Friday 29 January 2021

'Wives and Daughters' by Mrs. Gaskell

 Mrs. Gaskell has that rare quality in a novelist, charm.  She draws you in by her natural story telling power.  Season, scene, weather, parlour, the disposition of furniture, the work in hand of the ladies; all of this is laid out as in a narrative painting.  Soon there will be tea and genteel gossip.  Does that sound interminably dull?  It isn’t, for each of the participants have a secret life with fears, schemes, hopes and vulnerability.   Molly Gibson misses the companionship of her father which is subtly  balked by the new wife, the widow Kirkpatrick.

Her husband is fondly remembered:

“When I look back to those happy days, it seems to me as if I had never valued them as I ought. To be sure—youth, love,—what did we care for poverty! I remember dear Mr. Kirkpatrick walking five miles into Stratford to buy me a muffin because I had such a fancy for one after Cynthia was born. I don't mean to complain of dear papa—but I don't think—but, perhaps I ought not to say it to you. If Mr. Kirkpatrick had but taken care of that cough of his; but he was so obstinate! Men always are, I think. And it really was selfish of him. Only I daresay he did not consider the forlorn state in which I should be left. It came harder upon me than upon most people, because I always was of such an affectionate sensitive nature. I remember a little poem of Mr. Kirkpatrick's, in which he compared my heart to a harpstring, vibrating to the slightest breeze."

The vapid self serving Hyacinth Kirkpatrick fading beauty ca.40, was a governess in the house of Lord Cumnor after the death of her husband.  The Cumnor mansion is up the road from Hollingford village, scene of the novel and very much after the pattern of ‘Cornford’. The Cumnors set her up with a school for young ladies teaching them pianoforte, geography and French.  She is delighted with her new role as a doctor’s wife and begins to fancy herself above the common run of the village ladies and their tea parties.  County society for her.

Poor Dr. Gibson aged 50 or so had remarried in order to bring a chaperone into the house and to safeguard against relationships with the young men who are his resident apprentice surgeons. So he tells himself but his old bones will remain chilled.

“Mrs. Kirkpatrick accepted Mr. Gibson principally because she was tired of the struggle of earning her own livelihood; but she liked him personally—nay, she even loved him in her torpid way, and she intended to be good to his daughter, though she felt as if it would have been easier for her to have been good to his son.”

Cynthia her daughter is 19 and about two years older than Molly and they get on very well.  Finely drawn sisterly relationship.

Of Cynthia:

"Cynthia was very beautiful, and was so well aware of this fact that she had forgotten to care about it; no one with such loveliness ever appeared so little conscious of it. Molly would watch her perpetually as she moved about the room, with the free stately step of some wild animal of the forest—moving almost, as it were, to the continual sound of music.”

Cynthia has a secret.  Osborne Hamley, the squires’ eldest son has a secret.  His brother Roger doesn’t have a secret but he’s a senior wrangler and a proto-evolutionist.  The old squire is a classic curmudgeonly Tory who deplores Whigs, Catholics and the French.   There are numerous characters all very humorously drawn.  It’s a long novel but it clips along like the Doctor’s pacing horse.  An excellent tonic which I recommend without reservation.

Tuesday 26 January 2021

A Drive By Digression

 I saw ‘All the President’s Men’ a couple of weeks ago and thinking of ‘lapgate’ I was wondering when the drip, drip, drip of revelation like Washington water torture would start.  Biden may well be gone before impeachment ripens.  The consensus with aggravated ribaldry by powerline blog commentors is that the intersectional wonder woman Kamala will replace him.  In his own words ‘he will be given a break’ and his vig. which God forbid.

The book by W & B i.e. ‘All’ proves that you can be a great reporter without being able to write even moderately competent English.  Maybe it was an aesthetic decision: dull is more serious. By page 44 (Kindle) the link to Nixon’s outfit seems adamantine and the judgement looms:

“Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition ; there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.”


At least Nixon avoided ‘durance vile’:

“In durance vile here must I wake and weep,

And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep;”

(from ‘Epistle from Esopus to Maria’ by Robert Burns)

Maria was Maria Riddell a poetess friend whom he alienated by some drunken caper.  However they met again shortly before his death:

month later, when Burns was at Brow, bathing himself on Dr Maxwell's orders, under the belief that he was making a last attempt to regain his health, Maria invited him to dine with her. She, too, was in search of health, and living not far away. She sent her carriage to bring him to her lodgings. Soon afterwards she recorded her impressions of this meeting, which must have given deep satisfaction to the dying poet: 'I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first salutation was: 'Well, madam. have you any commands for the other world?"

(from robert burns )

But I digress.

 

Tuesday 19 January 2021

American Observers at Ugandan Elections

 Proverbs 20:17

Stolen bread tastes sweet, but it turns to gravel in the mouth.

Never mind, Biden’s improbable teeth are adapted to pulverising that gravel and his political gizzard is well inured.

I notice that nice respectable conservatives are sufficiently bemused to consider that the fraud can’t be proven and therefore it mightn’t have happened.  They avert their eyes from the  appalling vista and forget that which drives the discovery of truth.  I mean abduction or inference to the best explanation.  Very like a duck!

The sane conservatives laugh the bitter short bark when they read re the Ugandan elections which brought Musevani in for the 6th.term:

"Tracking the vote was further complicated by the arrests of independent monitors and the denial of accreditation to most members of the American observer mission, leading the US to call it off. The European Union said its offer to deploy electoral experts “was not taken up”.

Tibor Nagy, the top US diplomat for Africa, tweeted: “Uganda’s electoral process has been fundamentally flawed.” He called for the immediate and full restoration of internet access, and warned that that “the US response hinges on what the Ugandan government does now”.”( Irish Independent)


Note:

I have used the locution ‘appalling vista’ which other than an Irish reader drifting inexorably towards the rocks of late middle age, may not get.  It was Lord Denning’s remark:

"In 1980, Lord Denning upheld an appeal by the West Midlands Police against a civil action brought by the Birmingham Six for injuries they received in custody. He said in his judgment the consequence for the English legal system of accepting that police officers were lying was such "an appalling vista" that every sensible person would reject further legal action. (from Irish Times) 



Snake/Rope Master Analogy

 

Most philosophy writing is like a pint in a two gallon bucket: a few good points wrapped in repetition and waffle which tends to obscure them.  Sankara in his preamble to the Brahma-Sutra Bhasya reverses this m.o. to give a  concentrated aphoristic  expression of almost poetic compression.  The whole argument is put before you in a way that allow you to see it in a single comprehension.  That is its strength and its stumbling block.  The philosophic mind must enlarge and expand on the thought to fill the bucket.  Here I am threatening to do the same.  "I had not the time to write a short letter so you are getting this long one instead -Pascal in his Provincial Letters. 

The Snake/Rope/ analogy is often the standard introduction to Advaita conditioning our sense of its scope and direction.  That is not the path of the argument taken by Shankara in the Preamble.  He starts with an onto-epistemological aporia but because this master analogy has become the default gateway I will try to offer a couple of points on what it is trying to express and what the wrong turns are as I see them.   First of all the Rope/Snake is a confusion not a delusion or an illusion.  Even offering this initial distinction is potentially  a wrong turn.  I have begun to become fascinated by the logical analysis of the common place occurrence and forget to pay attention to the main thrust of what the analogy is trying to accomplish viz. the orientation of the mind in the direction of a transcendental hypothesis about the nature of subject/object awareness. 

Shankara indicates this clearly:

"With regards to this , some say that it consists in the superimposition of the attributes of one thing on another.  But others assert that whenever a superimposition on anything occurs, there is in evidence only a confusion arising from the absence of discrimination between them.  Others say that the superimposition of anything on any other substratum consists in fancying some opposite attributes on that very basis.  From every point of view, however, there is no difference as regards the appearance of one thing as something else.

 

In a confusing move Shankara appears to himself get drawn into answering  a logical analysis: 

"For everybody superimposes something else on what is perceived by him in front, and you assert that the Self is opposed to the non-Self and is not referable (objectively) by the concept "you". 

He answers this objection by giving examples of non-objective things that are subject to superimposition.  This would appear to validate treating analogy as homology i.e. likeness in a global respect.  From the point of view of the adhiropa/apavada strategy or version of dialectic i.e. progressive approximation, this may be acceptable. 

Nor is there any rule that something has to be superimposed on something else that is directly perceived through the senses; for boys superimpose the ideas of survace (i.e. concavity) and dirt on space (i.e. sky) that is not an object of sense-perception.  Hence there is nothing impossible in superimposing the non-Self on the Self that is opposed to it."

Friday 15 January 2021

Necessary Krishna

 Sometimes you will be told that Bhagavad.Gita VII.12 contains a contradiction when placed alongside directly previous verses:

“These things that indeed are made of (the quality of) sattva, and those things that are made of (the quality of) rajas and tamas,  know them to have sprung from Me alone.  However, I am not in them; they are in Me.”

From verse 5 on Krishna has been declaring that  he is the origin of the universe... “All this is strung on Me like pearls on a string”..... the sound in space, and manhood in men....the intellect of the intelligent and the courage of the courageous.  God it would appear in some readings is in ‘the intelligent’ etc.

Shankaracarya’s commentary clarifies:

Although they (the gunas i.e. sattva, rajas, tamas) originate from Me, still, however I am not in them - I am not subject to them, not under their control, as are the transmigrating beings.  They again are in Me, subject to Me, under My control.”

There is a continuity of being between God/Krishna/Isvara and the world by the non-difference of cause and effect (satkaryavada) yet God is a necessary being and the world is contingent being.

Thursday 14 January 2021

Maya as a condition

 Maya, what does it mean?  Sometimes it is treated as though it were a force which acts.  I see it as a state that arises as the result of the mechanism of awareness.  It is not there waiting in the long grass to spring on us.  It is the description of a condition which only the persuasion of an expert guru will convince you that you are in.  Faith hovers over your ironic acceptance.

Monday 11 January 2021

Up Up and Away

 You know that you are borne aloft in a beautiful iridescent bubble when the same words arise in descriptions of the  breaching of the Capitol complex recently.  I read ‘insurrection’, ‘insurgency’, ‘storm’, and even in a note from the writer Richard Ford in the Irish Times, ‘coup’. Were there tanks in the street, was the radio station taken over, the internet cut,and summary executions?  At this point in time there needs to be a general issue of stout paper bags.

Saturday 9 January 2021

The Geese on the Capitol

 Were said boo to.  The word ‘storm’ is used in all the reports.  Now to me that means a determined assault on a fortification.  No ‘storm’ is over in 5 mins. with no resistance from the defenders.  Very strange considering that the presence of a large crowd of protesters was expected among whom would be violent types up for mayhem.  There was a very inadequate preparation.

Could it have been a bear trap which conveniently Trump fell into?  If appropriate precautions had been taken the mob would have never got near the main building.  Then the fallacy of post hoc propter hoc would not be installed in the mind.  Here is sedition and insurrection made patent that points back to the sedition of electoral fraud claims.  How very adjacent.

Saturday 2 January 2021

South Asian Studies

 Some people are very studious and like to master any subject that absorbs them.    Students of religion will attempt to gain proficiency in languages which will give them access to texts which are not translated into English.  It’s an index of their seriousness which I respect but I am sceptical whether a moderate degree of competence in Pali or Sanskrit brings anyone closer to an understanding of the very fine distinctions which are central to the disputes between the various schools.  The pandits that are steeped in Sanskrit from an early age seem at times quite philosophically limited.  I wonder to what extent there is collaboration in the production of translations between the philosophically acute amateur of Sanskrit and the traditional pandit?  Probably more than I am aware of, though what is coming through on academia edu is mixed.

How can one bear the toil of studying Buddhism to a very serious level of expertise while not being religious?   This would be taking irony to an extraordinary level.   It was in an interview and her interlocutor did not think to enquire further for the likely reason that it is a commonplace condition; a game that is played.

If I were more studious I would understand.  Must try harder.