Sunday 27 December 2020

The Hope of Austin Farrer

 I would no longer attempt, with the psalmist, ‘to set God before my face’.  I would see him as the underlying cause of my thinking, especially of those thoughts in which I tried to think of him.  I would dare to hope that sometimes my thought would become diaphanous, so that there should be some perception of the divine cause shining through the created effect, as a deep pool, settling into a clear tranquility, permits us to see the spring in the bottom of it from which its waters rise.

(from ‘The Glass of Vision’ by Austin Farrer)

Monday 14 December 2020

Under Gemini: A Memoir by Mary Britton Miller (aka Isabel Bolton - 1883 - 1975)

 I read a lot and there is the danger of dulling by surfeit the critical faculty.  There are too many bad books reading over my shoulder sliming with cliche the  the work in hand .  One thing that causes me to put down a book immediately is the use of the continuous present.  To the block Hilary Mantel.  It seems to me a cheap attempt at immediacy and if the preterite won’t give your story force; it’s a weakling.

And then I was reading ‘Under Gemini, a Memoir’ by Mary Britton Miller and I realised that the continuous present in the first chapter was not producing the throw reflex.   Why?  Respondit Bergson by ouija:

This is not the Continuous Present it is the Durational Present.  These events frame a soul and make a world: now.   Miller is a very great writer and does not continue this device which is not a device past the opening.  First in ordinary time she tells us what she is going to tell us.

"There is a legend that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed. Our nurse, Mathilda, unable to tell which twin was which, called upon our mother to decide. She replaced the ribbons, saying I was Mary and the other child was Grace. Let us assume that she was right, for I was christened Mary and my twin was christened Grace; and so, awarding her the honor of having entered this world five minutes before I did, I will attempt to recapture the memories of our life together on this earth.”

Then she tells us:

“There is a room darkened against the light and on the couch a gentleman with a dark moustache is lying fast asleep. He snores. Behind the couch I kneel and kneeling with me is my other self. Identical excitement, terror, fearful joy invades us. We wait. I watch my duplicate arise and I am rising with her. There is a moment for decision and then a swift resolve—a dreadful sharing of the consequences that will follow the awful act we contemplate; and then, excitement urging us, we spit directly in our father’s upturned face. He rises. We flee while panic overtakes us and then a sudden darkness, the waters of continuing experience engulf our father and his wrath. We have no further memory of him whatever.”

In the same way their memory of mother is cut off.  The sudden night that overwhelms them is due to the death by cholera of both parents.  All at once the life of the five children in the family becomes the care of a maternal uncle and his organising wife Aunt Anna.  They now live with their grandmother and a carer which they are instructed to call Aunt Julia.  Apart from a ceremonial visit on Sundays to Aunt Anna’s they are left alone to express themselves by mighty acts of domestic delinquency.

Aunt Anna is no downtrodden and subdued Victorian lady:

"The spectacle of our Aunt Anna affected us quite differently. Whatever charm and geniality she might have had was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed. Her clothes fitted her tightly; they were handsome and well brushed, not glamourous at all but with their own special elegance. She did not approve of charm; she listened rather disapprovingly to Uncle Jim and always asked practical questions, saying, "My dear Jim, I don't agree. This should not be done. I don't approve." She said, "You must" and "You must not" with emphasis.”

The sweet sadness of the denouement of this memoir comes across the century.  Now my problem is, what am I going to read after this elevation into contact with a real genius whose obscurity was self sought?  I think more of her and then taper off with Elizabeth Bowen.  Maybe Mrs. Gaskell first then Bowen.  That’s what I’ll do.

American Classic.

He's Sinking Fast Dr. Jill

 This is a repost and it gives me the opportunity to correct the assumption by the teaching staff of the 'Michael Smurfit Business School' that an insistence on 'Dr' when you're talking to me' is an American thing.  



Dr. Gary Santry, his full style and title.


Dr. Santry lately made a professor at the Michael Smurfit Business School in U.C.Dublin and having received an award for outstanding service from the college was to the astonishment of all discovered to be entirely bogus and with faked credentials from American schools.
Dr. Santry I presume
He was an excellent teacher and his colleagues reported only one oddity about him. He insisted on being referred to as Dr. Sanrty which they went along with considering it an eccentric American practice. In Ireland in informal professional settings like the Senior Common Room this is not done. Only medical doctors are given the title Dr. by the general public. There was a minister of health in the government who had a Phd. In Agricultural Science and used the Dr. title promiscuously. Amusing considering that the faculty was known as Bog Science. That was Dr. Michael Woods who was fully qualified to give a kiss of life to a sod of turf.

English Literature is replete with figures who never went to College or had modest degrees. I find  honorary degrees demeaning unless you actually are allowed to teach at university. Santry was an excellent teacher in an institution dedicated to instruction in the arcana of Business. They should they have given him an honorary degree and let him at it.

Wednesday 9 December 2020

Christmas Menu and Lullaby


((Svengali - Et maintenant dors, ma mignonne!  Et maintenant dormir, mon cher!))

Before the First World War an editorial in the Skibbereen Eagle (West Cork) began - The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on the Tsar.  I have my eye on President Trump for the moment and foresee the Biden Xmas dinner. (excuse the bog French)

Turkey a la Orange avec les petites ballotines farci

Aperitif: Ruby Porto

Pommes de Terre ‘big guy’ / Jus Burismo surtout

Desert: Freeman souffle Y’all.

The Biden trot looks like a donkey evading a halter but of one thing we may be sure - he did not mastermind this farce.   Maybe no one did.  Maybe the materials were left lying around and right thinking people did the right thing.   If it had occurred in the Ukraine there would be talk of sending an observer there to oversee the elections in future.  Hunter, there’s a job for you.

One positive: with years of talk of American interference in the election there may not be time to start a foreign war.  Ah General Blinken.  Cue  “Wynken, Blynken and Nod”

 

Sunday 6 December 2020

The Meaning of God

 In its bewildering way paradox can make more sense than something set down plainly.  God may give meaning to our lives without our being able to give meaning to God.   Let me entertain the vertiginous thought that the meaning of God is the method of His verification namely worship.

“Standing up, Damaris realized that interpretations nearly always are wrong; interpretations in the nature of things being peculiarly personal and limited. The act was personal but infinite, the reasoned meaning was personal and finite. Interpretation of infinity by the finite was pretty certain to be wrong. The thought threw a light on her occupation with philosophies. Philosophy to Plato, to Abelard, to St. Thomas, was an act—the love of wisdom; to her——

But all that was to come. Love or wisdom, her act awaited her. She ran lightly down the stairs.”

(from <i>The Place of the Lion</i> by Charles Williams)

Friday 4 December 2020

The Ferriter, O'Toole & Banville Trifecta

 ‘George’  a commentor on my previous post writes:

"It sounds rather like Flann O'Brien's account, collected in Further Cuttings from the Cruiskeen Lawn of a controversy between a Father Felim O Briain and a Mr. Sheehy-Skeffington. Like most of O'Brien's work, it is most amusing. It is unfortunately too long for me to type into your comment box. But the first of the subpropositions mentioned begins"1. A person born in Ireland who is a Catholic and who possibly harbours nationalistic sentiments is a low mean stupid dog; he is superstitious and priest-ridden, is forbidden to read any worthwhile books, particularly the Bible; he gratefully lies down under all the most outrageous tyrannies, and even keeps inventing new tyrannies; he is a fool and a helot ...."O'Brien said that he would invite neither O Briain nor Sheehy-Skeffington to dinner, since "I am afraid to my life of being bored."

Who was this Father O’Brian.  He used the Irish form of his name and he was the Professor of Philosophy in University College Galway - An tAthair Felim O’Briain O.F.M. Phd, D.D. B Cl.  He is down as such in the college calender of 1941.  He died in 1956.   Owen Sheehy-Skeffington was a Senator and a liberal free-thinker humanist when that was neither profitable or popular as Myles would say.   Diarmad Ferriter the historian refers to ‘Skeff’ being expelled from the Labour party because of a row in 1943 with a priest over the nature of Socialism .  This he takes in his book (The Transformation of Ireland) to be an index of the pusillanimity of the socialists of the time.   Not mentioning the name of the priest which he must have known displays the the mean-spiritedness  of the modern liberal.  You know, just a generic priest -écrasez l'infâme.

Skeff and Fr. O’Brian could have agreed on this much anyway.  The ‘priest’ is quoted in a magazine of the time - ‘The Galway Reader’ by a Senator Burke who ran a co-operative farm in Galway.

“There is a genuine grievance among the abnormally large class of miserably underpaid workers in Eire ; before an employer should spend his profits on luxuries for himself, he should ensure that his workers can satisfy their normal needs ; bread for all, before cake for anyone, is an axiom that has many centuries of Christian tradition behind it.  “In a country such as Eire, where the national income is meagre, social justice imposes special standards of sacrifice and austerity on the upper income groups. This standard of austerity is absent in this country.”

Ferriter and Fintan O’Toole are the twin interpretive pillars of the Irish Times.  Either of them is a European level bore, quite predictable on the woes of Erin a la Banville.  The trifecta of them all on the same day and issue might break the algorithm which governs the three great waves which break on the coast of Ireland.  Only the Tuatha de Danann could save us then.

Thursday 3 December 2020

John Banville: Please Stop

 John Banville who won the Booker prize before it became a demographic award doesn’t like the ‘woke’ folk.  O.K. fine, splendid but he had to assure the potential audience for his new book; one of those written by his Benjamin Black alter ego, that he was not a troglodyte or worse - an old white man.  (It’s bad detective fiction.  I read one of them and there was a series on television.  They are not very good.)

In any case they are set in the ‘50‘s in Dublin and contain all the cliches about that era.  Archbishop McQuaid - wicked old prelate, priest ridden Ireland, mother and baby homes etc, etc.  Banville deplores them without the craw thumping of false regret which is one feature he shares with the ‘woke’.  We all of us in this new dawn are cut off from our history and on its right side which is the left side.

An article written by him in the Irish Times, he was literary editor there once, runs along that deep rutted track.  In  the comments section below someone (Patrick60) wrote a rejoinder which ‘needed to be said:

banville criticised

“Here we go again ... Ireland and the Catholic Church in the 1950s. Could we for a moment lift our eyes from Ireland's supposedly unique, priest-ridden backwardness in this period to consider what was happening in other countries? Many of our EU friends were busy fighting vicious colonial wars, involving in all cases horrific atrocities. This included France (Tunisia, Algeria), the UK (Cyprus, Kenya), the Netherlands (Indonesia late-40s) and Belgium (the Congo 1960). Racial oppression and violence were rife (egregiously so in the US and South Africa but far wider than that). Eugenics still had a strong following, nowhere more so than in Sweden which pursued enforced sterilisation for the "mentally defective" up to 1976 and required it for gender re-assignment surgery until 2012. (Yes you read that correctly.) Unmarried motherhood had the same stigma everywhere and every country had their equivalent of mother and baby homes. It was not a peculiarly Irish or Catholic thing. Nor was homosexuality viewed differently in Ireland to other countries in the 1950s. And all this is before we talk about the Eastern bloc countries for which the Irish left - including prominent elder statesmen of the left - had such a soft spot, fully aware of the nature of these regimes. Other countries seem to be able to confront their history with some measure of perspective and context. We prefer to wallow in it. The 1950s began 60 years ago. Give it a rest, John.”

Monday 30 November 2020

Book Reports

 To find something to read is made a little bit more difficult now that archive dot org and its affiliates have been neutered.  For a goodly period you had a superb library at one’s command from the comfort of home.  It’s a rearguard action before the strategic withdrawal.  Making money from books may for a while devolve into intellectual merch.  I don’t discount t-shirts.  Justin E.H.U. Smith a man in a die-cast suit, an angster whose antennae are attuned to the moons of the internet has gone substack with the promise of exoteric free, esoteric you pay me for the entry into a fanum which casts us on our faces.

Still there are areas which are free where copywright is not snaffled by self-styled new editions of old works which the public do not appreciate as though they were the spoil heaps of ancient mines which can have the last speck of gold extracted.  Fadedpage dot com a Canadian outfit has a lot of good titles meticulously produced.   Evelyn Waugh is there in full and Charles Williams.  I’m reading ‘The Place of the Lion’ now.  Realism which is also magical and doubts itself is my red tea.

I was reading ‘Daniel Martin’ by John Fowles and I’ve stopped where I balked before.  It became unreadable where it became un-writeable.  Emergency story lines were brought in and were cast buoy attached but the narrator sunk for the third time.  I may go back to see what happened.  If our Dan’s lungs were not filled with water he may have been murdered before being dumped in the sea.

Which brings me to Colin Dexter’s Morse books.  Entertaining puzzles with twists that are not factitious if that is not a contradiction.  ‘Turn back Lewis’.  The literary epigraphs as chapter headings are apposite and the mental elaborations of Chief Inspector Morse are usually noughted by his intuitions, the something not quite right.  The TeeVee adaption is a superior product also but naturally less inward.  I’ve watched them several times.

I have a Kate O’Brien book in hand as well - ‘The Flower of the May’.  Is she read much or known outside of Ireland?  Probably not and even here moving to the bins.  Virago published several of her novels.  ‘Flower’ starts with that great device for introducing a milieu, the wedding.  1909 Dublin, Southside - Mespil Road reception at home, ceremony in Haddington Road.  Merchant families.  I will write about this later.  Will it end with a funeral, a death in childbirth: that sort of bookend?  What is expected is also satisfying.

Philosophy: Lots of back and forth - Brahma Sutra Bhasya, Upanisads, Maritain ‘Approaches to God’.  Very French that title and old fashioned in its brisk clarity.  Nisargadatta and he would agree on the intuition of existence.

Bergson of course by two good explainers - Keith Ansell Pearson & John Mullarkey - Key Writings. Elie During on Bergson and Time, the twins paradox etc.  Both available from Academia.edu  What Bergson meant by ‘images’, ‘the world as an aggregate of images’   swims after the fashion of an eidolon  before my corporeal vision.

Thursday 26 November 2020

Ouija boards and Time Travel in America

 Eight Thousand plus voters who have passed over  moved the planchette on the ouija boards to spell out the name of their candidate in a touching display of post mortem fidelity to the party of their choice.  Assiduous apparatchiks transcribed their votes to a mail in ballot.  There was a significant number of time travellers who posted in ballots for people before they had been sent out.

On a Belfast poster - Vote Early -  a wag added in brackets (Vote Often). In Philadelphia the Gold Banana award goes to the man who urged President Trump to put on ‘big boy pants’.  He was an Irishman by the look and name of him and he perfectly resembled the stroke artist that we know so well whose joy it is to tell you that he has pulled one on you and there is nothing you can do about it.

Was there American interference in this election?  Such a thing to say.  I’m shocked, shocked.

Tuesday 17 November 2020

E voting in elections

 Ireland has a curious and therefore very Irish experience with electronic voting machines.  Wikipedia summarises the entire debacle:

<blockquote>Electronic voting machines for elections in the Republic of Ireland were used on a trial basis in 2002, but plans to extend it to all polling stations were put on hold in 2004 after public opposition and political controversy. Electoral law was amended in 2001 and 2004 and sufficient voting machines for the entire state were purchased, but the plan was officially dropped in 2009 and the machines were subsequently scrapped. Elections continue to use paper ballots completed in pencil.</blockquote>

The whole entry is worth reading.

e voting in ireland

Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp demonstrated how easy it was to falsify results in elections when these machines were used.

The final result was a move away from e voting to “stupid old pencils” (Bertie Ahern ex Prime Minister).

That was a while ago you might say.  Yes, but as we know, if someone is smart enough to devise a system someone else will be smart enough to hack it.

Saturday 14 November 2020

Dawn at St. Patrick's by Derek Mahon

 Derek Mahon, always alone, always watchful, trying to catch up to himself and the latest news from his soul.  He mentions McLean’s psych unit Bowditch Hall where Robert Lowell spent time.

"After a hearty New England breakfast,

each of us holds a locked razor.” (from ‘Waking in the Blue’)



Mahon is in St.Pats being dried out.    It is  a bleak poem and also very funny.

“in a Dublin asylum

with a paper whistle and a mince pie,

my bits and pieces making a home from home.”

Through the poem we hear his neurons fizzing like fallen lines you are advised not to approach.  The self-pity is bleached out and there is a sad sprig of hope.

---------------

Soon a new year

will be here demanding, as before,

modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,

new leaves. This is the story of my life,

the story of all lives everywhere,

mad fools whatever we are,

in here or out there.

________________________

Dawn at St. Patrick's

BY DEREK MAHON


There is an old

statue in the courtyard

that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone.

The griefs of the ages she has made her own.

Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard,

her body is covered in mould,

the garden overgrown.


One by one

the first lights come on,

those that haven’t been on all night.

Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone.

No snow, but the rain pours down

in the first hour before dawn,

before daylight.


Swift’s home

for ‘fools and mad’ has become

the administrative block. Much there

has remained unchanged for many a long year —

stairs, chairs, Georgian widows shafting light and dust,

of the satirist.


but the real

hospital is a cheerful

modern extension at the back

hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque.

Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff,

a snifter of Lucozade, a paragraph

of Newsweek or the Daily Mail


are my daily routine

during the festive season.

They don’t lock the razors here

as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright —

though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,

with grown men in their festive gear,

was a sobering sight.


I watch the last

planes of the year go past,

silently climbing a cloud-lit sky.

Earth-bound, soon I’ll be taking a train to Cork

and trying to get back to work

at my sea-lit, fort-view desk

in the turf-smoky dusk.


Meanwhile,

next door, a visiting priest

intones to a faithful dormitory.

I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist,

and stare the clouds of unknowing. We style,

as best we may, our private destiny;

or so it seems to me.


as I chew my thumb

and try to figure out

what brought me to my present state­ —

an ‘educated man’, a man of consequence, no bum

but one who has hardly grasped what life is about,

if anything. My children, far away,

don’t know where I am today,


in a Dublin asylum

with a paper whistle and a mince pie,

my bits and pieces making a home from home.

I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come

where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives;

     and that I

 may measure up to them

before I die.


Soon a new year

will be here demanding, as before,

modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,

new leaves. This is the story of my life,

the story of all lives everywhere,

mad fools whatever we are,

in here or out there.


Light and sane

I shall walk down to the train,

into that world whose sanity we know,

like Swift to be a fiction and a show.

The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun

casts now upon everyone

its ancient shadow.

Wednesday 11 November 2020

Victorian Gardener Shirley Hibberd

Everybody grows cabbage, and everybody eats it; but my lady never hears the word, for all cabbages are “greens” in polite society. But plain people call things by their proper names, and I, for one, rejoice in cabbage, even if I dine with a retired tailor. Now a cabbage is a thing that most people think they can grow well, and generally speaking, good cabbages are very abundant; but cottagers, not looking upon it as a precarious or particularly choice crop, too often get careless, and where they take one ton of cabbages, a little extra pains would enable them to take two.

 

(from ‘Profitable Gardening’ by Shirley Hibbert pub. 1878 - my copy calls him Hibbert, Interesting Wikipedia article on Shirley Hibberd also Internet Archive has a lot of his very influential books on gardening. proto-ecology etc)

 

)

Profitable Gardening That might have been written by V.S. Pritchett. It’s that same sort of vigorous prose with two short sentences balanced by one long. The bed is layed out and then double dug. 

 

 For this crop, a newly-trenched deep loam is just the thing, and, if never trenched before in the memory of man, it will produce wonderful cabbages, as I know from experience, on an old worn-out soil, where cabbages had become a failure, but which, at the second spit, had never been touched with spade or fork, when trenched two and a-half, or three feet deep, and the lower hazelly stuff brought to the top, the cabbages took to it, and grew like wildfire. 

 

‘Trenching’ is also known as double digging or sometimes ‘bastard trenching’. A spit is the length of a spade face. 

 There’s a short story peering out of the brambles in the first two sentences. Let me dibble a little: 

 

Rennick the tailor was never called anything else. Even his wife used say ‘Rennick is up the town buying thread’. Rennick loved his bacon and cabbage which he ate in the middle of the day and when sitting crosslegged on a table set near the window would keep a roll of worn calico near him occcasionally ripping lengths of it. ‘For the mechanics’. I was in the room getting measured for my school blazer. It had saffron edging on blue, no crest. There was an optional cap in the Edwardian style which demanded launching into a tree.

 Now read on.

Monday 2 November 2020

Tractatus by Derek Mahon

Tractaus by Derek Mahon


‘The world is everything that is the case’

From the fly giving up in the coal-shed

To the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Give blame, praise, to the fumbling God

Who hides, shame-facedly, His aged face

Whose light retires behind its veil of cloud

 

The world, though, is also much more -

Everything that is the case imaginatively

Tacitus believed that mariners could hear

The sun sinking into the western sea;

And who would question that titanic roar,

The steam rising wherever the edge may be? 

Sunday 1 November 2020

The Irony of Coleman Hughes

 Coleman Hughes in his youtube video of ‘Why I’m Voting for Biden’  shows a fine grasp of the principles of rhetorical irony - litotes, asteism, and antiphrasis with a
soupçon of paralepsis.  However the internet is a blunt instrument and he may have misjudged his likely audience and proven the theory that irony ought to have its own font.  Or on the other hand energised his conservative followers.     
It’s here:
IRONY 

Friday 30 October 2020

Daniel Martin by John Fowles is your Daddy

 Tommy Bunting, who’s your Daddy?  Daniel Martin (pub. 1977) is.  The former is the protagonist, narrator of The Book against God (pub.2003) by James Wood (recall: against God ) the latter is the eponymous narrator of Daniel Martin by John Fowles.  There’s a generation between Dan and Tommy, one went to Oxford and the other to  University College London.  Both their fathers are vicars in country livings (where it ain’t easy).  They are of course atheists which is reported to be standard for the sons of the cloth.  The novels are philosophically inflected, Dan’s by alienation and bad faith, Existentialism on the Oxus and Tommy’s by Theodicy and the quicksands of Epicureanism, the subject of his foundered doctoral thesis.  The one is separated from his wife the other an older man of forty five has left a twenty seven year old starlet behind in Hollywood where he is a successful scriptwriter.  She is moving in on him fast and he is planning ahead on how to extricate himself.  Alas poor Tommy.  His Jane is moving into an objective view of his capers.  When women become objective it’s game ball.  Dan was in love with a Jane during his student days and yet married her younger sister Nell.  It’s complicated but you can see the novel as sociology interest.

Oh yes, both are liars, one performitively the other constructively.  I don’t know what that means either.

<i>Daniel Martin</i> is 688 pages long in paperback with more noticing than is good for narrative health, as James Wood might say, and irritating Trollopean buttonholing in the guise of alienation.  I’m 35% through it, at the same point possibly where I abandoned it many years ago.  Inertia in me and entropy in the novel are forces that must be overcome.

Later, on the rive gauche, Danny.

Thursday 29 October 2020

Vedic Truth and the Novel

“Concentration, cessation from sense-objects, rites, etc., are its legs: the Vedas are all its limbs: truth is its abode.” (Kena Up. IV.8)

The murk  of rationalisation that clouds the truth is seen for what it is when we apply the single pointed instrument of concentration.  What flashes on that inward eye is the tawdry nature of our desires.  The useful question - what do you want, really; is that it? is like the handy branch from our firewood basket that we use to gather together the embers and is then thrown on the flames.  We can’t be given the truth, we have to establish it by elimination.

“Satya (truth) means freedom from deceit and crookedness in speech, mind, and body; for knowledge abides in those who are free from deceit and who are holy, and not in those who are devilish by nature and are deceitful, as the Vedic text says, “those in whom there is no insincerity, falsehood, and deceit” (Prasna Up. I.16)  Therefore Satya (truth) is imagined as the abode.  Although by implication, truth has already been mentioned as legs, along with concentration etc., still its allusion again as the abode is for indicating that as a means (for the acquisition of knowledge) it excels others, as the Smrti says.  “ A thousand horse sacrifices and truth are weighed in a balance: and one truth outweighs a thousand horse sacrifices” (Vishnu Smrti. 8)”(Shankaracarya's commentary)

Novels can be true to life or true in the life of their writers if they are honest and undiverted by the fame of a successful formula.  You could say that they are true if they approximate a scryed dream where chaos is given a shape and can live free of the individual dreamer.  Great novels are always about to become formless reservoirs of dark energy. 

Saturday 24 October 2020

What-gate

 The Smoking Man.  We already have one.  Now all we need are Bernstein and Woodward manques.  Joe ‘Big Guy’ might like Nixon get elected and later be impeached.  What sort of -gate will it be: Tweakergate, Lapgate ?  Cast your minds back, this is just beginning to roll.

Thursday 22 October 2020

Downcast by the Problem of Evil

  -  Do you accept physics?   Are you affronted by the failure of over-stressed beams?  Are lava flows an unjust imposition?   What is your position on tsunamis?

 -  Nature is naturing, from indigestion to cancer.  It’s all normal.  It is what it is: only a fool could object to it.

 -  I agree and we differ only in my seeing God as the underlying energy of all this, supporting and sustaining and so forth.  You though, with a very narrow perspective on omni-benevolence claim that I should be baffled by a supposed dilemma and merely hold to belief through obdurate ignorance and refusal to draw a rational conclusion.  I think my love of physics, as such, is greater than yours as I am not in the least downcast by it whereas by your account I ought to be.

Wednesday 21 October 2020

The Book against God by James Wood (pub.2003)

 Here is the unreliable narrator, Thomas Bunting, telling us that he is an unreliable narrator.  Does that mean that he will drift into the truth or “win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence”?  His account of Augustine is defective and a Bunting truth.  Evil is privative and a lie is privative inasmuch as it deprives the world of a feature that is inconvenient for the utterer.  The bunts of Bunting are generally sportive fabrications, fabulisms of an idle drifting mind or it maybe, as we read deeper into inadvertent truth, symptoms of incipient madness.

In any case his wife Jane has given him the red card and sent him off the marital pitch, not to take an early bath for he doesn’t do baths or ablutions of any kind preferring to loll unshaven in a filthy dressing gown of a morning and onwards into a day of divagation from his doctoral thesis into a ragbag of theodicy - The Book against God.

"At the moment I’m living in an unpleasant little room, a bedsit I suppose, in Swiss Cottage, in a 1930s building on the Finchley Road pounded by traffic. I moved here in May, just after my father’s funeral, and after my estranged wife put me “on probation.” At the service, with Father’s body barely cold, Jane told me that she would have me back only if I could prove to her that I was no longer a liar, an operation which, I see now, has more than a touch about it of the famous Cretan paradox. In four months nothing has happened yet on that front, so here I am on the Finchley Road, alone.”

In the manic phase he lives beyond his card’s means and won’t open the dunning letters until the baliffs are threatened.  He claims that due to his parents’ lack of means he is lead into sybarite temptation.  Daddy is the vicar of a country parish outside Durham, a scholar who left the university theological faculty.

"But my parents’ finances were sickly; in my memory, Father seems to be continually driving in to Durham to meet “the bank manager,” to arrange for “another lease of life.” Though my parents weren’t ascetic, indeed quite worldly by instinct, our life was materially thin. All our textures were strained through the sieve of their finances.”

Wood is a fine writer steeped in English literature and Dickens spreads his wings over the descriptions of his fathers dwindling congregation.

"With gentle, undogmatic faith, he fit himself around the lives of his flock. Peter believed that most of his petitioners were in search of friendship rather than God. Mr. Tattersall, now long dead, used to come every week on Sunday afternoon when I was a boy. He had a red birthmark like a wax letterseal across one cheek, and always carried a small umbrella, even when it was sunny. Father told me that Mr. Tattersall was “terribly alone.” Mother told me that Mr. Tattersall had driven a bus for many years, the cream-coloured 54 that went every day between the villages. He had had an accident in which he knocked down a pedestrian. There had been nobody on the bus at the time—there rarely was—and Mr. Tattersall had accelerated away. The pedestrian recovered, and Mr. Tattersall, whom no one liked, was not charged; perhaps it was felt that he was already punished by the now shameful symbolism of his birthmark.”

Is Thomas Bunting’s theodicy an attempt to kill the god of his father or relief from seven years labour on a thesis on the Epicureans.  He’s nearly finished and the question ‘and then what’ may be the  burden that he can no longer bear or put down.  It’s not unknown in the academic world -

burn out

The portrait of Tommy’s wife Jane is tender, close and accurate:

“Her hair is very dark, fiercely commanded into a ponytail which hangs quiveringly, like the needle of a delicate instrument designed to monitor her moods. I got to know this shaking sleek ponytail very well indeed, because Jane has many moods, and there is no way to predict when or why she will laugh (at which point her ponytail, laughter’s tassel, swings and rocks) or become angry (the ponytail, now pride’s brush, stiff and unmoving, as she tilts her head to the left and closes her eyes in fury). Her noise is quite long—something suggestive of erotic prolongation in a long nose, I think—and her neck is long, too. At its base is a teaspoon declivity. There are freckles on her collarbones: eager touchmarks, sexual dapple. Her accent is very proper.”

What is the fealty of a liar worth?  Not much  Jane thinks as he ducks and dives around her wish to have a child.  Then his father dies before God does and his eulogy at the service is a self-absorbed argument with the departed.  It’s about as far as an Englishman can take a Dostoevskian skandaly.

This is a book well worth reading and it must have been deeply frustrating for the critics who wanted to ply the birch.  I’m sure some found a way.

Tuesday 20 October 2020

Sankara on Memory and Identity in Kena Upanishad II.4

 It is my fixed view that the Vedic philosopher theologians while unaffected by Western thoughts generated broadly similar responses to the aporiai of consciousness, identity,  and memory.  Here in his commentary on Kena Upanishad II.4  Sankara rejects the idea of the aloof Self as  an agent of the act of knowing.

“On the other hand, the explanation my run like this; “The Self being the agent of the act of knowing, one infers It to be the agent of the action from the fact of the cognitive act itself, just as one knows that it is the wind which moves a tree”.”

The Self then is understood as being aware of what is going on in the mind.  It is not the knowledge itself.  As knowledge occurs via perception, inference etc. the Self is activated like a substance undergoing modification.  There appears to be two processes going on here, mental activity producing knowledge and the modification of the Self producing awareness of this activity.  The changeability of the Self per this theory counters our sense of the permanence of the Self.

A view ascribed by Sankara to the school of Kannada:

“Knowledge arising from the contact of the soul and the mind, inheres in the soul; hence is the soul endowed with  knowership.  But it is not changeable; it is merely a substance  just like a pot in which colour inheres” - since according to this view, too, Brahman is a mere substance without consciousness, it contradicts such Vedic texts as, “Knowledge, Bliss, Brahman” (Br.Up. III.ix.28), “Brahman is Consciousness” (Ai. V.3)  And as the soul is partless and hence has no locality in it, and as the mind is ever in contact with it, the consequent  illogicality of admitting any law regarding the origination of memory becomes insurmountable.”

This remark about memory in its extreme allusiveness is somewhat inscrutable but if connected to the critique of Buddhist annica (momentariness) becomes intelligible.  The soul and the mind being viewed on the analogy of mental subject and mental objects requires that some mark of the supposed mental data must be discovered for them to be recognised as memory.  Thus you might have the thought, ‘someone won the lotto and yes now that I think of it, it was me’.

“Remembrance means recalling to mind something after its perception, and that can happen only when the agent of perception and memory is the same; for one person is not seen to remember something perceived by another.  How can there be an awareness of the form, “I who saw earlier see now”, arise unless the earlier and later perceiver be the same?  Moreover, it is well known to all that direct experience in the form of recognition,  such as “I who saw that, see this now”, occurs only when the agent of seeing and remembering  is the same.  Should their agents be different, then the awareness will take such a form, “I remember, but somebody else saw”; but nobody in fact experiences in this way.  Where cognition takes such a form, all understand the agents of seeing and remembering to be different, as for instance in, “I remember that he saw this then”.  (from Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya II.ii.25 pg.412 trans. Swami Gambhirananda, pub. Advaita Ashrama)

This critique of Sankaracarya’s would also apply to Hume’s fardel.

Sunday 18 October 2020

Plenipotent Trump

 You didn’t know that Trump was the cause of cheating at online chess?  It seems that winning at all costs establishes a template for the use of chess programs which in seconds give the best counter move.  Huge!  And he’s a fascist dictator but luckily not very good at it.  Where are the locked stadiums full of dissidents who later disappear and the rude 5 A.M. calls to a waiting meat wagon?  He has no control over the media, nothing bad happens to reporters who diss him.  Could he not at the very least sneak in an agent into the New Yorker canteen to switch the salt and sugar cellars?  Hopeless.

Friday 16 October 2020

Known with Each State of Consciousness (pratibodha videtam)

 “It (i.e. Brahman) is really known when It is known with (i.e. as the Self of ) each state of consciousness because thereby one gets immortality.  (Since) through one’s own Self is acquired strength, (therefore) through knowledge is attained immortality.” (Kena Up. II.4)

Pratibodha-viditam,known with reference to each state of intelligence.  By the wordbodha are meant the cognitions acquired through the intellect.  The Self, that encompasses all ideas as Its objects, is known  in relation to all these ideas.  Being the witness of all cognitions, and by nature nothing but the power of consciousness, the Self is indicated by the cognitions themselves, in the midst of cognitions, as non-different from them.  There is no other door to Its awareness.  (Sankaracarya’s commentary trans. by Swami Gambhirananda pub. by Advaita Ashrama)

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I’ve been here before raking out the ashes and attempting to reveal the living heart of the fire of religion.  How is freedom possible?  We can’t prove it but we can live it as a reality.   If soul is a way of living the world this pratibodha videtam is a way to alter that world.  The gnostic personal shrine is a dangerous fanum littered with yogi brashtas (broken yogis)  and therefore the psychopomp is required and the everyday enactments of symbol that is ritual.  It is touching to see a mahatma like Nisargadatta putting jasmine garlands around the pictures of saints like any householder.

Monday 12 October 2020

Knowing Brahman

 “It is known to him to whom it is unknown; he does not know to whom it is known.  It is unknown to those who know well, and known to those who do not know”.(Kena.Up. II.3)

There are different classes and grades of people who have views about Brahman.  There are those who are opposed to the concept completely.  Those are the people ‘whose intelligence is extremely primitive’ (Sankara’s view)  They are not taken into consideration.  They lack that basic sense of the numinous and the continuous fascination with the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing.  High I.Q. is no bar to this obtuseness and may even help as a ‘halo’ effect.  ‘How’, they feel, ‘could I be wrong who am so clever’.

There are two sorts of don’t knows being considered.  The rare and wonderful are the self realised sages and saints who manifest divinity and do not know it in the way that you would know some sensible object.  They do not know their own reality.  A curious observation.

Then there is the ignorance of the devotee or sincere aspirant whose faith in the reality of the goal is profound.  He is on his way there.  “I know and I do not know as well” - how can this be?  The contradiction is resolved in a higher synthesis.   He may still be at the stage of identifying with the senses, mind and intellect as his Self.  Even so freedom is a goal that is espoused as a real one and the presence of a self-realised master as an exemplar inspires.  Very often there will be indications to them that they are not deluded in this.  The present intuitive view of identity will be eroded over time.

Friday 9 October 2020

On Boundlessness by William Wordsworth



  I seemed to learn

That what we see of forms and images

Which float along our minds, and what we feel

Of active or recognizable thought

Prospectiveness, or intellect, or will,

Non only is not worthy to be deemed

Our being, to be prized as what we are,

But is the very littleness of life,

Such consciousness I deem but accidents,

Relapses from the one interior life

That lives in all things, sacred from the touch

Of that false secondary power by which

In weakness we create distinctions, then

Believe that all our puny boundaries are things

Which we perceive and not which we have made,

- In which all beings live with god, themselves

Are god, existing in the mighty whole,

As indistinguishable as the cloudless East

At noon is from the cloudless West, when all

The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.


(Ms fragment intended for <i>The Prelude</i>)

Wednesday 7 October 2020

Cosmic Station

In Vedanta synchronic identity is the central question. Why is every state of consciousness saturated with selfhood. We don’t have to think about it, there it is, firm as an anvil. The -Kena Upanishad (ca.500 B.C.) asks in the opening statement which gives it its title kena - by what agent.

 

 “Willed by whom does the directed mind go towards its object? Being directed by whom does the vital force, that precedes all, proceed (towards its duty)? By whom is this speech willed that people utter? Who is the effulgent being that directs the eyes and the ears?” 

 

 This appears to be a version of a Cartesian theory of a director self behind the curtain but it is rather the opening of the typical progress of a dialectic in which each position is sublated in a higher synthesis. The immediacy of each state of consciousness, its self-effulgence, is the core of non-dual meditation. The mind body complex irradiated by consciousness is the source of our awareness of the world. Simply being what it is and embedded in the world allows native capacities to manifest. They do not exist as it were in the dark, a priori, waiting for a world and are not in any Platonic sense formal. 

 

 It occurred to me this morning that certain meditations on the cakras, yantra (mystic diagrams) and mantra can have a Kantian a priori effect, sort of, by being a background which organises all inputs both intellectual and sensory in a formal manner. The world reaches us on their wavelength. Is that what realisation is, being stuck on the same cosmic station?

Tuesday 6 October 2020

The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

There's an Irish expression – ag baint faid as – extracting length out of it. The story has almost died of exhaustion and home is nowhere in sight. The canon of parsimony has been violated beyond all patience and we now wish for 'closure'. We are denied relief but are too embarrassed by the gravity of the theme to fall out. That American word for putting something behind you and 'moving on' is deliberately not used in The Lost by Daniel Medelsohn. Well I've followed him to his old country homeland Galicia but I'll be dammed if I'll go to Australia by way of maundering exegesis of Cain and Abel. Enough already.

Friday 2 October 2020

Losing My Cool by Thomas Chatterton Williams (pub. 2010)

  It’s a young man’s book full of self-exculpation and rationalisation.  The writing is flat and shows the signs of that evil fairy, the purging editor, that watched over its cradle.  Nevertheless it is interesting to such as I who has often wondered about that American one drop doctrine. Young Thomas Chatterton went with the hip-hop identity with its abrogation of all sumptuary laws and de rigueur potty mouth.   His father Clarence was black married to  Kathleen a white woman.  Thomas and his brother Clarence were both taught to think of themselves as black because that is how they would be treated and they might as well learn to adapt to it.


My brother and I were black, period. My parents adhered to a strict and unified philosophy of race, the contents of which boil down to the following: There is no such thing as being half-white, for black, they explained, is less a biological category than a social one. It is a condition of the mind that is loosely linked to certain physical features, but more than anything it is a culture, a challenge, and a discipline. We were taught from the moment we could understand spoken words that we would be treated by whites as though we were black whether we liked it or not, and so we needed to know how to move in the world as black men. And that was that.


That makes sense yet the father rented a house on the white side of town.  He was born in 1932 in segregationist Texas and was tired of being told where he could live.  His mother was unmarried and he never knew his father.  By superhuman determination he ended up with a doctorate in sociology.  His story might be more interesting than that of his son, a rather cossetted lad who swanned about in garments that have always looked to me like high end curtain material.   From a culture that produced jazz, blues, spirituals and so on hip-hop seems a severe declension.  Williams blames the value system that it promotes on the anti-school, underachieving, criminality and thuggism of those that take it as their gospel.  At a certain point Williams discovered that in his private Catholic school being black with menaces was an effective way of facing down challengers.  His brother Clarence and Clarences’s friend Michael abetted him in this.   They deal with Bobby who is going to beat up young Thomas.  


“Walk over to my car, Bobby,” Michael said, and Bobby obeyed. Then Michael stepped around to the trunk and opened it, and inside there was a wooden Louisville Slugger and a big white tube sock. “Look into the trunk, bitch,” Michael said, and he picked up the sock by the open end and let it dangle from his hand. It had a large bulge weighting down the bottom, which Michael explained to Bobby was a padlock.“Which would you prefer,” Michael asked, “that I beat your faggot ass black-and-blue with this padlock or with that Louisville Slugger?” Bobby, alone on the corner with the three of us and deserted by his friends, didn’t say anything, just started to cry—to sob, really, in big heaving breaths like he was hyperventilating or suffering from the severest case of hiccups. He looked as if his bowels might move.


Williams life was in a no man’s land in the fraught borders between black and white, between  dismal hip-hop and the nest of culture in a house with 15,000 books all underlined and annotated.  His father gave him a lot of tuition which resulted in his getting a place in Georgetown University.   There the move away from ‘street nigga’ was completed.  He took his degree in philosophy and moved to France to teach English in a secondary school where he resides to this day.  

His story is very one off and as we are told inference from a single example is unsafe.  I blame rock and roll, I blame hip-hop, I blame the parents, are commonplace ways of dodging agency.  His summary judgment of his old girlfriend Stacey is cold, final, and unbecoming of a gentleman who knows the difference between a baguette and a brioche.  

On the whole informative.  I annotated between the lines.  If you come across it remaindered pick it up (after washing your hands).

Saturday 26 September 2020

Who's Afraid of Immanuel Kant

"The only addition, properly so called– and that only in the method of proof– which I have made in the present edition, consists of a new refutation of psychological idealism, and a strict demonstration– the only one possible, as I believe– of the objective reality of external intuition. However harmless idealism may be considered– although in reality it is not so– in regard to the essential ends of metaphysics, it must still remain a scandal to philosophy and to the general human reason to be obliged to assume, as an article of mere belief, the existence of things external to ourselves (from which, yet, we derive the whole material of cognition for the internal sense), and not to be able to oppose a satisfactory proof to any one who may call it in question. ("from introduction to 'The Critique of Pure Reason')


To do this he has to admit to an internal dualism in which a permanent self is a subject that is conscious of its representations.  Something has to be there to log the changes and to keep an eye on the shop.  The objection that arises from this the classical one.  You are only immediately aware of what is presented to your mind.  That there is a corresponding external reality is an inference based on animal faith.  Kant rejects this.  I am aware of the reality of the changes in my self over time.  It is a real intuition as real as I am myself and is therefore a type of inner representation that is connected to a reality.

"This consciousness of my existence in time is, therefore, identical with  ,the consciousness of a relation to something external to me, and it is, therefore, experience, not fiction, sense, not imagination, which inseparably connects the external with my internal sense." (from introduction to 'The Critique of Pure Reason")


To which I might demur and in doing so hobble my reading but I will resist that and enjoy the monumental ambition of a thinker who is regarded as the most important of the early modern philosophers according to a poll top of the philosophers


Kant 421/Hume:232      Kant443 / Descartes 201  (ranked)

So numero uno but here's the thing:  I have a suspicion  (a hedged conviction) that of all those that voted a good number have never read 'The Critique of Pure Reason' through.  As diligent students it would not have benefited them and when safeky graduated seem too historical.  I spent a few weeks on it in a state of genial befuddlement

Thursday 24 September 2020

Make Arrangements with Yourself

Reading Samuel Johnson’s poem reminded me of the enigmatic lines of Neil Young which may refer in an oblique way to hire purchase agreements/arrangements whereby when you have paid half the price of a vehicle you can sell it back, being young enough to sell or keep on paying until you own it as a metaphor for contemplating dropping out.

loosened from the minor’s tether,

free to mortgage or to sell,

Wild as wind, and light as feather

,Bid the slaves of thrift farewell 

(from: To Sir John Lade on his coming of age by Samuel Johnson)



Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself


when you're old enough to repay but young enough to sell


(from Tell Me Why by Neil Young)



Woodie knows it isn’t easy:

You gotta walk that lonesome valley,

You gotta walk it by yourself,

Nobody here can walk it for you,

You gotta walk it by yourself.

(from Lonesome Valley by Woodie Guthrie)

Tuesday 22 September 2020

Philip Goff on Panpsychism and the Moral Order


 Philip Goff swimming against a strong current of subjectivism in moral judgment has written on Panpsychism’s  inherentist position in the online magazine <i>Nautilus</i>

knowing universe


I driving in my new tomato coloured Datsun begin to notice how many of them are around.

Goff writes:

<blockquote>This is where panpsychism can help. On a non-panpsychist form of the container view, Reality is a general form of being, which can manifest as either mental or non-mental entities. On a panpsychist version of the container view, Reality can be thought of as pure, undifferentiated consciousness, while particular manifestations of Reality are specific forms of that pure and undifferentiated consciousness.</blockquote>


This version of panpsychism seems to me very like the Advaita Vedanta view in which individual realities are forms of limitation (upadhis) of pure consciousness.  The mind/body of the individual consciousness is also an upadhi and can receive inputs from ‘external’ reality as mental modifications (vritti) which are ‘true’ to the external because they are in the same substratum.  In this way the paradox of idealism and scepticism about the external world are obviated.  This ties into the concept of Dharma and rta or the order of reality.


Though often represented as subjective idealism Advaita is thoroughly realistic.  We can have a non-numerical identity between the inner and the outer which is corrigible because there is always something more to know.

I have seen panpsychism traduced as an abdication of reason or a new madness.

This purported newness is the result of an ignorance of the history of ideas.  Panpsychism is probably the most ancient philosophy there is.

Sunday 20 September 2020

Gavaya: Very like a cow Kumarila

I feel like the detective that turns on his way out the door and says: - There’s one thing that bothering me. Why choose a complex illustration for the upamana pramana if all you had in mind was plain similarity? Why the tuppence coloured cow and gavaya, and the knowledgeable forester etc, etc. Why not offer what everyone can understand eg. a similar design, a similar fate, a similar frock, a book with a similar theme etc. If not, why not? 

 My tentative sense of these ready to hand examples is that they involve unitary instances. One hammer is much like any other qua hammer even though there are many kinds with specialised functions; ball pein, cross pein, claw etc.

 Kumarila in Slokavarttika dismisses the idea of ‘twins’ as an exemplar of similarity because there we see that they are. (22/3 pg.226 Jha trans.) The moment you utter the word ‘twin’ you admit similarity, it is not something that you might discover about twins or peas.
In a case where we have the recognition of a single class as belonging to the principle objects themselves (and not to the parts), there we have a notion (of identity) such as “this is that very thing”; and where there is difference, there we have the notion of Similarity only.
When the person roaming in the forest sees a strange animal, he perceives the beast. At one and the same time he is aware of its ‘cowness’and that it is a gavaya. That is the upamana. To put it portentously we are moving towards a scientifically actionable knowledge of genus and species. 


Saturday 19 September 2020

The Batchelors by Muriel Spark

I always relish the moment when I know that I am going to enjoy a novel. Muriel Spark can supply piquant phrases wholesale. Two bachelors meet while shopping on a Saturday morning. They are Martin Bowles barrister of thirty five and Ronald Bridges curator of a small museum of handwriting in the City of London. He has become an expert handwriting witness and at age thirty-seven would appear to be settling into bachelorhood in a serious way. The novel was published in 1960 when a man that age unmarried would be regarded as a dodgy property by any woman and probably needing extensive renovation. They pull into a cafe for an espresso and continue to discuss prices and availability.
‘At a price,’ said Ronald. ‘At a price,’ Martin said. ‘What bacon do you get?’ ‘I make do with streaky. I grudge breakfasts,’ said Ronald. ‘Same here.’ Your hand’s never out of your pocket,’ Ronald said before Martin could say it. A small narrow-built man came in the door and joined the girl, smiling at her with a sweet, spiritual expression.
This man is Patrick Seton who is recognised by Martin as a man whose hand is continuously in the pockets of others. (I know you planted that association Muriel) He will be the prosecuting council in a case coming up -
‘What for?’ ‘Fraudulent conversion and possibly other charges. Somebody in my chambers defended Seton ages ago. Not that it did either any good. Let’s go.’
In those opening pages we meet the moral poles of this novel, Bridges and Seton. The former is a decent chap who suffers from grand mal epilepsy and Catholicism as the mileu that he moves in would judge as double affliction.
Ronald was used to hearing his hostesses over the years come out with this statement, and had devised various ways of coping with it, according to his mood and to his idea of the hostess’s intentions. If the intelligence seemed to be high and Ronald was in a suitable mood, he replied ‘I’m anti-Protestant’ —which he was not; but it sometimes served to shock them into a sense of their indiscretion. On one occasion where the woman was a real bitch, he had walked out. Sometimes he said ‘Oh, are you? How peculiar.’ Sometimes he allowed that the woman was merely trying to start up a religious argument, and he would then attempt to explain where he stood with his religion. Or again, he might say, ‘Then you’ve received Catholic instruction?’ and, on hearing that this was not so, would comment, ‘Then how can you be anti something you don’t know about? ‘Which annoyed them; so that Ronald felt uncharitable.
Seton is a nasty conman and a trance medium who occasionally picks up some real information from the beyond at seances run by a group called The Wider Infinity within which an esoteric splinter group functions as The Interior Spiral. Seton has robbed a widow of £2000 and is trying to pass it off as a gift by forging a letter urging the promotion of the great work. Bridges will be examining this letter and acting for the prosecution during the forthcoming trial. Its a plot rich novel with many amusing scenes and situations. Seton as a developing psychopath comes to contemplate murder as the release into the great beyond. That is convincingly Crippenesque. Fun too:
‘He pees in the sink,’ said Walter, ‘not that I hold that against him.’ ‘He doesn’t!’ said Chloe.(barmaid) ‘True,’ said Walter. ‘It’s nothing. We bachelors all pee in sinks and wash-basins.’ ‘I don’t,’ said Matthew. ‘You’re young yet,’ Walter said. ‘Filthy beasts, the lot of you,’ Chloe said, laughing towards one face and another as she leant over the bar.
A good novel, living out its life in the space of a week with a fine sense of moral balance and evil.