Monday 29 June 2020

Lady Limitation


May I propose that a monument be erected to an allegorical figure, Lady Limitation. This statue of Limitation should represent an elegant, opulantly dressed woman with just a suggestion, discreet as may be contrived, of ragged underwear, such as a torn hem, or a strap astray. Let her take her place on the plinth of history with Lady Liberty, Lady Justice and Lady Erin. The latter marks the centenary of 1798 in Sligo and as an allegory is less offensive to the strongly Unionist sentiment of that 'fine town, y'know what I mean'. This fudge is typical of the Irish approach to agreement on contentious issues. Like the Good Friday Agreement everyone takes their own interpretation out of it. Maybe there should be a Lady Agreement? But how to represent her? With two heads like a Hindu goddess.

Sunday 28 June 2020

Take That Colston and the Statue of Limitations


The present hysteria stated out a few years ago with demands for apologies. The great British People had to apologise to the Irish Nation for the famine. Finally the oleogenous Blair in 1997 performed a near, we regret type apology. Did Obama apologise to the Native Americans? The Indian Law centre tells me that he did:

The version signed by Obama became watered down, not making a direct apology from the government, but rather apologizing "on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native peoples by citizens of the United States."

The resolution also includes a disclaimer: Nothing in it authorizes or supports any legal claims against the United States, and the resolution does not settle any claims.

'This does not affect your statutory rights' was omitted.

It's all nonsense. Apology as a moral event must involve the doer of the crime and not some far off, long dead, relation or a statue.

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

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

Take that Colston, Gandhi, Jefferson etc. I suppose if you can designate a business corporation a person anything is possible

Friday 26 June 2020

A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene (pub.1955)


This is in some ways an ironic self-parody of the writer and his novels which would certainly irritate him if regarded as humility. By page 10 the still unnamed protagonist is saying:

One of the fathers, who was presumably the Superior, knocked and came in. He said, "Is there anything you want?"
       "Nothing. I want nothing." He nearly added, "That is my trouble.

The novel takes the form of a retreat from the fleshpots of Europe up the Congo river beyond which it is not possible to go by boat. This station happens to be a leprosarium run by White Fathers from Belgium. It is in the 1950's, the riots in Leopoldville are mentioned and a new era of freedom and continuous war is yet to come. Querry has hoped that his celebrity as an architect will not follow him here. He is known as ‘The Querry’ as in Le Corbusier or a man whose surname is also an epithet. The Fathers and the resident Doctor Colin have not a clue who he is. Only a factory owner in Luc the nearest town recognises him and insists on projecting a pious interpretation of his reason for being in Africa.

"Oh no, I haven't. I can show you a photograph when you come to my house—in one of the papers that lie around in case they may prove useful. Useful! This one certainly has, hasn't it, because otherwise we would have thought you were only a relation of Querry's or that the name was pure coincidence, for who would expect to find the Querry holed up in a leproserie in the bush? I have to admit I am somewhat curious. But you can trust me, trust me all the way. I have serious enough problems of my own, so I can sympathise with those of another man. I've buried myself too. We'd better go outside, for in a little town like this even the walls have ears."

This busybody and priest manque plays a fateful role in the novel. In Greeneland poltroons and triflers are always the agents of an ignoble fate. His very young wife Marie greets Querry:
 "I am very glad to meet you," she said. "We will try to make you comfortable." Querry had the impression that she had learnt such occasional speeches by heart from her governess or from a book of etiquette. Now she had said her piece she disappeared as suddenly as she had come; perhaps the school-bell had rung for class.

Greene as a world famous novelist must have had many attempts made to scrape an acquaintance with him and his depressive lethargy and the gathering of specimens might have allowed him to submit to importunity. Querry is also a quarry and maybe even a prey of the Hound of Heaven. Rycker likes to think so. After all this man has suffered the dark night of the soul when he went to the rescue of his servant Deo Gratias. This is the pious interpretation that is made of his decision to remain with the injured man:

 There was nothing to be done but wait for the morning. The man might die of fear, but neither of them would die from damp or mosquito-bites. He settled himself down as comfortably as he could by the boy and by the last light of the torch examined the rocky feet. As far as he could tell an ankle was broken—that seemed to be all. Soon the light was so dim that Querry could see the shape of the filament in the dark, like a phosphorescent worm; then it went out altogether. He took Deo Gratias's hand to reassure him, or rather laid his own hand down beside it; you cannot "take" a fingerless hand. Deo Gratias grunted twice, and then uttered a word. It sounded like "Pendéle". In the darkness the knuckles felt like a rock that has been eroded for years by the weather.

When he tells Doctor Colin about this:

"It must have been a long bad night."
       "One has had worse alone." He seemed to be searching his memory for an example. "Nights when things end. Those are the interminable nights. In a way you know this seemed a night when things begin. I've never much minded physical discomfort. And after about an hour when I tried to move my hand, he wouldn't let it go. His fist lay on it like a paper-weight. I had an odd feeling that he needed me."

Here is the point where the novel gets away from its writer and begins to tell a truth. Feeling the need of a mutilé is an answer to Querry’s own deformity. The planning and building of a new hospital on the simplest and most economical scale is a project that he can do using his expertise to save the Fathers money. He begins to work on it. Naturally the world, the flesh and the devil intervenes.

I feel that I have failed to give any sense of the story of the healing of a soul that rejects its cure and remains attached to its numbness. All the usual writerly qualities of Greene are there, location, climate, character, simple prose. It’s a good novel for our present retreat.

Dr. Colin examines a patient:
 Patient after patient exposed his body to him; in all the years he had never become quite accustomed to the sweet gangrenous smell of certain leprous skins, and it had become to him the smell of Africa. He ran his fingers over the diseased surface, and made his notes almost mechanically. The notes had small value, but his fingers, he knew, gave the patients comfort: they realised that they were not untouchable. Now that a cure had been found for the physical disease, he had always to remember that leprosy remained a psychological problem.

Monday 22 June 2020

The Statues by William Butler Yeats


There is a statue of the Dying Cuchulainn by Oliver Shepherd in the G.P.O. in Dublin. Yeats liked the concept but not the embodiment. It needs to be seen in one's own casual flesh to be appreciated. The dark bronze loses detail in a photograph.

I remember coming down the interior steps of a stupa in Bodhgaya and seeing in a niche a Buddha with Greek folds in his robes. A cool gnosis was enlivened.


The Statues by William Butler Yeats

Pythagoras planned it. Why did the people stare?
His numbers, though they moved or seemed to move
In marble or in bronze, lacked character.
But boys and girls, pale from the imagined love
Of solitary beds, knew what they were,
That passion could bring character enough,
And pressed at midnight in some public place
Live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

No! Greater than Pythagoras, for the men
That with a mallet or a chisel" modelled these
Calculations that look but casual flesh, put down
All Asiatic vague immensities,
And not the banks of oars that swam upon
The many-headed foam at Salamis.
Europe put off that foam when Phidias
Gave women dreams and dreams their looking-glass.

One image crossed the many-headed, sat
Under the tropic shade, grew round and slow,
No Hamlet thin from eating flies, a fat
Dreamer of the Middle Ages. Empty eyeballs knew
That knowledge increases unreality, that
Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show.
When gong and conch declare the hour to bless
Grimalkin crawls to Buddha's emptiness.

When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side.
What stalked through the post Office? What intellect,
What calculation, number, measurement, replied?
We Irish, born into that ancient sect
But thrown upon this filthy modern tide
And by its formless spawning fury wrecked,
Climb to our proper dark, that we may trace
The lineaments of a plummet-measured face.


Saturday 20 June 2020

Dogcatcher Statue


About statues there has been the general error that their existence as a monument is an invitation to reverence (Simon Schama). At the time of their erection that may have been the hope of the committee. The present attitude may be that 'here is a monument to failure, a not very noble failure'. This toppling of intent is more significant than the physical removal. Overheard in the Netflix documentary on Trial by Media about the subway shooter Goetz – on the way from the court, after losing,the D.A. is advised by a bystander: 'run for dogcatcher, prick'.

Thursday 18 June 2020

A Monument that has it Coming


Yes old Nelson was blown up in Dublin in 1966 for the crime of being an English hero. They forget that he was also a hero to the mercantile class of Dublin who appreciated his freeing of the seas. The monument goes, the history remains. An ignorant populace can congratulate themselves for an easy victory against the past and bask in a present state of enlightenment. In the place of the Pillar was erected a pin 120 meters high of stainless steel requiring constant maintenance to preserve its pristine ugliness. (official name Monument of Light)
Spire

I just can’t get used to it. From the Henry Street vista it looks as though it might fall on you. 4.5Million to construct and 300K p/a to maintain - certainly a costly monument to bosthoon bumptiousness with Celtic Tiger rampant.

Astavakra Does Not Allow Science


Science does not disprove free will but does free will disprove science? One asks, but who is that one who asks. We are according to the cliché, on a rock hurtling through space and time but there is this mystery – no contemporary events are causally connected (Whitehead). There is just a general, universe-al now, the present moment. Time and personal identity are syntheses which are useful, in fact essential. Some even say essentialising or creations which we can hold in our mind because mind created but have no ultimate ontological grounding. Buddhists would hold that this annihilates the self; the advaitin counters by pointing to the uncontradictable nature of the consciousness. It never is not. Its freedom is the primordial superimposition of continuity in time on to the changeless Self which is eternal.

There is no I to do anything or the I that is purported to do things is not any thing. Astavakra, the ascended Dude says:
cf: ascended dude

Happiness belongs to that master idler to whom even the closing and opening of the eyelids is an affliction, and to none else.

Swami Nityaswarupananda adds in a note:
Master idler - The expression refers to the man of Self-realisation, who is completely inactive. He feels even the little non-volitional action of closing and opening the eyelids to be a limitation and painful.
(from Astavakra Samhita XVI.5)

Tuesday 16 June 2020

Bergson, Universals, Upamana and the Gavaya


We may then suppose perceptions as different as possible in their superficial details: if only they are continued by the same motor reactions, if the organism can extract from them the same useful effects, if they impress upon the body the same attitude, something common will issue from them, and the general idea will have been felt and passively experienced, before being represented. - Here then we escape at last from the circle in which we at first appeared to be confined. In order to generalize, we said, we have to abstract similarity, but in order to disengage similarity usefully we must already know how to generalize. There really is no circle, because the similarity, from which the mind starts when it first begins the work of abstraction, is not the similarity at which the mind arrives when it consciously generalizes.
(from Matter and Memory)


Here is a move towards the solution of the problem of universals and indeed the upamana pramana. The misunderstanding of the latter problem is underlined by the displacement of the problem into the recognition of a gavaya. Essentially the instruction is simple - the gavaya (bos gaurus) that roams in the jungle is like your domestic cow. Very good but what is a cow like? What do you mean? A cow just a cow, you know what a cow is. The point that Bergson is making, as I understand him, is that the immediate response that generates the sense of sameness is at a different conceptual level from the universal that is a rational construct. An example that he gives from inorganic reactions i.e. hydrochloric acid and marble, does not lead us to believe that one recognises the other.


Monday 15 June 2020

Hazlitt's Gusto



(portrait of Ippolito de Medici by Titian. Nothcote commissioned a copy)

His closeness of attention to detail was sharpened by his time spent copying Titian in the Louvre. He worked from half-past nine or ten to half-past three or four on the four days allowed by his licence as a copyist. He hoped to have eight pictures completed in eight weeks according to a letter to his father in 1802. The paintings of Titian were what he was working on for his patron James Northcote. His admiration of skill in any sphere of life, pugilism, juggling, fives and of course painting and writing is a theme of many of his essays. To have your craft penetrate to the marrow of your bones is part of that confidence in life which is a major part of gusto. That entry to the profound mystery of the elaboration of a world is wrought by a control of your powers evinced by a signature mastery. The Cruijff turn
cruijff
would have given him endless pleasure, in its own way the analogy to the Titian turn with flesh:

Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object. -- It is not so difficult to explain this term in what relates to expression (of which it may be said to be the highest degree) as in what relates to things without expression, to the natural appearances of objects, as mere colour or form. In one sense, however, there is hardly any object entirely devoid of expression, without some character of power belonging to it, some precise association with pleasure or pain: and it is in giving this truth of character from the truth of feeling, whether in the highest or the lowest degree, but always in the highest degree of which the subject is capable, that gusto consists.
There is a gusto in the colouring of Titian. Not only do his heads seem to think -- his bodies seem to feel. This is what the Italians mean by the morbidezza of his flesh-colour. It seems sensitive and alive all over; not merely to have the look and texture of flesh, but the feeling in itself. For example, the limbs of his female figures have a luxurious softness and delicacy, which appears conscious of the pleasure of the beholder. As the objects themselves in nature would produce an impression on the sense, distinct from every other object, and having something divine in it, which the heart owns and the imagination consecrates, the objects in the picture preserve the same impression, absolute, unimpaired, stamped with all the truth of passion, the pride of the eye, and the charm of beauty. Rubens makes his flesh-colour like flowers; Albano's is like ivory; Titian's is like flesh, and like nothing else. It is as different from that of other painters, as the skin is from a piece of white or red drapery thrown over it. The blood circulates here and there, the blue veins just appear, the rest is distinguished throughout only by that sort of tingling sensation to the eye, which the body feels within itself. This is gusto. -- Vandyke's flesh-colour, though it has great truth and purity, wants gusto. It has not the internal character, the living principle in it. It is a smooth surface, not a warm, moving mass. It is painted without passion, with indifference. The hand only has been concerned. The impression slides off from the eye, and does not, like the tones of Titian's pencil, leave a sting behind it in the mind of the spectator. The eye does not acquire a taste or appetite for what it sees. In a word, gusto in painting is where the impression made on one sense excites by affinity those of another.
(from Gusto by William Hazlitt>

Saturday 13 June 2020

William Hazlitt's essay on Self-Love (from Literary Remains pub. 1836


Hazlitt said somewhere that his On the Principles of Human Action was a chokepear of a book. He didn’t lie. What is taken to be its distillation, Self-Love is certainly no better. As I was reading I kept thinking ‘maybe it will finish soon, can it take so long to say so little’. It’s really very simple. The spectrum of principles ranges from demonic self-will to angelic abnegation. To claim that disinterestedness is the main spring of action is not an arguable position no more perhaps than the felicific calculus but at least that has an initial plausibility, lasting ten seconds approximately, from chin stroking to brow smacking, when we come to ask – but how, who, how much, same as; in short the quantification of the imponderable.

William Hazlitt started the book when he was eighteen having made what he called a discovery in D’Holbach’s Systeme de la Nature. What that was is not clear and there is no attempt to offer an empirical launching pad for his insight. Is it like King Charles’s head which balked Mr. Dick in David Copperfield. He couldn’t get on with it and he couldn’t get past it. The proof of the inedible pudding is the turbid diction. This is the final sentence of his essay.

Consequently, as the desire of the ultimate gratification of the appetite is not the same with the appetite itself, that is mere physical uneasiness, but an indirect result of its communication to the thinking or imaginative principle, the influence of appetite over the will must depend on the extraordinary degree of force and vividness which it gives to the idea of a particular object; and we accordingly find that the same cause which irritates the desire of selfish gratification, increases our sensibility to the same desires and gratification in others, where they are consistent with our own, and where the violence of the physical impulse does no\ overpower every other consideration.

Wednesday 10 June 2020

Hazlitt would-be Hazlitt




The fascination of what's difficult

Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent

Spontaneous joy and natural content

Out of my heart.
(W.B. Yeats)

Straining after the just out of reach and depreciating what is near to hand, and what you can do well, is the disease of perfection. ‘The best is the enemy of the good’. Did Napoleon, the idol of William Hazlitt, really say that? My father often said it also. He never ascribed it. Hazlitt wanted to be a great painter, a British Titian no less. His portrait of Charles Lamb in a cloak but without regulation corybantes is a fine production that has fetched up in the National Portrait Gallery. If he had the money that would give him time to develop a clientele. It is clear that his talent was of a high order and he might have been successful like his brother John who was a noted miniaturist.

The other ambition which was never fulfilled was the production of a body of work in philosophy. At age 27 he published An Essay on the Principles of Human Action: Being an Argument in favour of the Natural Disinterestedness of the Human Mind. It was reviewed three times but otherwise did not find a readership. According to P.P. Howe biographer and editor of his work the gist of what he wrote is contained in his long essay Self-Love and Benevolence published in his Literary Remains (1836). I’m reading that at the moment. In general it is contra the extremes of empiricism found in Hartley, Helvetius and Locke. The other philosophical essay in ‘Remains’ is Belief, whether Voluntary. A late work I think containing the summary of his deep doubts about political commitment. Are our cherished visions of society merely the induced perturbations of the historical situation?

At last he had to resign himself to being one of the finest writers in the English language.

Tuesday 2 June 2020

Lovejoy's Metaphysical Pathos


Arthur O. Lovejoy deprecates what he calls ‘ metaphysical pathos’.

Another type of factors in the history of ideas may be
described as susceptibilities to diverse kinds of metaphysical pathos. This influential cause in the determination of philosophical fashions and speculative tendencies has been so little considered that I find no recognized name for it, and have been compelled to invent one which is not, perhaps, wholly self-explanatory. ‘Metaphysical pathos’ is exemplified in any description of the nature of things, any characterization of the world to which one belongs, in terms which, like the words of a poem, awaken through their associations, and through a sort of empathy which they engender, a congenial mood or tone of feeling on the part of the philosopher or his readers. For many people — for most of the laity, I suspect — the reading of a philosophical book is usually nothing but a form of aesthetic experience, even in the case of writings which seem destitute of all outward aesthetic charms; voluminous emotional reverberations, of one or another sort, are aroused in the reader without the intervention of any definite imagery. Now of metaphysical pathos there are a good many kinds; and people differ in their degree of susceptibility to any one kind. There is, in the first place, the pathos of sheer obscurity, the loveliness of the incomprehensible, which has, I fear, stood many a philosopher in good stead with his public, even though he was innocent of intending any such effect. The phrase omne ignotum pro mirifico concisely explains a considerable part of the vogue of a number of philosophies, including some which have enjoyed great popular reputation in our own time. The reader doesn’t know exactly what they mean, but they have all the more on that account an air of sublimity; an agreeable feeling at once of awe and of exaltation comes over him as he contemplates thoughts of so immeasurable a profundity — their profundity being convincingly evidenced to him by the fact that he can see no bottom to them. Akin to this is the pathos of the esoteric. How exciting and how welcome is the sense of initiation into hidden mysteries! And how effectively have certain philosophers — notably Schelling and Hegel a century ago, and Bergson in our own generation — satisfied the human craving for this experience, by representing the central insight of their philosophy as a thing to be reached, not through a consecutive progress of thought guided by the ordnary logic available to every man, but through a sudden leap whereby one rises to a. plane of insight wholly different in its principles from the level of the mere understanding. 
(from The Great Chain of Being)

Is all this so bad? After all the gravamen of his charge would apply to himself and his own footnote to Plato not unknown as a psychopomp. The Great Chain of Being is itself a portentous blast on a trumpet and the heavens rolling open and a voice saying ‘This is important, please play attention but I will repeat myself in case you missed it the third time’. I am enjoying it even if his impassive god is a device to underline the antithetical completist god. That god is a deist gentleman enjoying his rustication.