Wednesday 27 December 2023

Maggie O'Farrell's brushes with death and the Continuous Present in 'I AM, I AM, I AM'

 

My wife was reading the Maggie O’Farrell book ‘I AM, I AM, I AM’.  Is she a devotee of Nisargadatta Maharaj I asked:

My Guru ordered me to attend to the sense ‘I am’ and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed. I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study of scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain with the sense 'I am'. It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my Guru told me so. Yet it worked!

Or indeed a follower of Meher Baba whose motto was ‘Be Here Now’.

O’Farrell is in love with the continuous present in which her, all her, books are written.  In my view she wants a cleansing course of the pluperfect to flush it out of her system.  She ought to get in touch with her inner preterite and open up to multiple tenses. Her success as a writer is not affected by the cliche ‘I am now attending with a feverish vividness and ‘grokking on the fullness’. (Kesey also does  time in, in ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’) .  You can’t argue with a Sunday Times best seller which the afore mentioned ‘I am x 3' was.  In that of course the intensity of brushes with death, only 17, focuses the mind wonderfully and the tense conveys that.  These events are like what Wordsworth called ‘spots of time’ that remain undiminished by time.  In O’Farrell’s case they are shrines to mortality where attention is the homage paid to the dark god Thanatos.  She carries to this day the burden of her childhood encephalitis which has left her damaged in her space perception and fine motor skills.  These deficits play a part in those near things that grip you in a suspended unbelief which is irrational as the ‘I am here to tell you’ proof of life of the book testifies.  Will she make it?  Her publicity photos should show her clutching a copy of The Times of the day so we can be sure.

Its a fine book.  The chapter on her daughter who has multiple serious allergies is moving.  As a parent you do not want to outlive your children.  Can I go first please?

Friday 22 December 2023

'Under Gemini' by Isabel Bolton (aka Mary Britton Miller)

Again on the subject of the continuous present (cf previous post) this time frugally used by a genius. It is effective when it is used to give the feeling of what the Freudians call a cathexis or a blocked forever undischarged traumatic scenario which remains as a persistent penumbra.

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 I read a lot and there is the danger of dulling by surfeit the critical faculty.  There are too many bad books reading over my shoulder slimeing with cliche the  the work in hand .  One thing that causes me to put down a book immediately is the use of the continuous present.  To the block Hilary Mantel.  It seems to me a cheap attempt at immediacy and if the preterite won’t give your story force; it’s a weakling.

And then I was reading ‘Under Gemini, a Memoir’ by Mary Britton Miller and I realised that the continuous present in the first chapter was not producing the throw reflex.   Why?  Respondit Bergson by ouija:

This is not the Continuous Present it is the Durational Present.  These events frame a soul and make a world: now.   Miller is a very great writer and does not continue this device which is not a device past the opening.  First in ordinary time she tells us what she is going to tell us.

"There is a legend that once the ribbons we wore upon our wrists to establish our identity were misplaced while we were being bathed. Our nurse, Mathilda, unable to tell which twin was which, called upon our mother to decide. She replaced the ribbons, saying I was Mary and the other child was Grace. Let us assume that she was right, for I was christened Mary and my twin was christened Grace; and so, awarding her the honor of having entered this world five minutes before I did, I will attempt to recapture the memories of our life together on this earth.”

Then she tells us:

“There is a room darkened against the light and on the couch a gentleman with a dark moustache is lying fast asleep. He snores. Behind the couch I kneel and kneeling with me is my other self. Identical excitement, terror, fearful joy invades us. We wait. I watch my duplicate arise and I am rising with her. There is a moment for decision and then a swift resolve—a dreadful sharing of the consequences that will follow the awful act we contemplate; and then, excitement urging us, we spit directly in our father’s upturned face. He rises. We flee while panic overtakes us and then a sudden darkness, the waters of continuing experience engulf our father and his wrath. We have no further memory of him whatever.”

In the same way their memory of mother is cut off.  The sudden night that overwhelms them is due to the death by cholera of both parents.  All at once the life of the five children in the family becomes the care of a maternal uncle and his organising wife Aunt Anna.  They now live with their grandmother and a carer which they are instructed to call Aunt Julia.  Apart from a ceremonial visit on Sundays to Aunt Anna’s they are left alone to express themselves by mighty acts of domestic delinquency.

Aunt Anna is no downtrodden and subdued Victorian lady:

"The spectacle of our Aunt Anna affected us quite differently. Whatever charm and geniality she might have had was compressed, laced in, buttoned up, suppressed. Her clothes fitted her tightly; they were handsome and well brushed, not glamourous at all but with their own special elegance. She did not approve of charm; she listened rather disapprovingly to Uncle Jim and always asked practical questions, saying, "My dear Jim, I don't agree. This should not be done. I don't approve." She said, "You must" and "You must not" with emphasis.”

The sweet sadness of the denouement of this memoir comes across the century.  Now my problem is, what am I going to read after this elevation into contact with a real genius whose obscurity was self sought?  I think more of her and then taper off with Elizabeth Bowen.  Maybe Mrs. Gaskell first then Bowen.  That’s what I’ll do.

American Classic.

Wednesday 20 December 2023

Regarding the Present Continous

 

So I’ve said that the use of the continuous present is a cheap device to give a feeling of immediacy.  Its particularly blatant used throughout novels such as those of Hilary Mantel and our latest Booker prize winner Paul Lynch in ‘Prophet Song’.  Anthony Doerr uses it in ‘All the Light we cannot see’.  Besides being affected and monotonous what else is wrong with it?  I believe it is psychologically and epistemologically wrong creating a false picture

of human action.  First of all we do not act in a continuous stimulus response mode as though we were conditioned to do so.  Sometimes we do but not always.  In between bouts of habit there is considered action in which the past and its tense come into play.  The brain as Bergson would maintain is an organ of action and is guided by what has worked in the past; in short, memory and not pure perception is the key to response. Our language reflects this modality.  The future is attained by intention.  What will it mean doing this or that or do it differently or not do it at all.  We weigh our options against past error and success and altered situations.  The past perfect, the present perfect come into play and offer their counsel.  ‘I had considered at that point’ but it turned out that I was wrong and woe is me ‘I have done the same thing again’.  The elision of all those subtleties must impoverish the expression of  reality in a novel.

Look no one talks in the continuous present except the gangsters in Damon Ruynon’s short stories.  Leave it to them.

"Anyway, I finally mention the names of these parties to Judge Goldfobber, and furthermore I speak well of their reliability in a pinch, and of their nerve, although I cannot conscientiously recommend their tact, and Judge Goldfobber is greatly delighted, as he often hears of Harry the Horse, and Spanish John and Little Isadore. " (from 'Breach of Promise')

Monday 18 December 2023

Little Swimmers

 

Professor Liz Harman has the common view about pregnancy that choice folk hold.  When welcome it is a precious event that is shared with others and the medium favoured is a sonogram of the little swimmer.  If miscarried at this point there is sadness and loss.

Now if the pregnancy is unwelcome there is a medical situation that needs to be rectified.  There is magically not a pregnancy which would imply in the course of nature a birth.

The strangely normal thing is that the same woman can have both these attitudes at different times.  Objectively the reality of there being a little sportive swimmer is the same in both cases.

What is our likely attitude toward that moral stance?  How would one view such mutability?  As a mother with a favourite child, as a moral imbecile, a confused person, and probably not our first choice as a friend.  They have intrinsic value even if they don’t recognise it.  Would or should you trust them?

Wednesday 13 December 2023

Trollope's Truth

 

One of the things said of Anthony Trollope by an enthusiastic reader of his work which struck me was ‘I trust Trollope’. Should we? Is there mischief in Anthony, a sly misdirection between the deictic events, what he shows and what he tells us in his direct interpolations.  Henry James did not like this breaking of the fabulous spell preferring to lay his mazing anfractuosities there on the page.  None of your, please note I have nothing up my sleeve and my fingers never leave my hand.

Is Trollope telling the truth?  Looking the Palliser series I find his insistence that Frank Tregear was not after the money that Lady Mary would undoubtedly bring his way a little strained.  After all Lady Mabel and he had broken off their attachment due to the fact that neither of them had any money.  She loves him but knows that a life of penury would be impossible for them owing to their aristocratic taste for the finer things in life.  I also recall that Frank has a brother that is due to inherit the modest estate in Cornwall but that he will probably not ever marry and is generally abroad travelling.  Might he be eaten by a lion or destroyed by Corsican bandits or succumb to yellow fever?  This could be a way of resolving the funds impasse.  Frank however does not live in that suspended state and in a few months, takes his permission to seek another to Rome.  He doesn’t go in for languish as does Lady Mabel who is secretly put out by his speed in moving on.  As the Scots steward said in ‘The Eustace Diamonds’ don’t go after money but go where the money is. Which he does.  Lady Mary, with her beauty and ‘sterling’ qualities falls and as we know Daddy Pally demurs.  A penniless adventurer and my girl; that can never be.  By the way have you noticed how fickle men are in the novels.  Phineas Finn skips like a stone over the lake of love but sheers off when the wealthy Madam Marie puts it to him.  In the end those two outsiders are married which brings me to what I think might have lurked in the back of Trollope’s mind.  Can the beautiful but alien Isabel Boncassen be a suitable spouse for the future Duke of Omnium?  I really think that from an aristocratic point of view the union with Lady Mabel who is beautiful, witty and wise would be more fitting and durable given the duties of that elevated sphere.  Can the republican and the monarchist be friends over the long stretch of mutual  accommodations that is marriage?  Isabel must be an eternal outsider and she will feel it.  Such an ending would make a subtle reprise of Plantagenet’s marriage which was to begin with against Lady Glen’s true feelings.  In this case Silverbridge would simply have to revert to his initial love for Mabel. There could be Trollopian prosing about duty over several pages.

Think of that.

For me this novel was the weakest link in the series which probably took too long to die.  The comedy element was more about social embarrassment, again the oil and water of different classes.  The pathos of a man who neglected his family for quints (the decimal farthing) is there but is it enough.

Monday 4 December 2023

The Duke's Children by Anthony Trollope

 If you reverse engineer the Palliser novels you will reveal the narrative clockwork that drives the novels but it won’t help you to predict what is going to happen in the one you are reading.  I’m in the middle of ‘The Duke’s Children’ and I can see the author running the combinations of the recurring themes.  Marry for money and status - that probably won’t be lucky. Two men caught between two women, oscillating emotion of the male compared to the more steady female attachment.  We’ve seen similar situations before however I feel Trollope will ring the changes this time and there may be jetsam and someone left to languish.  


The busyness of the Victorian upper class who had a fondness for laborious idleness, fox hunting, shooting, up in the morning out on the moor blasting away at the fowl of the month or stalking deer over miles of Scottish mountains.  Behind this sport the army of support staff fettling horses, whipping in dogs, Masters of Fox Hounds blowing the horn, horse coping.  The fixing of the Leger is a theme in this book and a gilded youth losing £70,000.  In 187- serious money but Papa pays up.  Will daughter Lady Mary get the man she loves, will Papa come round?  Can the American beauty be accepted by the Duke of Omnium or will marrying out of the aristocracy be impossible to accept for his son. At a certain point you may feel that you know quite enough about the marriage arrangements of the idle wealthy.  There are no less than two MPs in the romance stakes, both Conservative.  Rebellious youth forsooth.


Like all Trollope novels he keeps you reading and wondering how the romantic tangles might be resolved. The other amazing thing is the amount of visiting each others houses they do.    Mansions  were required to keep up that level of hospitality.  And cousin marriage; chinless wonders did not come from nowhere.


‘The Duke’s Children’ is not the best novel in the series. Does Trollope succeed in humanising the Duke? So far there are touching episodes and those of us that have given their parents trouble will mist up a little recognising the forbearance we have received.  I’m only half way there and this note is dashed off waiting for bread to bake.


Saturday 25 November 2023

Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels

It is what is vulgarly known as bro lit.  If that drives you away from the action, if you are what Lucky Jack Aubrey would call shy, then so much the worse for you, the prize of a d-  good read will elude you and you will  fall on the ‘impermissible lee shore’ there to perish on the rocks of genre.  Not the slightest trace of what the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill called ‘rum, bum, and concertina’.  Maturin will admit to the rum ration, an astonishing half pint per diem along with grog which lead to falling from the rigging and gives another sense to ‘a tight ship’.   As a scientist cum philosophe he was appalled by this customary ration which in ‘Post Captain’ the second in the series caused Jack to dive overboard to rescue Bonden swimming 50 yards up to him and grasping him by the pig tail held him fast till a boat was launched.  He’s done that a few times in his career having the skill of natation unknown in the common tar who would not wish to prolong his agony if washed overboard in a storm.  Maturin does not know how to swim which is uncanny as he knows everything else in this sublunary domain.  However he is no dismal sciolist rather an amateur or lover of all branches of knowledge.  In short he is a polymath and a foil to Aubrey who is a perfect John Bull, sentimental and also violent, given to boozy venery and we are glad when he finds his Sophie a rich prize in herself with £10,000 towing.  He though is broke ‘caus the prize factor who was minding his money has indulged in major defalcation.  The comedic aspect of Jack skulking on land to avoid bum baliffs and finding sanctuary in a quarter of London where they cannot tap him with their cudgels.  Everything you will read in O’Brien’s books are founded on historical fact and the bold engagements of Jack Aubrey are founded on the real thing.


The writing is excellent and varies from the excogitations of Maturin on everything to the naming of parts of rigging,  naval lore, and the rectification of the trim of sailing ships by Jack, a highly skilled seaman who has been at sea from the age of 14.  But away from the sea to the land and the first sight of the divine Sophie perhaps not coincidentally the name of the first sloop under Jack’s command.  Sniggers in the focsle.


“Sophia, the eldest, was a tall girl with wide-set grey eyes, a broad, smooth forehead, and a wonderful sweetness of expression - soft fair hair, inclining to gold: an exquisite skin. She was a reserved creature, living much in an inward dream whose nature she did not communicate to anyone. Perhaps it was her mother's unprincipled rectitude that had given her this early disgust for adult life; but whether or no, she seemed very young for her twenty-seven years. There was nothing in the least degree affected or kittenish about this: rather a kind of ethereal quality - the quality of a sacrificial object. Iphigeneia before the letter. Her looks were very much admired; she was always elegant, and when she was in looks she was quite lovely.”


I read some of them years ago and although the adventures are free standing and good as that to read them in their order is the better course.

Most excellent.


 

 

Monday 20 November 2023

Etienne Gilson on Thoughts and Things

 As realists we abide in things not thoughts.  The thing comes first not the thought about the thing.  What you have in Descartes is certainty but its a dead certainty.  Nothing living can come from it.  It cuts us off from things and leaves us the world as a true hallucination as Taine put it.  


Etienne Gilson in his brilliantly clear ‘Methodical Realism’ which would be an offence to summarise has an essay of 30 paragraphs on the superiority of Realism to Idealism.  Realism is the true because what we do would be impossible if Idealism were the case.  Section 5 in the series is an example of his wit:


The knowledge the realist is talking about is the lived and experienced unity of an intellect with an apprehended reality. This is why a realist philosophy has to do with the thing itself that is apprehended, and without which there would be no knowledge. Idealist philosophers, on the other hand, since they start from thought, quickly reach the point of choosing science or philosophy as their object. When an idealist genuinely thinks as an idealist, he perfectly embodies the essence of a “professor of philosophy”, whereas the realist, when he genuinely thinks as a realist, conforms himself to the authentic essence of a philosopher; for a philosopher talks about things, while a professor of philosophy talks about philosophy.


Sunday 12 November 2023

'The Prime Minister' by Anthony Trollope

A frequently repeated locution in ‘The Prime Minister’ is the instructive ‘taught’. It occurs thirty two times in various forms which in a writer of Trollope’s attainments must be significant and more than careless repetition. In some of the cases you are a moral autodidact, in the others society and the power of the family will ‘larn’ you.
much perverseness in the girl, who might have taught herself 
must have taught you that when a man is cut up about a woman, 
in which she had first learned to love him, and had then taught herself to understand by some confused and perplexed lesson 
We had taught ourselves to think that you would have bound yourself closer with us down here 
She must be taught the great importance of money 
and she must be taught to use this influence unscrupulously 
she must be taught how imperative it was 
And so the first lesson was taught 
and she had taught herself to fancy that she could not live without Mrs. Finn. 
I think he ought to be taught to forget her 
had declared that there were some men to whom such lessons could not be taught, 
He had taught himself really to think that Fletcher had insulted him 
and she knew that the lessons which it taught were vulgar and damnable. 
and I've taught myself to think that they are not very different from other men. 
he had taught himself to look upon the sum extracted 
the tricks of trade as taught by Ferdinand Lopez 
It is because he has been taught to think that I am in a small way.He'll find his mistake some day." 
And so he taught himself to regard the old man as a robber and himself as a victim 
. and she must be taught to endure his will, 
His sense of honour had taught him to think 
he had already taught himself to regard it as one of those bygones 
snd she had taught herself to think that absolute banishment 
I think I have taught myself to think nothing of myself 
He had trusted that the man whom he had taught himself some years since to regard as his wished-for son-in-law 
, and he had almost taught himself to think that it would be better for herself  
Mrs. Fletcher the elder at last almost taught herself to believe 
could be taught to seem to forget him
The universe of ‘The Prime Minister’ is a very moral one and if I labour this point its so you don’t have to teach yourself to notice this thread of self mastery, self injunction and proceeding by mottoes and affirmations. You will notice that the recalcitrant women are poorly self taught or wrongly other taught and generally bound to go astray. Lady Glencora doesn’t teach herself anything being a creature of impulse and intuition and spur of the moment plans. Emily Wharton lacks that inner instructress and falls under the rod of Lopez whose copy book heading is ‘What I will is the good’. The Whartons and the Fletchers have been taught by history and civilisation and homo hierachicus. Foreigners are not part of the lesson plan, a Jew is automatically a bounder and so forth. Decent whiggery from the right sort is acceptable but really the Tories are godly you know. Have you learned your lesson: Trollope is a stern invigilator and if you fail your exam you may not be allowed to re-sit. Its quite bracing. One trusts Trollope or so I have taught myself. The character of Lopez is precisely demonstrated, his inner emptiness bolstered by outer show. I’m inclined to think that in a quiet way ‘The Prime Minister’ may be the strongest of the Palliser series. Now on to ‘The Duke’s Children’.

Wednesday 8 November 2023

Thucydides on Gaza

Reading the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides today I was struck by the speech of Diodotus against Cleon about the fate of Mytilene. His point was that when the innocent are punished just as much as the guilty then at the next revolt the former will join in knowing they have nothing to lose. The complete mobilisation of the people is inevitable. That is what Hamas wants and they will get it. The Israelis knowing this will try to push as many of the Gazans into exile as possible, creating a new Nakba. The openly fascistic Netenyahu has his counterpart in Cleon:
‘Personally I have had occasion often enough already to observe that a democracy is incapable of governing others, and I am all the more convinced of this when I see how you are now changing your minds about the Mytilenians. Because fear and conspiracy play no part in your daily relations with each other, you imagine that the same thing is true of your allies, and you fail to see that when you allow them to persuade you to make a mistaken decision and when you give way to your own feelings of compassion you are being guilty of a kind of weakness which is dangerous to you and which will not make them love you any more. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favour; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any goodwill of theirs.
.... After a lapse of time the injured party will lose the edge of his anger when he comes to act against those who have wronged him; whereas the best punishment and the one most fitted to the crime is when reprisals follow immediately. Diodotus:
Consider this now: at the moment, if a city has revolted and realizes that the revolt cannot succeed, it will come to terms while it is still capable of paying an indemnity and continuing to pay tribute afterwards. But if Cleon’s method is adopted, can you not see that every city will not only make much more careful preparations for revolt, but will also hold out against siege to the very end, since to surrender early or late means just the same thing?

Tuesday 31 October 2023

Reading Trollope in the Rubble.

Reading Trollope (The Prime Minister) in the wee hours is the best time to savour the skilful pacing and alternation between the world of the righteous lawyer Wharton and the yeoman Fletcher and the vain world of the meretricious meddler Lady Glencora. At the same time in this dimension towns are being rubbelised. Some of those blocks will be cleaned of mortar to be reused for new builds. A survivor child will write that novel that moves between the earnest kibbutz armed socialism - marrying a settler - or having an affair with a Palestinian in Berlin - a newspaper in Tel Aviv covering the story - Scots Jew known as Rabbi Burns and Ali Baba doing stand up in Islington. You see,it’s easy.

Monday 30 October 2023

If we only had old Israel over here

repost from 2017:  Has anything changed since then?  The Israelis are creeping up to the Amalekite option. God in smiting mode:

"Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (1 Samuel 15: 1)

However God was cross with the Israelites for sparing King Agag and some livestock:

"But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them; all that was despised and worthless they utterly destroyed."

Bibi has mentioned Amalek but didn't indicate what if anything might be spared.  There is a gas field off the Gaza coast, so there's that. 


If we only had old Israel over here


How far can you trust the moral sense of someone who thinks that Israel is a modern and liberal democracy? That is an obvious big lie, the whopper so big the stunned mind thinks there might be something to it. After a cup of strong tea you recover your wits and realise that this is the belief of someone who is so blinded by sectarian interests that the truth is beyond their reach. Like a man lost in a snowstorm they are moving in a circle thinking that they will eventually arrive in a place of safety. I often consider what the situation in Northern Ireland would be today if Israeli tactics as applied to Gaza had been used. Assassinations, razing of the family homes of convicted terrorists, drone bombs and the disregard for civilians that the Israelis attempt to justify. To qualify: their justifications are a function of their contempt in that they are not intended to persuade. 'You need this kind of thing, we don't care. Every now and then the grass needs cutting.' The Israelis are at the Cromwellian phase of dealing with the natives who are offered the choice of 'to Hell or to Connaught (Gaza)'.

At this point even the liberal voices in Israel itself that deplore I.D.F. and settler actions in the Occupied Territories seem to be part of the plan to convince doubters that there is a reasonable element that can be talked to and will listen to reason. Meanwhile expropriation and extirpation can go on. They really don't care.

I once bought by mistake an Israeli product. A packet of razor blades. The good news is that they were useless.

Thursday 26 October 2023

The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope

Lizzie is a liar, no three ways about it, confabulating like a good‘un from morning till night and coming to see in the end there might be some truth in her story. Money, rank, and beauty give her licence to paint a poetry over the prose of this world. She is a widow whose sickly husband died within a short time and being a baronet left her a lady with a £4000 pa. income for her life and a son who is the heir to the title. Lady Eustace had a diamond necklace valued at £10000 put on her neck by her husband and she intends to make her own of it and not let it sink back into the estate as her bete noir the family solicitor Camperdown insists. It is an heirloom and therefore cannot be taken as personal property. Was it in London that she first received it or in Scotland at the home castle of Portray? If at home then it might be counted amongst the paraphernalia of the home and therefore property of her own. The law is uncertain on these fine points. Best let it be in Scotland. Yes it was in Scotland. 

 

 Lively as a goat amongst the crags she leaps from fable to fib to buttress her stratagems getting increasingly confused as stern truth advances towards her. I read the Palliser series out of turn so I have foreknowledge of certain events and as I read I wondered how was this wrought. Simple when you know Lady Eustace and her mutability and invention all centred around the pole star of her own aims. Is it wrong to attempt to draw her first cousin Frank away from his true love Lucy. Not at all, in her computation it would suit them both,with her money his career as an M.P. and rising barrister would be enhanced. At that time MPs were not paid a salary and besides Frank Greystock is not a very good manager of his money. He’s in debt but still lives the life of a wealthy young man about town. His £2000 p.a. and her £4000 would be a fine basis for easy living. All his relations think so, a ‘poor’ man marrying the very plain governess for love, what is the sense of doing that. As ever the marriage mart is a theme of Trollope’s.

 

 It’s a very long novel but the narrative tension never slackens. As I wrote having read the books out of turn I wondered about certain outcomes but the author makes it all character centred and credible. The meddling Lady Glencora and Palliser’s quint farthing is a continuing theme from earlier books. An insinuating satire on the mores and manners of Victorian society twenty years before the Queen’s jubilee (1860‘s). George Gissing wrote ‘In the Time of Jubilee’ from the perspective of the lower middle classes if you want a more astringent version of of high Empire when the map was pink. Absolutely superb controlled writing but do read the Palliser novels in sequence.

Thursday 5 October 2023

Etienne Gilson's Realism

 I’m reading a lot of Etienne Gilson at the moment, dropping in and out of his books on Realism and Neo-Thomism.  He rightly scorns the idea that Cartesian methodic doubt can lead anywhere. Idealism has burned the bridge to anywhere and yet it fascinates by its apparent lucidity.  It establishes the problem field and keeps us stuck there with the endless toing and froing of the external and the internal world that act like the two ends of a seesaw.  


He writes of a Fr. Noel:


“Here we have finally come full circle, but the reader will be excused if he wonders why so much effort was expended creating the sensation of movement when in reality we have gone nowhere. First, we were told that we had to carry out an exhaustive, methodic doubt, but, since we were not permitted to doubt either thought or the fact of the existence of sensible reality, what did we actually doubt? Descartes’ doubt at least doubts something, but Monsignor Noel’s doubts nothing.”


It has been a notion of mine that Idealism is catching because it is easy to understand and modern psychology offers a specious basis.  Realism as offered by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a difficult complex philosophy which starts out in the difficult terrain of ontology going from being to the real and knowledge of it.  Descartes as Gilson holds begins with epistemology and tries to catch hold of the real with Deus as the deus ex machina.  


Another point that Gilson controverts elsewhere is the doctrine of Jacques Maritain’s that an intuition of being is essential for a true comprehension of metaphysics.  He seems to me to have a strong argument.  I shall have to go back to ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ to try and comprehend the different levels of abstraction involved in the intuition of being.  I have this idea that Maritain may be conflating Aristotle and the Cartesian critical method moving from the initial judgement or apprehension i.e. it is and it is this, what is called an intuition.  Gilson maintains that the true Thomistic realism goes from Being to the Real.  

 

The analogies between this way of thinking and the Advaitic Realism are many.  Gilson’s clarity and explanatory power is excellent.  More anon.


Monday 11 September 2023

'Phineas Finn' and 'Phineas Redux' by Anthony Trollope

 

So without working deliberately at it over the years I’ve read a fair bit of Trollope but this is my disordered venture into the Palliser series. First I read ‘Phineas Finn’ and directly afterwards ‘Phineas Redux’.  They are big novels, serialized and therefore with dramatic nodes, shifts in the pace, side bars and disquisitions.  Trollope is a master of maintaining narrative tension and moving the story around so that the illusion of the absent for the moment characters are always there in the wings being busy and about at any moment to inflict themselves.

It would be silly of me to tell someone who reads a bit that Trollope is mandatory.  If you are about to find that out then I will restrain myself from urging him on you like a big friendly dog. Here I will just offer some points about Phineas Finn which may escape the British or American reader.  He is an Irishman and a Catholic and therefore an outsider.  In the circles in which he moves in he is also a commoner and that counts for a lot.  Unlike the other Irishman in the novel, Fitzgibbon, he is not of the landed gentry class even if his family is regarded as sound stock by that Anglo-Irish class.  He is an exotic bird, very handsome, affable, witty, charming and with a touch of gallantry which appeals to the members of that element in English society, the Barbarian; huntin’, shootin’, fishin’; and if you get involved in a duel with them they will try to kill you. The other Arnoldian categories of the Hebraic and the Populace are supplied by Robert Kennedy and Bunce his landlord.

I found him at first a bit of a cipher.  Where’s the politics, will there be sticking points, will he turn balky over the Irish Land question or disestablishmentarianism? There is envy at his rising to minor office but he shows his capacity for work.  However he is unlucky in love or unrealistic about his chances as a poor man and a commoner with aristocratic women.   The portrait is limned in over the two novels and life’s tragedies and injustice hew the block closer to the finished man.

Another outsider and exotic is Madame Max, the rich young widow, a Jew by marriage, from somewhere out there where abroad is bloody, Vienna.  Excellently drawn as are all the women.  Lady Laura and Lady Glencora are political kitchen cabinet types promoting, through the blandishment of dinner parties, their policies.

That’s all I have to say about that.  I have no key to the characters of the political drama in the House of Commons.  It is a time of great change and reform.  Votes for all, the position of the Church established by law, the scurrility of the popular press, libels and injunctions.    Good speeches and some comedy to temper the stateliness.

Friday 11 August 2023

William Edward Hartpole Lecky: his 'Rationalism in Europe', his lands and the strange story of his birthplace Cullenswood Hous.

 

There can’t be many universities in the world who have a statue showing him sitting with an open book of an alumnus who escaped with a pass degree and a second class divinity testimonium.  A fine monument of William Edward Hartpole Lecky is in the front square of Trinity College Dublin.  After his student days (1856 -60) he spent some years on the continent enjoying a species of literary vagabondage which culminated in a rather remarkable two volume study of ‘Rationalism in Europe’ pub.1865..  This at the age of 27. It runs to over 800 pages of small but quite readable font.  I have it before me now in the authorised edition of 1910. He writes in Vol.II on Persecution:

"is to determine the judgment by an influence other than reason; it is to prevent that freedom of enquiry which is the sole method we possess of arriving at truth. The persecutor never can be certain that he is not persecuting truth rather than error, but he may be quite certain that he is suppressing the spirit of truth.”  (The gravamen of the charge of persecution and the inculcation of blind faith falls on Roman Catholics)

Prior to this observation he discovers the milder forms of encouragement that can wrought a change of belief:

"he firmly resolved to make any sacrifice rather than profess what he does not believe, yet still his affections will endow their objects with a magnetism of which he is perhaps entirely unconscious.”

Have we not seen this recently with those who have donned the white alb of science, the lab coat, to promulgate doctrines which are without foundation? Farther down:

"Indeed, the simple fact of annexing certain penalties to the profession of particular opinions, and rewards to the profession of opposite opinions, while it will undoubtedly make many hypocrites, will also make many converts. “

I wonder if this may not reflect on his own ancestors who first came to Ireland in the 17C. as Quakers and who as dissenters would have suffered debilities. Obviously lightened by the time of William Edward who ended up owning 721 acres at Aughanure, Bestfield and Kilcock and via the Hartpole side 1,200 acres at Shrule Castle, Co. Laois.  The Hartpoles remained Catholic until 1640.  It seems that part of the plantation of Munster was not aligned to religion.

In a curious inversion of history Cullenswood House where Lecky was born in 1838  became Scoil Eanna set up by Padraic Pearse as a Gaelic academy.

“In 1833 Cullenswood House was bought from Charles Joly, the then proprietor, by John Lecky, grandfather of the historian. John Lecky was succeeded by his eldest son, John Hartpoole Lecky; and John Hartpoole Lecky’s son, William Edward Hartpoole Lecky, was born at Cullenswood House on March 26th, 1838. So our school-house has already a very worthy tradition of scholarship and devotion to Ireland; scholarship which even the most brilliant of our pupils will hardly emulate, devotion to Ireland, not indeed founded on so secure and right a basis as ours, but sincere, unwavering, lifelong.”( from an essay of Pearse -Pearse on Cullenswood

Pearse may have been a little charitable here for Lecky regarded Home Rulers as murderous ruffians and agrarian incendiaries.  In the end however it was the Black and Tans that burnt Cullenswood House.

It seems to have been repaired and in the 1990‘s was functioning as a Gaelscoil and again becoming delapidated due to neglect.  The story of its renewal and refurbishment is told here

as gaeilge

lios na nog

Nach Iomaí Cor sa Saol

 

Ps. Since blogspot decided to change its site html is awry and formatting is exasperating. 

Monday 7 August 2023

von Hugel, the Mystical, Bergson, and Nisargadatta.

 Baron Von Hugel in his magisterial work ‘The Mystical Element of Religion’ considers the apparently inescapable dilemma of the Subjective versus the Objective.  How do you know that your ‘rapt to the highest heaven’ is not an illusion?  Can you ever know?  Are they those peak experiences breadcrumbs to find our way home or pebbles?  Can the illusory really be transformative or is that only an apparently deep question which evaporates like a puddle in the sun?  


“And this objection is felt most keenly in religion, when the religious soul first wakes up to the fact that itself, of necessity and continuously, contributes, by its own action, to the constitution of those affirmations and certainties, which, until then, seemed, without a doubt, to be directly borne in upon a purely receptive, automatically registering mind, from that extra-, super-human world which it thus affirmed. Here also, all having for so long been assumed to be purely objective, the temptation now arises to consider it all as purely subjective. “ (Mystical Element)


……And finally, this doubt and trouble would seem to find specially ready material in the mystical element and form of religion. For here, as we have already seen, psycho-physical and auto-suggestive phenomena and mechanisms abound; here especially does the mind cling to an immediate access to Reality; and here the ordinary checks and complements afforded by the Historical and Institutional, the Analytically Rational, and the Volitional, Practical elements of Religion are at a minimum. (op.cit. below)”


Are we stuck with this analysis or is it vyavaharika  (conventional/mundane/relative) rather than hewing to the ‘paramarthika’  (absolute) line as the Vedantin puts it?  As long as we think in terms of the usual accounts of truth as correspondence or coherence we will be trapped in an inescapable aporia.  We are stuck on that reef and no tide will lift us off.  Berkeley was right you know when he held that there need be no matter that is the cause of our representation if that was what we were relying  on for our experience of the world.  Representations beg the question. There had to be a way of allowing for the ‘external’ world, a way that was properly founded.  God keeps the game in play and when Samuel Johnson kicked the stone God underwrote the ouch.


But does all that really matter to the mystic who lives in the heart of being even when his epistemology is flawed.  As Bergson who is frequently referred to by von Hugel points out we move from intuition to conceptualization and not the other direction which is the path that philosophical inquiry takes.  Conceptual analysis is useful while at the same time being an engine of alienation.  It spawns paradoxes and oppresses us with mental fidget.  In that hedging  locution favoured by philosophers - ‘we worry’.


Nisargadatta the Sage of Bombay achieved self-realisation following the instruction of his guru to continuously keep his mind on the reality - I am.  I AM THAT the great saying of the upanisad is almost a forced conclusion compared to the immersion in being of I AM.



Sunday 16 July 2023

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

It would be interesting to see whether the spirit of Greta would not now lie over the novel and spoil it of the Nobel prize.  Man is now viewed as the despoiler of nature, the wrecker who should keep to his already tamed and eviscerated tract.  The emphasis now is of rewilding, of rewetting bogland, of returning to nature.  Hamsun was for the taming of the wilderness, clearing, draining, tilling his land, asking it humbly for a home.  Not every place is suitable to dwell and surely inside the Arctic Circle is inhospitable and forbidding.  A month of darkness in which to interrogate your soul, the sudden Spring and an intense release of the ground to your crops that must be saved to help you survive a snow bound Winter.  Peasants everywhere value work. To say of a man ‘he’s a great worker’ is an accolade, not an irony like ‘ a great timekeeper’. 


The Land is the protagonist of this novel.  Everyone has to wrestle with it and it can be said that only Isak throws it and makes soil which is not a given as in other kindlier tracts of the earth. Fertility has to be earned and man’s domain and dominion is hard won.  This is displayed by means of the drama of counterparts which is an organising feature of the novel. You have Isak and Axel, Inger and Babro, the roving Geissler and Eluses the rambling shopkeeper.  Fertility is frustrated by infanticide another major theme demonstrating the new values of elaborate rationalisation in the developing of the nations consciousness.  That’s interesting and the speech of an official’s wife in the trial for infanticide has a modern ring.  Ja, its the patriarchy. That crime hangs over the valley like a fog which Axel encounters returning in the Winter dark from felling trees.


“He got up, and felt suddenly confused. H'm. What had happened now? Nothing, only that he had been sitting down a bit. Now there is something standing there before him, a Being, a spirit; grey silk—no, it was nothing. He felt strange—took one short, uncertain step forward, and walked straight into a look.  great look, a pair of eyes. At the same moment the aspens close by began rustling. Now any one knows that an aspen can have a horrible eerie way of rustling at times; anyhow, Isak had never before heard such an utterly horrible rustling as this, and he shuddered. Also he put out one hand in front of him, and it was perhaps the most helpless movement that hand had ever made……….


Isak was eager to see what would come next; he was shivering still; a coldness seemed to radiate from the figure before him—it must be the Evil One! And here Isak was no longer sure of his ground, so to speak. It might be the Evil One —but what did he want here? What had he, Isak, been doing? Nothing but sitting still and tilling the ground, as it were, in his thoughts—there could surely be no harm in that? There was no other guilt he could call to mind just then; he was only coming back from his work in the forest, a tired and hungry woodman, going home to Sellanraa—he means no harm….”


 Regret is one thing, expiation is another and all has to be achieved before this deflection into the dark side is straightened out.  As in the beasts that Isak cares for and knows, like the flat eared ewe stolen by trickery, coming of good stock is a moral foundation that not everybody has.  The Bredas are a flighty lot of useless yokes.  Will they ever find a clean path that they can follow?  Maybe, but its not a sure thing this luck business.  It might be stumbled on.  They are the sort you don’t hate but you keep out of their way nevertheless.  


Geissler the Lensmand is an unusual figure without a strict counterpart in the novel.  He is a tutelary spirit, that advises, bestows and grants boons.  He turns up, a genius of improvisations that turn out saving strokes.  He is impatient with gratitude or benefitting by the help he gives and the evidence of his own varying fortunes is displayed by the state of his waistcoat:


“Geissler back again. Years now since he was there, but he is back again, aged a little, greyer a little, but bright and cheerful as ever. And finely dressed this time, with a white waistcoat and gold chain across. A man beyond understanding!”


This ‘filthy modern tide’ (Yeats) comes to the valley in the form of mining and the telegraph.  Anything which distracts from the tilling of the soil is morally faulty and won’t be lucky.  So many themes in this great novel.  Not a lot of jokes but one thing you can say about Hamsun even if he walked on the dark side for a while - ‘he’s a great worker’.

 

Tuesday 11 July 2023

Bergson's Key Insights in 'Matter and Memory'

 I finished Matter and Memory by Henri Bergson recently reading only a few pages at a time, that immersive sort of reading as though I was writing it. Nice idea but unlikely with this author who can turn a few millimetres of definitional space into a football pitch.  You become acquainted with the truth of his description of the difference between the amateur and the philosopher as demonstrated through the approach to a problem field.  The amateur takes the topic as found in the history, 6 reasons for, 6 against and the path through the middle.  The philosopher hears his own Socratic daimon saying ‘don’t go there’, uh uh; maybe the problem is not as posed and the oppositional poles as in the internal/external, idealism/realism dyads are merely a continuously morphing mistake.  I’m probably completely wrong in thinking that this is the key insight in his first chapter.  Broadly stated the internal demands the presence of the external to be itself.  

“The realist starts, in fact, from the universe, that is to say from an aggregate of images governed, as to their mutual

relations, by fixed laws, in which effects are in strict proportion to their causes, and of which the character is an

absence of centre, all the images unfolding on one and the same plane indefinitely prolonged. But he is at once

bound to recognize that, besides this system, there are perceptions that is to say, systems in which these same

images seem to depend on a single one among them, around which they range themselves on different planes, so as

to be wholly transformed by the slightest modification of this central image. Now this perception is just what the

idealist starts from: in the system of images which he adopts there is a privileged image, his body, by which the

other images are conditioned. But as soon as he attempts to connect the present with the past and to foretell the

future, he is obliged to abandon this central position, to replace (pg 15) all the images on the same plane, to suppose

that they no longer vary for him, but for themselves; and to treat them as though they made part of a system in

which every change gives the exact measure of its cause. On this condition alone a science of the universe becomes

possible; and, since this science exists, since it succeeds in foreseeing the future, its fundamental hypothesis cannot

be arbitrary. The first system alone is given to present experience; but we believe in the second, if only because we

affirm the continuity of the past, present, and future. Thus in idealism, as in realism, we posit one of the two

systems and seek to deduce the other from it.”


Staying at that level of analysis leads to a constant oscillation, the result of the apparently inescapable dualism between me and my world.  Here the philosopher says no, perhaps there is a path to non-duality in which there is what Bergson calls ‘pure perception’. 

If that isn’t knowledge as we know it Henri then what is it, a transcendental swiss penknife or something?  What would make you think it exists unless it evinces itself in some manner. And are you cher Maitre Bergson really saying that we perceive our perceptions?


Friday 7 July 2023

The Unclassed by George Gissing

 Let me first of all deal with the problem of coincidence in novels, Victorian novels in particular.. The Unclassed by George Gissing is full of them. Does not that flagrant breach of likelihood ruin verisimilitude?  Yes if you view the novel as a tranche of life, a piece of social history using the characters as lay figures.  Of course its not that, it is a story, a world enclosed in a narrative, pure fabulism. It is a restricted world and the relationships of the characters must be worked out within it.  Therefore they must all meet in whatever likely or unlikely way they do. Its a small world..


A good way to bring disparate characters together is school. Right away the enmity which is a central element is established by Ida Starr skulling Harriet Smales with a writing slate knocking her out.  The row has come about through Harriet declaring Ida’s mother to be no better than a street woman which is actually true.  Though Ida who is about 10 or so does not know what this means having been sheltered from this life by a mother who wants to rear her gently being herself from a well off background but a little wayward, seduced at age 18 and by refusing to give up the child, Ida,  is cast out by her father, Abraham Woodstock.  Maud Enderby is a friend of Ida’s and she is being reared by her Aunt who is a strict ascetic non conformist. Maud believes that her parents are dead . Harriet’s father is a compounding chemist, sickly of course as per usual in the novels of Gissing a good percentage of the characters will be ailing.  Harriet is the only child but there is a nephew Julian Casti a few years older than her.  Mother is dead.


That is one assemblage of characters. The other element is the lone figure of Osmond Waymark.who brings them all together by writing an ad in the newspaper looking for a friend of literary bent to meet for conversation and company.  This is some years later than the opening scene. . 


Now this sort of review through dramatis personae is not my usual way of dealing with a novel.  I’m doing it to remind myself that this was the work of a 26 year old man and  his second novel.  It was an extremely complex narrative retaining interest in the characters as they developed over several years.  In some ways the novel is like a therapeutic journal plotting his own internal drama.  Waymark represents the authori himself as the strong writer able by the force of his personality to turn the prostitute Ida to purity and love unsullied by lust.  At the same time he is attracted to the religious Maud Enderby.  Casti represents the side of Gissing easily imposed on by a scheming woman dragged down and neglecting his talent.  At the time of the writing of the novel he had broken with Nell the alcoholic prostitute that he had married.  The intensity of the energies released in the writing creates a like absorption in the reader.  We want the fantasy to correct the sordid aspects of his life and the visualisation to achieve reality.  The speed with which it was written and its journal aspect mitigated the usual writerly orotundity which can make the prose the analogue of lumpy porridge.


Do all the characters meet? Yes they do, of course. There are many well drawn evil characters.  Harriet is a monster of passive aggression, and vengeance, Slimey a Caliban clown, and Mrs. Sprowl an instigator of vile plot.  As in many of Gissing’s novels there are slums noisome, crooked, rotten and with defective plumbing causing night soil to be cast into the yard.  This is a good novel. 

 


Saturday 24 June 2023

'The Three Imposters' by Arthur Machen

    First of all you will have to pay attention to the prologue.  Do not regard as a long winded introduction to the main story.  It holds the key and introduces you to the imposters and their aliases.  You are  therefore primed to disbelieve everything they may say and enjoy the irony of their fabrications while seeking to discover why they go to such lengths to tell Dyson and Phillipps egregious rigmaroles.  That reason you will never discover  because it is opaque to the profane.  In this realm causality operates on another level not the normal billiard ball one which is a matter of transmission of gross force on the material plane. The imposters lie out of sheer jouissance in the activity.  To impose and rook the stranger is a goal in itself.  Its what they do and they are good at it.  But why do Dyson and Phillipps meet them to be the objects of their imposture? My intuition is that the gold Tiberius, that coin a lone survivor of coinage struck as the celebration of infamy is accursed and has brought destruction on its possessors down through the centuries, generally hidden from sight and fought for when it occasionally turns up. It has therefore become karmically magnetized and though the Three Imposters do not know that Dyson has the coin their will to evil draws them into his company and to Phillipps’s who also knows about the coin.  


The action of the energies evoked by the coin are an example of what Hindu ritualists call ‘apurva’. Why, they asked, do rituals which must fructify appear to act with a non-linear causality? Are there subtle seeds which act to  create a catenary of action or must we accept that this action is apurva or unprecedented, uncanny if you will?  Shankaracarya the great teacher demurs.  It is the will of God that makes everything happen.  


The evil will and the vile energies that surround the coin make me fear for the future of Dyson and Phillips or whoever chances to bring it into the light of day.  The novel is a masterpiece of irony and palindromic fabulism.


Phillipps is most certainly wrong:


"I certainly think," replied Phillipps, "that, if you pull out that coin and flourish it under people's noses as you are doing at the present moment, you will very probably find yourself in touch with the criminal, or a criminal. You will undoubtedly be robbed with violence. Otherwise, I see no reason why either of us should be troubled. No one saw you secure the coin, and no one knows you have it. I, for my part, shall sleep peacefully, and go about my business with a sense of security and a firm dependence on the natural order of things. The events of the evening, the adventure in the street, have been odd, I grant you, but I resolutely decline to have any more to do with the matter, and, if necessary, I shall consult the police. I will not be enslaved by a gold Tiberius, even though it swims into my ken in a manner which is somewhat melodramatic."  


Friday 2 June 2023

What its like to be a sage

 What its like to be a sage is a riff on what its like to be a bat.  It controverts it with irony because the bat is not an idealist.  The bat if anything is a non-dualist.  If the bat had it’s own very own special bat feelings, inscrutable and mysterious to the non-bat world then the existence of an external world that was congruent with those feeling would arise.  Of course the bat is a non theoretic creature; the problem of an external world does not arise, there is simply a consciousness and action without a second thought.  Humans do take thought when not immediately pressed by the exigencies of survival and navigation around the furniture of this world.  The human being is a theoretic creature who examines his own reactions and places them within the boundary of an entity called the person.  In essence that is a naturally occurring theory which may be useful for navigational purposes, indeed essential yet as Bergson and the Advaitins hold the forked consciousness is parasitic on a non-dual plenum.  Bergson calls it ‘pure perception’  and allies it to Memory the significant element of Consciousness.  Getting to that state is for the Eastern sage a letting go and letting be, expressed by Ramana Maharshi as ‘effortless effort’.  The Master enjoins ‘Show me the face you had before you were born’ or ‘the sound of one hand clapping’.  There is consciousness in that state but it has not yet migrated per ur-theory to a person.  It is the natural state.  


Janaka in the Ashtavakra Gita explains it thus:


"Janaka said:

I became intolerant first of physical action, then of extensive speech, and then of thought. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.


Having no attachment for sound and other sense objects, and the Self not being an object of perception, my mind is freed from distraction and is one-pointed. Thus therefore do I firmly abide.


An effort has to be made for concentration when there is distraction of mind owing to superimposition etc. Seeing this to be the rule, thus do I firmly abide.


Having nothing to accept and nothing to reject, and having neither joy nor sorrow, thus, sir, do I now firmly abide.


A stage of life or no stage of life, meditation, control of mental functions - finding that these cause distraction to me, thus verily do I firmly abide.


Abstention from action is as much the outcome of ignorance as the performance of action. Knowing this truth fully well, thus do I firmly abide.


Thinking on the Unthinkable One, one only has recourse to a form of thought. Therefore giving up that thought, thus do I firmly abide.


Blessed is the man who has accomplished this. Blessed is he who is such by nature."