword
And he told me it was better for me than to be in Ireland forever

Only for the death of my mother I'd be fine
With a bottle in each hand in the company of a gir,
But for the thirsty cards and the power of the law
It's not in Santa Cruz I'd lie beneath the sod.

Carncoll Hill is a place of ease
With fowl and grouse always singing
Blackberries and sweet soft yellow apples are there
And the lowing of cows and calves come Mary's feast day

I owe twenty one pounds in Mayo
Which I am never going to repay
For fear I would be taken on account of my debts
And chained by my ankles

Until Crook Hill visits Avonmore
And the lizard herds the cows
Till tolls are allowed on the crest of the Twelve Bens
My regard for you will never die, O County of Mayo

My faithful comrades I am well defeated
If I could I would relate two thirds of my woe
But since you will earlier see what's left of my people
Take my blessing with you to the County of Mayo

||||||||||||||||


There was a battle of Santa Cruz de Teneriffe in 1797. It was there Nelson lost his arm in a failed assault on the town.

Religion escapes from Captivity

When you read this written by an unquestionably clever person you wonder what narrow definition of ‘religion’ is at work:

It is against the horizon of these principles that I listened to my students with great interest today as we began discussion of Lucretius’s atomistic metaphysics as outlined in De Rerum Natura.  In order to achieve ataraxia or tranquility and freedom from anxiety, we must overcome our two primary sources of anxiety:  fear produced as a result of religion (I think this is a bad translation, as the concept of religion as a distinct domain of human behavior and practice doesn’t really arise until the 17th century), and fear of death.

(from: larval on religion - Levi Bryant post)

Narrowly enough defined, almost anything, however paradoxical, will have some truth in it. The more you examine it the more exiguous that truth will appear till a climax of evanescence is achieved and in the light of common day it is seen as no more than a commonplace trope or a wikism.

The concept of religion was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries,[31][32] despite the fact that ancient sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written

(from Wikipedia on Religion:
Wikipedia on Religion)

That is wispy like the chocolate bar that is mostly air. Listen up babes, (I had to say that) what were the prophets on about, to what end were the great councils called? Are you in or are you out? Are you a people of God or are you a rabble? Everything does not have to have a ‘meta’ entry to exist. Conditions exceed their boundaries and enable poetry in their escape from captivity.

Swedish 'lycka'

Is the ‘luck of the Swedes’ a rationalisation of envy (cf. Previous post). The migrants want what they have without the history that the Swedes have put into it. One thinks of the golfer who remarked ‘ I’m lucky and the more I practice the luckier I get’. There has been a long process which has culminated in a democracy which gives the most in foreign aid as a percentage of its G.N.I.

Out of the DAC countries, Sweden was the most generous – it was the first to meet the 0.7% target in 1974 – donating 1.1% of its GNI to foreign aid, which works out at about $6.2bn. Next came Luxembourg, at 1.07%, then Norway at 0.99% and Denmark at 0.85%. The UK was fifth, higher than Germany at 0.41%, France at 0.36% and Switzerland at 0.49%. In total the UK spent $19bn on foreign aid last year, compared to $16bn from Germany and $10bn from France.

So they do a lot for the ‘Chadian’ who is working on his luck at home but the ‘Chadian’ who is unskilled and is taken in often ends up S.O. Swede Luck. Just Google ‘migrant problems in Sweden’ to get a general idea of how sudden mass low-skilled immigration creates problems for the host country no matter how well meaning they are. You might say that the final stage of envy namely destroying that which you cannot achieve, has been attained.

Those Lucky Old Swedes

When you read this you realise why philosopher kings are such a very bad idea. The deviation towards ‘wokeness’ works like an iron mountain on their nous compass. In their little plane they can’t clear its height. Slightly scathed they emerge from the wreck and in their helpful piping voices continue to explain, explain, explain.

The staggering levels of international inequality would not be so objectionable if the typical Swede had done something to deserve a better life than the typical Chadian, for instance, but the truth, of course, is that Swedes were merely lucky to have been born in Sweden rather than Chad. And given this, what justification could the Swedes have for putting guns at their borders to deter Chadians from trying to move north and take advantage of the preferable social, political and economic environment? In the eyes of cosmopolitan egalitarians, they have none. As Joseph Carens puts it, “Citizenship in Western liberal democracies is the modern equivalent to feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. Like feudal birthrights privileges, restrictive citizenship is hard to justify when one thinks about it closely.” (Carens 1987: 252)

(from Immigration entry Stanford Ency. Phil.)

Noreen Bawn (Blonde Noreen)

While I'm on the subject of emigration here's a repost from 2014:

Emigration and Noreen Bawn

On Crooked Timber they are discussing Joseph Carens' book The Ethics of Immigration . He advocates open borders and the posters are in general anxious to maintain access for all to that country which is a home away from home and a refuge for all requiring no passport. There is no let or hindrance when you turn up in Utopia.

In Ireland we know about emigration. We know that it's not a good thing for all the usual reasons that are given at the departure lounge of airports at Christmas in the now traditional t.v. news segment One imagines the producer saying – 'find some crushed rednecks'. Going abroad for adventure is excellent, being virtually expelled is not. Is it better to receive than to send? Employer groups think that it fosters wage correction, a sum that is always rounded down.

This country is broke yet our social welfare and unemployment benefit is higher than Britain's. We know that sending our young people away by the infliction of dole penury is a stupid waste. The open borders position has a cool anarchic flavour but it's as bad for them as for us. There is an obverse side to the reparation argument which if we agree has merit applies also to those that stuck it out. They are owed too.

Noreen Bawn (Blonde) emigration ballad written by Neil MacBride from Creeslough, Donegal in early 20C.

Two versions running the gamut but avoiding the C&W.


traditional noreen bawn

Baroque funky noreen bawn

The Emigrant by John Masefield

The Emigrant
by John Masefield


Going by Daly's shanty I heard the boys within
Dancing the Spanish hornpipe to Driscoll's violin,
I heard the sea-boots shaking the rough planks of the floor,
But I was going westward, I hadn't heart for more.

All down the windy village the noise rang in my ears,
Old sea-boots stamping, shuffling, it brought the bitter tears,
The old tune piped and quavered, the lilts came clear and strong,
But I was going westward, I couldn't join the song.

There were the grey stone houses, the night wind blowing keen,
The hill-sides pale with moonlight, the young corn springing green,
The hearth nooks lit and kindly, with dear friends good to see,
But I was going westward, and the ship waited me.

The pathos of the missing syllable in the last line. Your heart drops with it.

Masculine, Feminine and Neuter Gender. Male, Female and Undecided.

It might be useful to try and trace the history of the present muddle about gender. It used, not long ago, to be a term in grammar. There were masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns so called by convention. They might as well have beeen called x, y, and z nouns. Some literal minded people were puzzled by the masculine and feminine appellation. How was ‘patria’ feminine? How is ‘cailin’ (girl) masculine in Irish? Is this early Celtic gender confusion? In other words there was an analogical extension from ‘feminine’ to female. Sex as Vilfredo Pareto often remarks is a very powerful residue.

As with the conventional ascription of gender in nouns the notion of the conventional applied to male and female arose. Each society has its folk ways, roles, duties and so on. True and useful; however to go on from there and to equate gender (masculine/feminine) as convention with sex (male/female) as convention is a category error. Of course it is also true that male and female conventional roles arise out of sexual differences.

So where are we now? Essentially this: I like what is conventionally supposed to be feminine so therefore I am a woman. On the other hand you are the rightful King of France.

Sir Roger Scruton FBA, Conservative and Heretic

The faggots are piled around the feet of the heretic and the executioner is about to apply the torch when a messenger rides up. The Grand Inquisitor shrugs as he reads the missive whose red wax captured ribbon flutters like a tiny premonitory flame. He gruffly commands:

- Stay your hand, release him. Roger of Scruton Hall, there has been a change of plan. You are to be raised a knight of the realm and a member of the British Academy. Wealth will be yours and fame. Depart from here, unshriven and recalcitrant.

You would have thought that heresy was a dwindling trade but Sir Roger Scruton FBA has made a go of it. He started early at the age of 24 when in Paris in ‘68 as an onlooker of the student riots. ‘Twerps’. He has not deviated from that judgment since then.

In 1980 he published his book The Meaning of Conservatism and in 2015 Confessions of a Heretic a collection of essays. So what, the young fogy has become an old fogy even if he’s right and he is . Conservatism is as various as the societies in which it is rooted. Because of this when Scruton talks out of the American side of his mouth he utters things which would shock the English cultivar. The generalisations which would assimilate both, miss the point and Scruton is correct when he holds that Conservatism is not discursive but a pre-emptive feeling of distrust of novelty and downright disgust with murderous utopian social engineering schemes.

Here he is on Environmentalism:

Environmentalism has all the hall-marks of a left-wing cause: a class of victims (future generations), an enlightened vanguard who fights for them (the eco-warriors), powerful philistines who exploit them (the capitalists), and endless opportunities to express resentment against the successful, the wealthy and the West. The style too is leftist: the environmentalist is young, dishevelled, socially disreputable, his mind focused on higher things; the opponent is dull, middle aged, smartly dressed and usually American. The cause is designed to recruit the intellectuals, with facts and theories carelessly bandied about, and activism encouraged.

(from Confessions of a Heretic)

That seems to this reader to be reactive malignant Batesonian symmetrical thinking. He corrects towards the complementary after this salute to his constituency and he displays the fairness which is a strength of Conservatism.

However, the cause of the environment is not, in itself, a left-wing cause at all. It is not about ‘liberating’ or empowering the victim, but about safeguarding resources. It is not about ‘progress’ or ‘equality’ but about conservation and equilibrium. Its following may be young and dishevelled; but that is largely because people in suits have failed to realise where their real interests, and their real values, lie. Environmentalists may seem opposed to capitalism, but – if they understood matters correctly – they would be far more opposed to socialism, with its gargantuan, uncorrectable and state-controlled projects, than to the ethos of free enterprise. Indeed, environmentalism is the quintessential conservative cause, the most vivid instance in the world as we know it, of that partnership between the dead, the living and the unborn, which Burke defended as the conservative archetype.

‘Free enterprise’ - the American side of his mouth and with its insinuation of untrammelled, a proven error. I ask myself about Thunbergian doom – Have we been here before? Do you remember the Y2K bug that was to bring massive disruption and queues at the border. Or am I thinking of Brexit? Nothing happened very quickly then and now what? Let’s be prudent. Go green with nuclear power stations and less meat eating and please knock those useless wind farms that deface the land.

Both books are worth reading.

Sri Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati on Sri Harsha

Was Sri Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati (Sri SSS) correct when he said that Sri Harsha did not understand the true method of vedanta?(Chap.14:285) Next two question arising from that is (a) what is the true method of vedanta and (b) how did he fail to understand it?

In Chap.3:20 of his Method of Vedanta Sri SSS expresses it thusly:

The Method of False Attribution followed by Retraction underlies other forms of Vedanta Teaching (Adhyaropa/Apavada). It is found throughout the Upanishads, Gita and Brahma Sutras.

What Sri Harsha fails to understand is that the search for truth through dialogue which brings clarification is not served by the stultification of your interlocutors. Even honest error has a perspective which can be corrected. It may even bring focus to an issue by displaying a characteristic misstep. Inquiry has many landing points which are partial and false. They are surpassed by a new vision. This is the process known as sublation.

In fact we are all wrong and ‘nobody knows anything’.

There is one false attribution that is the root cause of all others. It is due to its presence that the other erroneous ideas come into being and work mischief during the time of their existence. So the Upanishads single out this error and call it metaphysical ignorance (avidya). And the knowledge whereby one establishes the true nature of metaphysical reality through negating that error is called enlightenment (vidya).

(Chap.3:22)

Note: adhiropa is the transliteration that I first came across. adhyaropa is now more usual so I will use that in future and it ties in with adhyasa - superimposition

Yellow Vests abú (forever)

Recall:
veist bui(yellow vest)

Well it’s settled. The leasee of the hotel that was going to be presented as a direct provision centre for asylum seekers has withdrawn his contract submission and the project is now scrapped. After trying to tag the protestors with the racist label the minister advised them to ‘step back’. Now they are doing the step back boogie.

They wrought it very cleverly keeping the overt racists quite and allowing those that are against direct provision on humanitarian grounds to seem to be central to the protest. What then was the main unspoken objection to the centre as well as the entirely justified resentment at having your village population increased by 20% without any enhancement of infrastructure and without consultation as a fait accompli. The general sentiment in the country at large is that asylum seekers are for the most part economic migrants without any real claim to refugee status. They can’t even be bothered to make up a good story because they rely on administrative delay to prolong the process and then they will have to be allowed to stay.

At a subconscious level too is the memory of the tragedy of emigration from Ireland. We know that it is not a good thing when the young leave in droves. It should not be encouraged. As well as that the economic migrants are often from the better off segment of their societies who can afford to pay the smugglers large sums of money for their transportation. Why should they be favoured over genuine impoverished refugees that languish in camps? The Norway solution of quick decision on status followed by deportation in the case of rejection seems to be working for them. There direct provision centres are closing down not opening. Here in Ireland there has been a 26% increase in asylum applications this year over that of the whole of last year. Céad míle fáilte!

Sri Harsha: The Reader over your Shoulder

If the reader over your shoulder is a type of Sri Harsha (12th.C). be very afraid because you are going to be found out. I would defend the right of Sri Harsha to controvert everything and offer no positive teaching of his own unless you regard what he impugned as an limning by way of negative space. His positive thesis may be in a book now lost. In the particular book that I am referring to, the Khandana Khanda the scrutiny of his eagle eye has lit on the Nyaya school often referred to as 'the logicians'. Their programme as stated by Ganganath Jha in his introduction to the translation of the work - KhKh

The things, or categories, whose correct knowledge leads to the attainment of the highest aim of human existence, are (according to the Nyaya), the following sixteen—The Instruments of Right Cognition, the Objects of Right Cognition, Doubt, Motive, Example, Doctrine, Factors of Inference, Hypothetical Reasoning, Demonstrated Truth,. Discussion, Disputation, Wrangling, Fallacious Reason, Perversion, Casuistry and Clinchers. (Gautama’s Sutra 1-1-1). The most important among these are the Instruments of Cognition*and the Objects of Cognition; all the rest are of subordinate importance, being aids to the Instruments-of Cognition.

One of the points at issue is whether it is necessary for fruitful dialogue that both parties should admit the existence of the valid means of knowledge ie. the pramanas. That may not be necessary for in fact for without that, incoherence, inconsistency and self-contradiction could be found in the definitions of the opponent. Reductio ad absurdum can proceed without any commitment to the existence of the means of valid knowledge. Sri Harsha would hold that we can prescind from a committment to the existence of pramanas and still offer therapy to the holder of faulty definitions of experience, memory, perception, and recognition.

Sri Harsha states:

Not at all. We do not say that debate is to be undertaken having admitted that the means of valid knowledge do not exist, but that debate may be undertaken by individuals who are indifferent to the question whether the means of valid knowledge do exist or whether the means of valid knowledge do not exist, and yet carry on just as you do having admitted their existence. Were this not the case, even this fault adduced by you, having misconstrued our viewpoint to be that the means of valid knowledge do not exist, could not be stated.

(trans. by Phyllis Granoff from Philosophy and Argument in Late Vedanta: Sri Harsha's KhKh)

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad on Non-Realism

While I have been thinking about the prevalence of 'non' as a prefix for some very important aspects of Advaita eg. non-dualism, non-difference (of cause and effect) and so forth I have been intrigued by Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad's concept of non-realism which seems at first blush to be a refined position between idealism and realism. This interests me greatly and so I have been scouting around reading here and there amongst his papers to try and find out more.

Ram-Prasad seems to have a poor grasp of what realism is and a fortiori non-realism subtle or gross must elude. What is one to make of this from a 1995 paper on Dreams and the Coherence of Experience

The traditional realist claim is that objects that experience presents as existing externally, do in fact exist internally. The denial of externality appeals both to those who doubt that experience is ever veridical (in other words, who doubt that the objects experience presents are ever exactly identical with existing objects) and also to those who think that experience is veridical only if ob jects are not external.

A simple succinct definition of Realism found in a Dictionary of Philosophy:

theory to the effect that entities of a certain category exist independently of what we think. A consequence of realism in this sense is that the entities are there to be discovered, and that ignorance and error is possible.

Further down he states:

Both the Cartesian skeptic and the Berkeleyan idealist use dreams to challenge externality: a subject takes it that there is experience of a world of external objects, but there need be no such world as seems to be thus experienced. Cognition that there are external objects could therefore occur without such objects.

Did Berkeley use dreams to establish his immaterialism? Was it not a logical following through of Locke's primary and secondary qualities?
So Non-Realism is perhaps not ready to join the big Nons yet. If anyone out there knows more, please relate.

Who put the A in Advaita (1)

Who put the A in Advaita? there are so many of these 'nots' in the philosophy of Advaita that it might be useful to quicknote them.

First of all there is a dvaita or not-two or non-dualism. We are accustomed to think in terms of polar concepts so we look for the opposite of nondualism (running the suffix into the noun). Would that be holism or something after that fashion? Now that has some merit though not covering precisely what non-dualism attempts to adumbrate. We are getting past the dualism of subject and object and trying to embrace a vision in which the two are one or both subject and object are both aspects of the one reality. That sounds good but it leaves out the central principle of adhyasa which is that neither subject nor object are freestanding realities in their own right. The cognitive event in which both are blended is a shining forth of fundamental reality. So the anirvachanya position re normal perception which means 'not definable as specifically real or unreal' comes into play. Another way of stating the Subject/Object divide is that the divide is real as a manifestation or appearance. Things as they appear are limiting adjuncts of the Real which means that any attempt at definition of the Self collapses. It cannot be grasped in a single apprehension in an objective way.

Through what, 0 Maitreyi, should one know the Knower?' (Brh.Up. IV. v. I5), it is concluded: That which has been described as "Not this, not this." ' Besides, thus only can the statement, 'I will instruct you (about Brahman),' be relevant. That is to say, if the Sruti wants to teach the transcendent nature of the individual self-which is free from all differentiations of limiting adjuncts, then only can this assertion be fulfilled.

Yellow Vest (Veist buí) protest

The yellow vests have arrived at a hotel near where I live. Some of them are working there turning the defunct hotel in a direct provision centre. Others are protesting the placement of a possible 300 migrants claiming asylum there. You can see why they might be annoyed as the village just up the road has a population of 1,400. The protesters are well settled in with a portaloo and some canteen facility signalling a determination to stay as long as it takes. As everybody knows most of these proposed as residents are economic migrants. At the end of a long process of review, which is a modest source of revenue for young lawyers, a large percentage will be refused asylum and be deported. Others will drift away into the black economy working for a pittance. They get an allowance of 39.80 for adults and 29.80 Euro for children plus food and lodging.

Current state of row:
oughterard row

Extract from an Irish Times report on asylum seekers (Jan.2019):

However, while Syria remains a highly volatile war zone, more people from Georgia claimed asylum in Ireland in the first 11 months of 2018 than Syrians.
After the 409 Georgian nationals, there were 383 Albanians and then came Syrians, some 326 of whom had claimed asylum in the Republic to the end of November.
Zimbabwe was the next most represented nation, with 257 of its citizens claiming asylum here, followed by Pakistan; some 230 new asylum claimants in 2018 declared Pakistani citizenship.

Scantlings and Spring Balances

You need more hands than a Hindu goddess to install spring balances in sash windows. It’s about time that they were done. For x years, the length of a short mortgage I have been propping them up with scantlings. Luckily I have my own shakti rupa to help but I have done it without her. They are single glazed, six panes in each sash moulded and scribed. The wood is Iroko which shows precisely no signs of wear. Why didn’t you make them double glazed while you were at it? Lumpy and expensive and really we are not living in Finland. If you’re cold put on a jumper. I like draughts which I describe as continuous air exchange. When Greta is a granny picketing a nuclear power station and checking her account someone will have violated my fenestration and put in triple glazed self cleaning glass with inbuilt draught alert. A final and fitting end would be as garden lights.

The Dance of the Bats and Arthur Koestler

In the early morning just before dawn around 6:30, I go outside to see the pipistrelle bats coming back to roost. When I first step outside there’s a couple and then quite quickly there’s a lot circling round my head as though they were checking to see what this big object on the sonar was. Round and round they go in a 15 foot circle enjoying the last of the night feinting towards the dormer and swinging away again. Wonderful, dizzying dance. There must be some ingress into the roof space at the dormer which I can’t make out. They only need less than one inch to enter. Occasionally one comes in an open window and then we have fun with a butterfly net. Extraordinary creatures with their delayed conception. Is there any permutation or possibility that nature hasn’t happened on; most of them useless and some decidedly handy. Arthur Koestler in his The Ghost in the Machine writes how when later stages of evolution come to a dead end, its as though the process bethought itself and went back to the larval stage and took a different tack. His teleology would cause conventional evolutionists to sniff :

It seems that this retracing of steps to escape the dead ends of the maze was repeated at each decisive evolutionary turning point. I have mentioned the evolution of the vertebrates from a larval form of some primitive echinoderm. Insects have in all likelihood emerged from a millipede-like ancestor -- not, however, from adult millipedes, whose structure is too specialised, but from its larval forms. The conquest of the dry land was initiated by amphibians whose ancestry goes back to the most primitive type of lung-breathing fish; whereas the apparently more successful later lines of highly specialised gill-breathing fishes all came to a dead end. The same story was repeated at the next major step, the reptiles, who derive from early, primitive amphibians -- not from any of the later forms that we know.

And lastly, we come to the most striking case of paedomorphosis, the evolution of our own species. It is now generally recognised that the human adult resembles more the embryo of an ape than an adult ape. In both simian embryo and human adult, the ratio of the weight of the brain to total body weight is disproportionately high. In both, the closing of the sutures between the bones of the skull is retarded to permit the brain to expand. The back-to-front axis through man's head -- i.e., the direction of his line of sight -- is at right angles to his spinal column: a condition which, in apes and other mammals, is found only in the embryonic, not in the adult stage. The same applies to the angle between backbone and uro-genital canal -- which accounts for the singularity of the human way of copulating face to face. Other embryonic -- or, to use Bolk's term, foetalised -- features in adult man are: the absence of brow-ridges; the scantness and late appearance of body hair; pallor of the skin; retarded growth of the teeth, and a number of other features -- including 'the rosy lips of man which were probably evolved in the young as an adaptation to prolonged suckling and have persisted in the adult, possibly under the influence of sexual selection' (de Beer).........
It is as if the stream of life had momentarily reversed its course, flowing uphill for a while, then opened up a new stream-bed. I shall try to show that this reculer pour mieux sauter -- of drawing back to leap, of undoing and re-doing -- is a favourite gambit in the grand strategy of the evolutionary process; and that it also plays an important part in the progress of science and art.

The Devils, The Possessed, Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have been reading The Devils, Demons, The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky this last month. I don’t mean three books just the three translations available to me made by Magarshack, Peavar & Volokhonsky, and Garnett. The first named is quite readable and light on patronymics which are a boulder in the way of smooth reading. The Garnett has a period flavour which is not out of place for a novel serialised through 1870. I find no real difference between the latter two translations. I switched back and forth between them all. The Magarshack is the more literary, possibly easing the original feverish and hasty writing of the original. Garnett lacks the chapter variously called “Stavrogin’s Confession” and “At Tikhon’s”. That is an important omission when considering the character of Nikolai Vsevolodovich (Stavrogin). Considered as a portrayal of the damage done by paeodophile grooming it puts the elegant Nabakov in the shade. (I must reread Pale Fire.) Given in both translations as an appendix which is a little scholastic consisering that Dostoyevsky wrote it as the chapter after Ivan the Tsaravitch (Crown Prince). It wasn’t originally printed as being too shocking for 1870 and for me the depiction of the invitation into the soul of evil, relishing it and then in the end being destroyed by it, is very powerful.

The critical cliché about Dostoyevsky is his ‘lumpy structure’, scrambled narration and so on. That, as I have remarked before in other connections, is entirely false but the diabolism of it is that it is true after its own fashion. All of the novel is the work of the active imagination and reflects the chaos and evil tumult of the conspirators. Are they the pigs that the devils have entered into or are they the devils awaiting the Gadarene swine? The theme of counterparts could be explicated at great and tedious length. The humour of ‘skandaly’ (outrageous scenes) is there as well as pathos. Read it every seven years and always find more.

Antifragile by Nassim Taleb

But recall that this chapter is about layering, units, hierarchies, fractal structure, and the difference between the interest of a unit and those of its subunits. So it is often the mistakes of others that benefit the rest of us—and, sadly, not them. We saw that stressors are information, in the right context. For the antifragile, harm from errors should be less than the benefits. We are talking about some, not all, errors, of course; those that do not destroy a system help prevent larger calamities. The engineer and historian of engineering Henry Petroski presents a very elegant point. Had the Titanic not had that famous accident, as fatal as it was, we would have kept building larger and larger ocean liners and the next disaster would have been even more tragic. So the people who perished were sacrificed for the greater good; they unarguably saved more lives than were lost. The story of the Titanic illustrates the difference between gains for the system and harm to some of its individual parts.

(from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

The SS Imperator of the Hamburg America line was launched in 1912. He, so called instead the normal ‘She’ by request of the Kaiser, was bigger than the Titanic as were the later built Vaterland and Bismark.
Imperator
A present day super liner ‘Symphony of the Seas’ is five times bigger than the Titanic was.

An imprudent captain was a factor in the Titanic sinking. More of those and many more boats of any size whatever would sink. Consider the opera buffa elements of the sinking of the Costa Concordia.
Vada a bordo, cazzo!

Antifragile is a little weak in spots with a tiller corroded by blowhardia causing it to list when dodging reefs. Will she reach port? Probably but for God’s sake do not go so close to the Statue of Liberty.

Alexandrine History

This extreme is illustrated by the impressions that Jean Reville describes,in connexion with the problem of the Fourth Gospel :"Concluding his study of the Prologue of the Fourth Gos-pel, M.Loisy says of the Evangelist: 'He is not writing a history of Jesus but rather a treatise on knowledge of Jesus.' I hold instead that he intended to write a history, but history as an Alexandrian understood history , which is something radically different from what we mean by history....The aim of the Gospel, the aim of the Prologue itself, is historical, that is the fact that must not be lost sight of. However, the Evangelist writes history as all men who were imbued with the Alexandrine spirit in his day wrote history, with a sovereign contempt for concrete material reality, as was the case with Philo or St. Paul. In the view of those great minds, history was not a pragmatic narrative of events, a faithful reproduction of details, a careful chronology, an integral resurrection of the past. The historian's task was to emphasize the moral and spiritual values of facts, their deeper significance, that element of eternal truth which is present in each contingent and ephemeral phenomenon in history.

(from Le quatrieme Evangile by Jean Reville as quoted in The Mind and Society by Vilfredo Pareto)

Our Own Common Era

It is the unheralded ancestor of every subsequent era system, including the Christian Anno Domini system, our own Common Era, the Jewish Era of Creation, the Islamic Hijrah, the French Revolutionary Era, and so on.

(further down)

All events, however dislocated, were part of a single story, a total history. 

These observations are from an Aeon essay by Paul J. Kosmin of Harvard College who is John L Loeb associate professor of the humanities, specialising in the history of the Ancient Greek world, at Harvard University in Massachusetts. His most recent book is Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire(2018)

Are you sitting comfortably; this won’t take long. What do you notice about the group of dating systems mentioned above? Most of the numbers are different except for two: A.D. and C.E. Correct. That leads us to suspect that they may be part of “a single story” as Kosmin says himself. What has caused the break in acronym? Can it be that “our own C.E.” represents ‘under new management’? Fine but shouldn’t this new regime have a starting date? When would it be? Very difficult problem even for a Harvard prof specialising in time. Really hard problem. Let’s just cancel the history of dating instead.

A French Detective Speaks

"But, in the world of reality, at the very heart of reality, there is always a fixed point, a solid nucleus, about which the facts group themselves in accordance with a logical order”.

(from The Eight Strokes of the Clock by Maurice Leblanc.

And yet as it happens the story that Prince Renine spun was an lie told out of a desire to correct the world of reality and align it with an ideal. Alethtomy? From  ἀλήθεια
cf Wikipedia on the topic:
aletheia

I was a hidden treasure and I wished to be known Allah/hadith

Renine is disclosing a supervening emotional reality or an ideal sublation.
Read it at The Eight Strokes of the Clock

Peter Wessel Zapffe climbs Mount Kailas

Dealing with the absurdism of Peter Wessel Zapffe by the method of retorsion is relatively easy.
maverick philosopher
If our unnecessarily large brains have concocted a farrago of comforting illusions might not this solemn philosophy be just another one of them? However for those who have entered the Zapffian the view from outside is obstructed. The door to that doomy portal closes after you enter it and besides there are many teachings of the traditional wisdom schools that echo the cool pessimism of the view from the mountain top. At the pinnacle near the bench mark will be scratched, Nietzsche was here. Vedanta and Buddhist sages may have added stones to the cairn also. cf.Vedanta and Anti Natalism

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

(from The Last Messiah essay by Peter Wessel Zapffe pub.1933
trans. The Last Messiah )

The symbolic meaning of hollow Mount Kailas and Arunachala, wherein dwell Shiva and deathless sages, is a rebuttal of the ultimacy of the absurd. Saints and rishis have penetrated that adamantine rock through the practice of gnothi seauton (know thyself) and atma vichara (inquiry into the self). Yes, they agree, man cannot know truth but he can realise it. The good as a categorical or utilitarian slogan is otiose but the action of one who embodies the good is a safe template which we can apply to our work.

(general review of Zapffe by Gisle Tangenes: The View from Mount Zapffe)

Vedanta and Anit-Natalism

Having approached the Teacher in the prescribed manner i.e. with fuel in his hand; he thus addresses him:

Thus in this beginningless world on account of my own actions I have been giving up successive bodies assumed amongst gods, men, animals and the denizens of hell and assuming ever new ones. I have in this way been made to go round and round in the cycle of endless births and deaths as in a Persian wheel by my past actions, and having the course of time obtained the present body. I have got iired of this going round and round in the wheel of transmigration and have come to you, Sir, to put and end to this rotation.

(from Upadesa Sahasri Chap.1 by Shankaracarya)

This sounds arguably very much like prospective anti-natalism. Gratitude for this birth and the meeting with a Teacher is a given that mitigates that. One might also press the point that the doctrine of maya in Vedanta is nihilist. We are, it is held, radically deluded and under a misapprehension of what our true nature is. That is a shallow understanding of maya and a simplistic grasp of the snake/rope analogy. Creation is not free standing and self supporting. It is non-different from Brahman, an indescribable (anirvachanaya) relation, neither identical nor different.

Pareto's Cormanesque Juridical Entities

Pareto was fond of bizarre stories drawn from classical sources which served to illustrate his theories about residues and derivatives. Re a derivative which he calls juridical entities he cites:

Pausanias, Pcriegesis, VI, Elis II, n, 5-7, relates that, at Thasos, one of the rivals of the champion runner, Theagenes, was in the habit of thrashing his statue every night, and that finally to punish the man it fell upon him and crushed him : "The children of the dead man then brought action against the statue for murder, and following one of the Draconian laws, the Thasians threw it into the sea." But a blight oracle declared that it was because the Thasians "had forgotten the greatest of their fellow-citizens." So they fished up the statue and reerected it in its original position.

Pope Formosus was put on trial in 897. Unfortuneately at that point in time he had been dead for eight months:

The Cardinals, the Bishops, and many other Church dignitaries, assembled in Sanhedrin. The Pope's body, wrested from the tomb in which it had been lying for eight months, was clothed in the pontifical robes and seated on a throne in the Council hall. Pope Stephen's attorney arose and turned towards the horrible mummy at its side sat a terrified deacon who had been designated to act as its counsel. [Animals too had their attorneys.] The prosecutor read the charges. Then the living Pope inveighed at the dead Pope in a mad violence: 'Why, ambitious man, didst thou usurp the Apostolic See of Rome, thou who wert Bishop of Porto?' The attorney of Formosus answered in his defence so far as terror did not paralyze
his tongue. The dead Pope was convicted and his punishment fixed.

Iris Murdoch: Muddles and The Mixture as Before

"I do love the way you talk, you're so precise, not like my father. He lives in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea."

This is Julian the daughter of Baffin the popular novelist of the quasi deep Murdochian sort. The author in the mirror of her characters writes against herself. Bradley Pearson the ever so serious, not many words but true ones, in a review of Baffin’s latest, writes:

Arnold Baffin's new book will delight his many admirers. It is, what readers often and innocently want, "the mixture as before." It tells of a stockbroker who, at the age of fifty, decides to become a monk. His course is thwarted by the sister of his abbot-to-be, an intense lady returned from the East, who attempts to convert the hero to Buddhism. These two indulge in very long discussions of religion. The climax comes when the abbot (a Christ figure he) is killed by an immense bronze crucifix which accidentally (or is it accidentally?) falls upon him while he is celebrating mass.

This is all in The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch which I haven’t finished and mightn’t. It’s the insolence of being too successful, too prolific and not allowing the creative energy to gather itself that irritates. It’s Murdochshire on a warm summer’s day and the general sense of ‘muddle’ that confounds. A favourite word of Oxford philosophy which occurs 16 times in ‘Prince’ ,17 times in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, 42 times in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. I include muddles, muddler, muddling etc in this count – it’s the concept that counts, you know.

What does it mean? What could it mean? It ought to have an entry in a dictionary of philosophy. Let me attempt a prolegomena to a sense of it.

a mix up, taking something to be that which it is not, a categorical error, a state of affairs as a false framing (not really love), an unwitting masquerade, misapprehension, confusion, mistake, misprision, misplaced soul searching (solution: keep one in every room), stultification by intent ……..

Murdoch in many places is saying ‘Iris put down that pen, take the dogs for a walk, become more chaste and elegant, cut like a hated editor and for God’s sake don’t strain so much'.

‘I for one;, when did people stop saying that, have reverted to reading again Dostoevsky’s The Devils. Now that’s a novel, not a toy.

Bilimoria on Theodicy

Purushottama bilimoria has a review of the various theodicies in the Hindu tradition.
Towards an Indian Theodicy
theodicy

His remarks on the short sections of Shankaracarya’s commentary on Brahma Sutra Bhasya II.i.34/5 are interesting.

Śaṅkara is adamant that creation is “sāpekṣa,” that is, Brahman is not independent, even though he is the sole material cause of the world. As a matter of fact, he does not have nor can exercise free choice, since he has no control over dispensing the consequences of creatures’ actions, in which he is guided by the “Force of Law” – Karma.

The essence of this view is that when you create a world you create interaction, you create work and therefore causality. Because issuing from the boundless consciousness of Brahman in which there is no border between spirit and matter, interaction on all planes is subject to cause and effect. The explication of Brahman as the material cause of the universe must not be taken to mean that Brahman is itself material. This is made clear by Shankaracarya in his commentary on Tai.Up. (Satyam Jnanam Anantam Brahma). See various posts on this very close analysis –
Tai.Up.
To create a world in which there was no interaction would be incoherent. Bilimoria puts it in a stronger way that might be questioned.

It is clear though that God’s dependence upon the karma of the creatures, seriously delimits, that is, restricts, God’s omnipotence; second, it takes away any element of the hand or even the inscrutability of providence: grace would not be easy to come by in this account

Delimit and dependence seem to suggest the concept of a creation inflicting itself on the creator when in fact the demands of karma are internal to creation. When grace is required it comes from inside the creation via an avatar as the Bhagavad Gita puts it:
.

BG 4.8: To protect the righteous, to annihilate the wicked, and to reestablish the principles of dharma I appear on this earth, age after age

Within the creation the avatar is subject to birth and death and can interact with others to answer their prayers. There is no remote creator dependent on his creation but he must act from within the creation if he is to act in Isvara mode.

Bilimoria stresses again this ‘dependence’ aspect in his consideration of B.S.B. II.i.35:

Be that as it may, the uniqueness of the Hindu idea of the beginninglessness of the universe (in cyclical returns), and God’s dependence on the world (rather than the converse) renders God not as independent and existing outside of, nay prior to, the created world – which marks the idea of God in Judeo-Christian monotheistic doctrines. God is bound by the karmas of the individual creatures even after their selves have been dissolved along with the world.

This is in reference to the beginning-less nature of the Hindu creation which is periodically dissolved and reissued with the karmas of participants continuing on. Before you had the big bang you had the big contraction. And off to work we go.

Nisargadatta Maharaj on Personality / Advice to a Seeker

Questioner: Why do you keep on dismissing the person as of no importance? Personality is the primary fact of our existence. It occupies the entire stage.

Maharaj: As long as you do not see that it is mere habit, built on memory, prompted by desire, you will think yourself to be a person – living, feeling , thinking, active, passive, pleased or pained. Question yourself, ask yourself. ‘Is it so?’ And soon you will see your mistake. And it is in the very nature of a mistake to cease to be, when seen.

The Questioner reveals some of his history:

I am an adopted child. My own father I do not know. My mother died when I was born. My foster father, to please my foster mother, who was childless, adopted me – almost by accident. He is a simple man – a truck owner and driver. My mother keeps the house. I am 24 years now. For the last two and a half years I am travelling, restless, seeking. I want to live a good life, a holy life. What am I to do?

Maharaj: Go home, take charge of your father’s business, look after your parents in their old age. Marry the girl who is waiting for you, be loyal, be simple, be humble. Hide your virtue, live silently. The five senses and the three qualities (gunas) are your eight steps in Yoga. And ‘I am’ is the Great Reminder (mahamantra). You can learn from them all you need to know. Be attentive, enquire ceaselessly. That is all.

(from I AM THAT: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj )

The ‘I am’ is the focus on consciousness as such and not any particular conformation of it.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch (pub.1970)

Published in 1970 the same year as The Sovereignty of the Good there is a certain ghosting through of the philosophical work in the novel. Julius King refers to the philosophy book that Rupert Foster is writing as ‘High Church Platonism’. Arguably that is what ‘Sovereignty’ is, with Good being God. At two points in the novel the question is asked – why is stealing wrong? Rupert replies at length with the force and clarity which no doubt earned him his first at Oxford where he met Axel and Julius King. Julius also has a go at an elucidation of stealing and its wrongness. In both case it is Tallis Browne who is asking the question.

Are you confused yet? Time to introduce the Dramatis Personae:
Rupert and Hilda Foster, he a senior civil servant, economics department, she a housewife with a multitude of committees to attend to.
Peter their only child, dropping out of Cambridge and gone to live with Tallis Browne a community worker and evening class lecturer.
Tallis Browne is the husband of Morgan, Hilda’s sister, back from America where she has been for the last two years. While there she was the mistress of Julius King. They have parted now.
Simon Foster is the brother of Rupert and the partner of Axel. The latter is a colleague of Rupert’s and an old friend from college days.

Well then, are we sitting comfortably? As the novel opens it is the 20th. Wedding anniversary of Rupert and Hilda. The time seems to be in the early 60’s, Rupert had a good war. I have never been able to quite get the insinuation of that expression. They are drinking champagne in the afternoon and getting a trifle squiffy. The Evening Standard has reported that Julius King is in England after a stint in Dibbins College heading up a military funded lab working on biological warfare. Nerve gas and anthrax resistant to antibiotics. He has given that up because he got bored with it. We are told that he is Jewish and independently wealthy. Julius is the arch manipulator, Mephistophelian meddler and the kingpin of this novel. He makes things happen with an malicious ingenuity which is quite credible given that all the characters other than Tallis Browne are self absorbed and not capable of noticing the damage done or if they have, doing anything about it. In contrast to the ghostly ‘Sovereignty of the Good’ we might subtitle this book ‘The Ebullience of Evil’.

Morgan Browne is an emotional wreck sustaining herself with lots of whiskey and gin. Morgan le Fay is a suggestion from her name, sexually predatory and the disciple of Merlin/Julius. She is a disturber and a creator of variance. Tallis Browne who will not divorce her lives in Notting Hill in utter filth which Murdoch has great fun describing. Have you ever been in a house where you step backwards onto a plastic bag which yields like dead puppies? Morgan visiting Tallis remembers that their previous house in Putney had a similar smell.

Axel and Simon live near to Rupert and Hilda in the posh Barons Court area. The minutiae of this relationship seems a parody of heterosexual marriage with fluttery airheaded Simon and stern sensible strict Axel. The closet is firmly closed to Axel’s colleagues in Whitehall. Even Simon when he first met met Axel did not know that he was ‘queer’. They met in the kouros annex of the National Museum in Athens quite by chance. That was some 3 years previously and the photo of the kouros resides on the left of the mantelpiece. Simon’s fear of the loss of the love of Axel is the lever that Julius uses to make him collude unknowingly with his plan to disturb the cosy relationships in his vicinity. How that is worked is a masterpiece of creative ingenuity of Murdoch’s.

It’s an excellent novel very well sustained with a good serving of evil that is in its way a demonstration of its privative quality. Confidence, faith, trust and love is taken away in a spirit of wilful caprice and when ruin ensues rationalisation follows. Probably one of her best books.

In case you are wondering why stealing is wrong:

Rupert, who had not had a philosophical training for nothing, was never startled by any question, however bizarre, and was ready at once to give it his undivided attention. He reflected now for a while, staring at Tallis. Then he said ‘Of course the concept of stealing is linked to the concept of property. Where there are no property rights there is no wrongful appropriation of the goods of another. In completely primitive situations where there is no society—if any such situations exist or existed—it could be argued that there are no property rights and so no stealing. Also in certain kinds of community, such as a monastery or conceivably a family, there could be mutual voluntary renunciations of property rights, so that within the community stealing would not exist by definition. Though even in these two cases what a man customarily uses such as his clothes or his tools might be thought of as natural property and ergo as deserving of respect. Indeed one might argue that it could never be right under any circumstances, to remove a man’s toothbrush against his will. However, in state and society as we know it, there is no prospect of any universal voluntary surrender of the concept of property, and extremely complicated property rights, extending far beyond the area of clothes and tools, appear to exist and are upheld by law. Doubtless many of these complex arrangements can be argued to be economically and politically necessary to the well-being and continuance of the state, and in a healthy open society the details of these arrangements are properly a matter for continual discussion and adjustment in the light of both expediency and morality. Acceptance of any society, and even a bad society gives its members many benefits, does seem to suggest a certain duty to respect property. In a bad undemocratic society there might of course exist specialized duties to disregard particular alleged property rights, or even to break the law as a matter of protest, though it should be kept in mind that there are always prima facie utilitarian arguments against stealing, in so far as people may be distressed by the removal of their goods. But in a democratic society stealing is surely wrong not only for utilitarian reasons but because property is an important part of a structure generally agreed to be good and whose alteration in detail can be freely sought.’
When Rupert had finished speaking Tallis waited as if there might be something more to come. He looked puzzled. Then he said, ‘Thank you very much, Rupert.’ And to Hilda, ‘Please forgive me, I must go. Don’t bother to see me to the door. Oh how kind of you. Thank you, good-bye, good-bye.’ He went away smiling and waving.
Hilda and Rupert walked back into the drawing room. They picked up their drinks. They stared at each other in complete bafflement.

If they knew that their son Peter was shoplifting with abandon they would be less puzzled.

Julius is asked the same question:

Why is stealing wrong?’
‘It’s just a matter of definition,’ said Julius.
‘How do you mean?’
‘It’s a tautology. “Steal” is a concept with a built-in pejorative significance. So to say that stealing is wrong is simply to say that what is wrong is wrong. It isn’t a meaningful statement. It’s empty.’
‘Oh. But does that mean that stealing isn’t wrong?’
‘You haven’t understood me,’ said Julius. ‘Remarks of that sort aren’t statements at all and can’t be true or false. They are more like cries or pleading. You can say “Please don’t steal” if you want to, so long as you realize that there’s nothing behind it. It’s all just conventions and feelings.’