Saturday 29 October 2022

Carl Truman on The Romantics (from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)

 

Carl Truman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self  had been suggested as The Closing of the American Mind  of our day so I thought to take a look.  One chapter on ‘The Unacknowledged Legislators’  suggesting that Shelley and other Romantics might have a part in the making of the modern mind seemed a place to dip my toe.  Just on that alone I decided to venture no further into the deeps of a long book.  It seemed too naive as though the author lacked an empirical acquaintance with original sin and was unaware that the libertine finds justification for the satisfaction of his desires everywhere and if countered turns the argument away as the mere prejudice of the rebarbative mind. 

Last page of chap:

"This is the point that Rousseau, Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley understood.  It was why they used poetry as a means of achieving the moral reformation of individuals and of society..........And in a world in which the idea of universal human nature has been abandoned or attenuated to the point of being meaningless, it also means that those who shape popular taste exert the most moral power and set society’s moral standards.  While he no doubt would have retched at the thought, William Wordsworth stands near the head of a path that leads to Hugh Hefner and Kim Kardashian."

I only read ‘Playboy’ for the extracts from The Prelude. 

Take Shelley for instance.  Two Victorian sages express quite negative  judgments.  Thomas Carlyle writes:

"Shelley is a poor creature, who has said or done nothing worth a serious man being at the trouble of remembering.... Poor soul, he has always seemed to me an extremely weak creature; a poor, thin, spasmodic, hectic, shrill and pallid being. . . . The very voice of him, shrill, shrieky, to my ear has too much of the ghost! (from Invective and Abuse  by Hugh Kingsmill)"

Matthew Arnold in a review essay on Dowden’s  Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley wishes that he had been left with much less knowledge of the poet’s life.  He considers this letter to his abandoned wife Harriet writing from Troyes where he is resting on his travels with Mary Godwin:

 

"My dearest Harriet (he begins). I write to you from this detestable town; I write to show that I do not forget you ; I write to urge you to come to Switzerland, where you will at last find one firm and constant friend to whom your interests will be always dear—by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured. From none can you expect this but me—all else are either unfeeling or selfish, or have beloved friends of their own.''

(This beautiful soul adds in conclusion some commissions)

"I wish you to bring with you the two deeds which Tahourdin has to prepare for you, as also a copy of the settlement. Do not part with any of your money. But what shall be done about the books ? You can consult on the spot. With love to my sweet little lanthe, ever most affectionately yours, S."

" I write in great haste ; we depart directly."

Arnold finds the English language lacking in the precision of invective that French supplies:

"But neither will I call the letter an odious letter, a hideous letter. I prefer to call it, applying an untranslated French word, a bete letter. And it is bete from what is the signal, the disastrous want and weakness of Shelley, with all his fine intellectual gifts—his utter deficiency in humour."

Can an Englishman say worse? 

Wednesday 26 October 2022

Bergson Stirring a Cup of Coffee by Stephen E. Robbins

 

Stephen E. Robbins' interpretation of Bergson uses the concept of the holograph to delineate how the brain modulates the vastness of Memory.  Bergson himself writes of the brain as being like a valve.  Everything that you have ever experienced is out there laid down in temporal order compressed into the single plane of duration.  Nothing is missing but not everything is to the point so the brain as an organ of action extracts that which is germane.   The vastness of the totality of experience could not be stored in the brain.  Events are stored in their fullness in memory and it is only on analysis that we can separate out all the physics.  An example that Robbins gives is the stirring of a cup of coffee as an experimental event that is such that if something untoward or unexpected were to happen we would immediately spot it.  So we therefore have it all in memory otherwise it would pass unnoticed.   Robbins throws all his esoteric, to me, knowledge of physics at this event.  Adiabatics, vectors, rate of turn etc, etc.  But apply to the man himself:

Robbins

Friday 21 October 2022

Bergson and Transhumanism and Coathangers

 

Why is transhumanism a pipe dream?  If your brain has a chip installed in it to reroute input around a damaged section caused by a stroke is that an indication of the possibilities of a full machine human interface?  Questions like this arise out of a materialist view of the nature of the human person.  That the brain is a place where memories are stored seems to be a solid scientific fact but it is questioned by Henri Bergson.  He demonstrates through a close analysis of lesion induced aphasia and apraxis that things are not so simple.  He distinguishes between two different sorts of memory, rote memory and the fuller sort which reaches over the whole life of the person and is alway totally present to him.  Both however are focussed on the present moment the brain being an organ of action.  Recognition it will be readily accepted is essential for action.  This happened before and my reaction was successful then so here I go again.  Yes sort of.  Bergson picks this analysis apart:

On one theory, the recognition of a present perception consists in inserting it mentally in its ormer surroundings. I encounter a man for the first time : I simply perceive him. If I meet him again, I recognize him, in the sense that the concomitant circumstances of the original perception, returning to my mind, surround the actual image with a setting which is not a setting actually perceived. To recognize, then, according to this theory, is to associate with a present perception the images which were formerly given in connection with it. But, as it has been justly observed, a renewed perception cannot suggest the concomitant circumstances of the original perception unless the latter is evoked, to begin with, by the present state which resembles it.(page 185 'Matter and Memory')

It, the previous event, must be already here with you.  You did not have to go back to fetch it.  Isn't it the case that we recognize without having an image that we refer to.  Bergson again and again demonstrates his ability to turn a single observation into a revelation.  Every so often I have to read ‘Matter and Memory’ again to find new insights that I didn’t grasp before.  Here he is using a homely metaphor:

there is also a close connection between a coat and the nail on which it hangs, for, if the nail is pulled out, the coat falls to the ground. Shall we say, then, that the shape of the nail gives us the shape of the coat, or in any way corresponds to it ? No more are we entitled to conclude, because the physical fact is hung on to a cerebral state, that there is any parallelism between the two series psychical and physiological. When philosophy pleads that the theory of parallelism is borne out by the results of positive science, it enters upon an unmistakably vicious circle, for, if science interprets connection, which is a fact, as signifying parallelism, which is an hypothesis (and an hypothesis to which it is difficult to attach an intelligible meaning *), it does so, consciously or unconsciously, for reasons of a philosophic order : it is because science has been accustomed by a certain type of philosophy to believe that there is no hypothesis more probable, more in accordance with the interests of scientific inquiry. (Matter and Memory- Intro.)

Tuesday 18 October 2022

Growing the Economy through A.I.

 

A.I. is a misnomer of course.  Machines don’t think because machines don’t dream.  They are incapable of those startling metaphors and analogies that dreams excel in due to their being the domain of pre-logical thought.  You cannot say NO in a dream; it has to be performed by doing and then undoing.  It always interesting to read myself in Google News as I do not always use that search engine.  There it is algo urged that I interest myself in the gardening tips of Monty Don and Ukranian artillery.  Like the Weird Sisters Big Algo seeks to win us by honest trifles and betray us in matters of deepest consequence.  This could be me.  What a charming profile.  Tips for the creation of the perfect compost and the terraced gardens of Tuscany.  How very me.  Bit by bit or byte one is husked and carefully layered on the heap which is put out in the Spring as base dressing.

Saturday 15 October 2022

Enoch Burke in Durance Vile

 

Twitter is mostly a foolish forum and I fear it will bring out the worst aspect of my penchant for the short cutting remark.  So I would hope.  I’m already getting bored but however plunge on.  I’ve been following the Enoch Burke case to gauge sentiment amongst the populace.  He is now over a month in jail and the school have yet to come to a determination about the suspension that was visited upon him for his refusal to use the preferred pronoun of a minor who was ascribing to the condition of being a eunuch for the kingdom of Woke.   The sequence of events was 1: suspension on refusal to comply with school directive 2: A verbal interruption of a formal dinner for the school and the past pupils complaining of the abrogation of bible codes in a Protestant confessional school and the denial of his freedom of conscience.  (What - no private judgment) 3: his turning up at the school to teach even though suspended 4: Injunction against him appearing on the school grounds 5: jail for contempt of the court order.

Now on Twitter the bleating of those opposed to Burke is that he is only in jail because he refuses to purge his contempt.  True but entirely false and beside the point of the demonstration of the firmness of his beliefs.  Why haven’t the school come to a decision about his fate?  Their only option is to fire him.  Could it be that they are dithering because there is opposition from past pupils about the woke agenda?  Or are they just vindictive, the longer they delay the longer he will be in durance vile.  Naturally when he is dismissed he will have no reason to turn up to teach and the court order will lapse.  He will then bring a case of wrongful dismissal which may or may not be successful.

Oh yes I forgot.  Enoch Burke has brought a defamation case against the Sunday Independent for publishing a story that he was moved from his cell/wing because he was annoying the other prisoners, Ordinary Decent Criminals (O.D.C.s)  This was not true and has been denied officially by the prison authorities.  In court today the judge said that he was bemused by the suggestion that this libel might prejudice his future legal actions by representing him as ‘hard time ' for O.D.C.s  I think the judge meant ‘amused’ but let ‘bemused’ stand as a state of fatuous bewilderment.

Sunday 9 October 2022

'The Talented Mr. Ripley' by Patricia Highsmith

 

Type into the command line of a Linux O.S.  whoami and the response will be ‘root’.  Should Tom Ripley have queried his own central operating system or his soul the answer would be ‘whatever’.  Ripley is a figment or a creation, a fiction, a prodigy of versimilitude composed of shy smiles,  petty schemes and shiftless manoeuvring.  We first meet him using the stationary of the I.R.S.  which he stole while he had the job as a storeroom clerk in one of their offices.  He’s writing dunning letters to various people claiming a short fall in their payments and following that up with avuncular phone calls advising them to settle.  You can be anyone you like on the phone, phoney.  So far all he’s been getting are cheques so the joy of the con is all that in it for him.  Eventually he will take this this impersonation  to the ultimate merger and will become that which he pretends to.  The inconvenient existence of this persona has to lapse for this achievement.

Being an imposter is a strenuous occupation but at first it seems only a holiday by the sea in Italy near Palermo.  The man that he thinks is  following him because of his I.R.S. scam is none other than Greenleaf pere who is under the impression that Ripley is a great friend of his son Dickie who is trust funding his passion for painting and not inclined to come home to take up his responsibility as the heir of a large boat building business.  The boy is not inclined to see this and T.R.'s mission should he accept it is to go over there and persuade him to come back.  The trouble is that Tom does not really know Dickie at all but the offer of a return first class liner ticket and a wodge of money makes him decide to chance it.

Even on the boat going over he is trying on different Tom Ripleys using a cap as a prop.

He had a sudden whim for a cap and bought one in the haberdashery, a conservative bluish-grey cap of soft English wool. He could pull its visor down over nearly his whole face when he wanted to nap in his deck-chair, or wanted to look as if he were napping. A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

He is reinventing himself and the smoothness of the sleight of hand as he gets Dickie Greenleaf to accept him as an acquaintance from an established cadre of socially sound people is quite excellent:

       'You don't seem to remember me from New York,' Tom said.

       'I can't really say I do,' Dickie said. 'Where did I meet you?'

       'I think—Wasn't it at Buddy Lankenau's?' It wasn't, but he knew Dickie knew Buddy Lankenau, and Buddy was a very respectable fellow.

So far we are with Ripley trying to pull himself  into a new life, to make something of himself.  It’s when he begins to make someone of himself other than his own self that we begin to draw back and resist identification with a man who has not got a firm grip on his identity.  Tom you see is his own creature enjoying the translucence of consciousness.  Like a sage of psychopathy he does not identify with any collection of personal attributes as a given ground of ‘lived experience’.  He lives his experience a different way uniting its elements with the desire to absorb the other.  In every way this novel is a psychopathic farce, an homicidal ‘Charley’s Aunt’.  The posse are the front door he goes out by the french window and joins them round the front to call on himself.  Highsmith puts him into situations that make us gasp and stretch our eyes as he lies and lies and gets away with it.

By the way forget the film which blunts the evil for the sake of interiors and beautiful knitware, the book’s the thing.

Sunday 2 October 2022

God Help America

 AI don't know about you but I have this bated breath feeling.  This latest American stunt, I mean the bombing of the pipeline will not go unanswered.  They are cutting off any incentive as they see it for the Europeans to force some sort of peace deal and get the gas flowing.  It's the favourite type of American war, proxy, where you can claim a win but deny a lose.  Pure Ukrainisation not the Vietnamisation of yore.  There is no question but that America is functioning in outright authoritarian mode at the moment.  Sending 20 armed F.B.I.  to a pro-life man's home after a minor scuffle at an abortion clinic which the local authorities declined to prosecute.  There is no country in the world in which election laws so lax would not produce massive cheating and when those that  worked to bring those laws about benefit from them:

What's that smell in this room? Didn't you notice it, Brick? Didn't you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room? (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof)


God Help America and God Help us All.


Saturday 1 October 2022

Culture War Vs Moral War

 

All of the commentariat, the chattering classes, talk about the ‘culture war’ but that is an agenda grab.  It’s really a moral war and reducing it to culture which by definition is constantly mutating is sound rhetoric.  ‘You feel like that now, but wait (insert ‘journey here) and you will achieve a different perspective.  You will become more educated and give over your far right tendencies.’  The answer to that is in the polling booth where the populace can utter a definitive, begone twerp.