Monday 28 June 2021

'Far from the Madding Crowd' by Thomas Hardy

 ‘Worlds in Collision’ could be the subtitle of ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’.  It set the template for much of British fiction.  When you change your social orbit, comedic, tragic events happen, and the clockwork orrery is awry.  Gabriel Oak becomes or has the potential to become landed, a peasant proprietor but by the action of a rogue sheepdog becomes a poor shepherd once more far from the marital considerations of Bathsheba Everdene.  That apparent epicycle (I’m just getting going) or going backwards will be corrected morally, and socially, or you’ve never read a Victorian novel.  True but Hardy’s sadism in relation to his characters is well known so Oak may yet come down in a storm.  There is one and Oak withstands it in a fine set piece of saving the corn from the tempest.  Boldwood (!) loses his and cherchez the same femme.  Bathsheba is considering him, Boldwood, as a suitable candidate but her dry powder meets the flash of Troy and launches a thousand plot parentheses.  They become entangled in a dark wood.  He, the vile seducer, is the result of social miscegenation so to speak being the natural son of an aristocrat and his mother the wife of a doctor.  How on earth did Bathsheba become a spinner of mens’ fates, a Moirae?  By rising in the world through inheritance of a substantial farm which she insists on running herself, a planetary wobble that surely we hope and fear may be catastrophic.  ‘Down here for dancing, up there for thinking’ she cannot manage, of course.  Gabriel Oak can.  He bends but does not break  displaying an annoying lack of manly irascibility.  Bathsheba has a great bench and he accepts that even though he was once a good match he must wait on the sidelines.  It’s a dull business being a Victorian stoic, just you, Marcus Aurelius and mutinous natives.  And that brings me to the comic chorus of the rustics there at all the tragic inflections of the plot.  They like a drink and are full of sententious observations on life’s vagaries.  That hasn’t changed.

Hardy was 34 when this was published.  Melodramatic but not so much as to ruin it and with a poet’s eye for that odd detail that makes us believe.   Placet.

Friday 25 June 2021

Dummkopf

 

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! What a referee

What a referee! What a referee!

Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! He went and lost his pea

And his little wooden whistle wouldn't whistle

(Billy Cotton band)

The month after the woodworking magazine that I took had a picture of a naked woman  in an ad for a machine, looking very cold ; there were lots of letters with the complaint ' we close the doors on our sheds to work on our hobby and get away from all that'.

But yes the rainbow regime must light up the stadium for the Hungary V Germany game.  Keep going - take the game out of game.  Dummkopf.

Thursday 24 June 2021

Jordan Peterson and Ideology

 When Jordan Peterson is talking about ideology with that uvula swallowing ‘o’ pronunciation,  what is he talking about?  In my view it is simply this -  a philosophy with a distinct human origin often traceable to a single individual or a group emerges, is taken up by philosophes, intelligentzia, right thinking people, bien pensants and so forth.  It is the flavour of the era.  Very quickly it tends to become dogmatic with fixed principles and modes of discourse.  Then is the time of the heresy sniffers and scryers of correctness.  As a human ideational construct it ought to be constantly mutating but it doesn’t. Sublation runs into the sand.  

But isn’t religious belief like that? Is it not also an ideology?  The central difference is that religion is not of human origin and so its tenets are fixed by definition.  Its doctrines do not alter with the intellectual weather.  Mythology is another archetypal domain with an inner mirroring of the human psych which is constant and changeless.   Conservatism is an ideology that allows for slow organic change and resists rapid transitions.  Adaptation comes out of the slow wisdom of what works.  One size does not fit all societies.

Peterson is not an ideologue.  He runs with the archetypal pack.  His maps of meaning are not a personal cartography.

Friday 18 June 2021

Jordan Peterson not talking about the war

 

I encountered two criticisms of Jordan Peterson yesterday.  One of them was from Lewis Waller :then and now on Peterson

and the other was from the indomitable John Waters on his substack account -John Waters Unchained.

johnwaters@substack.com

The former was no surprise given that he jerks and genuflects with a post modernist knee though he affected to find much of value in Peterson’s Rules books.  What he objects to chiefly is the supreme emphasis on personal responsibility.   He parsed it as ‘response-ability’.  If the deck is stacked against you culturally, societally, what can you do, your options are limited.   Indeed, but how much of the truth is it?  The  Hero, a theme of Peterson’s, can turn on a dime.  He makes a space in the thicket of obstructions and decides with a healthy irascibility that this game of soldiers is a dead loss or salvable.   The insight into the interior checks comes from a rigorous ‘agenbite of inwit’  and the sense of divine love that carries you through that lonesome valley which pace Woody Guthrie you do not have to cross by yourself.

What John Waters would probably aver is that there is a lack of congruence with the structure of the human person in the philosophy of post modernism, critical theory and the dismal mephitic swamp of identarianism, viewpoint theory and cancel culture.  There is no joy in any of their liturgy rather misery and ananda deficit.  What the sage said : satyam vada, dharmam chara - speak the truth, follow dharma.  Suddenly that constricted space becomes boundless because as we are told - Being and the True are convertible.

Like the droll Meath man said - You’d wonder’ .  Why has Jordan nothing to say about the Covid  panic barring an irritable bark - ‘take the dam vaccine’.  He puts that foot out and then draws it back claiming that I understand why one wouldn’t want to take it.  Look this won’t do Jordan, too much of your stock in trade has been about resistance to mass movements.  The Shorter O.D. has a beautiful definition of panic:

“A sudden  and excessive feeling of alarm or fear, usually affecting a body of persons, and leading to extravagant or injudicious efforts to secure safety.”

Not talking about the war is talking about the war.  John Waters expresses his disappointment and  his article is well worth reading.  May I offer a defense of Peterson which brings into focus another archetype not spoken of by psychology.  As well as the Hero there is the Saint.  Psychology leaves off its shoes on that holy ground.  Peterson is not a saint who is prepared to martyrise himself.  He knows very well that if he says a word outside the rubric of correctness on youtube, he will be demonitised  and very likely kicked out.  I would not be surprised if he is planning to move to another channel.  The path of the Hero requires cunning.  In my view he came back to the battle too soon before his wounds were healed. And there were wounds which were not patent before he was stricken by multiple hurts any of which might have defeated another.  He was a wounded healer and like the Fisher King needs to drink from the Holy Grail to become whole and hale.

Saturday 12 June 2021

The Wife of Martin Guerre by Janet Lewis (pub. 1941)

 Wikipedia in its entry on ‘The Wife of Martin Guerre’ missed the piquant detail that Janet Lewis’s research into miscarriages of justice due to over reliance on circumstantial evidence was what first brought to her attention the strange almost mythical case of Martin Guerre.  Herself and her husband, the poet and critic Yvor Winters, a professor at Stanford, were working to free a David Lamson accused of beating his wife to death with a piece of lead pipe.

Lamson

They were successful but Lamson did spend 3 years in San Quentin, one year on death row.  In those days you were hanged within a month from judgment so the slow development of a relationship that is the Hollywood scenario was impossible.

The story of Martin Guerre’s return is philosophically rich on so many levels and even its ramifications into modern life seem  imbued with the mysterious power of alternative realities.  Was David Lamson actually guilty?  It came out later that he had accidentally shot dead a friend of his when he was out hunting as a kid.  He left the body in the bush for two days before reporting it.  He fired a rifle at a girl friend that he was cross with.  No injury there but this is an unlucky man for whom mishap is unidirectional.

Arnaud de Tilh the imposter was hanged before the house of Martin Guerre in 1560.  He had been sentenced to death by beheading but perhaps his confession of guilt led to the more benign form of execution that leaves the body intact.  It’s probably a pineal gland thing.  Descartes would know.

Lewis’s book enters into the mind of Bertrande the wife of Martin and persuades us that a woman might accept a stranger with sufficient likeness to her missing husband to be a good enough substitute.  Besides he’s a nicer man now, mellowed by war.   All his sisters and the household accept him as genuine and the security of the domus is intact again.  There is a definite head in a time of real patriarchy; accustomed absolutes maintain order.  The wife from time to time doubts until she finally along with Martin’s paternal uncle brings a case of impersonation.   The fiction runs parallel with the history withal made truer than plain narrative by diving into the texture of life at the time.

The son’s expectations:

This was so well understood together with the necessity for the law, that it never occurred to Martin to suppose it might be otherwise. It was known throughout Languedoc that a father owned the privilege of freeing his son, if he chose, from the parental authority, but this could only be done through a deliberate and formal ceremony; and although there were fathers who sometimes so liberated their sons, if anyone had asked Martin Guerre what he thought of such a procedure, he would almost certainly have replied that he thought ill. All such authority as belonged to the cap d'hostal Martin Guerre wished to retain, however much he might personally suffer for the time being under such authority. After the lapse of years he expected himself to be cap d'hostal and when that responsibility should rest upon him he would have need of all the accumulated authority of antiquity, even as his father had need of it now.

However young Martin runs away after an infraction of the absolute rule of the cap d’hostal.  He means to come back after a short while but does not.  At a time of banditry and war, roaming mercenaries and  general chaos, going missing was common.  But there’s always hope which distorts  into verisimilitude the false.

Lewis fills between the lines of the well known story beautifully.  It is a classic which may have suffered the fate of being a set text in schools.  The presence of essays offered out there on the web show misreading or the cunning of deliberate error.  It’s strong enough to survive the assault of juveniles.

Tuesday 8 June 2021

Agent and Patient

 There’s a spectrum from agent to patient.  In the ordinary way of thinking about it the agent confronted by a possible  action can do it, not do it, do it differently.  The patient is the one we have been discussing, the powerless one, the end stage junkie, the alcoholic, the gamblers enormous guy.  An insidious HAL is in charge of his ship and unless he is reborn he is doomed.  He has to pause the course that he has set.  That path to homeostasis that is his fix  must be laid aside before he can begin to remove the programs and Daisy can give him his answer.

The agent has his own set of rules, habits and behavioural loops.  They smooth the path to immediate response.  The centipede wondering which leg to move first fell over.  Freedom is a project even if its unattainable as an end state of a-causality.  The Vedantic sage dismisses the merely causal as an illusory end, just karma, nevertheless spiritual practice engenders peace or the tranquillity of order.  Now the big question - Who Am I - is possible.

Monday 7 June 2021

Normal Service will be resumed some time.

 Excuse me, excuse me (louder)

Yes?

That’s my hat you’re wearing

Of course.  Sorry about that.  What’s this shiny material on it, very handsome?

That’s tin foil.

Vile concoction  created by evil scientists curiously the same colour as NY taxis exscapes from lab.  Panel of people dropping in the street with close up in the corner - aargh.

Put away that comic and do your homework.

Now the bats are bats unless they are highly trained to fly 1000 miles and drop their deadly load.

The UFOs are admitted to be such and not lampshades hanging from your attic window.  Triangular ones are suspicious.  Could it be a section of Toblerone?

In charge of the shop is the man with the macrame brain  who is channeling Chauncey Gardner.  Now that’s definitely untrue.  Really, you expect me to believe that.  My antennae will have to be adjusted.  I’m beginning to pick up messages from serious people.

Sunday 6 June 2021

Rationalism and the Enlightened

 A rationalist does not believe that he has fully lived the reality of something until he has worked it out intellectually.  The jnani (enlightened) has no need for this.  He abides in knowledge.

Yes, ok, but how does that work out in Advaita, you ask, needing to know even without a need to know.  You’re here, so I’ll try to sketch in general terms how this might be understood.  Bring your own irony, we cannot guarantee supply.

There is a reflection of the Self in the intellect which is to say that the intellect is not the Self because it is not conscious.  It only seems to be conscious through being pervaded by the Self which is pure Consciousness.  Being qualified by the intellect makes the Self seem to be a limited entity.  In this way we come to identify the Self and the non-Self.  The three facets of the individual i.e. body, mind, intellect qualify the Self.  ‘I’ , ‘mine’, are an expression of this qualification.

At this point the notion of the Saksin (Witness) is brought in.  At first sight it seems a bonus explanation that merely serves to confuse?  Perhaps it induces  aloofness as an ascetic strategy.  But if we have already scored 100% what use are bonus points?

My understanding of it is;  that the Self as qualified by B.M.I. is the Witness.

#94: Everything  pervaded by the intellect together with the ego, is the qualification of the Witness.  Without being connected with anything and pervading everything by means of Its reflection, the Self is therefore, always of the nature of Knowledge Itself.

{The jnani’s statutory rights are not affected.}

#95: All this, described according to popular ideas is the reverse (of what is true) and exists for the undiscriminating; it does not exist at all for men of Knowledge. (from Chap.XVIII Upadesa Sahasri)