Iran shows its wares to three airforces.

 Reading the commentary on twitter and elsewhere the significance , it seems to me, is missed,  of the Iranian show of force.  They are demonstrating the palette of weaponry like arms salesment.  We are giving you a small selection of what we have and telling you in advance what they are so that you can be prepared. Today the Israelies will be reflecting that this sample took the airforces of three countries to shoot down which is o.k.as long as they remain willing to continue to do so.  Will their allies stick around?  Genocide is not a good look and the grabbing actions of the settlers alienates.  The Americans will dump them just as they did the Vietnamese, the Afghanies, Iraqis, and so forth.  Consider the cooling of ardour for the Ukraine.  They are not reliable long term allies, AIPAC or not.  The Palestinians will not quit any more than the North Vietnamese did.  Israel is no longer a safe place to ignore the demands of justice.  They should make an equitable peace now or risk losing everything.

Dexter, Ripley and other advocates of the quick and dirty fix

 

There are different sorts of multiple killers that we meet in literature, some who turn it into a avocation which gives life meaning and then those types that stumble into it and find it a useful quick and dirty fix for the grit in the machinery of their lives.  It’s like the WD 40 of locked up nuts or stuck pistons.  I’ve looked at Dexter but not read any of the books which may carry on the satirical aspect of the code of Harry.  He’s the singular and more prolific  assassin than the earlier group of vigilantes ‘The Four Just Men’ of Edgar Wallace which I may or may not have read some time ago.  What Dexter has over them is the police procedural element, the forensic science, blood spatter analysis that give verisimilitude to the gruesome.  De Quincey started it all with ‘The Fine Art of Murder’.  His pedantic footnotes set a style of high toned persiflage which persists in the English essay and perhaps has  influenced such eschatologists as William T. Vollman.

The Gorse series by Patrick Hamilton follows the trail of bodies that the protagonist despatches without a trace of remorse or a scintilla of finesse.  You have money, I want it, therefore I must take it and if you threaten me it’s your own fault if I erase you.  Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is that sort of problem solver, an impetuous boy that regards being slighted as a capital offence.  How close he comes to being caught is part of the tension that is created around this classic sociopath.   I am reading ‘Ripley’s Game’ again and I am pleasantly surprised by how good it is and how much of the plot I’d forgotten.

I’m paused at episode three of ‘Ripley’ on Netflix.  A very stylish version of book one in the series, more low key and real than the glam Damon, Law, Paltrow trio in a previous film which was as much about knitwear and slacks as murder and impersonation.  Andrew Scott is a grim, sullen, resentful man who takes passive aggression into an active mode.  He seems to be able to create a perceptible void about himself, like an aura of emptiness.

Ireland’s own forensic pathologist Dr. Marie Cassidy has created a stylish elegant persona  walking into crime scenes in high class tailoring not quite saying ‘what have you got for me?’.  Her observation "It’s the man in your bed you should be worried about, not the man under your bed"has become a feminist proverb.  Shes Scottish so her pronunciation of 'murder' has the Macbeth ring. '  Ay, my good lord, safe in a ditch he bides,. With twenty trenched gashes on his head —. The least a death to nature.   She has taken to writing novels in her retirement, ‘The Body of Truth’ was her first.  No seriality, just one offs. Must take a look.

James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings (ed. James A. Harris)

 

I proceed, in the second place, to take notice of some of the more remarkable phenomena of Memory.

This is a faculty, which, if it were less common, and we equally qualified to judge of it, would strike us with astonishment. That we should have it in our power to recall past sensations and thoughts, and make them again present, as it were: that a circumstance of our former life should, in respect of us, be no more; and yet occur to us, from time to time, dressed out in colours so lively, as to enable us to examine it, and judge of it, as if it were still an object of sense: - these are facts, whereof we every day have experience, and which, therefore, we overlook as things of course. But, surely, nothing is more wonderful, or more inexplicable. (Beattie on Memory taken from ‘Selected Philosophical Writings’ ed. James A.Harris)

James Beattie (1735 - 1803)is less famous that his two near contemporaries Thomas Reid (1710 - 1796) and David Hume (1711 - 1776).  Both Beattie and Reid were opposed to the sceptical Hume particularly on consciousness and memory.

Thomas Reid:

Why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of the thing, memory a belief of the past existence, and imagination no belief at all, I believe no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.

Further down:

Philosophers indeed tell me, that this immediate object of my memory and imagination in this case, is not the past sensation, but an idea of it, an image, phantasm, or species of the odour I smelled; that this idea now exists in my mind or in my sensorium; and the mind contemplating this present idea, finds it a representation of what is past, of what my exist, and accordingly call it memory, or imagination.

(from An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense by Thomas Reid)

Specifically on the odd idea that memory and imagination were distinguished by vivacity James Beattie writes:

Some philosophers refer to memory all our livelier thoughts, and our fainter ones to imagination: and so will have it, that the former faculty is distinguished from the latter by its superior vivacity. We believe, say they, in memory; we believe not in imagination: now we never believe any thing, but what we distinctly comprehend; and that, of which our comprehension is indistinct, we disbelieve. - But this is altogether false. The suggestions of imagination are often so lively, in dreaming, and in some intellectual disorders, as to be mistaken for real things; and therefore cannot be said to be essentially fainter than the informations of memory. (op.cit)

Beattie’s further ruminations on the difference between the two are closely observed  and follow the rubric of common sense realism that holds that we experience the world before we begin to reason about it and focusing on the ideas we have leaves us marooned on the desert island of solipsism castaway by the shipwreck of idealism.

It is interesting that among the moderns Margaret Anscombe is taken by the irreducibility of memory.

Writing in her essay on Memory and the Past Elizabeth Anscombe:

Then what makes my state or act of consciousness memory of the thing. Is it the mere fact that the thing happened and that I witnessed it? In that case there is nothing in the memory itself that makes it refer to the actual past event. And if so, why should the experience of memory have anything to do with actual past events or show one what it means for something to have happened?

She then in her consideration of the phenomenon of memory examines the present experience of which memory is supposed to be.

 

 But if I consider some present thing (which can, if you like, be a state of mind) and my future ability to speak of it, it is brought out more clearly how difficult it is to make out that anything I may attribute to my future mental state will make what I say refer to this.

Beattie is exceptionally readable.  The 18th.Century was one of prose as Matthew Arnold remarks in his essay on Thomas Grey.  There  is a fine handling of the long sentence with numerous parentheses which are immediately intelligible.  His remarks on the location of memories remind one of the fact that Neuroscience and its accomplices in Philosophy have not moved past the problems that he identified:

The human brain is a bodily substance; and sensible and permanent impressions made upon it must so far resemble those made on sand by the foot, or on wax by the seal, as to have a certain shape, length, breadth, and deepness. Now such an impression can only be made by that, which has solidity, magnitude, and figure. If then we remember thoughts, feelings, and sounds, as well as things visible and tangible, which will hardly be denied; those sounds, thoughts, and feelings, must have body, and, consequently, shape, size, and weight. What then is the size or weight of a sound? Is it an inch long, or half an inch? Does it weigh an ounce, or a grain? Does the roar of a cannon bear any resemblance to the ball, or to the powder, in shape, in weight, or in magnitude? What figure has the pain of the toothache, and our remembrance of that pain? Is it triangular, or circular, or a square form? The bare mention of these consequences may prove the absurdity of the theories that lead to them.

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

 

So ‘Rikki don’t lose that number’ song from 1974 (Steely Dan) is about Rikki Ducornet whose book ‘The Jade Cabinet’ I have been reading having being steered there by my instructor in the avant garde, the youtube book blogger ‘Leaf by Leaf’.  I need help in that region.  I don’t keep up.  What really took me to the book was his inclusion of it in a post on great openings.

“Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real.”

Oddly enough Google can’t find that quote from Beattie nor is to be found where you might expect it in his ‘Dissertations Moral and Critical’ which has a section on Memory which proves perhaps the fallibility of Memory the presenter of this text. She is a daughter of Angus Sphery.  His other daughter is Etheria a creature of air and ethereal beauty.  “She grew up speechless and yet for all that tremendously clever.”  This is in contrast to Father’s quest for the proto language which would be divine is conjuring up the real.  I have posted on the Vedic words theory of Shankara or the power which underlies mantra to cause to irrupt from the noumenal that which it mentions.vedic words

Adam and Eve thought Angus:

“stumbling from Eden as dumb as stones, had tediously to reconstruct a language which, in fact, could only be a pale copy, a simpleton’s stuttering - compared to the Divine Original which Father claimed was so powerful as toconjure the world of things.  All of Adam and Eve’s needs were seen to by this language of languages which was also a species of magic.”

Intimations of this perfect language might be found in the secret scripture of nature -

“the shells of winkles, on the hides of panthers, tigers, zebras, llamas and giraffes at the London Zoo, goats and cows of the field, cats in kitchens, dogs in alleys, turtles sleeping in gardens.  ........the Primal Language was spelled out phonetically by the planets.”

In this novel esoteric lore ebulliates and not always to the furtherance of the central narrative viz. the fraught relationship between Radulph Tubbs and the airy Etheria.  I would consider the Egyptian interlude might well have been volatilised, fractioned off by the alembic of Ducornet’s mind leaving a pure essence of obsessive lust that destroys the monster of vulgarity, Tubbs.

That rabbit hole she should have filled in and speaking of which Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll is one of the dramatis personae which bring to our attention the striving between the two hebephiles.  When Tubbs first spots Etheria she is but ten years old so he must wait for seven long years to consummate his febrile lusts.  Angus Sphery’s love of jade is the engine of this consummation. Tubbs has a very fine collection:

“The cabinet was Ming and of sober elegance, and the jade of such rare perfection that as he fingered them our father trembled.  Again and again he returned to a piece that Radulph disliked particularly, and although he really could not have cared less, Angus Sphery  informed him that the jade represented an insect, a cidada.”

Angus admires unto ownership and lays thereby a path to the construpation of his beautiful daughter. The invitation to dinner as the fee for the jade piece is the start of Radulph’s courtship.  Etheria is now thirteen.  Another friend of Dodgson was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson.  Mary Sidgwick, sister of Henry the Ethics man, was eleven, proposed to at twelve, married at eighteen.

The mother as ever has to be won over if the daughter is to be transferred to Tubs and the problem is that she despises this dragon of industry, this myrmidon of mammon and his factories which grind to dust hapless orphans.  Having invited her to his Grimswick manufactury he now must bring it up to a sanitary condition.  However the cucumber sandwich and the strawberry tart which she accepted from the matron must have had lurking germs of the cholera that lately had eliminated a third of the orphans.  “I believe her appetite proved ruinous."(Memory) Fine acerbic satire in this Potemkin factory sanitation passage.

Interspersed in the novel are the memoirs of Tubbs who relates how he fails to answer a riddle set by Etheria who demands as forfeit whatever she wants. The chimera and her pup two priceless pieces of jade that he does not even know that he posses he gladly surrenders.

“She shall have it.”

 “It’s not for her!  The precocious brat bounced up and down in her chair with excitement.  “But for Papa!  It is to be his birthday, Saturday.  He wants it badly.”

The frightful Tubbs gets his prey but of course it is elusive for who can hold the subtle air.

There are many fine things in this book and a certain amount of dross which for me stands out more in a very short book which a longer one might have absorbed.  It's beautifully written, She is a superb stylist and manages the idiom of Victorian English literature beautifully which is not an easy thing to do.   A very good read and I shall revisit her book cabinet again. 

Prodrome of the Present Condition of Ireland

 

My word of the moment is ‘prodrome’:

“In medicine, a prodrome is an early sign or symptom (or set of signs and symptoms) that often indicates the onset of a disease before more diagnostically specific signs and symptoms develop. It is derived from the Greek wordprodromos, meaning "running before".[Prodromes may be non-specific symptoms or, in a few instances, may clearly indicate a particular disease, such as the prodromal migraine aura.” (from prodrome

Where I came across it was in what I would have called the prologue part of ‘The Death of Grass aka ‘Not a Blade of Grass’.  A odd word I thought perhaps ill chosen but having read the book I now think that it is appropriate.  We are given a picture of the comfortable life of the middle class in England in 1933 and 1958. After the war the country is on the mend,  everything is going swimmingly but is there a malaise or a lack of moral preparedness that will manifest itself by a speedy return to barbarism under the pressure of self preservation.  That is the implicit judgement in the choice of the word ‘prodrome’.

What was Ireland’s prodrome or the little signs that prefigure the descent into our present state of malaise, societal dissociation, and a government gone rogue heedless of the people.  What were the dizzy spells, irritability, spontaneous groans, manic laughter of a poisonous village.  There was always those places which seemed madder than a bad tempered dog but now its general.  Plantation 2.0 is the name we have given it.

I offer for the present condition of Ireland the prodrome of The Millenium Candle and your very own native tree planted in a forest near you. More anon.

'The Death of Grass' by John Christopher (pub.1956: in America as 'No Blade of Grass')

 

Speaking of William T. Vollmann; by the serendipity machine that is google I found ‘The Death of Grass’ by John Christopher as a suggestionwhile looking for ‘The Dying Grass’ novel,   Its from 1956 (penguin modern classics) in the dystopian genre.  The prodrome or introductory section sets the scene for the two Custance brothers who are visiting with their parents their grandad’s farm in the lake district.  There having discovered that the elder Davey has a taste for farming and country life it is decided that he will inherit the farm.  The other brother John wants to be an engineer and so indeed it turns out.

Fast forward to 1958, twenty five years later.

It opens up with the news of disturbances in China where the shortage of rice has caused unrest.  A virus affecting the rice crop has destroyed the staple of the masses.

"What's the latest? Did you hear the news before you came out?'

'The Americans are sending more grain ships.'

'Anything from Peking?'

'Nothing official. It's supposed to be in flames. And at Hong Kong they've had to repel attacks across the frontier.'

'A genteel way of putting it,' John said grimly. 'Did you ever see those old pictures of the rabbit plagues in Australia? Wire-netting fences ten feet high, and rabbits - hundreds, thousands of rabbits - piled up against them, leap-frogging over each other until in the end either they scaled the fences or the fences went down under their weight. That's Hong Kong right now, except that it's not rabbits piled against the fence but human beings.'

But like any virus we have scientists to protect us from its predations by inventing a vaccine, a cure of some kind.

They isolated the virus within a month of it hitting the ricefields. They had it neatly labelled - the Chung-Li virus. All they had to do was to find a way of killing it which didn't kill the plant. Alternatively, they could breed a virus-resistant strain. And finally, they had no reason to expect the virus would spread so fast.'

The author has studied his species of grass and is able to tell us that rare rice grass is found in the Lakes district and that it too is affected. But not the grasses we like to eat; wheat, oats, barley and rye. Chung-Li is very selective.

Yes,' John said, 'wheat is a grass, too, isn't it?'

Wheat,' David said, 'and oats and barley and rye not to mention fodder for the beasts. It's rough on the Chinese, but it could have been a lot worse.'

'Yes,' Ann said, 'it could have been us instead. Isn't that what you mean? We had forgotten them again.

And probably in another five minutes we shall have found some other excuse for forgetting them.'

David crumpled the grass in his hand, and threw it into the river. It sped away on the swiftly flowing Lepe.

'Nothing else we can do,' he said.

Two hundred million have died in China despite partial success of the isotope 7 spray.  Unfortunately it has released the phase 5 of the virus which had been masked and ineffective before that.  It became more virulent and attacked all forms of gramineae, wheat etc.  What are you going to feed the stock on without grass in one form or another.

Well not to worry. What?

'Yes,' Roger said, 'that's something that worries me, too. Every government in the world is going to be comforting itself with the same reassuring thought. The scientists have never failed us yet. We shall never really believe they will until they do.'

Can’t we all live on root crops even if we have no butter for our parsnips?  Yes but, there will be panic in an orderly British fashion:

"The disaster in the East, it was explained, had been due as much as anything to the kind of failure in thoroughness that might be expected of Asiatics.”

John talking to David on his farm where he is visiting with his family learns that the order-in-council to plant potatoes where previously wheat was grown has been rescinded.  Just the kind of confidence restoring measures that democracy specialises in.  No good will come of it and David the farmer is going to put in potatoes and beet next spring.  Moreover he is going to erect a high rampart across the neck of the narrow valley that his farm Blind Gill is on.  At the back of the farm is a  mountain so he can barricade himself in. He invites his brother and family to wait out on the farm any trouble which may happen.

Things very rapidly go South, which means that the family must go North from London to the brother’s place, the agricultural bunker. They learn that a Fascist takeover plans to nuke major cities to bring the population down to a feedable size.  Can they make it in time? John’s friend from the propaganda ministry tells them they have got to get out now.  That journey and its adventures have become a stock dystopian device.  They learn that a sharp shooting killer is a useful member of a team and that being strong and ruthless in the war for survival is necessary. Roaming bands of marauders leave the cities. To be armed is essential.  John Custance as leader of the little group driving and walking to Blind Gill must make decisions which would be unthinkable to the middle class engineer of a few days previously. He must kill without hesitation.  Society has returned to a barbarism.

Its a short intense book much better written than the average of the genre.   It was published in America as ‘No Blade of Grass’.  Read it.  Remember it happened to the humble potato.  Now if there were an evil vegan scientist in Wuhan....

'Rising Up and Rising Down' by William T. Vollmann

 

William T. Vollmann was totally unknown to me but a review of his multi volume book ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’ seemed to promise an interesting read in that no man’s land between the IGR (intelligent general reader) and the savant.  A touch of hands on ontology, a report from harm’s way, written by a man who knows the smell of death. Vinegar and vomit but not as experienced outside the chip shop as a drunk’s technicolor yawn.

Hemingway had a go in ‘For who the Bell tolls’.

“All right, Inglés. Learn. That’s the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”

I’m only beginning to read the first volume so I won’t be able to give a full account of it but the augeries are good.  Death is his subject and the anatomy of the grave. There is good Doctor Browneian stuff, the catacombs of Paris, the skulls of Cambodia, blunt force trauma in San Francisco, the corpses delivered for autopsy in an upright position strapped to tall sack trolleys to avoid the hills. Then he smells the coffee in Vienna. There’s a cure in that. He says - I take my meaning where I can find it, when I can’t find it, I invent it.’

He is not as keen to make your flesh creep as the Fat Boy in Dickens who offered to recite ‘The Blood Drinkers Burial’ (in character).  Hello darkness my old friend, but there must be a sense of injustice at being compelled to feel guilty over the death of his sister by drowning  when he was in charge of her, he being 9 and she 6.  Care sears guilt into our bones.

He would concur with that other eschatological doctor Saint Francis de Sales in his Fifth Meditation (Introduction to the Devout Life):

“Consider the universal farewell which your soul will take of this world.  It will say farewell to riches, pleasures, and idle companions, to amusements and pastimes, to friends and neighbors, to husband, wife, and child, in short to all creation.  And lastly it will say farewell to its own body, which it will leave pale and cold, to become repulsive in decay.”

The writing is good, clear, sober prose with a moderate cadence, no flights.  There is no sense of running to meet your inevitable fate, that full stop.

Dmitri Fydorvitch Karamazov packs pistols

 Dmitri Fydorvitch is on his way to Mokroye and Grushenka and the Pani that has come back to claim her, he that ruined her and left her a prey to a rich merchant, Samsonov. His life is going to change and the pistols won’t save him. Plug the Pole and then himself in a grand guignol of atrocity and take the rap for parricide, Daddy weltering in his blood and brother Ivan Fydorvitch in colloquy with a junior devil. Give me the pistols at once he says to the man he pawned them to. His destiny is there in Mokroye and is the significance of the Elder’s bow before him. 

It is just as De Quincey wrote in essay on ‘The Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’  tension is heightened by business which delays the denouement of the horrible event that is to come. We give the shopping list, load the troika, show fistfulls of money, describe the grasping nature of the landlord, the foolery of Maximov and Kalegnov. There is an atmosphere of unconstrained hysteria and folly. How are we to go on? Send for Jews with fiddles and cymbals. Dmitri dissolves in tears and then laughs woodenly. Round his head the terrors begin to gather.  

Dostoyevsky is at full strength automatic writing here, his genius has taken control and everything must be said.  The things that ought not to be said, that are left for us to find, the parallels between the early life of Zosima the Elder and Dmitri are flickering shadows.  As in life personalities blend together and at once are separate and alone with personal guilt that denies mitigation.  Its not that we should have known but that we in fact did know.  A great novelist creates that symbiosis, the sense that we are dramatis personae, flowing together in a single mind.

Leftovers show

 As I was saying about the connection between Atheism and Technism, Del Noce’s coinage for the fascination with gadget solutions to whatever ails you.  ‘Is there an app for that’?  As with the secret of Mont Saint Michel lurking at the bottom of a microscope even works of fiction, dramas, shows on tv have that belief that there is a final answer to be given by a sage scientist. This is evident in the rather, for the most part, excellent and imaginative show ‘The Leftovers’ put out by HBO in ‘14 - ‘17. 

The Leftovers

Its more than a riff on rapture. Heidegger might have been consulted for it, I jest. Much of it has an underlying theme of the ultimate precarity of life and how facing that anxiety can either destroy us or demand authenticity. ‘That’s a lie’ is a constant refrain being said by all the characters in the 3 season show. John Murphey will burn your house down for that. All that is good and we accept the symbolism, shamanistic travels to other worlds, the bureaucratization of sudden departure, the scamming angle, the cult of the Guilty Remnant that adopts smoking as remembering. All of that is brilliant, deep, metaphysically profound, obscure, and simple as death. Then however it goes awry in the third season when they bring in the scientific solution, let’s call it by its true name, a one way teleporter between the two worlds that of the leftovers and that of the departed. Really they ought have, like Iris Dement sings in the theme song of the second series, ‘Let the Mystery Be’. Live in Keatsian Negative Capability.

II had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare  possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Hope is cheaper than despair.

 

My tweets of the moment are grim and dark even melodramatically so. But that’s the nature of the tweet. I write:

Compared to Repeal (of the 8th Amendment) all other social ‘improvements’ are tinsel and glitter. Ireland is on the skids heading towards a sea of evil.

At least we haven’t been presented with the argument that ‘durable relationships’ would strengthen marriage, so far.

By the branches of Rhetoric: No Logos (reasons), Ethos (testimonials from celebrities), lashings of Pathos (emotional manipulation). Such is the referendum debate from the Yes/Yes party.

At this point I can hardly add much to those sentiments. Repeal did the most serious, indeed deadly, damage to Childhood, Motherhood, Fatherhood, and Family. These proposed amendments are merely tidying around the edges, cleaning up the debris and facilitating the erosion of the nation state and in time its destruction. At this point they look likely to be defeated. I hardly dare hope that this could be a return to moral sanity in the way that some small event could recall a different world. I remember the cop that got one of the pair of serial killers that went around Ireland years ago to confess by asking him if he remembered the day of his First Holy Communion. Everything is captured in Memory as Bergson wrote and can be a key.

Socio-Political analysis would deny this and point out that a deeply unpopular government is having its claret tapped. That too and the Covidology Codology that continues to rankle even among those who were taken in by it, perhaps especially those. We’ve gone all antithetical as it were or contrary. Bile to be purged, boils to be lanced and the Green Party to be put away like the toys we are bored with and won’t bother to buy batteries for.

Let’s hope. It’s cheaper than despair and you can always return it.

Mont Saint Michel explained

 I’m reading Augusto Del Noce’s ‘The Problem of Atheism’ at the moment. One of his essays distinguishes between natural atheism and irreligion. The one is the old timey involvement with the god question as though it were a serious issue that needed to be resolved  and required careful consideration; the other is the ‘what’, ‘yawn’, ‘is that still going, is it a thing’.  The latter eye roll is the triumph of empiricism.  

O.K. you know all this so why am I bringing it up? We got on Sky recently. My excuse for this is that the ash trees have grown so tall and so ivied that signal from the satellite is impaired most of the year. So Sky. Tonight we were flicking through the program list and spotted a documentary on Mont Saint Michel. That could be interesting. It was as an example of the dismal worship of science. Nothing much was mentioned of the religious origins of the world heritage site merely that there was a legend of the founder Bishop  being touched on the head (or in) by St.Michael in a dream causing a hole to appear in his skull. Sure enough in a reliquary a skull was found with just such a hole. Then we had an expert in this curious condition explain it to us as a result of a cyst. This was accompanied by 3D graphics. Then there was the age of the bricks which are examined for magnetic orientation pinpointing the time of laying within ten years. More explaining coated in the white alb of science, graphics winding through the compass of reality.  

There was no mention of the fact that Mont Saint Michel was a Benedictine foundation given to them by Edward the Confessor or that after a couple of centuries of absence they returned in 1968 or that they were replaced by the Monastic Fraterneties of Jerusalem in 2000. Maybe they could have used a few graphics from a Knights Templar movie for that. Nothing but the design of the sluice gates that keep the island from being silted up and losing its unique isolation from the mainland. An engineering marvel, awesome hydraulics, cams opening and closing.

 Its possible to know everything and understand nothing.

Maybe I’ll fire up the chain saw. 

Nisargadatta on Idealism and Realism

 

Nisargadatta is not promulgating an ontology/epistemology.  He uses the existing philosophy of the enquirer as a means to attainment of a path that might lead to enlightenment.  The point is finding water by drilling deep not by a multitude of small holes.  Sifting through various approaches, realism or idealism, internal or external reality is beside the point for him.  Sincere seeking using the dialectical advaitic method of adhiropa/apavada or statement followed by retraction.  Maharaj challenges the Questioner’s implicit realism:

“M: The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness, you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way.  Your own changelessness is so obvious that you do not notice it.  Have a good look at yourself and all those misapprehensions and misconceptions will dissolve.  Just as all our little watery lives are in water and cannot be without water, so all the universe is in you and cannot be without you.”

The important thing is getting detached from the panoply of awareness to focus on the central fact which cannot be sublated, the I AM you are in the moment.  What are you at with your theories, you can only be distracted by them.  By being in the presence of a master one has other business than that.

On the face of it Maharaj seems to be offering a pure subjective idealism as a ‘final’ theory.  Such would be the western way of doing philosophy.  In advaita/nondualism the theory ends in the unsayable, the apophatic.  Move towards the ‘trikala abheda’ or that which is un-contradicted in the three moments of time;  past, present, and future.

Last word from Nisargadatta Maharaj:

“Don’t mentalise and verbalise.  Just see and be”

Was Mortimer Adler happy you know?

 

Somebody out on the internet wrote that they were going to read and review the intellectual autobiography of Mortimer Adler called ‘Philosopher at Large’ (pub 1977).  What I knew of him was not very much, the ‘How to Read a Book’ which I haven’t got round to yet and the Great Books put out by Encyclopedia Britannica of which I have a few bought second hand which show no sign of having ever had daylight penetrate their inward parts.  I have exposed them to UV radiation but the format of double columns marching endlessly is not a genial read.

So far I have read a couple of chapters and my general impression is that of someone on the spectrum, high functioning Aspergers.  The writing is flat, affectless, no descriptions of scenes, people, family only in general terms, friends as foils and interlocutors and always Adler studying all the time.  In a big library reading room with books ranged round from A to Z he thinks it is a good idea to work his way around following the alphabet.  Taxonomy, Logic guide his construction of the world.  He seemed to have no idea about how his assailing his professors with questions, interjections, following up lectures with written  objections and and responses to the answers given might be excessive.  Another indication of the autistic type is extreme physical awkwardness and lack of interest in such activity.  Proficiency in swimming was a requirement for a degree which was denied to him because he refused to go to swimming classes.  He would write long philosophical letters to girls that he met.  Indeed his record keeping has a touch of graphomania.  Whoever has his posthumous papers requires extensive shelving.

His talk on Aristotle’s account of happiness ( available on you tube) is good  and now that he is dead after a long and strenuous life we may ask - was he happy? I don’t know.  Acclaim is not sufficient. Was there any joy? Now read on: maybe, I haven’t got to C yet.

'A Dark Adapted Eye' by Barbara Vine

 

Craft: when the practice becomes absorbed into the writer’s natural intelligence and the active imagination takes over. Ruth Rendall assuming the mask of Barbara Vine writes herself into the story as Faith the narrator of ‘A Dark Adapted Eye’.  The title refers to the  perceptual adaptation to low light by the eye.  Of course it has the metaphorical import of the ‘falling of the scales’ also.  Faith has come to the home of her aunts Vera and Eden who live in the rural England in a quiet village.  Does a half sister become a half aunt?  Helen the daughter by a first marriage of a paternal grandfather lives in a large country home nearby.  Faith is avoiding the blitz and she is about eleven when the story opens.  A swirl of information and dramatis personae come at you through the opening pages mirroring the narrator’s confusion and as the story progresses everyone takes their places.  You are immediately told about the central event which isolates and maims this family history.  Vera  murdered her sister Eden and has been hanged for the crime.  Its as if all the participants had their own observation platform of this landscape bringing horror, denial , revenge, reticence, snobbery, and the make and mend of frugal wartime.

Faith’s voice changes as she grows through the years of contact with her aunts, her cousin Francis, his capers and later on Vera’s other child Jamie about whom there is a mystery.  Who was the father if it was not Gerald the army officer who is serving abroad?  All will not be revealed or rather some genteel obscurity of questions will remain at the end.  The subtlety of diction reflecting progress towards being an English Literature student at Cambridge is what only instinctual craft can manage.  Landscapes become a little more florid, personal reflection more stylised, and the persona of the non-judgemental liberal becomes clearer.  But the horror, the horror as the man said will not go away as knowing the precise hour and manner of a death fixes the picture of the family.  Faith’s father is Vera’s twin.  He’s a respectable bank manager in London and he hides all evidence of connection. He rips out a photo of Vera from its frame and in doing so cuts himself leaving a smudge of blood on it.  Barbara Vine must have hesitated over that piece of metaphor but an execution makes Shakespeares of us all.

This is a why dun it story and the skein of tangled motive is like the jumper which is unraveled to make baby clothes for Jamie and must be washed and  ironed to take out the kinks before knitting.  I’d read it again.  It’s a minor classic, a gothic analogue of ‘Middlemarch’.  To say more would be, so to speak, drop stitches.

Yellow Beaked Boys - The Karamazov Brothers discuss the Argument from Evil

 The dialogue between Ivan and Aloshya leading up to the Grand Inquisitor chapter is one of sustained power and mastery which I imagine Dostoievsky wrote beating out each awkward sentence while the fire was still hot.  The two full brothers Ivan and Aloshya, the former a philosopher wielding arguments from evil to question God, to call him to task; the latter in the monkish garb of a novitiate responding with faith shaken by the examples that he is confronted with. 

But really they are very young and are foolish; opinionated yet ignorant.  Not stupid, that can’t be said of them, not in the least, because they want to get to the bottom of things.  Young men, there will be terrible things to face before long.  Will you be ready to ‘love life more than its meaning’, to live it with ‘your insides’?  

'So Late in the Day' by Claire Keegan

 In all of the following I am going to assume that the story has been read which might at the most take up an hour or so of your time.  As ever it is crisply written and to this reader contains enough material between the lines to subvert a specious reading.  Life enters fiction when the  story gets away on Keegan.

Is it possible to construct a case for Cathal? Yes it is.  Has he been hard done by?  Indeed he has.  Does he deserve it?  We are being induced to think that he does in some sense.  He is after all presented as a beta male whose department boss is ten years younger who wears designer suits (to work?) and keeps in trim by playing squash.  Cathal owns one pair of shoes and a few, likely generic, trainers.  The wedding suit will remain in the crypt of dreams peeping reproachfully from the wardrobe.  Laugh down your snots ladies and cry ‘ecrasez l’infame’. In my edition there is an afterword in which reference is made to a version of this story in French published by Sabine Weapiesir called ‘Misogynie’.  Might it not also have been entitled ‘Androgynie’?  Sabine is also the name of the bolter at the altar.

Taking it from the beginning.  Cathal has turned up for work on the Friday of his the cancelled wedding week end.     Turning down bursary applicants must go on.  An invidious note.  While getting coffee he meets Cynthia from the finance department.  The little interchange between them when you look back from the vantage point of the end of the story has a deeper significance than is apparent.

 It was almost ready when Cynthia, the brightly dressed woman from accounts, came in, laughing on her mobile. She paused when she saw him, and soon hung up.

‘All right there, Cathal?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Grand. You?’

‘Grand.’ She smiled. ‘Thanks for asking.’

He took up the coffee, leaving before he’d sugared it, before she could say anything more.

The alpha male boss is kind:

The boss was a Northern man, a good ten years younger than himself, who wore designer suits and played squash at the weekends.

‘Well, Cathal. How are things?’

‘Good, thanks.’

‘Did you get a bite of lunch, something to eat?’

‘Yeah,’ Cathal said. ‘No bother.’

The boss was looking him over, taking in the usual jacket, shirt, tie and trousers, his unpolished shoes.

‘You know there’s no need to stay on,’ the boss said. ‘Why don’t you call it a day?’ He flushed a little then, seeming uneasy over the well-intentioned phrase.

‘I’m just finishing the budget outline now,’ Cathal said. ‘I’d like to get this much done.’

‘Fair enough,’ the boss said. ‘Whatever. Take her handy.’

When you think of the humiliation that Cathal has just suffered his turning up for for work is brave.  Theme song: I’m in the saddle again. His handling of Cynthia is correct and we can retrospectively allow the appellation that she maintains all men of the calibre of Cathal apply to all women.  Yes, Cynthia is a cunt.  That ‘thanks for asking’ has the true passive aggressive whine.  Cathal is going to move on, unpolished shoes notwithstanding.

The gravamen of the charge against Cathal is that he is mean.  However recall that he owns a house or his death owns a house, in Arklow.  Paying for that out of a lowly clerkish salary requires fasting and abstinence.  That’s a habit.  He doesn’t own a car and is prepared to spend time waiting for the bus to get home.  Sabine his girl friend lives in a flat which she shares with three students.  That’s not expensive.  Spending the week end with Cathal at his house and cooking there with viands she buys is certainly a better deal than hanging out with younger women.  There’s an intimation that Sabine may be little cross eyed and beamy.  She intends to slim down to get into her wedding dress.  Noticeably she does not cook for Cathal when she turns to salad and low cal food.  That cooking which was not very haute was really for herself and a defence against the accusation of mooching.  

Then she moves in, with her impedimenta that tend to shoulder aside the frugal traps of Cathal.   As everyman knows, when a woman gets to tidying you can never find anything.  Seriously the institution of marriage gives the security that make these reactions trifling.  These things build living together..  Then there’s the matter of the antique diamond ring that requires adjustment.  The initial cost must have been painful and the resizing a twinge or two.   The keeping of accounts is corrosive.  The usual French women in literature is a picture of a shopper who is firm with rascally grocers and keeps a budget with logic and precision.  

Sabine has tea at the Shelborne with Cynthia which is not of the Uncle Giles sort (cf Anthony Powell) fish paste sandwiches and a slice of seedcake.  The dirt is dished and baby that’s all she wrote.  Dear Cathal, its not me, its you.  Well I respectfully demur and in the interstices of the story so does Keegan.

Will our hero move on?  He already is doing so by turning up for work, bold micturation and other forms of ‘defi’.  Having once made a serious move in life it can happen again.  Marry an Arklow woman with a good knee to a pot. What were you thinking?

Intro to 'So Late in the Day' by Claire Keegan

 

        At the Altar-Rail

‘My bride is not coming, alas!’ says the groom,

And the telegram shakes in his hand. ‘I own

It was hurried!  We met at a dancing room

When I went to the Cattle-Show alone,

And then, next night, where the Fountain leaps,

And the Street of the Quarter-Circle sweeps.

 

‘Ay, she won me to ask her to be my wife-

‘Twas foolish perhaps! - to forsake the ways

Of the flaring town for a farmer’s life.

She agreed.  And we fixed it.  Now she says:

“It’s sweet of you, dear, to prepare me a nest

But a swift, short, gay life suits me best

What I really am you never have gleaned

I had eaten the apple ere you were weaned.”

(Thomas Hardy)

This poem about a cozening woman seems an apt introduction the the short story by Claire Keegan ‘So Late in the Day’. More anon. 

'Small Things like These' by Claire Keegan

 

Does it matter if your fiction is based on a mass illusion or a biased version of history that does not abide by facts that are readily available, well attested, and documented?  Maybe but isn’t fiction in itself fictive and no account of any historical period can cover everything.  There must be selection and that introduces distortion.  Your scale of importance differs from mine and an overlooked event or attitude may be vital to the whole history.

The long short story by Claire Keegan ‘Small Things like These’ is a case of a true false novellatisation of history.  I was around in 1985 and I remember quite well the economic recession and  cold weather that winter.  I asked my wife who also read the story:

 - Do you think that nuns at that time would have put a girl in a coal shed at serious risk of hypothermia?

 - No, she replied, in 1965 maybe.

Social attitudes towards the church had changed in 1985 and at that time there would be an inquest.  A cover up would be difficult if not impossible.  This is hinted at in the story.  Recollect that the nuns tried to blame the other girls in the institution for the incarceration and that Mrs. Keogh a reliable weather vane had got some hint from the nuns about the unreliability of Furlong.  They moved fast, a phone call would be enough.  Remember this : those nuns did not come from Mars.  They were Irish drawn from the class that values respectability more that anything. Eileen Furlong is in that cadre and the author has indicated that.  Strangely very few people have made an obvious correlation and they prefer to think of the ‘nuns’ as alien corvids.  It’s perfectly clear that Furlong’s Christmas burden would receive a frosty welcome.

The mummers of Wexford have a St.Stephens day tradition of going about in fancy dress playing music and gathering money.  One of their characters is called the Sugan Earl after a pretender Earl of Desmond in the 17C.  Twisted hay ropes (sugan) cover the players.  One asks oneself- ‘Is Bill Furlong’ a sugan liberal stuffed with bien pensant hay’? It is an Irish liberal cliche that if were only Protestants we would have avoided all the Catholic guilt.  Furlong has been reared in a Protestant milieu , so there’s that.  However there is the cold wind of modernity that is cutting the legs from under the natives.

“And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.”....

"If some complained over Joseph looking overly colourful in his red and purple robes, the Virgin Mary was met with general approval, kneeling passively in her usual blue and white. “

Very well says you but what about the writing?  For me the change in her usual style mars.  The stripped out plainness of the prose loses the characteristic vigour displayed in her previous works which I enjoyed very much.  There’s an alienating factor of a ‘voice’ that relates the story, seeming at times to be a local character a type of observing neighbour with limited education.  There is just a soupcon of this, or is it just me.

“Now, Furlong was disinclined to dwell on the past; his attention was fixed on providing for his girls, who were black-haired like Eileen and fairly complexioned. Already, they were showing promise in the schools. Kathleen, his eldest, came in with him to the little pre-fabricated office on Saturdays and for pocket money helped out with the books, was able to file what had come in during the week and keep an account of most things. Joan, too, had a good head on her shoulders and had recently joined the choir. Both were now attending secondary, at St Margaret’s.

The middle child, Sheila, and the second youngest, Grace, who’d been born eleven months apart, could recite the multiplication tables off by heart, do long division and name the counties and rivers of Ireland, which they sometimes traced out and coloured in with markers at the kitchen table. They, too, were musically inclined and were taking accordion lessons up at the convent on Tuesdays, after school.”

‘Fairly complexioned’ is a local usage, “multiplication tables and long division”.  ‘Pon my word they’re fierce scholars altogether.

The truth needn’t be Gothic but in Ireland we love those images of a porteress sister with a great iron ring with a multitude of large keys for locks that yield unwillingly, drawn from the depths of sable robes.  Did 10 or 20 or 30 thousand girls pass through those institutions? The McAleese report which took 6 months and covered the available paperwork opts for the lower figure.  Others demur but consider this common sense idea: if you were getting headage payments from the state for some of the girls would the figures given by the nuns be inflated or otherwise?

 

Mummers:straw men/sugan earl