Here and There with Sankara and Bergson

Katha Upanisad: 2.i.10: What, indeed, is here is there; what is there is here likewise. He who sees as though there is difference here, goes from death to death.

 

This is the deep meaning of sadhana. You are not aimed elsewhere, you are here and now already there. What keeps us tethered to this point where we act is the nature of consciousness which is adapted to action or designed to navigate through the world. We do not have to strive which the meaning of the effortless effort that the sage discourse on. In the commentary by Sankara on this sutra he refers to the limiting adjuncts viz. the body and the senses. In Bergson’s well known depiction of the memory cone this is the point P intersecting the line of history. Living exclusively at that point is to be utterly submerged in the everyday practical reality. Being too far away from that point is to be in the grand flux of imagination and memory as a dreamer lost in reverie. All states whatever are immediately self-luminous and therefore reveal the nature of identity. Now we are practical then we are speculative and yet only the ‘mass of consciousness’ is taking on various forms of limitation. 

 

“This being so, anyone who - being deluded by ignorance, consisting in seeing differences that are natural to limiting adjuncts; sees, perceives; here, - in this Brahman, which is not a plurality; as though there is a difference; feels such differences as, “I am different from the Supreme Self, and the Supreme Brahman is different from me", he gets, death after death, he becomes subject to repeated death after death.”(commentary)

'The Whirlpool' by George Gissing

  

This is a very complex and closely plotted novel but all that doesn’t matter much because the real events are inward and moral. Again and again Harvey Rolfe the central figure, a gentleman of independent means who passes his days in scholarly pursuits mounts the heights of moral assessment; high ground which he has gained after a rackety start in life.  The exact details of that are given quite late in the novel but initially as we meet him dining at the Metropolitan Club we find that he is decent sort of chap who at age 35 is rolling towards middle age down the gentle slope of esoteric study in his rooms which are in a filthy condition arising from a charity job he has given to an indigent lady that lives by grace and favour of the landlord in a room at the top of the house. As ever in the novels of Gissing incompetent and mutinous servant pullulate. 

The smash of Bennet Frothingham’s Britannia Loan, Assurance, Investment and Banking Company is the novel’s big bang as it were. All of the characters in it are affected by the loss of their money and readjustments are required by all except for Harvey who has his money in solid and safe instruments which allow him £900 a year, a quite respectable income in 1897.   The moral core of the novel is suffering and growth. Mrs. Abbott is one of those people visited by great sorrow who  comes out on the right side of that equation.  

"In truth, Harvey did not quite like Mrs. Abbott. Her age was about seven and twenty. She came of poor folk, and had been a high-school teacher; very clever and successful, it was said, and Harvey could believe it. Her features were regular, and did not lack sweetness; yet, unless an observer were mistaken, the last year or two had emphasised a certain air of conscious superiority, perchance originating in the schoolroom. She had had one child; it struggled through a few months of sickly life, and died of convulsions during its mother's absence at a garden-party."

The children of a cousin of hers have been abandoned by their father and she takes them on and rears them with the Rolfe’s financial help.   Her husband died due to an overdose of laudanum that he was taking for his neuralgia whether that was deliberate or not is left unclear. 

Alma the daughter of Bennett Frothingham is a talented musician who marries Harvey.  She is rather spoilt and lacks the character to stick at anything and being over reliant on praise falls into a torpid state when they move into Wales and there is no one to admire her.  

The Carnabys, Hugh and Sibyl are friends of Rolfe affected by the financial smash of Britannia and have to begin to think of trade to restore their fortune.  Sibyl is a queenly figure, an aristocratic type, in contrast to Hugh who is a classic Arnoldian barbarian who ought to be putting down uprisings in a far flung corner of the Empire.

" Her opinions were uttered with calm assurance, whatever the subject. An infinite self-esteem, so placid that it never suggested the vulgarity of conceit, shone in her large eyes and dwelt upon the beautiful curve of her lips. No face could be of purer outline, of less sensual suggestiveness; it wore at times an air of cold abstraction which was all but austerity."

Part of the mystery and interest of this novel is that we never really plumb the depths of what Sibyl really is.  What is her relation to Cyrus Redgrave who attempted to seduce Alma before her marriage.  Is there an alliance between them of some sort.  Alma thinks there is.

I see now that it is impossible to even suggest the winding and threading of the plot of this novel which was written at great speed by Gissing. The overwhelming fact of social class and the genteel ignorance of ladies of where the money was coming from is realised in the minor figure of Mr. Leach:

"At the age of fifty, prematurely worn by excessive labour, he was alarmed to find his income steadily diminishing, with no corresponding diminution—but rather the opposite—in the demands made upon him by wife and daughters. In a moment of courage, prompted by desperation, he obtained the consent of Dora and Gerda to this unwelcome change of abode. It caused so much unpleasantness between himself and Mrs. Leach, that he was glad to fit up a sleeping-room at his office and go home only once a week; whereby he saved time, and had the opportunity of starving himself as well as of working himself to death."

A brilliant novel, a picture of late Victorian life amongst the rentier classes.

Henri Bergson, Louis MacNeice, and William James

 But first the poem by Louis McNeice which clearly shows the influence of Henri Bergson:

This is a republication of an earlier post with an addition and proper tags:

Louis MacNeice

August

The shutter of time darkening ceaselessly

Has whisked away the foam of may and elder

And I realise how now, as every year before,

Once again the gay months have eluded me.

For the mind by nature stagey, welds its frame

Tomb-like around each little world of a day;

We jump from picture to picture and cannot follow

The living curve that is breathlessly the same.

While the lawn-mower sings moving up and down

Spirting its little fountain of vivid green,

I, like Poussin, make a still-bound fete of us

Suspending every noise, of insect or machine.

Garlands at a set angle that do not slip,

Theatrically (and as if for ever) grace

You and me and the stone god in the garden

And Time who also is shown with a stone face

But all this is a dilettante’s lie,

Time’s face is not stone nor still his wings

Our mind, being dead, wishes to have time, die,

For we being ghosts cannot catch hold of things.

Was Louis MacNeice a Bergsonian? In Creative Evolution I find:

“Such is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic in this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general.”

(pg.332, Mod.Library edn.)

Poems enact duration in such a way as to bring us into the reality of what makes knowledge possible, what Aquinas called connaturality. We find our way into the being of things through such artefacts.

Addiition: The spatialization of time, its mathematization, is an example of a useful fiction that becomes taken for reality. (cf.Matter and Memory) We ‘catch hold of things’ by freezing the flow. In an interesting speculation that has mythic dimensions Bergson envisages godlike duration:

And would not the whole of history be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own, which should watch the development of humanity while contracting it, so to speak, into the great phases of its evolution? In short, then, to perceive consists in condensing enormous periods of an infinitely diluted existence into a few more differentiated moments of an intenser life, and in thus summing up a very long history. To perceive means to immobilize.

(from Matter and Memory)

Not only is MacNeice influenced by Bergson but the following extract from a lecture by William James has a similar catenary of images.  

But all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered, they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time, snap-shots taken, as by a kinetoscopic camera, at a life that in its original coming is continuous. Useful as they are as samples of the garden, or to re-enter the stream with, or to insert in our revolving lantern, they have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them what makes any single phenomenon be or go—you merely dot out the path of appearances which it traverses. (from lecture VI.on Bergson’s Critique of Intellectualism in  A Pluralistic Universe by William James)