Thursday 30 April 2020

Coleridge and Orthopraxis


A quick and dirty definition. Orthopraxis is what the faithful of other religions get up to, those mindless routines they feel will leave them within the ranks of the righteous. The imputation, though never stated, is that they follow codes of conduct which have only a slight connection with doctrine. From what does this invidious approach flow? Philosophers when they come to religion bring with them the biases of their era. Coleridge in The Statesman’s Manual characterises them thusly:

In all ages of the Christian church, and in the later period of the Jewish (that is, as soon as from their acquaintance first with the Oriental and afterwards with the Greek philosophy the precursory and preparative influences of the Gospel began to work) there have existed individuals (Laodiceans in spirit, Minims in faith, and nominalists in philosophy) who mistake outlines for substance, and distinct images for clear conceptions ; with whom therefore not to be a thing is the same as not to be at all.

Mr. Locke is regarded as a chief culprit or as one whose philosophy blights a true reading of the Bible. He continues:

The contempt, in which such persons hold the works and doctrines of all theologians before Grotius, and of all philosophers before Locke and Hartley (at least before Bacon and Hobbes) is not accidental, nor yet altogether owing to that epidemic of a proud ignorance occasioned by a diffused sciolism, which gave a sickly and hectic shewiness to the latter half of the last century.

Can we get at the true inner meaning of religion its doctrine and practice if our definition of evidence only accepts what can be discerned with the senses. The inner impetus to action is opaque to us. Condillac who was influenced by Locke is mocked by Coleridge:

The former has an Idea, that Hume, Hartley, and Condillac have exploded all Ideas, but those of sensation ; he has an Idea that he was particularly pleased with the fine idea of the last-named Philosopher, that there is no absurdity in asking. What colour Virtue is of? inasmuch as the proper philosophic answer would be black, blue, or bottle-green, according as the coat, waistcoat and small-clothes might chance to be of the person, the series of whose motions had excited the sensations, which formed our idea of virtue.

Does a modern empiricist philosophy darken counsel?

But all History seems to favor the persuasion, I entertain, that in every age the speculative Philosophy in general acceptance, the metaphysical opinions that happen to be predominant, will influence the Theology of that age.

Wednesday 29 April 2020

Jumping the Virus - Covidology V


We love repetition, don’t we. Yes, yes the children cry, same old, same old, please. Don’t change the story, the sitcom nutty neighbour, the catch phrase, the couch phrase. Repeat after me the mantra of the everyday that makes things normal. We will try to go back again and be rescued by familiar ennui, the comfort; but not to put too fine a point on it, our lattes are curdled and in this generation shopping will remain a licensed activity that some irrupting virus will stay. The worst of it is that the ‘preppers’ are smirking and offering fifty day food packs in sealed containers delivered to your door. There are sects of the flagellants who so desire normality that they are prepared to accept what Defoe called very large bills of mortality. They see the angel of death in the sky and there will be no avoiding his sword till there is general repentance. When the vaccine arrives they won’t take it either and feel themselves justified to lurk in the shadow of herd immunity. They have evidence that there is a conspiracy to rob freeborn men of all nations of the god given right to do as they like. Will we call that ‘jumping the virus’ at one bound?

Saturday 25 April 2020

Tomatoes and The Blue Flower


The packet of Moneymaker tomatoes that I got turned out to be empty. Its perfectly sealed sachet was void of seeds. Odd, very and in a long history of gardening, my first experience of emptiness. Without naming it I ripped the packet open and poured out emptiness. Not a satisfactory satori. There’s been a run on seeds this year so I’m stuck with a lot of post viability seeds in my shoe box which I sowed anyway and got a few results. Two decent tomato plants and two with co-morbidity. It’s like that now, what with dancing nurses in empty hospitals. As I said to Dr.Sean – do we stick with what we have or chance something worse?. We are all statisticians now. The real humbug is coming from the cocooning bioethicists (over 70) who claim that they would forego ventilators in favour of the younger patients. As an emeritus prof if continuing to teach courses he is taking the place of younger staff. His wisdom is very valuable and let us hope that he is not put to the test.

What beautiful weather. Now is the time to inspect the gentian that grows freely on the burren near us.

‘His father and mother were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall ticked with a monotonous beat, the wind whistled outside the rattling window-pane. From time to time the room grew brighter when the moonlight shone in. The young man lay restlessly on his bed and remembered the stranger and his stories. “It was not the thought of the treasure which stirred up such unspeakable longings in me,” he said to himself. “I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers? Such a wild passion for a flower was never heard of there. But where could this stranger have come from? None of us had ever seen such a man before. And yet I don’t know how it was that I alone was truly caught and held by what he told us. Everyone else heard what I did, and yet none of them paid him serious attention.”’
(from The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald)

Friday 24 April 2020

The Statesman's Manual by S.T. Coleridge


The comprehension, impartiality, and far-sightedness of Reason, (the Legislative of our nature) taken singly and exclusively, becomes mere visionariness in intellect, and indolence or hard-heartedness in morals. It is the science of cosmopolitism without country, of philanthropy without neighbourliness or consanguinity, in short, of all the impostures of that philosophy of the French revolution, which would sacrifice each to the shadowy idol of All. For Jacobinism is monstrum hybridum, made up in part of despotism, and in part , of abstract reason misapplied to objects that belong entirely to experience and the understanding.
(from The Statesman's Manual by S.T. Coleridge publ 1816)

As far as the French Revolution was concerned every day was commination day. The Reason as Coleridge understood it was the abstracting generalising power and the Understanding was the discovery of its principles as embodied in the particular. Now the elevation of the Reason as the supreme arbiter of the life of man, in short in the cliche of the moment, evidence based reasoning, leads to a confounding of the creative spirit which goes beyond what is presently construed as evidence. It is the individual anomaly that moves us forward to a new vision.

In Singerism the plight of the Chinese peasant ought to move us as much as the local indigent, because both are persons worthy of our attention. To feel more for one than the other is a prejudice that ought to be discarded. Animal suffering is suffering and we are guilty of speciesism if we balk at such assimilation.

I see that we are back to whiggery again. S.T.C. and W.B.Y. would not have agreed on the further reaches of the uncanny and he would likely have dismissed as mere visionariness A Vision. He writes:

Yet this again yet even Religion itself, if ever in its too exclusive devotion to the specific and individual it neglects to interpose the contemplation of the universal changes its being into Superstition, and becoming more and more earthly and servile, as more and more estranged from the one in all, goes wandering at length with its pack of amulets, bead-rolls, periapts, fetisches, and the like pedlary , on pilgrimages to Loretto, Mecca, or the temple of Jaggernaut, arm in arm with sensuality on one side and self-torture on the other, followed by a motly group of friars, pardoners, faquirs, gamesters, flagellants, mountebanks, and harlots.

Thursday 23 April 2020

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.
https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/university-to-tighten-checks-after-bogus-lecturer-scam-26065476.html
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 a demeaning aspect to honorary degrees 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. Should they have given him an honorary degree and let him at it.

Wednesday 22 April 2020

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel


My good friend Joe the Gardener and I have a saying for those multi skilled people with a mastery of several crafts. ‘We want him on the boat’. This is the ark of people who will create civilisation out of the ruins of the old. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel has no one of any practical capacity. All are pond skaters, useless urban barbarians who imagine that their aesthetic sensibility is enough. Kirstan a central character has Because survival is insufficient tattooed on her arm. She is a member of the Travelling Symphony troupe who perform music and the plays of Shakespeare. That’s nice but outside forces, alchemists quite capable of making gunpowder and melting down lead flashing for bullets, would soon overwhelm them,. Within months of the pandemic’s 99% fatality individuals would be generating electricity. Robinson Crusoe taught us that with a few tools you could transform a wilderness into a garden. Mandel has them getting bored with venison but wearing ragged clothes. Nice writing and a weaving of various stories but realisation macramé.

As a map of a post pandemic world it is light as the froth on your latte.


Tuesday 21 April 2020

Mentioning 'Narrative'


There are those words which have lapsed and gone to cliché bardo where they shriek and gibber and seek a hapless channel that they may find a life again in the witless. Such a word, surely, and ‘surely’ is itself lost to polite use; is the word ‘narrative’. There, I’ve put it between the prison bars of single quotes which render it harmless withal twee. The solemn obsequies of catachresis have been performed yet it retains its baffling power. If it could only have stayed within the bounds of Scottish Law meaning a statement of the essential facts of the case as in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. No it was not satisfied with that sturdy if contended status, it had to bring ‘irony’ into it. There are, you, see no facts of the case and agreement is factitious. In this spirit the memoir of John Burnside, A Lie about My Father sprinkles ‘narrative’ about. His da was a foundling or more correctly a stepling having been left on a doorstep as an infant to be raised by a series of informal fosterings as a human pass the parcel. Burnside is a poet and ought to know that a joke is all well and good until it escapes.

Monday 20 April 2020

Graham Greene's answers to Prayer in The End of the Affair and The Power and the Glory


In a comment on my previous post John Doyle wrote of an answer to fervent prayer that brought a difficult situation with it. I have had experience like that myself so I have no difficulty in accepting the truth of what he says laying aside the sceptical post hoc propter hoc with a little smile. Graham Greene was a man who believed in prayer and who writes about it convincingly. I’m thinking here of two books in particular, The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair. Excellent recollective reading at this time when death seems to want to crash our party, approaching with the friendly clink of his carry out. In the latter book Bendrix is saved it would seem by the prayer of his lover who offered to leave him and give herself to God in exchange for his life. God in Greene’s book is a literalist who highlights the passage in the Gospel ‘knock and it shall be opened unto you’ by having the front door blasted off its hinges on top of Bendrix and saving him from the falling rubble. During the Blitz of course. Generally in Greene’s books God is a near remote figure who cannot comment on individual cases and simultaneously has a sharp elbow.

It’s a novel of stalking with Bendrix setting a private detective after Sarah to find if she has a new lover after she abandons him. The detective and his boy are splendidly comic pathetic in the English manner. Weather as the not often gentle rain is a feature of this book as it is in ‘The Power’ which runs with the immediate sweat of Mexican jungle. Humidity, humility and a priest on the run clinging to his duty to the end. He has prayed that he will sacrifice his own last confession and communion and go to hell but that his daughter should be saved from the evil which he sees nascent in her. Does he get his wish? This is Greeneland so you won’t be surprised. Mr. Tench the dentist marooned in Mexico by the falling peso is another comic turn from a member of the chorus. There’s a Marxist policeman, an acolyte of Satan, who trails the Padre.

These are some of his best books which haven’t dated at all. He was never much better than this which sound depreciative but is not given the high standard of his work.

Sunday 19 April 2020

Covidology IV


Can we surpass ourselves? Is there more in us than meets the eye, the eye of whiggery?

All hated Whiggery; but what is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of drunkard’s eye.
(from The Seven Sages by W.B. Yeats)

Prayer in these days is being dismissed as empty incantation. Raising the mind and heart to God is feeble magic and divagation from the true path of enlightened action. Fatuous waffle from the high places is to replace the inspiration that guides action. To do everything solely through our own efforts is to surely fail. Prayer changes everything in a direct immediate way through breaking the moulds of conventional reliance on practices which are not adequate to the present emergency. Action based on modelling where none of the numbers have any validity may itself be a form of secular incantation or statistical voodoo.

Death has your number.

Let’s work, let’s pray.

Saturday 18 April 2020

Covidology III


Let’s all get over the idea that those who disagree with us on major issues are wrong about everything and moreover when we appear to agree they have some deep evil plan afoot. The lockdown has brought this thinking out in many usually quite sensible people. Of course the government and politicians generally are a nest of vipers that we have thrust on our collective bosom but they may have been right and the proof of it is the vastly improved readiness which will enable a staged and prudent return to normality. We are getting to that point. Patience is required. However John Waters and Gemma O’Doherty have brought a case before the High Court on the unconstitutionality of the actions taken by an interim government.
high court
We are at the stage common to P.R. systems in Europe of coalition talks after a numerically indecisive general election. Waters is a man for whom I have a great deal of respect and is not a knee jerk contrarian though the media may portray him as such. I believe he has taken a wrong turn here. O’Doherty is a anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, yes, a flake probably.

Now that readiness has been established, as much as it ever can be, we need to focus on return to a parlous normal lest sheltering in place becomes cowering in place.

Friday 17 April 2020

Surpassing Yourself in Art


This idea of surpassing your intent that I mentioned
knausgaard
has a bootstrapping inflection. How do you get past yourself and really create? How did Hemingway write a story which was not a Hemingway story? Pablo Picasso was once approached by his good friend art dealer with a painting whose provenance he wanted to authenticate. Picasso took one look at it and said ‘that’s a fake’. ‘But’, said the dealer, ‘I was there in the studio the day you painted it and I saw you working on it’. ‘I often paint fakes’ said Picasso.

When asked for the meaning of her dance Isadora Duncan said ‘If I could tell you that I would not have to dance it’.

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of”. Pascal.

The notion of patent intent that is linked to correct interpretation is a logical rational confection that entirely misses the transcendent connatural aspect of art. It is at home in the univocal flatland world. The mu force of the double-bind holds that there is no true single interpretation merely the affront of the work before you. ‘Whaddya think of that, bright boy’? Unless we transcend we miss the point. The work is the point and our interpretation dashes itself against that.

The classical view of genius is that you had a genius or were subject to an impersonal force. The Romantic artist is a genius, one who is attuned by an individual grasp of reality. Prometheus is his avatar and his fate.

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
(from Among School Children by W.B. Yeats)

Thursday 16 April 2020

Vol. 1: My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard


How did Karl Ove Knausgaard surpass the banal aspect of therapeutic journalling? It might have been an adventitiously humorous book of worries with a referential title that leads us to expect bad days in the bunker as its culmination and yet it seems more than that: a map of the commonplace that does not underline its insights.

He begins with a disquisition on death which I hope reads better in Norwegian. He is inclined to indulge in tiresome pondering, the danger of a literary education crossed with serious person persona. The main source of his miserabilism is his lack of a sense of humour. Without that scale life’s contours are mountainous and the logistics of getting beer to a New Year’s party as a teenager can run to 100 pages. Don’t take less.

Immersion in the longueurs of life is the path with heart for Karl Ove. Flatness is all. He discovers this by moving from the meditation on death to what Yeats would have call a ‘masterful vision’, the face in the sea that appeared during a tv report on a trawler accident. His father sneers – ‘was it Jesus you saw’ and continues to ply a sledge on a rock in the garden. Hey Karl Ove we get it – too much hatred can make a rock of the heart.

This was in 1976. Then he is 8, his father was 32 and the writer is 39. The interpenetrating cones a la Bergson, or the Yeatsian gyres, produce the initial plane or palate on which memories coruscate. This is his portal leading into ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’. The fate to which his father succumbed, that of an alcoholic living in his mother’s house as if it was a foul squat and dying there in a pool of blood and shit which his sons clear up over several days. He tells us the names of all the products he uses as he goes through the rooms piled high with stinking clothes and filth and empties. Cry breaks and coffee breaks and trips to the shops. In states like that you notice everything, perceptual straws to cling to. The shop assistant leaves the change on the counter when his palm is outstretched for it. Why would she do that?

That section of the book is its intent. He gives his father a Christian burial when we were told that he was anti-Christian. Imposing your will on the dead is not a victory and death will have its sting. Peeping out between the lines of the ‘journal’ are indications that Karl Ove is bent on replication of his father’s life, he drinks and is divorced from his first wife and I read that he is now parted from his second wife and four children. Maybe you are headed for a moral bunker with literary lunches, launches, holiday cabins and writing, writing, writing.

The success of it is that I am beginning to read the second book and notice the same triangulation that fixes us in time and duration. Now it’s a children’s party with members of a vegetarian kindergarten co-op. Only Karl Ove could fail to make that funny.

Sunday 12 April 2020

Flour Power


The toilet paper wars you will know about but what isn’t observed is the run on flour. People have taken to baking out of the fear of contagion from filthy lucre. There used to be that cynically named Mother’s Pride industrial white sliced pan. It and its like brought people to the shops for their daily fresh bread. Mother’s attempt at soda bread bad as it may be has more ‘hominess’, it wafts as as a fragrance of care. The little boat like crust of hot bread with butter melting on your hand is a memory that actually happened.

Friday 10 April 2020

Another Germ


At a time like this:

From Paul Reynolds crime correspondent R.T.E.

An investigation is under way after a man pretending to be a member of An Garda Síochána stopped an undercover garda drugs unit.

At around 3pm yesterday, the man, who is in his 40s, was driving a Renault Megane with blue lights flashing on the front and back.

He drove up behind a car in Baldoyle in north Co Dublin, which turned out to be an unmarked car from the divisional drugs unit.

His car was searched and fake garda and fire officer badges were discovered along with a large 'fire officer on call’ sign.

The man was questioned at the scene, the items were seized, and he was allowed go when his identity was established.

The car has also been seized.

In a statement, Garda Headquarters said: "On Thursday 9th April 2020 at approximately 3pm gardaí observed a car utilising blue lights in the Baldoyle area.

"During a search of the car, a number of unofficial An Garda Síochána and Dublin Fire Brigade items were seized by Gardaí.

"No arrests have been made currently. Investigations are ongoing."

Clearly a man who loves all things Police. But did he have the nodding dogs on the dashboard and the large foam dice hanging in the rear window? Is he known to the police, I mean, now that his identity is established presumably along Humean lines as a disorganised bundle of perceptions. Might he have asked the real police to step away from the vehicle and put that donut down. Speculation at this point verges on the invidious. Let's be careful out there.







Tuesday 7 April 2020

Covidology II


It could be a good career move for a young healthy person to become infected voluntarily with the coronavirus? Present yourself with a warranted genuine antibody certificate to a prospective employer and be sure of being accepted as fit to meet the public. There could even be a lapel pin/badge. ‘You’re in safe hands with our team’. ‘Our people are patriotic economy warriors, making this nation great’. ‘Roll on the vaccine but until then you know you can rely on us’. ‘We care, we dare - to serve you’.