'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

 I have written before about the element of panpsychism in the novel.  Here is the perfect expression of the pervasion of consciousness delivered by Mrs. Ramsey’s handmaiden Lily Briscoe who is attempting to complete her painting of the beautiful mother and her son James sitting on the steps leading from the french windows.

 

“She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held the whole together.”

But it won’t come together for her, composition eludes her.  The empty space that is Mrs.Ramsey, gone, a portal to inanition. She misses her, the reader misses her as an avatar of the Moirae all combined in the one person but one  whose thread has been cut.  Prue gone, inheritor of beauty, Andrew gone, the mathematician, yet lingering on is Mr.Ramsey, Augustus Carmichal with his yellow stained beard now a famous poet and a personage, Tansley has a fellowship and probably still thinks women can’t write, can’t paint .  Ramsey continues to bully with his moods and the need for reassuarance from women.  Lily does not give this homage to the great man whose pondering on the reality of the kitchen table may be the source of his irascibility.  

The house has a speaking part.  In the ‘Time Passes’ section the passage from desuetude to near dereliction beautifully plots the course of decline of the energies of its inhabitants.  Once it was, could Woolf be so parallel, a lighthouse. Philosopher Ramsey, Poet Carmichael, Scientist Bankes, Tansley young scholar, Briscoe seeking a vision and lattely finding it.  The long Edwardian summer is over, the happiness of Paul and Minta, now the Doyles, cankered by infidelity.  The thread of fate is cut, the clew falls back.  Were those brown stocking ever finished?  

What is it that they bring as offerings to the lighthouse:

“Then, wheeling about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the path, his children following him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to be drawn acquiescent in their father’s wake, obediently, but with a pallor in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered something beyond their years in silence.”

Is it possible to reconstitute your world?  A mark, a smudge, an impressionistic blur is Lily Briscoe’s way of finishing her picture.  There seemed to be a flash of white across the french windows.  Mrs.Ramsey?

“Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Ethos

 Ethos is one of the three aspects of rhetoric based on the reliability and general authoritativeness of the rhetor or the one that is trying to persuade us.  Pramana theory (Indian epistemology)  of the sources of valid knowledge regards the utterance of an ‘apta’ (reliable person) as a source.  

What I sense is that once you lose that reliability seal of truth telling even when you speak sooth that can be objectively checked it somehow lacks its force. The virtue has gone from the utterance.  The Israelis have reached that point.  Even the truth falls dead from their lips.  

Shaftesbury's epistolary essy on 'Enthusiasm' applied to Covidology (from his 'Characteristics' 1709)

 With all the panics that we have had here, what Shaftesbury would probably have called ebullitions of enthusiasm, I haven’t seen any reference to his epistolary essay on the topic of enthusiasm its genesis and his proposed remedies.  Enthusiasm from the Greek en theos - the god within refers generally to the excesses of religious fervour which can overwhelm individuals and groups causing them to become detached from their normal sober selves.  One thinks of Holy Rollers, snake handlers, and the ecstatic devotees of the ancient forms of religious fervour.  Shaftesbury would include all sorts of mass psychosis which can be spread through mimesis. He also refers to it as a form of panic having its origin in melancholy or black bile which may affect the body politic as well as the human body.  

“ may with good reason call every passion ‘panic’ which is raised in a

multitude and conveyed by aspect or, as it were, by contact or sympathy. Thus,

popular fury may be called ‘panic’ when the rage of the people, as we have

sometimes known, has put them beyond themselves, especially where religion

has had to do.”

“For vapours naturally rise and, in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions hap￾pen in nature, storms, earthquakes or other amazing prodigies–––at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it.”

The major panic which we have had recently due to Covid follows precisely the pattern observed by Shaftesbury in his epistolary essay ‘On Enthusiasm’.  The arguments put forward for its grave nature were of the solemn foolery type which he called ‘formalist’.  This is the presentation, by very serious people who follow the science, of a chilling message which may not be trifled with.

“Perhaps so, but let us see first whether they are really grave or no, for, in the manner we may conceive them they may peradventure be very grave and weighty in our imagination, but very ridiculous and impertinent in their own nature. Gravity is of the very essence of imposture”

Now the normal way or the wise way of dealing with such societal vapours is ridicule and persiflage.  In other words ‘don’t be silly, you are imagining things’.  The problem with Covid though was that the ‘magistrate’ instead of letting it go or having the black bile vent itself and thus be exhausted rather chose to amplify the panic.  Moving more than 5 km away from your home was restricted and entry into a cafe or public house was on the basis of a QR code which assured your vaccination status.  The remedy of ridicule was voided by the fact that you had to remove your mandated mask to eat and thus open yourself to the certainty of contagion.  Shaftesbury saw what would happen when heavy handed remedies are applied by the legal system to stem the excesses of panic enthusiasm.

“For to apply a serious remedy and bring the sword or fasces as a cure must

make the case more melancholy and increase the very cause of the distemper.”

The mention of fasces brings to mind the close union of the great corporations with the Fascist Italian government.  In Ireland too our tax bonanza from the multi-nationals that avail of our tax haven, the pharmaceutical industry being most salient during the time of Covid, made the government very attentive to their needs.  We are after all home to 19 of the top 20 pharma giants.  Sententious assertions of the wisdom of ‘following the science’ became a quasi religion, a melancholy that lay on the nation like a miasm or ‘pestilential exhalation’.  The proposers of those nostrums such as vaccination which did not prevent infection but somehow magically lessened its effects, Ashley-Cooper, the 3rd. Earl, calls formalists.  A footnote to my text defines this species of jobsworth:

“In Shaftesbury’s vocabulary, the formalist was the person who sustained his views through self solemnity and what Shaftesbury regarded as the imposture of gravity”.

Babes we have been here before.  It is likely that at any time in the history of any individual country there may be festering a pustule of pus gathered round a mental obstruction, a malign fidget that becomes contagious.  The saurian watchful grasp the moment to launch a factory reset towards the fata morgana of transhumanism, transgenderism or any transformation that draws us away from the image and likeness of God.

Advaita and the Paradox of Realism

 Advaita’s paradox is that what makes perception to be a reflection of the real world, what Adhvarindra calls perceptuality, is also that which derealises the evident.  What is true falsifies.  Realism inverts itself.  This is similar to the thought of Plato.  Our personal fire creates the shadow world but when we emerge into the ultimate fire of the sun that shadow world is annihilated in the light of Logos.  

What does ‘mithya’/false mean in the case of advaita?  Is it not false by stipulation if you talk false to mean uncontradicted in the three moments of time, past/present/future.  Like Parmenides they hold that what is changeful is unreal, it never really is or both is and is not.  This rigorism is balanced by the concept of the non-dual.  What is false is a world that is freestanding, self established.  Both levels of reality are symbiotically linked, they flow into each other.  There is the absolute (paramartha) and the relative (pratibhasika) the metaphysical and the conventional reality. 

To controvert that opposed categorisation of conventional and metaphysical you have the moment of supreme insight called akhandadara vritti, the unbroken mental modification which reveals the truth of how perception is possible.  We have, as it were, a window overlooking the metaphysical. It is the one through which we see.  Everything flows together in a unity of being that allows for realism within the bounds of ‘the cave’.Empirically there is always more to know, to find out but knowledge itself has realism as the default position.  Even getting things wrong proves it otherwise ‘wrong’,  pace neo-modernism, is a meaningless concept.  

Here I am weltering in a slough of mixed metaphors and analogies, windows, shadows, snakes, ropes, mirages.  ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’?  

Recall the tantric saying: What is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere.

 .  

The Plight of the Stepchild in Mrs.Oliphant's 'A Country Gentleman and his Family' (1863)

 With Mrs. Oliphant do not expect a conclusion wrapped up with  a bow.  She leaves events in mid stream with the characters having their personalities as fate.  This is contrary to the usual denouement of the three volume novels that were geared to the circulating libraries of the day. Not exactly a pause button more like this is as far as our history takes us.  The fabulous has died and gone to fictive heaven.  It is life just as we know it with questions hanging.  The deal was not closed.

In ‘A Country Gentleman and his Family’ has a close examination of the psychology of the stepchild Geoff and his step father Theo Warrender.  Geoff is a precocious child tied to his mother but also attempting to not be an obstacle between his mother and her new husband.  The boy at 8 to 10/12 in the novel is not very likeable with mutual clinging between mother and child.  Add that Theo Warrender is a jealous man who wants the youngster gone and the conflict is sure to boil over.  The attempt by Oliphant to immerse us in the inner workings of the child’s mind is generally convincing.  Remember a full half pint is as full as a full gallon.  

Stepchildren must have been commonplace in life as well as fairy tales during the Victorian era given the rate of maternal mortality.  ‘David Copperfield’ (1849)   has a rejective stepfather but David is a likeable manly little chap whereas Geoff (1863) is a little twerp if that isn’t too harsh.  He tries to break out of his over protective cage, but his health is delicate and he is without friends of his own age.  However Eton beckons with poor food, fagging and caning. How very jolly.

A good read with intermissions of humour and fallen women, potential bigamy and comfortable clergymen.  

Hester: A Story of Contemporary Life. by Mrs. Oliphant

 ‘Hester’ A Story of Contemporary Life was published in 1883. It is regarded as a proto-feminist novel but don’t hold that against it. Everything is quite credible and if mapped against the life of its author moderate in its display of female capacity. Catherine Vernon is a firm woman who comes to the rescue of the Vernon Bank when its male head brings it to the brink of ruin by gross extravagance. There is going to be a run on the bank. Market day is nigh and rumours have intensified. John Vernon has decamped, Mrs. John is unaware of the crisis and offers the 20lb. In her purse to stanch the bloody flow of capital not matched by the gold in the coffers. Who are you going to call? Catherine a major shareholder of another major branch of the Vernons has money of her own. The Bank of England supplies the bullion the sight of whose chests eases the fear of Vernon Bank customers. Whew! 

The novel uses the excellent device of counterparts. Catherine and Hester as against John Vernon and Edward Vernon. Edward is a Vernon cousin and has a taste for living on the stock market gamblers edge of great profit or mighty ruin. He is the presumed future head of the bank and is also the love interest of Hester as John Vernon the defalcator seemed to be of Catherine. In the end he married another woman. Their daughter Hester has inherited the decisive manner of the true Vernon stock and manages her mother with a nice precision.  

Mrs. Oliphant wrote a lot very quickly and Virginia Woolf who admired her regretted that she had not the time to produce a finished work of art. That seems true but the diabolism of it is that it is entirely false. Writers with an intelligence as quick as Oliphant’s use pressure to draw on the active imagination. The narrative swerves are more real for being as haphazard as life itself. Catherine Vernon is always known as Catherine as being of the town’s psychic family and having the dignity of a Christian name like a knight of the realm. She establishes a Veronry where all the genteel members of the Vernon clan that are distressed gentlefolks reside. This is a large mansion divided up into self contained units. The relationship of its tenants to Catherine, abasement before her, bitchy behind her back is expressed to an exquisite level of noticing probably from the author’s own life and the retainers that she supported with her inveterate labor. Being helplessly obliged is uncomfortable and unforgivable. Their grumbling at this onerous predicament is amusing and Catherine who is well aware of their genteel ingratitude is ironically detached from their ostensible fawning.  

In the common garden the summer house is a matter of territorial conflict.  

“It was at this moment that the two ladies appeared who considered the summerhouse their special property. They were tall women with pronounced features and a continual smile—in dresses which had a way of looking scanty, and were exactly the same. Their necks were long and their noses large, both which characteristics they held to be evidences of family and condition. They followed each other, one always a step in advance of the other with a certain pose of their long necks and turn of their shoulders which made some people think of the flight of two long-necked birds. Mr. Mildmay Vernon, who pretended to some scholarship, called them the Cranes of Ibycus. They arrived thus at the peaceful spot all chequered with morning light and shade, as with a swoop of wings.”

Other residents with a prominent role in the drama are a Captain Morgan and his wife, octogenarian relations of Catherine’s who become friendly with Hester as she is growing up. Their grandchildren Roland and Ellen come into the story also. The young man is a stockbroker, handsome, charming and sure to be a love interest. But there’s Harry Vernon who is courting Hester without success. Will his sturdy if dull soundness win the day or will it be Edward Vernon the putative heir.  

Meanwhile the gambling on the market unites Roland and Edward the one cool and controlled professional and the other a potential addict seething and resenting his subaltern role. Will there be a bust? The Vernon Bank is not too big to fail and can history repeat itself in another key. A financial smash and the crushing betrayal of Catherine by Edward may disable her this time. The story moves along smoothly, with sharp observation of the social setting and the machinations of those that would challenge the dominance of the matriarch.  

This is a superb novel. I read that Mrs. Oliphant is coming to be recognised as an important writer unjustly neglected. Her characters seem real much more so than the papier mache constructions of the average Trollope. 

Shankaracarya's Upadesa Sahasri and the Problem of Pain

 In the first chapter of Upadesa Sahasri by Shankaracarya, the one dedicated mainly to the establishment by Sruti/Scripture of the unity of the Self with the absolute Brahman, in the midst of a plethora of citations we get the irruption of what is inevitable - pain! The glory of the realised state of unity seems contradicted by that very salient fact. 

#33:

If he says, “ The pain due to burns or cuts in the body and the misery caused by hunger and the like, Sir, are distinctly perceived to be in me. The supreme Self is known in all the Srutis and the Smritis to be “free * from sin, old age, death, grief, hunger, thirst, etc., and devoid of smell and taste’. How can [ who am different from Him and possess so many phenomenal attributes possibly accept the supreme Self as myself and myself, a transmigratory being, as the supreme Self > I may them very well admit that fire is cool | Why should I, a man of the world entitled to accomplish all prosperity in this world and in the next and realize the supreme end of life, i.e., liberation, give up the actions producing those results and yajnopavita etc., their accessories?”

In all philosophy the interaction of the physical and the psychical is a perennial puzzle. There is evident interaction but the causal connection between extended matter and unextended consciousness is opaque. We stub our toe, we feel pain which we may identify materially as the firing of c-fibres. It is a fact that I feel that pain myself. The Self apparently is in pain. How is this compatible with the state of release from all the ills of this transmigratory existence which is supposed to be the natural state of the Self?

34. The teacher should say to him, “It was not right for you to say, ‘I directly perceive the pain in me when my body gets cuts or burns ’. Why? Because the pain due to cuts or burns, perceived in the body,’ the object of the perception of the perceiver like a tree burnt or cut, must have the same location as the burns etc. People point out pain caused by burns and the like to be in that place where they occur but not in the perceiver. How? For, on being asked where one’s pain lies, one says, ‘I have pain in the head, in the chest or in the stomach’. Thus one points out pain in that place where burns or cuts occur, but never in the perceiver. If pain or its causes viz., burns or cuts were in the perceiver one would have pointed out the perceiver to be the seat of the pain, like the parts of the body, the seats of the burns or cuts.

What the teacher is pointing out in his rebuttal is the objective nature of the perception of pain. It is felt by the Self. The pain is not in the Self but is perceived in the same way as we perceive a tree or any objective phenomenon. The Teacher goes on to elaborate this subject-object understanding.

#35

Moreover, (if it were in the Self) the pain could not be perceived by the Self like the colour of the eye by the same eye. Therefore, as it is perceived to have the same seat as burns, cuts and the like, pain must be an object of perception like them. Since? it is an effect, it must have a receptacle like that in which rice is cooked. The impressions ° of pain must have the same seat as pain® itself. As they are perceived during the time when memory is possible (i.e., in waking and dream, and not in deep sleep), these impressions must have the same location‘ as pain. The aversion to cuts, burns and the like, the causes of pain, must also have the same seat’ as the impressions (of pain). It is therefore said, ` Desire ^ aversion and fear have a seat common with that of the impressions of colours. As they have for their seat the intellect, the knower, the Self, is always pure and devoid of fear.”

Lurking behind this position is the deeper ontological thesis of the inert nature of the body-mind. It is unconscious by nature or jada. Advaitins speak of the chit jada granthi or the knot between the inert and the conscious. Related to this is the elaboration of the concept of the Saksin or Witness which gives a theoretical underpinning to the firm if false feeling that the Self is identified with the body-mind and its modifications. 

Bina Gupta in her book on the Saksin ‘The Disinterested Witness’ : A Fragment of Advaita Vedanta Phenomenology” enumerates six approaches to the understanding of this concept.

1.The saksin is indubitable, unerring, eternal. It is always directly manifested and its manifestation is not due to any extrinsic reason.

2. The saksin is the neutral (pure) consciousness as qualified by a modification of the inner sense.° 3. The saksin is that which is never concealed.® 4. The saksin manifests ignorance.’ 5. That which directly manifests is the saksin.® 6. The saksin is that which illuminates everything.

Clearly the concept is a complex one and deserves a note on its own. Probably the Saksin as a modification of the inner sense would be the most significant characterisation. More an

on.

Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya I.i.4

 How is Brahman known?  That is the question asked in a frequently referred to sutra B.S.Bh I.i.4  .The answer is of course through the Vedas.  Does that rule out any other way of knowing Brahman.  The standard answer is yes; what is beyond the ken of the human mind cannot be demonstrated rationally.  Yet at the same time Sankara offers in his counter to non orthodox views various indications of the intelligence inherent in the workings of creation. The world for instance cannot have come out of  insentient pure matter as that would deny what we know of the cosmos and the emergence of consciousness.  That in a sense is an incipient argument from design.Importantly all arguments that state that it is useless to rely on what can neither be accepted or rejected in a worldly empirical way are voided by the fact of realisation.  

“...it is but reasonable that all ideas of duality, involving action, accessories, etc., should be eradicated, because the absolute Brahman is neither acceptable nor 

rejectable.”

Metaphysical indications as are offered by the Thomistic 5 Ways, contingency, motion etc., are not accepted because a generalised inference cannot reach the unknowable. 

Very good it is said: You have heard about Brahman but that does not mean that you now have come to a knowledge of Brahman.  That would be just like having your mistaking of a rope for a snake pointed out to you.  Not so is the reply: hearing, reflection, and meditation on the Self is enjoined.

At this point the Vedantin comes in to summarize and clarify everything.  He mentions the things that are conducive to a state in which the truth of the Vedas will become clear.  The various post mortem fates of those that do good indicate a gradation of achievement.  Of course Sankara points out quoting an Upanisad: “For an embodied being there can be no eradication of happiness and sorrow to be sure”. (Ch.VIII.xii.1)  Embodied in this case means one who is identified with the body.

Taking the Vedantin role Sankara makes clear that unembodiedness is not, and cannot be, achieved, as a result of good deeds.  If you are definitely bodiless, what can this mean?  The only sensible conclusion is that the enlightened one does not consider his identity to be personal.  There is a physical form with perhaps residual karma that may require spectacles to avoid walking into the furniture but his identity is impersonal.  There is no doubt that some students of Advaita find this disembodiedness a sticking point.  They take it quite literally and are puzzled by the groans of pain emitted by a jnani when he stubs his toe or suffers from cancer.

Jnana then is not a sort of good luck/fortune thing (sampad).  It does not depend on that.  It is the direct absorption by reality or the recognition that such was the case all along. “ Brahman is denied to be the object of an act of knowing.”

“By presenting Brahman as not an object on account of its being the inmost Self (of the knower), they remove the differences of the “known”, the “knower”, and the “knowledge” that are fancied through ignorance.”  

My own way of getting this is that you cannot get ‘outside’ the self in order to know it.  You cannot comprehend it which is why the upanisad says ‘neti’, ‘neti’, not this/not this.

Now comes an important epistemological point:

Opponent: Is not knowledge a kind of mental action?

Actually no. Knowledge is an achievement, a state.  Meditation though mental may be done or not as the case may be.  Knowledge is the immediate fruit of a valid means of knowledge.  Might the application of these means of knowledge be an action?  Yes.  So knowledge is then a mental condition but not an act.  But in the case of ‘jnana’ or self-realisation knowledge is not grasped by the mind and it is beyond what can be described because the Self cannot be comprehended by the Self.

As I read this sutra I realise that it places all the important points of Advaita in juxtaposition.  What is its purport, its summum bonum?  How is that achieved and can we even speak of an achievement?  The answer to that would appear to be yes because knowledge is an achieved condition.  Even though knowledge is an achieved condition yet the preparation for that state involves actions which are enjoined in the Upanishads.  

The knowledge of Brahman is said to give rise to unembodiedness.  What can that mean?  Some take it literally but that can’t be right because clearly the sage walks and talks and has a physical presence.  This is a state of knowledge in which the identification with the body ceases.

“…the idea of embodiedness is a result of false nescience.  Unless it is through the false ignorance of identifying the Self with the body, there can be no embodiedness for the Self.  And we said that the unembodiedness of the Self is eternal, since it is not a product of action.”

Karma has ended for the sage but for the rest of us hearing, meditation and contemplation  are used to bring on that state of enlightenment. (sravana, manana, nididhyasana)

'Now in November" by Josephine Johnson (pub. 1924)

 ‘Now in November’ by Josephine Johnson is an extraordinary first novel. With it she won the pulitzer prize of 1935 and at the age of 25 she is the youngest ever winner and a very worthy one. It is really quite excellent, deft, precise, impassioned and yet detached, holding back the overarching fear of losing everything again. Father, mother and the 3 girls have fallen back on the feeble security of a mortgaged farm that was in the family but now neglected and overgrown.

The house was old even then, not log, but boards up and down as barns are made. It was overgrown with the trumpet and wild red ivy-vines, twisted and heavy on the porch. Wild grapes were black across the well in autumn and there was an arbor of tame ones over the pump. Father found an old thrush’s nest hunched up in the leafless vines and took it down so that Merle wouldn’t mistake it for a new nest in spring and keep waiting for birds that never came. She filled it full of round stones and kept it up on the mantelpiece, maybe because she thought that the fire would hatch stone birds,—I didn’t know. She was full of queer notions and things that never existed on earth. She seemed older sometimes than even Kerrin who was born five years ahead.

It is Marget who is the narrator, 14 when the novel opens, and writing in retrospect 10 years later. Merle is 10 and Kerin is 15. Time is of the seasons and the years weave about the regular tasks of a mixed farm. Dad who is 57 when he comes back to the farm tries to do a lot, possibly not quite realistically though the girls Merle and Marget help. Internal evidence seems to indicate corn, sheep, cows, vegetable garden, fruit. No profit in any of it merely hard Scrabble survival at a time in America when markets had collapsed. If it was just a matter of feeding yourself you could stick it out but the incubus of mortgage lying heavy on you. The glimpses of beauty and ease are there overlain with crushing fear. Kerin though, intelligent and beautiful, is wild and wrought by an anger which she has taken from her father, an impatient, wrathful man ready to criticize waste or dawdling. She wants his love but they being like one another repel. Her birthday present to him goes awry:

She held it out toward him but kept her fingers still on it, and we could see that it was a folded knife tipped with silver on the end. “This is supposed to be your present, Dad.” She sounded excited and full of pride. “Watch what I’ve learned to do—taught myself how to do it!” She opened the knife and aimed at a brown spot on the wall, a little spot hardly big enough to see and high up across the room. “Look out!” Dad shouted. “Stop!” He shoved back his chair and tried to snatch the knife, but jerked at her arm instead. Merle and I screamed out, and the knife went wild, straight at old Cale’s blind head, and slashed across his nose. “God damn you!” Father shouted. He grabbed at Kerrin and knocked her back against the wall. Merle started to cry and Kerrin screamed out some horrible things. 

Kerin’s instability increases. The great drought comes along to put the final kibosh on things. On and on it goes. Long established oaks die, the land becomes utterly parched:

The fifth month of the drouth began with nothing but clouds and the taunt of an hour’s drizzle. Nothing to soak the ground below an inch deep. September now and the fields more barren than in winter. The pastures where mules and hogs had been not even covered with dying grass. They were eaten to earth and looked like the hide of a mangy hound. Even the ironweed was withered. For a mile around there was nothing but ragweed in the fields, dust-green and heavy-pollened. Locust trees in the south woods died together. Small gold leaves sifted down and were covered with dust. A weird sick acre full of the dying twisted trees, and underneath them the dying ironweed-stalks. The dead elm leaves hung like folded bats.

The girls roam the land away from Kerin's unsettling energy which increasingly begins to haunt the family.  Add to that the need to meet the mortgage.

 I used to think of it sometimes when the orchards started to bloom and changed from a greyness into white fur along the plum branches, and a rose light came in the peaches. And I used to think of it when the apricots began to redden, and you could look down from the hog-lot’s edge into a valley full of white smoke, more like a gulf full of white spray, where the giant pear trees were. I’d scratch my nail along the post and I’d think—when somebody does like this on a scrap of paper, then all these things are gone, and a little scrawl is bigger than trees or valley.

Grim indeed that the scratch of a signature can eliminate a terrain. Is it a misery chronicle? Objectively yes but at our distance as readers we see the indomitable spirit refined by suffering. The writing is beautiful, rolling along with gentle cadence as quiet and self-effacing and noble as its narrator. 

A neglected classic, her most achieved work, the social justice activism seems to have exchanged the creative spirit of primary immediacy for the world of slogans. I’m reading it again.

Tangential to 'The God who may be' (pace Richard Kearney)

 Reading Richard Kearney on Anatheism and ‘God who may be’ I find myself to be the perfect example of naiveté. I know nothing about the quarrels within the phenomenological family or the importation of theism into the pellucid waters of our immediate awareness.  

Do we see clearly into the depths or are the refractive indices too baffling? The naive person has an advantage over the savants. His only difficulty is to stay in the present moment and not be distracted by shiny objects.

There is the natural or sahaj samadhi. I suppose it is the end or goal of the God that may be the God that is allowed to manifest in every moment. Every moment in this sense is your last. Is this the sense of eschatology that R.K. wishes to remind us of? Probably it is something else, a technical term.

You have to decide. Do I want this or not? If I allow this will I end up having lost all my friends and be bracketed with snake handlers by polite society?

Nearby is the domain of the Imaginal (Henry Corbin) the country of no place.

The place where Ludwig Feuerbach starts, the expansible consciousness, could be an entry into the core of Sanathana Dharma but not being aware of this he misses his exit and continues down the highway of materialism.

What is it that arises out of the immediacy of awareness? What is it that brings on the experience of connatural ity, that is founded on actual connaturality? Is it not perceptuality.

Exodus 3:13 – Evil is Going away from the being of God who is. Living in the not-being, draining reality.

Q: How does one approach the Being of God?

A: Through consciousness which is ‘pratibodha videtam’ known in every state

of awareness.

The Claverings by Anthony Trollope

 

If you were to lay down the bare outline of this novel it might seem to have some of the lineaments of the romance novel, a Mills & Boone confection, but it really isn’t though as I read I felt, ‘should I be enjoying this so much’?.  Of all the Trollopes that I have read there was not the slightest sense of the suspense of hiatus or drag at any point.  It just moved along beautifully and the shill I, shall I, of Harry Clavering’s dual engagement, his divided soul, his velleities that required careful marshalling and man’oeuvering by the ladies of the Clavering and the Burton clans is fascinating.  They are the heroines of the flagrantly feminist novel.  The other two ladies Julia Lady Ongar and Florence Burton, bad girl V good girl are in love with vacillating Harry. 

To be clear Julia nee Brabazon has jilted Harry Clavering a fellow of Cambridge whom she traduces by referring to him as an usher i.e. a schoolmaster’s assistant.  She owes too much money, he has not enough.  There seems to be a suggestion that this Harry chap the rector’s son has more than his share of manly beauty, an Apollo no less, but he’s broke, that’s no joke what with the cost of frocks, maids etc, etc.  Lord Ongar, libertine, debauchee, and sot who affects a crow black wig will win fair lady with 60 or 70,000 sterling pounds p.a., a castle a beautiful dower house and 7,000 pa should he predecease her.  Which of course he does attended by a less than desolate Julia, creepy Sophie Gardeloup, and her charmingly sinister brother the Count Paterhoff.

Now she is free and back in London from Florence; alone and shunned by society, trailing vague rumours of infidelity initiated by Sophie and the Count that allow them to control her to some extent.  Her sister Hermione  is married to Lord Clavering, Harry’s first cousin.  Down the park of the great house is the rector whose living and personal money plus his wife’s 800 l p.a. allows him to subcontract the tiresome parts of his cure of souls to a Mr.Saul for 70 l p.a.  He hunts until Bishop Proudie (Barchester) asks him to desist.

This novel is about Famille Clavering so all of them have speaking parts.  One charming sub-plot is the wooing of Fanny Clavering by Mr.Saul who is a gentleman, of course, but not of our kind, country family squire-ish sort.   The cold cruel Lord Hugh is a well drawn portrait of complete authoritarian selfishness, tightfisted, controlling, brutal. Archie his brother is an ex-navy idler fond of a bet willing to take on Lady Ongar also.  His attempt to use Sophie to advance his cause is comedic.

Where’s the energy, the plot dynamo? It’s Harry who somehow manages to promise himself to two women.  The other women who want to rectify the situation come to doubt him as a fine thing and a wonderful capture.  Nevertheless he is the prey of one of theirs and not to be let go lightly.  In another case:

Mrs. Clavering, who knew well how to do such work, was gradually bringing her husband round to endure the name of Mr. Saul. Twenty times had he asserted that he could not understand it; but, whether or no such understanding might ever be possible, he was beginning to recognize it as true that the thing not understood was a fact.

This is one of the stand alone Trollope novels.  It has been described as perfect and really its interweaving of the strands of Victorian life is masterly.  Before I commit any more cliches can I urge you to read it.

The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach: reaction to Chap. II

 I appear to be live blogging Ludwig Feuerbach.  I could be watching 'Dexter'.

Chapter II: E.oC.

Was the divine a projection or a reflection?  Feuerbach seemed to go for

the latter at first but by the end of the chapter the former wins out.  Good,

fine, splendid but then the note of Idealism begins to nullify that.  We are

it would seem encapsulated in a noetic bubble.

“But feeling has here been adduced only as an example. It is the same with

every other power, faculty, potentiality, reality, activity—the name is

indifferent—which is defined as the essential organ of any object. Whatever

is a subjective expression of a nature is simultaneously also its objective

expression. Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means

of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher

kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the

conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these

other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his

own nature—qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.”

A species then of subjective realism, a soupcon of Kant, is added to the mix. 

Lack of definition and clear lines is a Romantic thing where things flow into

each other without there being an ontological basis for this blurring.  As he

enters into Chap.II this  is more marked. “The object of any subject is nothing else than the

subject’s own nature taken objectively.” Xenophanes said it: ‘If an

ox could paint a picture, his god would look like an ox’.

“ Whatever is God to a man, that is his heart and soul; and conversely, God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,—religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”

Here it is perfect Romantically expressed subjectivism and a neon warning

sign of the fata morgana of Idealism tinged Religion.  Not so much the

unknown God of the Acropolis but the unknowable god as though the God

wrestled with by Jacob  were a figment merely of florid religiosity. 

He offers a morsel of religous  anthropology: ‘religion is man’s earliest and also

indirect form of self-knowledge’......Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself,

before he finds it in himself’......’the object and content of the Christian religion are

altogether human’.  

What is central to his misapprehension of the nature of Christianity is his

lack of understanding of the nature of analogy.  The epithets applied to

God , good, wise etc. are not applied in the same sense as they are to man. 

This is a commonplace in theology.  Their inadequacy is well understood

and they are only offered as a bridge to contemplation and prayer. He

appears to think that because those attributes are inadequate and that only

those things that attributes can capture/signify can be granted

existence therefore God to whom attributes cannot be applies does

not exist.  God is therefore the vain projection of man’s need for transcendence.

“Wherever, therefore, this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of a man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained the mastery of faith. And it is only the inconsequence      of faint-heartedness and intellectual imbecility which does not proceed from this idea to the formal  negation of the predicates, and from thence to the negation of the subject to which they relate.”

He seems not to distinguish between human attributes as such and attributes applied

analogically.  Basic error.

'The Essence of Christianity' by L. Feuerbach: reaction to Chap.1

 The essence of Christianity:

Gets it right straight away.  Man lifts his mind to God and that mind marks him off from the brute.  Fido lifts his mind up to man.  Consciousness however is the difference.  Man can think of his own special features as man, as a species.

There are those classics that you are always seeing mentioned that you eventually get a sense of what they are about suspecting all the time that this may be a simplistic opinion.  Eventually you come across the real substantial thing in its antique weight and the challenge to now acquaint yourself with its authentic presence is unavoidable.  Digitally that occurs more often as the libraries of the world disgorge themselves into your laptop.

“Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species,”

Yes absolutely and here is the source of the Buberesque ‘I and Thou’ of course.  But following that is the plangent note of the Sanathana Dharma.

“Religion being identical with the distinctive characteristic of man, is then identical with self-consciousness—with the consciousness which man has of his nature. But religion, expressed generally, is consciousness of the infinite; thus it is and can be nothing else than the consciousness which man has of his own—not finite and limited, but infinite nature.”

So many insights: ‘the limit of the nature is also the limit of the consciousness’.  What I sense from this book is a profound religious intuition that there is a linkage between the nature of man and that of the Divine.  We are by nature god centred.   These intuitions could only be understood by him as antithetical to Lutheranism.  An impersonal deity or a projection of the personal, a nullity,  was not acceptable.

Everything is reflected back at you -  what is personal e.g. the will comes back as will as such. “The power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of the “ is the power of the intellect itself”.  I see that we are moving towards th idea that the divine that bounces back to us is the divine in ourselves.  Prevenient transcendent grace is therefore tapping into our own power.  This is I think his direction of travel and it is a terra incognita and there be dragons for the Protestant Christian.   “We can affirm nothing without affirming ourselves”

The central question: is he alienated from his own insight? Did the truth that man finds the divine within himself become excogitated into the Absolute then being the mere projection of this divinity?  The transcendent being nullified also has the effect of a like fate for the immanent.  Denying the transcendent cuts the atomised individual off from grace.  Agnosticism followed fast by atheism ensues.  One might say after T.S. Eliot — ‘he had the experience but missed the meaning’.

Perception in Gaudapada and David Hume - Paradoxes of Idealism

 II.15 M.K.: Those objects that appear as obscure inside the mind and those that appear as vivid outside, are all merely created by imagination.  Their distinction is to be traced to the difference in the organs of perception.

If there was ever an indication that Vedantins aren’t from Mars it is this.  The tendency to idealism brings to the fore the notion that it is only a matter of vividness that marks the difference between the imagination and perception.  This is to be found in Hume.  A similar epistemology will evoke a related  response to the problem of differentiation between the mental and the sensible.  Impressions and ideas together are perception, is how Hume  puts it.  So how does one distinguish them?  By their relative vivacity. 

The notion of vivacity comes up in Sankara’s commentary on the sutra only to be dismissed. 

“The fact that things in the mind, called up by mere mental impressions, have an obscurity, while externally as objects of the sense of sight etc., they have a vividness, (that fact) is not due to the existence of the objects themselves; for this distinction is noticed even in a dream.  To what is it due then?  This is caused by the difference in the organs of perception.  Hence it is proved that the things of the waking state are as much a creation of imagination as the dream objects.” M.K. II.15.

Obviously there is a difference between their views on the  ontological status of perceptions.  Gaudapada holds that because we have perceptions in dreams and perceptions in the waking state the common denominator of being perceptions is their true status.  They thus remain as items in consciousness.  The activity of the senses is also in consciousness. So all being in consciousness and  consciousness qua consciousness resulting from superimposition (adhyasa) all experience is mithya/false. 

Hume  bundles mental and sensible events  into the one category of perception but distinguishes between the constituent impressions and ideas by virtue of their relative vivacity.

It’s interesting to see how the attempts to fix the paradoxes, that arise from the adherence to Idealism, criss cross each other generating  bafflement. 

Advaita and Synteresis/Synderesis: The Spark from Tripura Rahasya

 

What makes or made advaita an intelligible religious philosophy that you could investigate?You could have been born into it of course and have been surrounded by its adherents some of whom seemed ennobled by its teaching.  They impressed you and made it seem a path that to follow even if the ramifications of its epistemology seemed opaque.  You heard the teachings, revolved them in your mind and in the depths of quiet meditation they sunk into your spirit giving a life meaning and direction.

The curious thing is that philosophers who deal in arguments continuously have rarely taken up religious faith on that basis.  Some impulse deeper than that has moved them towards God by whatever name you call him/her/it.    They feel that it is the natural direction, they are at home in it.   Having found themselves involved their natural predilection for clarification begins to be felt. This is the surface play of their minds and separate from true attainment which outruns the mind.

Many years ago I found myself in the presence of the sage of Kanchi.  There was a small group taking his darshan.  I had no idea of his eminence in the world of Vedanta.  From behind the picket fence where he sat with his entourage he took questions.  Then one of them addressed me saying ‘announce yourself’.  I thought he said ‘enhance yourself’ and showing my puzzlement it was explained that I should tell my name and country.  Which I did.  ‘Have you a question for Swami?  I asked: ‘Should I continue my studies? (of philosophy).  Swami replied: Please continue.

Now I was several yards away from where he sat and when he made that gesture peculiar to Indian body language of turning the upheld palms of his hand outward meaning ‘carry on’ I felt a distinct push against my chest which made me almost stumble backwards.

That’s the sort of thing that you don’t argue with, a finger in the chest saying ‘wake up’.  At the same time the ruminative mind wants to chew the cud of argument.  For me this passage from ‘Tripura Rahasya’ is that steel meeting flint.

56-63. “The mind is truly abstracted in sleep. But then its light is screened by darkness, so how can it manifest its true nature? A mirror covered with tar does not reflect images but can it reflect space either? Is it enough, in that case, that images are eliminated in order to reveal the space reflected in the mirror? In the same manner, the mind is veiled by the darkness of sleep and rendered unfit for illumining thoughts. Would such eclipse of the mind reveal the glimmer of consciousness?

“Would a chip of wood held in front of a single object to the exclusion of all others reflect the object simply because all others are excluded? Reflection can only be on a reflecting surface and not on all surfaces. Similarly also, realization of the Self can only be with an alert mind and not with a stupefied one. New-born babes have no realization of the Self for want of alertness.

“Moreover pursue the analogy of a tarred mirror. The tar may prevent the images from being seen, but the quality of the mirror is not affected, for the outer coating of tar must be reflected in the interior of the mirror. So also the mind, though diverted from dreams and wakefulness, is still in the grip of dark sleep and not free from qualities. This is evident by the recollection of the dark ignorance of sleep when one wakes.

Now in many respects ‘Tripura Rahasya’ is a philosophically zany document seriously infected by subjective idealism which would claim that we are directly in contact with mental objects.  ‘We perceive our perceptions’ was Sankara’s rebuttal.  The line between wakeful perception and dream is blurred.  Even so the insights of advaita shine through and dispel this mental virus.

Later in my reading of Advaita I would come across the same argument in the ‘Upadesa Sahasri’ of Shankaracarya his only non commentarial book.  I have posted extensively about this.  Follow the topic links.

Sintering in welding involves bonding together.  It can be traced back to a common root in old German with ‘cinder’.  I wonder if it might not be cognate with ‘synteresis’ /also ‘synderesis'(soul spark: Greek) or the spark from the divine that leads the soul to recognise the good, the dharmic.  This is the first event in the journey to the source.  The philosophical ruminations keep the fire going though in many ways they may be damp second rate fuel.