Somerset Maugham's Reality

 I was saying that in his collection of short stories entitled ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Maugham has a story entitled ‘Appearance and Reality’ in which he mentions the famous book of the same name by the Idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley.  This is not just a flaunting of his extensive reading or a mere adventitious entree into a story told him by a Frenchman which bizarre as it sounds makes sense to the French.  If you want to be technical this is a ‘detached observer’ framing. ‘This is what I was told, you may believe it or not.  To my native informant it makes sense.  Let me then commence’.

There is no filler or narrative putty applied to present a smooth surface to the reader in the work of Somerset Maugham. In his ‘Writers Notebook’ and ‘The Summing Up’ he refers to the compression, simplicity, precision, and exactitude of his favourite writers.  How then does ‘Appearance and Reality’ apply to the story?

Bradley asks: where does the reality of what is presented to us by our perception reside.  In the object?  We can’t by definition know that.  That would be the God’s Eye view.  Essentially what we experience is an appearance or the object as it appears to us.  How he deals with Berkeley’s demurral on this point I don’t know, I haven’t come to that point yet in the book.  A chapter at a time savoured for its clarity is the way to read this extensive work which includes reality. 

The idea as  Maugham develops it is that we are informed by our experience.  What pops out as significant for us depends on our souls or the way we live our world.  There is a collectively learned aspect to this which we can recognise as French soul, Irish soul, Black soul.  It is an internally coherent way of living the world which the denizens of any particular cultural sector can recognise.  There are no neutral data.

Now read on.

'Flotsam and Jetsam' by Somerset Maugham from the collection 'Creatures of Circumstance'

 I think of Somerset Maugham as the consummate story teller.  You are brought in to a well lighted place shown the furniture which reflects the characters who go on their way as dumb as falling stones beset by their constitutional gravity.  He doesn’t often love his personae but anyone with knowledge by acquaintance, as Bertie Russell said, knows that distaste is a standard correct response.  His Malay stories are often a vision of humid hell.  

In the story entitled ‘Flotsam and Jetsam’ from the collection called ‘Creatures of Circumstance’ Skelton,a youngish anthropologist on his way to the Borneo coast, a three week trip, is struck down by malaria.  A rubber planter Grange and his wife who live nearby take him in while he recuperates.  Aha I thought anthropologist now gets to study OP (orang putay/white man) in his native habitat.  I won’t go into the story which is classic Maughamish  operative secret.  During the day while the anthropologist is recovering he talks to the wife who at one point seems to be about to reveal the source of the extreme nervous ticks that oppress her.  She tells a lot but holds that back.

When the sick man recovers he departs:  

“He was glad now that Mrs. Grange had not told him the story that was on the tip of her tongue to tell.  He did not want some tragic tale of sin or folly to connect him with them in a recollection that he could not escape.  He wanted to forget them as one forgets a bad dream.

It is left to Mrs. Grange to tell us the story talking to herself in the mirror as if in her past as an actress she was delivering a soliloquy.  A secret that is untold retains its power to trap one in that continually recurring scene of horror.  Skelton does not want this unloaded on to him even if this might free the teller of the secret.  Anthropology has its limits.

Is that direct address to the reader a weak ending, though I will grant screen playable?  Has Maugham slipped?  I’m not entirely happy that an observer has been removed from the scene but yes the response to incontinent sharing of ‘please don’t tell me, I don’t want to know’ is a real one.

The next story in the collection is called ‘Appearance and Reality’ which sent me to F.H. Bradley’s book.  Maugham was a reader of philosophy and he liked the book.. The title of his novel ‘Of Human Bondage’ is taken from Spinoza’s ‘The Ethics’.

I’ve just started that and I have the distinct feeling that there may be more of appearance than reality in this tale.

'Virtually Intelligible' (Etienne Gilson)

 “In order to account for the possibility of abstract knowledge, Aristotle and St. Thomas had conceived. an elaborate scheme, according to which things them- selves were credited with virtually intelligible forms, which the human soul was supposed to abstract from things by its active intellect, and to know by its possible intellect.” (Etienne Gilson: The Unity of Philosophical Experience pub. 1937)

There I go again getting fixated on a word or phrase that is replete with creative ambiguity.  ‘Virtually intelligible’ is such a locution.  I see virtually here meaning originating out of its own power, its own virtue.  Of course it is intelligible to the perceiver as an instance of a universal but this nature is inherent.  ‘Virtually’ taken in the usual sense refers away from itself towards the root instance, the central example so to speak.  ‘She lived for most of the year by herself in Mallorca and they were, as husband and wife, virtually separated’. The common expression ‘virtually identical’ captures this reference to another  central example of something.  

S.O.D.     Virtual: Possessed of certain physical virtues or capacities effective in respect of inherent natural qualities  or powers; capable of exerting influence by means of such qualities. (now rare)

Curious that the usual sense of ‘virtually’ has moved away from inherance to an almost opposing sense.                

'Lucky Jim' by Kingsley Amis (pub. 1954)

 

Lucky Jim - we don’t envy him.  What the first thing to remember about Jim Dixon is that he is a Beta male and  he knows it.  During the war he served in a non-heroic role, somewhere well clear of the enemy lines. All the others in his digs saw action or commanded.  Even one of his students Michie had; I don’t know whether to call Jim’s war a good or a bad one.  It’s an English usage that I can’t get quite straight.  If you were decorated was that a good war.  It may be reticence or irony or understatement.  Dixon seems to have been producing triplicate for the duration.  Another mark of his less than silver back maleness is the way that an emotional vampire woman, Margaret, fastens on to him for the life giving supply of emotional plasma.  Those ladies know their clients.

Funk is his ongoing condition which he treats with that common over the counter medication: beer.  His place in the History dept. of a provincial university is in jeopardy unless he gets a paper  out that his head of dept. can show to the board.   The end of the final term of his first year of probation is upon him and the paper on mediaeval shipbuilding is still with a publisher whose reply to a query, when?, is written on a sheet  torn from a pad and written in green ink.  A: as soon as I can get round to it, I’m busy.  Uh, uh, not auspicious.  Be that as it may his head Mr.Welch seems kind and in the best tradition of academic serfdom has Dixon doing research for him.  Looking up he calls it.  Still he wants Jim out at his house in the country for an arty evening of madrigals and tiny glasses of sherry.  That doesn’t end well.  After slipping out slyly to the pub and having several pints slightly Brahms and Lizst as the Londoner said the last cigarette in bed slips from his nerveless fingers.  That might have been academic sutee but was just a hole in the blanket and the sheet.  Megatomy with a palsied hand held razor blade leave things worse but in his case a fair maiden comes to the rescue.

Who she?  Callahan by name but the important thing is that she is the girl friend of Bertrand a soi-disant artist and all round poseur.  In the best traditions of the campus novel he is perhaps having an affair with the wife of another member of the History dept.  The girlfriend who is beautiful catches Dixon’s eye as it would probably do for all males with active blood circulation.  Alas Jim thinks that she is out of his class.  More thumos deficency.  She seems a good sport and helps Jim tidy up his incendiary drunkeness.

Another reason that Dixon is nervous is that Margaret from the English dept. is there at the madrigals also.  The Welches have been putting her up after the suicide attempt which even Jim thinks has odd features to it.  Why during the attempt  play the wireless so loudly inviting a call from the flat downstairs.

So there you have it - the main dramatis personae of this novel.  Their interactions with the hapless protagonist pulling faces through one contremps after another is the fun.  The high point of this low comedy is Jim’s lecture on Merrie England with him quite merry himself.  With a hey and a hoy and a hey nonny no - around the maypole of disaster.

There is much satire about academic life and artistic pretensions.  We remember that Amis was an academic himself and fond of a tipple and that his emotional and marital life was not the shortest distance between two points.  We are invited to fill in the B and C between Amis and Dixon.

It’s a good comic novel which give the unlikely experience of improving on re-reading.  Always a good sign. Cheers.

Confusion not Confounded in Advaita Vedanta

 There is an excellent reason why Vedanta has chosen the apparently paradoxical way of talking about perception using the phenomenon of confusion.  Confusion in Vedanta is taking something to be what it is not. The rope is taken to be a snake, the stump at dusk is taken to be a human form etc.  It is important here to distinguish between this mis-take and the related phenomena of delusion and illusion.  

The point is that there can only be confusion when there is a state of affairs that is the case.  We are thus tied into a reality.  The mental modification (vritti) is not the true reality but that true reality can be found.  

This way of looking at things runs counter to the Western conundrum known as the argument from illusion.  If, it is said, we are mistaken in this instance, may we not be globally in error. This view has its origin in Cartesian doubt.  What we are in contact with is the mental experience.  That there is an external world corresponding to this is due to the mercy of a God who is not a deceiver.  Vedanta is different in that there is an ontological connection between the vritti (mental modification) and the upadhi (limiting adjunct).  They share the same substratum.  They meet on the plane of being.

Too Much

 What is there to do?

You are here now.

This is not going to go away.

You may get the fascination of consciousness for itself which is perhaps what samadhi is.

But this is not everything.

This is not dissolution.

We only want everything.

Is that too much to ask?

'The Count of Monte Cristo' by Alexandre Dumas

 ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ was serialised over two years and for the modern reader beset by vastly more media and their attendant distractions one might imagine that a similar time might be required to get through its over 1200 pages.  As Dell Comix used to say “don’t take less”.  Really don’t, steer clear of the rocks of an abridged version.  It’s a lee shore as Edmund Dantes might have said in a nautical metaphor.  Anybody that starts to read the Penguin Classic, flex your knees when lifting, version will affirm that the voyage through this ‘baggy monster’ will be done much more quickly.  I may have spent two weeks or so at it.  

It speeds along with a fair narrative wind behind it.  The Penguin edition has footnotes which elucidated the political background and the various mythological references that Dumas throws to elevate the tone.  It’s a rattling good story and as I read it I thought apart from the treasure it is quite credible.  In regimes which were insecure the threat of summary incarceration keep a fractious populace in line.  Looking further into the background of the writing of the novel I discovered that the basic outline of the plot was lifted from the ‘memoirs’ of a policeman.  You might say being ‘stitched up’ was what got Dantes in durance vile and also what got him out of it to wreak: what?  Revenge or retribution?  Is not all judicial punishment a rebalancing of the scale and if that involves the loss of everything that the criminals hold dear then we accept it.  Call it what you will, the rent in the universe has been mended.  Dantes should have died but he did not, now they must pay.  The intricacy of their repayment of their debt is is beautiful.  We are given hints but the unfolding is like an engine of condign retribution, running smooth as a sowing machine stitching the traitors into a shroud.  All that was hidden will be brought into the light of day.  Long brooding on the mechanics of justice and how it is to be wrought has honed the blade that must fall.  Not literally of course, the miscreants destroy themselves by going steadily into paths of wickedness.  The irony is that two of them are ennobled, one a baron the other a count and another with the scoundrel’s ribbon of the legion of honour.  

All of them have forgotten that young sailor picked up at his betrothal party and whisked into oblivion.  The dungeon pallour of the Count of Monte Cristo, a nice running metaphor, has changed his appearance and unlimited money from the treasure is better than plastic surgery as a means of disguise.  Who could imagine that the two men were one and the same.  

The reading did not pall in the least and the high tone as it moves through multiple locations never descends into bathos. Perhaps once when Cristo dons a sailors kit when repelling a burglar is there a hint of buffo to the opera.  That I think is the keynote that should guide the reader.  It is grand opera.  Scale up.  Interludes like the Roman carnival with Franz and Albert are ways of lulling you into a lyric mode.  This is life, sweet isn’t it?  Now imagine being the victim of envy and cowardice and suddenly rapt into horror.  

Still can you control everything?  Might not your retribution bring collateral damage in its train?  Cristo wonders but we are quite complacent.  Stay not your hand, smite them we urge. 

Dammed good read.  It skips along. Forget the movies, this is the proper article warranted genuine Dumas.  I must read more of him.

Upamana Pramana (Comparison) and Genus and Species.

 Does the pramana of upamana translated as ‘comparison’ start somewhat in midstream?  We are immediately given the concept of genus and species, the cow in this case so in essence we already have the power to discover genus and species natively.  Taking the single example of the ‘gavaya’ ( bos gaurus) we can be immediately aware that it must be a member of a species and with that awareness comes the knowledge of differentiation which makes a species.  Sharing the same genus as the cow (bos Taurus) is a likely presumption.  

There is an element of the problem of universals lurking beneath the surface of Upamana:

This (upamana) is not possible through perception, for then the cow’s form is not in contact with the eyes.

We only sense particulars and actually to begin with genus and species is logically downstream from the universal ‘cow’.  The problem of universals is not salient in the ‘Vedanta Paribhasa’ of Adhvarindra.  Sankara deals with it in his section of Brahma Sutra Bhasya called ‘Vedic Words’.  I find some similarity (that word) between his treatment and the ideas of William of Ockham.

More anon on that.

Addendum to "A Tree in the Yard' 17/7/26

 It is important to distinguish between the object which can be grasped by the senses I.e. the tree in the yard and the metaphysical reality which makes that perception possible.  That reality is not itself perceptible but it can be realized.  That realization does not refer to a special mental condition or continuing experience.  Sankara in BSBh rejects the notion that samadhi is equivalent to the highest realization.  He regards it as just another state of mind.

What meaning then can we give to the notion of realization?  It is of course an unshakable belief in the unity of Being, the I AM that Nisargadatta focussed on during the time of his sadhana.  It creates a transformation in the qualities of the person, those that can be experienced by others.  It must be said that a penchant for the collection of Rolls Royce cars and high end watches is a counter indication of realization.  Spontaneous compassion and immediate insight into the spiritual condition of others is an essential indication.  Being in the presence of a sage can raise one’s own awareness to the point that instruction seems to come from within. I’m not sure that faith in him is even necessary.  It's a matter of spiritual harmonics.

A Vedantin views the Tree in the Yard

 The tree in the yard, that staple of solidity, reality and undeniable fact is sometimes referred to as unreal by the Vedantin.  What can he mean?  

Essentially the rope/snake analogy is being flaunted and asked to do a great deal of work.  We need to pull back a little further to get better focus and ask what the paradigmatic form of error is for the Vedantin.  It is confusion or taking something to be that which it is not.  That is perfectly fine for the everyday physical world.  In poor light we take the stump to be a man, the piece of shell to be silver etc., etc.

That sort of talk does not translate/transfer to the metaphysical however.  The tree is real but we may ask wherein does its perceptuality arise ?  How does that out there physical reality come to be in my consciousness as it actually is.  The short cut answer without going into the technicalities of upadhi and vritti is that there is a unity of the substratum of consciousness, a unity of Being.  What is real on the physical side, a tree that is separate and real for the perceiver is unified on the metaphysical side.  Taking the physical to be the only reality is a mis-take.  This is the world of duality.  Keeping both sides going is the world of non-duality.  

Thus we get the extravagant closing down sale of the world: everything must go.  This is an unreal bargain. 

Frank Wright's Moustache: The Loam which nourisheth and sustaineth.

 A really good, out-and-out "reactionary" journal is, at first, like a breath of fresh air in the midst of all this turbulent, pretentious, childish optimism. A royalist publication is worth its weight in gold. Catholicism, we feel, is essential to our health. We fly to the past — anywhere out of this suspended animation of the so smugly "revolutionary" present. Out of the detestable crowd of quacks — illumines, coueists, and psychologists — that the wealthy death-bed has attracted, and who throng these antechambers of defeat; from all the funeral-furnishers, catafalque-makers, house-agents, lawyers, moneylenders, with their eye on the Heir of all the Ages, we fly in despair.

But the "Reactionary" (a sort of highly respectable, genteel quack, as well, with military moustaches and an "aristocratic" bearing) is even more stupid — if that were possible — than the "Revolutionary." We listen to him for a moment, and he unfolds his barren, childish scheme with the muddleheaded emphasis of a very ferocious sheep. He lodges in the garret next to us at the inn, and is in arrears with the rent. The servants (who are all the reddest of revolutionists, of course) hate him. The Reactionary, in the long run, does not add to the cheerfulness of the scene.

(From ‘The Art of Being Ruled’ by Wyndham Lewis pub. 1926)

Lewis had a moustache and he was called a reactionary and a fascist so we may take the second paragraph as a piece of self mockery.  That flagrant item sported by Wright ends in points which demand wax.  I feel that he would repudiate gel as verging on the metrosexual.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that but when your aim is to bristle drooping fails to promote a sense of rigour.

Frank Wright Speaks

 There I was thinking I was a Traditionalist when according to Frank Wright I am in fact a Modernist and of course a heretic.  May I state once again that I admit to being a heretic but I am not an apostate.  What he means by Traditionalism is something quite different from that which I respect rather than adhere to if one can adhere to a general theory of the source of religions. 

traditionalism 

Who is Frank Wright when he’s at home?  Enter the name in the search box of youtube and be prepared for the deluge.  His political analysis of the march of Globalism is excellent and is delivered with witty asides, memes and serious foolery.  Essentially we are living in a constructed reality aimed at dissolving nation states into cupasoup bland uniformity at the behest of ‘stakeholders’.

Does Frank believe that outside the Catholic Church there is no redemption?  Though he has never uttered that precise phrase I think that his attitude is adjacent to that old time Catholicism.  Is that a bad thing?  On the whole it is not; most people are not prepared to wait for the answer to ‘what is truth’.  They want it straight and unequivocal and they also want eschatology not ecology.  Do I agree with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church?  Yes I do.  I realize that I may be going close to the Voltairean position that religion is good for the masses in that it gives them a definite moral path they can follow.  I think he recommended it for his butler.  The populace is safer without the bewilderment of comparative religion.  Who was it said that a little comparative religion leaves you with comparatively little religion? 

I’m a heretic so what I offer is in Frank Wright’s opinion entirely useless and proves that I am foundered in Modernism.  Is religion like sums in Arithmetic where there is only one right answer.  A certain simplistic view of religious truth would hold that this is so.  Atheists and agnostics agree with this.  ‘Look’, they say, ‘they all of them claim that their truth is the only one’. ‘They can’t all be true so it is rational to decline to believe any of them until the issue is decided’.

The Traditionalist (Perennialist) would argue that the outcome of multiple truths does not end in relativism.  The absolute is incapable of being expressed in direct language.  It is apophatic.  However to put everyone under ‘the cloud of unknowing’ is to risk them being drenched by uncertainty.  One should not do anything to weaken the ‘simple’ faith of others.  Say your own prayers.------------

'Salem Chapel' by Mrs. Oliphant (pub. 1863)

 Yet another of those noticing women, Mrs. Oliphant.  The other one I was reading recently was Anita Brookner in her Booker prize winning ‘Hotel du Lac’.  Of the two the sharper is the Victorian lady  who can deal with a range of social settings and the delicate treatment of the nuances of class so much a part of English life.  That she was a Scotswoman probably helped to mould that acerbic view of the difference between the Church appointed by law and the non-conformist Chapel folk.  Though never identified as Methodist the talk of ‘our connection’ and ‘the connection’ is a Methodist way of describing the local control of the running of a chapel, the paying of a minister, selecting their own minister who might be dropped if he displeased the deacons.  This is a major theme of the novel.  Arthur Vincent though a powerful preacher seems a little too stand offish for the deacons.  He does not flatter them by attending their soirees and besides he is infatuated by Lady Western, a beautiful young dowager.  She’s church folk and that rankles.  We are never in any doubt that this attraction can come to nothing.  Her heart is given to another, the poor man who retired from the field leaving to Sir Joseph Western this peach, this nenuphar of nubility.  Sir Joe died off stage. 

Curiously the man who is wooing the sister of the minister has the same name as the unsuccessful suitor. I have already made clear that if you are bothered by coincidence do not read Victorian three volume novels.  They are a small world.

Matthew Arnold’s England was divided like Gaul in ‘partes tres’, the barbarians,the hebraic and the populace who are keen on doing what they like.  Lady Alice is not a barbarian aristocratic type, huntin, shootin, fishin.  She is too nice to the young minister simply out of patrician good manners.  Another woman of that class is Mrs. Hillyard who being poor, though gently born, has to make her living at piece work sewing.  She is a well drawn sharp observer of the milieu into which she has descended.  She now attends chapel.

Who are the dwellers of that town?  Mrs. Oliphant is able to give us the full flavour of Victorian Britain particularly the religious divisions on the Protestant side.  Within the Anglicans the main contrast is between the High Church with its ‘smells and bells’ and the Low Church’s clear lights of the unadorned.

As for Rome.  We don’t talk about Rome.  The locution ‘Romish’ is used as a pejorative.  Evangelism shuns those excesses.

Running parallel to the Vincent/Salem struggle over the social control of the minister is the fear that Susan Vincent will be ruined through her abduction by the estranged husband of Mrs Hillyard.  The author brought me at least into that sphere of Victorian mores.  This was a real fear.  Can you project yourself into that world by a species of moral time travel.  If you cannot enter into the dark mind of the patriarchy Victorian literature is not for you.  Ruined, you could always go to Australia.  

Carlingford and its novel cycle gives us a more complete picture of the life of a small town that 1000 Middlemarches.  We have the prosperous members of a rising lower middle class, the Poulterer, the Butterman.  They are confident in their own realm but insecure owing to their disabilities as Dissenters.  They want to put on a good show with packed pews, a minister capable of giving ‘coorses’ in the finer theological points of true Christian Free Worship unbeholden to the State.  Their social welfare system is organised and effective without the mummery of grey cloaked sisterhoods i.e. Anglican nuns.

The tracking of Vincent’s sister and Fordham is well done and we get the sense of the exhaustion and fear that he might be too late to prevent the ruin of his sister.  

A very complex and satisfying read.  Mrs. Oliphant is due a reappraisal.

Islam: A Higher Religion?

 Is Islam one of the higher religions?  Perhaps it is but it manifests as one that is totalising, that cannot share space with any other in its ideal form.  The tenets declare they must control all the organs of life and government.  There is nothing that is outside its writ.  Obviously this makes it very difficult for any society that has a mixture of religious affiliation.  

Their view of Western women is that they are fair game and no better than prostitutes.  Pakistani Muslim rape gangs are notorious.  Can Western democracies accept the ever-growing phenomenon of parallel societies with absolutely contrary mores.  They don’t wish to assimilate and have no respect for the host culture.  It’s a major problem and one incapable of being tackled by a liberal multicultural world view.  You can be as accepting as you like, they will never accept you.

Contra culture as the incarnation of religion as T.S. Eliot says in his ‘Notes towards the Definition of Culture’ many of the physical manifestations of Islam in music, architecture and poetry are of the highest order.  If Eliot was right its concrete incarnations ought to be derivative and repetitive.  Sufism presents a different picture despite what invidious epithets we may apply to the founder of the faith and its revelations.  Needless to say the stern upholders of orthodoxy reject the ameliorating influence of the Sufi path.  Clearly the innate reaching after the absolute transcends the overtly held doctrine with its anger and smiting.

I might be prepared to leave it there if that were the only consideration but when the masses of unreconstructed Muslims reach the shores of Europe freed from the control of the tyranny which they are accustomed to, we are confronted with tumult and disorder.  Islamic immigration must be severely restricted.

Loyalties by John Galsworthy

 (I see that this play in on an Indian curriculum.  Interesting for the Hindus who have so many markers for who’s in and who’s out and their well know admiration for the ‘pukka sahib’.)

It was Groucho Marx who famously said - “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me for a member.  Here’s De Levis who wants to belong to a club that doesn’t want him for a member.  Really he doesn’t want to be a member of that club either in the sense that he does not share the ethos of that club.  Dancy underlines this aspect of decency which De Levis does not share:

(Act III)

It was a crazy thing to do; but, damn it, I was only looting a looter. The money was as much mine as his. A decent chap would have offered me half. You didn't see the brute look at me that night at dinner as much as to say: "You blasted fool!" It made me mad. That wasn't a bad jump-twice over. Nothing in the war took quite such nerve. [Grimly] I rather enjoyed that evening.

De Levis could not resist taking a free horse and to maximise the deal ‘tried her high’ to test what quality she had.  Now the idea that Dancy thought he was getting rid of a ‘weed’ that he had not the keep of is specious rationalisation.  Dancy is described in the play directions as a ‘riding man’ friend of the landed gentleman Winsor and in a cavalry regiment.  That he would not be aware that a filly had potential is nonsense.  So he knew De Levis would grab the chance and had the money to keep her in his stable.  True. but the bitter remark ‘he would’ shows that DeL. against all the ethos of respect for the noble animal, the horse, was prepared to risk ruining her by hard training.  Again ‘not decent’.  … a decent house…..a decent club.  Decent is a key value in that world that De L. is trying to crash.

Winsor: He sold that weed you gave him, Dancy, to Kentman, the bookie, and these were the proceeds.

DANCY. Oh!

WINSOR. He'd tried her high, he said.

DANCY. [Grimly] He would.

Recollect also that De L. ascribes chagrin to Dancy on account of this parting with an excellent filly which won two races and was sold to a bookmaker for £1000 (£73,000 in todays money) a far from negligible sum but for a very wealthy man,  not an amount that would cause him to impugn the name of a ‘decent house’ as being the sort of place that you might have money stolen in.  

CANYNGE. Without any proof. This is very ugly, De Levis. I must tell WINSOR.

DE LEVIS. [Angrily] Tell the whole blooming lot. You think I've no feelers, but I've felt the atmosphere here, I can tell you, General. If I were in Dancy's shoes and he in mine, your tone to me would be very different.

CANYNGE. [Suavely frigid] I'm not aware of using any tone, as you call it. But this is a private house, Mr De Levis, and something is due to our host and to the esprit de corps that exists among gentlemen.

When the so called weed that De L. sells then goes on to win the Classic race ‘The Cambridgeshire’ his fury at missing that coup causes him to blurt out the tale of his stolen money to the club at large - a decent quiet club.  

COLFORD. It makes no odds, General. Four of us in there heard him. He's saying it was Ronald Dancy robbed him down at WINSOR's. The fellow's mad over losing the price of that filly now she's won the Cambridgeshire.

Any critique of his attitude is met with the accusation that it arises from antiSemitism.  There’s a clash of values certainly but unless you espouse the ethos of the club why attempt to join it.  Doing so makes you a bounder, a pushy, flashy sort of fellow.  A man like that is not clubable.  The conventional view that this play is about antiSemitism does not hold water.  As St Erth puts it:

DE LEVIS. Well, I shall tell people that you and Lord St Erth backed me up for one Club, and asked me to resign from another.

CANYNGE. It's a matter of indifference to me, sir, what you tell people.

ST ERTH. [Drily] You seem a venomous young man.

DE LEVIS. I'll tell you what seems to me venomous, my lord—chasing a man like a pack of hounds because he isn't your breed.

CANYNGE. You appear to have your breed on the brain, sir. Nobody else does, so far as I know.

DE LEVIS. Suppose I had robbed Dancy, would you chase him out for complaining of it?

Indeed. What of Dancy, if he gotten away with the repatriation of his money as he saw it?  If someone from the same class as the country house set had so far forgotten himself as to steal that money would the theft have been pursued by legal means or would they have gone a different way about it.  The important thing is not to make a fuss, a damnable scene.  That would have been to no one’s benefit.  Without accusing anyone, using some formula derived from public school practice, the money would find its way back to its owner.  No more need be said and the whole thing would be forgotten.  No scandal would be attached to the house.  Nevertheless some association with ‘Dancy’ would be generally known and the chill of decent society would be felt.  A previous case:

MARGARET. Do you remember St Offert—cards? No, you wouldn't—you were in high frocks. Well, St Offert got damages, but he also got the hoof, underneath. He lives in Ireland. There isn't the slightest connection, so far as I can see, Mabel, between innocence and reputation. Look at me!

What would Rabbi Bonder in his disquisition on wealth ‘The Kabbalah of Money’ have to say?  De Levis had to an extent taken advantage of the impecunious Dancy.  He might have balanced the scales of the universe by doing the ‘decent’ thing. 

‘Listen old chap, that filly you gave me.  I know you were stuck then.  I sold her on and got the price she was really worth.  I’d like to split the difference with you.  It would be on my conscience if I didn’t.’

A brilliant play one that ran for a year when it was first put on.  

Nisargadatta on Ajativada

 Questioner: Repeatedly you have been saying that events are causeless, a thing just happens and no cause can be assigned to it. Surely everything has a cause, or several causes. How am I to understand the causelessness of things? 

Maharaj: From the highest point of view the world has no cause. 

Q: But what is your own experience? 

M: Everything is uncaused. The world has no cause.

(All quotes from 'I AM THAT' by Nisargadatta Maharaj : sect/appearance and reality) 

Nisargadatta is not making some sort of Human point. He appears (good word that) to be holding the rather rigorous view called ‘ajativada’. Ajati meaning ‘not born’. What is unreal can have no origin. The cosmos is an appearance - ‘vivarta’. Vivartavada holds that the cosmos is not a freestanding or independent entity. It never emerges from the Absolute but remains within it. There is thus no causal chain in the sense of A causing B and B causing C or a train of distinct events. None of this happens according to the ajativada doctrine.  

This line of thinking has Buddhist overtones. In the Sunyavada view: ‘Emptiness is form, form is emptiness’ .(Sunya - empty)

The world does not have a cause says Maharaj. ‘That all depends on what you mean by cause's says Cyril Joad. One might see a certain similarity to scholastic thinking re contingency and causality in which the cosmos is retained within the will of the Absolute in a current way and not just prior to the ‘big bang's. The whole enchilada is kept in existence now.

Nisargadatta next moves to the material analogy. There are all kinds of vessels made of clay, all kinds of jewellery made of gold but in the final analysis there is only clay and gold in different forms.

M: Of course, everything is inter-linked. And therefore every- thing has numberless causes. The entire universe contributes to the least thing. A thing is as it is, because the world is as it is. You see, you deal in gold ornaments and I — in gold. Between the different ornaments there is no causal relation. When you re-melt an ornament to make another, there is no causal relation between the two. The common factor is the gold. But you cannot say gold is the cause. It cannot be called a cause, for it causes nothing by itself. It is reflected in the mind as ‘I am’, as the or- nament’s particular name and shape. Yet all is only gold. In the same way reality makes everything possible and yet nothing that makes a thing what it is, its name and form, comes from reality.

But why worry so much about causation? What do causes matter, when things themselves are transient? Let come what comes and let go what goes — why catch hold of things and enquire about their causes?

This is offered as a solution to the appearance of multiplicity. Vivarta (appearance) is a consistent doctrine in Vedanta. You only seem to see variety. There is only unity.

The questioner gets annoyed at this escalation up the metaphysical ladder. Actually one can sympathise at this noetic evasiveness.  

Q: Words like God, universe, the total, absolute, supreme are just noises in the air, because no action can be taken on them. M: You are bringing up questions which you alone can answer. Q: Don’t brush me off like this! You are so quick to speak for the totality, the universe and such imaginary things! They cannot come and forbid you to talk on their behalf. I hate those irres- ponsible generalizations! And you are so prone to personalize them. Without causality there will be no order; nor purposeful action will be possible.

The Questioner has a valid point. God is not a bystander. This existence has a divine purpose. Q wants to align himself with it, just that, and let what comes by grace happen in its own time.

Q: My own feeling is that my spiritual development is not in my hands. Making one’s own plans and carrying them out leads nowhere. I just run in circles round myself. When God considers the fruit to be ripe, He will pluck it and eat it. Whichever fruit seems green to Him will remain on the world’s tree for another day.

What is Philosophy

 Philosophy is a disquisition on the obvious. Staring at the everyday until it becomes uncanny. How does consciousness stick to itself? I don’t have to pay any attention to it. There it is self shining, enveloping every moment as I-I. There is no need to fix your attention on it. It is simply there. Samadhi must be where consciousness becomes self fascinated but without a definite content. It somehow locks on to itself and rests. The cache is cleared. It’s the final rinse.

A.N. Whitehead on Disorder and Order in societies (from Process and Reality)

 But there is not any perfect attainment of an ideal order whereby the indefinite endurance of a society is secured. A society arises from disorder, where ‘disorder’ is defined by reference to the ideal for that society, the favourable background of a larger environment either itself decays, or ceases to favour the persistence of the society after some stage of growth: the society then ceases to reproduce its members, and finally after a stage of decay passes out of existence. Thus a system of ‘laws’ determining reproduction in some portion of the universe gradually rises into dominance; it has its stage of endurance, and passes out of existence with the decay of the society from which it emanates. (pg.91:’Corrected Edn. of Process and Reality’ eds Griffin and Sherburne)

I had to type out that paragraph in order to better get at the intricate meanings implicated in each other that have to be painstakingly unfolded and balanced against each other. It is a matter of subtraction and re-inserting. It seems to me that as he writes, the new ideas that occur are spliced in and do not fit neatly. He is not natively lucid.

His observations cover everything from the macro to the micro, from this ‘cosmic epoch’ to the adventures of protons. The same process is at work throughout though with the added boon of rationality in the human. There is an implication for political life there also. With mass migration you may have an element enter into national life that is antithetical to the culture, to what Whitehead terms its ‘satisfaction’. We may expect change towards adaptation or a mixed reception tending towards deterioration in the long run. When the majority of the receiving society has lost its sense of identity and the confusion that occurs with too rapid social change all kinds of demented adaptations will ensue. (Cf. Mattias Desmet ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’ also ‘The Pursuit of the Millenium’ by Norman Cohn)

Hundreds of years may pass before the culture stabilises into partial fusion or in the worst case, the domination of one sector over the others.  

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen ( Novel of the White Powder)

 Where were we with the Three Impostors?

Does it spoil the fictive aspect of the novel to know that all the stories told by the Three are pure fabrications purely designed to fool up their hapless auditors.  Dyson drawn into the world of yet another brother of Miss Leicester/ aka Leddy,  a victim of the white powder, at last suspects that he has  been wound up like a seven day clock.  Of course it just adds another layer of disbelief to the mix and embedded in their fictions is truth which we are told must come out.

Machen says somewhere near the end of the book that it is concocted out of unlikelihood and coincidence but such is the mystery of London that nothing is more improbable than what happens.  Anyway he may be exaggerating because there are connections within the novel.  Russell the egregious struggler who lives on bread and tea is a friend both of Dyson and ‘the man with the spectacles and the furtive scanning’.   Even in an impersonal city like London there are villages of artistic communities that know of each other, that meet and mingle.  All associates and the associates of associates are potential leads to the whereabouts of the hunted.   So it proves.

The gold Tiberius creates its own system of gravity.  For now  the sauntering duo, Phillipps and Dyson, who will exit the house down the drive will not cross the path of the killers who have escaped out the back.  However they have met the emissaries of Doctor Lipsius and if they report the grisly find in the abandoned manor would be wise to do so by way of anonymous tip-off.

'The Three Impostors' (novel of the Black Seal as told by Miss Lally)

 Must I remind you that it was the piquant Miss Lally that is leaving the house in the prologue with a dripping parcel?  And what that parcel contains? Her larky manner should not blind you to her thoughtful consideration of a suitable addition to the Doctor’s cabinet of horrors.  What unconscious confessions will the ‘Novel of the Black Seal’ contain?

The format of the tale follows that told by ‘Wilkins’.  Poverty stricken in London about to expire meets a benefactor and employed by him goes on a journey leading to strange and terrifying events.  In a sense this is like those elaborate phone cons run by groups of thieves.  There is a script.  They follow it closely hewing to the fears and hopes of the ‘mark’.

Why are they doing it?  Wilkins tells that when he came back from America his fortunes changed utterly.  He now was welcomed everywhere and his bona fides were accepted without question.  We may conjecture that certain forces emanating from the dark side were looking after their acolyte.  

How did Miss Lally find Phillipps in Leicester Square?  The  rational sceptic is putty in her hands.  I see the coin is like a tracking device.  It brings earnest seekers to it to continue the slaughter that it commemorates.  The Three Impostors will themselves be confounded should they get hold of it.

Miss Lally is not a good girl.

'The Three Impostors' by Arthur Machen (pub. 1895)

 There are books which you will have only read for the first time when you reread them.

You have been introduced to the impostors in the prologue which in reality is more like an epilogue to this palindromic storey.  Don’t be fooled by their insouciance, their lightness.  These are killers, after their prey whom they feel has stolen the gold Tiberius, a coin the only remaining of an issue struck to commemorate a great slaughter and thus imbued with a unique malignity.  Though gold it is magnetised with great evil and thus apposite for the aims of the doctor who had set the hounds of hell after the young man with spectacles, whose hand, right hand is in a dripping parcel.  “It comes from (the oozing) the right hand that took the gold Tiberius.”  The Doctor will appreciate this grisly token for his museum.

Bear in mind that this coin draws its seekers and its finders into a reticulation.  They must meet each unaware of the power that draws them together.

Dyson meets Wilkins:

The lies flow smoothly, glibly and with a malicious pleasure in their inner coherence.  One might say that Dyson’’s epistemic fidelity was flawless.  A liar sees only lies but might there be an occasional islet of truth in the sea of lies?

Who is Smith?  Is he the Doctor muffled in fable?  What was Smith’s mission in the Far West of the States?  It seems to draw the hostility of the natives.  “For every pound of gold upon the scales, a life.”  This sounds like an occult Murder Inc.  Who is availing of this service?

Remember that the prologue is more of an epilogue.  The young man with the spectacles has been found and despatched with extreme prejudice quite as awful as was done in the States.  That would refer to the story told by Mr. Wilkins.  Note that Phillipps and Dyson are approaching the house where the torture has taken place as the Three Impostors have just left.  They are likely to encounter them as they go on their way and thereby the spell of the gold Tiberius will be consummated.

Now read on:

Ernst Cassirer on 'Myth and Religion'

 The question I ask as I attempt to plumb some philosopher is ‘what is his doctrine, what is the mainspring, the assumption, the very clearly indisputable central fact for his thought.  It might be something like evidence: how do I know what I know:  It might be: what am I immediately aware of?  This ‘pole star’ as it were, can be so powerful a true north that other ways of thinking languish, shunned as unpresentable.  Ernst Cassirer whose ‘Essay on Man’ I have been reading does not consider some very important thinkers in his section on ‘Myth and Religion’.  Who and why? Leaving the former aside for a later post (James, Otto, Bergson only to controvert him) the principle behind his exclusion, what Coleridge would have called ‘the understanding of his ignorance’ is to be discovered in his neo-Kantianism.  Writing in the first book of his trilogy on ‘Symbolic Form’:

“Every genuine, basic spiritual function has one decisive feature in common with cognition: it is inherent in an original-formative force and not merely an imitative force.  It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but rather contains an independent energy of spirit through which the simple existence of the appearance assumes a determinate “signification”, a distinctive ideational content.  This is as valid for art as it is for cognition; it is as valid for myth as for religion.  They all live in distinctive image-worlds, which do not simply reflect an empirically given but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle.” (pg.7)

Upamana and Vedic Words (yet again)

 What can we do to naturalize the Vedic Words doctrine?  Why do I call it a doctrine?  It is a firmly fixed rock to which the crampons of epideictic thought are attached.  The Vedas are there forever, with each emission of the universe they remain unchanged.  They are apoureesha (not of human origin).  They act as the secret core of things that makes things to be what they are.  In a sense they are the esoteric Godelian axiom.  All this mundane reality rests on them, the secret seed of things.  They are the ground of grounding. (cf. general post on the topic of 'vedic words' etc: vedic words )

It is then not a surprise to find that Sankara’s teaching is similar to that of Plato’s.  There is a realm of ideas.  There must be. That doctrine to be naturalized must be put to the test of empiricism.  What do we actually do?  What is the procedure by which we gain the use of general concepts, ideas, universals or whatever you are having yourself?  

The pramana upamana (comparison) is a good place to start.  What make comparison possible, a procedure that we can operate?  May I suggest that the ultimate comparison is identity as paradoxical as that may sound.  A thing is found to be the same as itself.  It is what it is.  We know a thing as that thing by the fact that it is that thing.  Our first encounter with an entity is to accept that it is.  That is the default position true for all awareness even mistaken awareness.  Next step ontologically is to recognise it as a ‘some’ thing or as having an identity.  Does that not seem in-duh-bitable?  Such is philosophy with its fascination for the process of turning the obvious into the mysterious.

A thing is what it is.  The being or existence element though never found un-composed is the ontic, the ( ti on: Gk) what it is the ontological.  This initial identity spawns other non-numerical identities using as aids the striking qualities of the original.  The ur-thing is the natural kind that is not a composition of its qualities or attributes.

Identity does not arise in a temporal sense.  It is now and for all time the ground of upamana.  The identity of a thing with itself is eternal, has no beginning and does not last.  Vedic in short if we take that expression as a metaphor.

Mind going out in Advaitic Epistemology

 The vritti is an interesting element of the advaitin theory of perception which they share with the Nyaya school.  If there is direct perception of the object, as against an indirect inferential representation akin to the British Empiricists, does that mean that the mind has to go out to as it were envelop the object. I feel that enveloping metaphor is a leading one as though there were first a sight of the object and then the enveloping could proceed.

A more psychologically based view is that our sensational attention is always on in a muted way.  It is a sort of global awareness.  Who has not had the experience of in a crowded room, everyone talking volubly,  one’s name jumping out of the rhubarb?  In some sense the mind had ‘gone out’ already.  Another example would be the startle we feel when we have withdrawn ambient attention through concentration or meditation and are interrupted by someone.  

Sensation in the form of basic awareness is the global sensitivity to your environment.  It’s like a bare radar screen and then a blip for an object that we should pay attention to.  Vedanta Paribhasa talks about a subtle stream of mind but what is that but another name for attention.  Is not this attention a pale shadow of chaitanaya or Pure Consciousness?

Get Real

 The ‘Real’ as used in metaphysics is a term that I have never been happy with.  I can understand ‘real’ butter, a real Rolex, or  a fake Rolex withal a real watch.  Why should that which is unchanging be taken to be truly real. I can see where the notion might have come from.  A changeful entity both is and is not what it presents.  This is its status as a particular, what it wears upon its face.  As the instantiation of a universal it borrows the clothing of a solid citizen of the substantial republic (res publica).  

Has something gone wrong in our thinking when we subject the world we encounter to such derealisation?  To put it in Platonic terms the flickering world of our projection shares with the realm of Ideas the fact of existence or of being.  Nouns and verbs are the fleeting active personal world pitted against the impersonal ‘real’ world.

This is a mistake

Concerning Self Awareness in Vedanta

 

What ought to be kept a hold of in this discussion is that the mind is by nature non-conscious.

The whole ‘field’ (B.G.13/the Field and the Knower of the Field)  is a plane of physical interaction that

purely by virtue of being/existing is pervaded by consciousness i.e. sat chit. 

‘He shining everything shines after him’ .  Self awareness is a natural result.  Its location in the Body/Mind/Intellect

(Ahamkara) comes as a result of the natural gravitation towards the sensing pole of the interaction. 

This is the distorted image of the self that the anatman doctrine controverts.

'Dracula': The novel as an actual entity.

 A metaphor for the workings of the universe according to the theory of ‘Process and Reality’ would be the novel.  Take ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker as an actual entity.  As a whole congealed event the elements in it are happening at the same time intertwined, separable conceptually but single.  The different modes of information are plied linking the characters.  All the apps of the age, stenography, wax cylinder recording, letters, legal instruments and the vade mecum of travel, Bradshaw’s.   The modern 19th.Century is pitted against the malign chthonic forces rising out of the East.  The hope of rationalism that everything can be explained by theory is ‘decided’ which means in the etymology favoured by Whitehead, cut off.  Transcendental sacramentals, holy water, rosary beads, the figured cross, superject their energies.  The congeries that is the novel is drawn from the mind of Stoker-god who is both within and without his novel.   He is sunk in the text and its embodied genius takes him, its putative author, by surprise.  The book becomes energic  when this happens.  It lives, it lives.  

Reading 'Process and Reality' (in my shed)

 

Well then have I definitively given up on ‘Being and Time’? Yes.  My feeling was that the trek was not worth the trudge.  Now I have to look for a ‘hard’ book to read, a challenge that might be worth the slog.  I have lit on ‘Process and Reality’ by A.N. Whitehead.  Published in 1929 based on the Gifford Lectures of ‘27 and ‘28.  I’ve looked at it before on several occasions and have a general idea of the scope and ambition of what is his major work which has given rise to a school of process philosophy and theology.  One major difference between this work and B&T is that when Whitehead gives you neologisms/locutions he details precisely how this new expression serves to distinguish his thought from that which has gone before.  Thus ‘substance’ might be replaced by ‘actual entity’ and ‘universal’ by ‘eternal object’.  That that sentence under advisement.  As I go on my understanding will change.

The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.  (pg. 7 ed. Griffin and Sherburne )

He later adds that his process philosophy has a relation to Eastern thought:

In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Nisargadatta in answer to a question about causality responds treating the universe as a single block:

Q: As long as the mind operates, causation is a valid law.

M: Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. (#4 I AM THAT)