Monday 25 November 2019

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 )

Wednesday 20 November 2019

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.

Tuesday 19 November 2019

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.

Friday 15 November 2019

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


Wednesday 13 November 2019

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!

Tuesday 12 November 2019

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.





Monday 11 November 2019

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.

Wednesday 6 November 2019

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.

Monday 4 November 2019

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.



Saturday 2 November 2019

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


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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.