Monday 28 February 2022

'The Way of All Flesh' by Samuel Butler

 

Billy Peebles stationary shop had canes of various gauges with a crook on the end.    As you made you way in towards the counter to buy a nib, a pencil or a copy book they hung over it  still fresh and unblooded by the educators of the town.  Until corporal punishment was abolished in the 60‘s everyone accepted that the rod ought not to be spared lest the child be spoiled.  All classes used it freely though within the family the  wooden spoon was nearest to hand.  Probably a cane would have been regarded as the teacher’s mode of correction of everything from bad behaviour  to  irregular verbs.

‘Divil the bit of harm it ever did anyone’.  No I’m not so sure of that and Samuel Butler would concur.  Regular thrashings for anything and everything humiliates and breaks the spirit.  In the rectory schoolroom of Theobold Pontifex the cane’s saving sternness was plied freely as a prophylactic against all manner of naughtiness, consummated and projected.  Interestingly the few internet reviews of ‘The Way of All Flesh’ that I have read do not dwell on this aspect of correction which embittered most children’s lives.  The other critical lapse is that the Lamarkian theory re the transmission of acquired characteristics  which was held by Butler and by Overton the narrator of the novel passes unnoticed which makes the long lead into the story of Ernest Pontifex a redundant indulgence.  We see the same business acumen move through the generations and if the entrepreneurial spirit is weaker in Theobold, Ernest’s father, at least he can sit and save.

Overton is both a narrator and an actor.  His views on matrimony and family life are decidedly bleak, a classic misogynist.  The one independent woman in the novel Ernest’s aunt Alethea Pontiflex he has proposed marriage to several times.  Wisely she declines his control of her life and loot.  Independently wealthy she takes on Ernest as a potential heir but knowing the lad’s lack of judgment fears that if the money is put into his hands too soon he will waste it.  Overton and she come up with a plan to keep him from inheriting her money until he reaches the age of twenty eight should she die before that.  Indeed this was a wise move because Ernest gets into various scrapes eventually even landing in goal for sexual assault.   His career as an ordained minister of the Established Church is definitively over and he is rejected by his parents as beyond redemption.  We can blame his landlady Mrs. Jupp  for that.  She is the classic fruity Cockney with a comical run of free associative dialogue.  There are quite good character sketches of the lodgers in the house of Jupp.

When Ernest comes out of goal he sets himself up with Ellen, the maidservant of his family dismissed for falling pregnant years before.  The tailoring skill which he has picked up in goal he uses as the foundation of trade in old clothes. That goes well for a while until his wife drinks the profit and runs off.  Ernest’s suffering  continues and only Overton knows that if he sticks it out until he comes into his aunt’s money all will be well.

It’s quite a long novel which I had read years ago and forgotten.  It reflects many of the Victorian themes, money, respectability lost and found, the entree into the genteel class that was the Church, fallen women and duty.   There are many minor characters that are well sketched and the constant tension as we wait to discover what the next torment for Ernest Pontiflex will be keeps us interested. I recommend it.  A classic.

||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||  (Ernest as a Clergyman)

He lived among the poor, but he did not find that he got to know them. The idea that they would come to him proved to be a mistaken one. He did indeed visit a few tame pets whom his rector desired him to look after. There was an old man and his wife who lived next door but one to Ernest himself; then there was a plumber of the name of Chesterfield; an aged lady of the name of Gover, blind and bed-ridden, who munched and munched her feeble old toothless jaws as Ernest spoke or read to her, but who could do little more; a Mr Brookes, a rag and bottle merchant in Birdsey’s Rents in the last stage of dropsy, and perhaps half a dozen or so others. What did it all come to, when he did go to see them? The plumber wanted to be flattered, and liked fooling a gentleman into wasting his time by scratching his ears for him. Mrs Gover, poor old woman, wanted money; she was very good and meek, and when Ernest got her a shilling from Lady Anne Jones’s bequest, she said it was “small but seasonable,” and munched and munched in gratitude. Ernest sometimes gave her a little money himself, but not, as he says now, half what he ought to have given.

Monday 21 February 2022

The pure drop of Omicron

 

‘It’s like a bad hangover for a couple of days’.  Omicron.  In ‘Grace’ by Joyce Mr. Cunningham gravely remarked - ‘It happened that you were peloothered'.  Here the toxicity which produced a dull ache to the frontal lobes was due to the viral potation imbibed I know not where.  After those two days there was another short time of a vile taste in my mouth and muscle twinges.   Now that’s passing.  You could say I had the pure drop never having had any inoculation and that leads me to ask - what is going on in those countries that are still insisting on masks and mandates?  They have pushed the game on well past the credence of the people.  It’s over.

Wednesday 9 February 2022

Realism in Advaita part 1

 

Advaita throws the word ‘real’ and its antonym ‘unreal’ about freely leaving the casual reader or the sitter at the feet of Swamiji, guruji, and the internet oracle, confused.  Is Advaita a type of subjective Idealism which holds that the world is a dream or ‘like’ a dream in that it is experienced and vanishes on waking, an ‘insubstantial pageant’?  Fear not, let this mini-guru with more than a hint of tin in his water pot put you right.  One thing I have though, if not enlightenment, is a fair reading in general philosophy that allows one to sift the nuances of the levels of reference.  Am I then referring to the vyavaharika/pratibhasika (absolute/relative) distinction?  Not quite.  Let me first deal with the opening question purely from an epistemological point of view.  What are we aware of when we experience something?  Is it an internal occurrence in our minds  that by some process represents the external reality or is that an overly complex way of saying that we experience an object?  Effectively, experience of the object is the immediate thing and all else is an over elaboration of the febrile mind and a derealising distraction.  There is a tiny, shy, half-truth in that.  My counter would be that Adi Shankara catered to the seeker who requires rational clarification.

The other, frequently met with, counter to this question of epistemological stance is the Orientalist - ‘really this Realism/Idealism dyad is a Western preoccupation that does not apply in Vedanta’.  Again, Shankara took it seriously though Vedanta’s answer to the aporia (puzzle) is so to speak, non-binary.   What else does non-dual mean if not that?  In any case the attempt to navigate between the Scylla and the Charybdis of Internal and External has also a long history in Western thought from, I would hold, Plato and Aristotle to Henri Bergson and the modern revival of Panpsychism.

This is a long menu and the first item must be the neglected - what is the nature of the person, the mind/body complex that is in a world of objects?  

I’ll be back.

Friday 4 February 2022

Hypostasis (Reification) in the Pancapadika of Padmapada.

 

This beginningless Ignorance is referred to in the Vedas, Smrtis, Epics and Puranas as Name and Form, the Undeveloped, Ignorance, Maya, Nature (prakrti), Non-perception, the Unmanifest, Darkness (tamas), the Cause, Dissolution, Power, the Great Sleep (mahasupti), Sleep (nidra), the Indestructible, the Shining Ether.  In different places it is spoken of in many different ways.  It is spoken of as preventing the manifestation of Consciousness in its true form as the Absolute and then producing the appearance of the individual soul.  It is spoken of as the wall on which are painted the pictures of the impressions resulting from our meditations, rituals and acquired skills in previous lives.  It is spoken of as that which remains in dreamless sleep as the mere latent impression of its power of projection, concealing the light of Consciousness.  (P.P. pg.98 f./20 - version of Sri Swami Satchidanandendra Saraswati in his 'The Method of the Vedanta)

It is clear from that list of epithets that Padmapada the purported author of the Pancapadika holds to a view of Avidya (Ignorance) that is hypostatic (reifying).   He draws this conclusion based on the Vedic tenet that only Knowledge banishes Ignorance.   There is such a thing as Knowledge therefore there must be Ignorance as its polar opposite.  Sri S.S.S. demurs.  Ignorance is just the very action of superimposition (adhyasa) and not an occult force bringing Ignorance into existence.  He writes:

“The author of the Pancapadika does not use the word Ignorance to designate that phenomenon of superimposition or erroneous cognition, which is well known as being subject to correction and cancellation through knowledge.  Why instead of doing that, he applies the term Ignorance to the Undeveloped Principle, which belongs to the realm of knowable objects, is a mystery.”

To clarify, in my understanding of him, Sri S.S.S. is objecting to an unwarranted expansion of the term ‘ignorance’ to the metaphysical sphere. An analogical use has become a metaphor and treated as an existent entity.

 

 

Tuesday 1 February 2022

Covidology de Jour

 There’s that American expression - ‘what just happened’.  An event, baffling, deep, inscrutable, has occurred and we require explanation.  What precisely were the forces at play?  It might be useful to know and vital for our future safety.  Bojo’s birthday bash has released Ireland from its thrall to a ‘narrative’ that was thin as grocer’s bacon and like it also in that the various slices are difficult to separate.

Was there a ‘they’, dark forces of malign intent or a convergence of profound mismanagement?  Corona was recognised by clever people as being of artificial origin indicating lab leak which was followed by denial and implications of tin foil toppers by those who had lots of connection to Wuhan.  There was a ‘they’ there forming a nucleus of catastrophe manufacture and saving themselves by a creation of diversion.  Very early in the pandemic the gradation of risk was known but only the Swedes made the correct choices.  Incompetence was a factor and mediocrity and a political system that was like a steam engine with a defective governor.  Pressure kept building up without the journalistic valve and it was the exhaustion of the viral fire that saved us and Boris saying ‘party on dudes’.

What of the panto villain Klaus der Schlub, behind you, behind you?  Mockery is the remedy for Davos applied topically and liberally.  The unvaxxed will not forget.

P.S.  Now I understand Neil Young’s line:

When you’re young enough to repay

But not old enough to sell.