Gaia Writer

A Man's Perspective On The Pleasures of Reading Jane Austen.

2011-07-21T01:13:00.000-07:00

Sitting down to read the opening pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion is like slipping into the cosiest of slippers, fresh soft new felt dressing gown, and sitting beside a glorious crackling fireplace in the dead hours of the dead months of deepest winter with an enormous mug of cinnamon hot chocolate.

If you, reader, have no experience yet of what is meant by the words "exquisite diction", you have only to turn to these pages and read them aloud to instantly drink in the liquid music of pure English tones. They are such pure tones that they flow past the ear with no sense of labor or effort, but with a complete ease which might deceive the uneducated listener as to their simplicity. But have no illusions! every word is placed precisely where it belongs, and no word is used without art, and any word is omitted with strategy.

Fall silent as you read slowly. Doff your hat; bow your heads. For we are in the presence of literary royalty in these first pages of Jane Austen's Persuasion.

PS - The movie of this book is by far the best Austen movie I've seen, fyi.

2011-07-21T01:10:00.000-07:00

Why Read Tacitus?

As I'm reading the Annals and Histories of Tacitus a few pages an evening I've decided to record why Tacitus is so important to us at the moment politically, historically, morally and personally.

1. Tacitus gives a careful and comprehensive picture of the early Roman empire. Seeing his picture enables us to better contextualize and understand current world events.

2. Tacitus is a sinuous and versatile prose master, even in translation, and thus a great teacher of how to speak, think and write.

3. Tacitus is the model historian, to be copied and defined against for all future tellers of true tales.

4. Tacitus really understands tyranny. To educate and reveal the abuses of absolute power, his vision is supreme, and a kind of negative picture of human liberty.

5. Tacitus sees with absolute clarity the differences between liberty and license, and the differences between civic virtue and private immorality. As such, he is in one book a citizen's education.

6. Tacitus is concerned with the nature of civilization as individual virtue. He constantly shows non-Romans as virtuous and noble free men, and Romans are savages, highlighting the reality of virtue as a property in men from all walks of life. He is truly cosmopolitan, concerned with civilization in its most intimate and personal reality as personal virtue. Thus Tacitus is a great moral teacher.

7. Tacitus gives one of the earliest non-Christian reports of Christianity, thus showing us a fascinating outside view of the young cult.

8. Tacitus gives an example of ruthless honesty in assessing one's birth culture, and how to maintain integrity throughout and avoiding alienating oneself from the culture.

9. Tacitus is a wisdom writer, giving the basic mentality of republican virtue in his words, ideas and personality, showing how one can be free even in the midst of a slavish society.

10. Tacitus is a great maker of sayings. For example:

"The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise."

"Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity."

"To show resentment at a reproach is to acknowledge that one may have deserved it."

"It is a principle of nature to hate those whom you have injured."

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

"Viewed at a distance, everything is beautiful."

"Men are more ready to repay and injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure."

10. For the first and last time in history the entire Mediterranean basin was united in one political unit during the time of Tacitus' histories, so his work is a unique and primary insight into the management of large enterprises such as are commonplace today. Tacitus himself served in this organism as consul and governor.

11. Other than Suetonius and Dio Cassius, both considered inferior historians compared to Tacitus, his is the only history of this key period of time to come down to us mostly intact, and it is said to be by far the best of the three.

12. Critics may equivocate all they like, but Tacitus is self-evidently republican, oligarchical, humanist, and reason-centered. As such, he is an elder contemporary to the Founding Fathers of the United States and valuable as a teacher to the creators of the modern world. He is still relevant for these essential values.

13. Tacitus examines mass psychology alongside and in contrast to individual psychology, delivering acerbic judgements of both; his description of psychology remain powerfully accurate and instructive.

14. Finally, I can no longer see or read the news without seeing them through the eyes of Tacitus, who is the original scholar of dissidents everywhere, and I must record that tyranny is alive and well in the public media - a view which is all thanks to the tutelage of this long-ago Roman historian.

Love Maps of Books.

2010-09-19T20:52:00.000-07:00

Books are the most permanent, stable and reliable friends we have in life, so it befits us to make a love map of them. What is a love map? It's a basis for appreciation and affection. It's a map of what you love about a book. The idea comes from marriage scholar John Gottman, as a way of drawing couples closer together.

The kind of book suitable for a love map must be one you would want to spend all your life with. The writing of books is endless, but greatness remains rare. Choose only the greatest of books to do a love map of, and they will reward you with some of their magnitude.

Then, write the answers to the following questions:

1. What is the title? Pages? Divisions?
2. Who are the main characters?
3. What are the main relationships, briefly told?
4. Where is the action set in space? When is the action set in time?
5. What do the characters want most?
6. What do the characters hate most?
7. What happens in the beginning?
8. The middle?
9. The end?
10. What are the most important events in the novel? Why?
11. What is funny? Strange? Sublime? Beautiful? What affects me?
12. What foods are eaten in the book?
13. What opinions are expressed in the book? How are they still relevant?
14. What are the major tools, props, and physical markers of the book?
15. What color is the book overall, or specifically?
16. How do the characters handle conflict?
17. How do the characters recover from conflict?
18. What do the characters read or do for entertainment?
19. What jobs do the characters do? How do they occupy their time when not in the book?
20. What is to happen to the characters after the book ends? What happened to the characters before the book began?

Ask at least 20 questions, and write down the answers.

By now you will be better acquainted with the book than most literary critics, and have a more thorough knowledge with which to enjoy a re-reading of the book.

The books we love deserve to be treated with love and respect; making a love map of them is the best way to get closer to them.

How to Read Lawrence Sterne's Novel 'Tristram Shandy'.

2010-09-15T08:06:00.000-07:00

Tristram Shandy is a hard novel to read, but funny and brilliant too. These are the best tips I've come by from passionate readers of the novel, summarized for ease of reading:

1. Be patient. Sterne is all about distraction; distraction IS the point of the book. Accept that and let go of expectations and you'll enjoy it.

2. Re-read the first six chapters several times until you get the feel for it. The feel or flow of text is the thing to notice, not the story.

3. Learn what Sterne is trying to do: innocent entertainment, with the eye to puncturing moralistic seriousness.

4. Learn what Sterne is NOT trying to do: the "novel" didn't exist in its modern realistic form at this time and there were no boundaries for writers. In other words, be charitable to the guy; he didn't know what he was doing because he was the first to do it.

5. Read both high and low: notice classical references and crude plays on sexual and scatalogical references. Sterne is master of both high and low taste, and constantly melds them together.

6. Skip boring digressions. There are some boring bits; skip them! Sterne doesn't play by the rules of novel writing; you are not obliged to play by the rules of novel reading.

Why Plutarch Rocks

2010-09-04T09:06:00.001-07:00

You know with Plutarch - as you do with no other classical historian - that you are dealing with a man and not a machine. The man shines forth in his Moralia and Table Talk series of essays. Whereas you might be tempted to think of Suetonius as a sort of central office of the bureau of ancient gossip, you could not mistake Plutarch for anything but a man.

And a good man at that. Plutarch really knew men, and it shows in his Lives that he did. He might know less about politics that we commonly do now, but he knew about loyalty, lies, and lechery - saw that these are the bricks and mortar of power - and so when he sought to define a man he limited him by his character, not only by his intelligence.

I have just finished reading the Lives of the leaders of the Roman Civil War. Caesar, Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Cicero, Antony - the way Plutarch breaks down the times through the lens of each man is strangely impersonal - we see the time, but every character is covered with a sort of gloss of noble rhetoric. I had to go to Cicero's second Phillipic to see Anthony through the eyes of the day, and he sprang forth with unusual violence from Cicero's pen.

Nevertheless, the men are there in shape, if not in energy. Plutarch has maybe hellenized his Roman heroes - since we see Caesar's outrageous energy as merely a tumble of events, and Antony's inhuman vigor as a little roughness at the edges. Clearly Shakespeare had no access to Cicero's Phillipics, or else he would have created a more fierce Anthony. But in the life of Pompey and in the events of Cicero's life, Plutarch is sincere and shines with august words.

No other book evokes the times so well, already perhaps glazed with a thin patina of sentiment for the past, but nevertheless representing the real smell of the time and place from the point of view of a hellene. Plutarch is like a British journalist living in Washington DC - he can see and hear and report, but can he understand the American ways completely? Perhaps not, but the strength and goodness of his vision make the journey worth while

Schopenhauer's "On Style": the Do List of Suggestions for Writers

2010-09-03T07:09:00.001-07:00

I just read Schopenhauer's essay on style. And while it is a lovely sort of a rant, good for a blog entry, it tends to focus mostly on the Don'ts and very little on the Dos. So I thought I would record all of Schopenhauer's Do List.

Schopenhauer says the source of the best writing is epigraphic and monumental. I had to look up epigraphic in the dictionary, on google, and in the encyclopaedia before I got insight into what Schopenhauer means by this.

Before paper, all the most important statements a nation used to make were written painstakingly on stone. Throughout the ancient world, then, the style used was spare, grand, round, full, rich, right and true, and it is this Schopenhauer means when he says "epigraphic" style.

Next: "An author should have sometime to say; no, this is in itself almost all that is necessary. Ah, how much it means!" This is his key piece of advice.

"Le Style Empese" means to pour out words like a flood, according to Schopenhauer - again, no hint of this from a google search - and this he contrasts with a prim polite style, both of which are deviations from the epigraphic ideal.

I like Schopenhauer's nice taste, derived from the French, where he says after Hesiod that the half is more than the whole. I learn the same lesson from Gide as a child when I read in his journals that the problem with the English is that they do not know what to leave out. Knowing what to leave out, however, remains the great problem of style.

Style must be objective - that is, directly forcing the reader to think the same thought as the author.

Always write with care, as if the words are to remain forever.

Always write one thought at a time, then link thoughts logically together into paragraphs, rather than interrupting a sentence with parentheses.

Write like an architect builds, sketching out the plan, and thinking it over down the smallest detail.

That's the sum of Schopenhauer's positive advice. There's much negative advice to of great use, and the essay is well worth a read.

Now, I wish I could only apply all this to my writing retrospectively!

On Thucydides and the Peloponnese War History - A Rampage of Appreciation

2010-06-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

Although I have reservations about the practice, I'd like to include some web links about Thucydides and his work on the History of the Peloponnesian War.

Here's two introductions to the topic for newcomers:

Squidoo lens on the Peloponnesian War.
Wikipedia on the Peloponnesian War.

Many folk try to convert Thucydides' work into a modern and specific political agenda. Or they try to divorce Thucydides from the Athenian context in some way. This kind of intellectual busywork abounds online because, firstly, if you have an agenda and can read, you can shoehorn Thucydides into it, and secondly, Thucydides is writing universal history, history for the ages, and the interpretations generally fall short of the book itself. But they are illuminating attempts, and sometimes shines a great light on the modern political realm by comparison with the smaller Thucydidean realm.

Iraq war opinion piece. - 'Thucydides: Ur-Historian of the Ur-War' (Great title!)

A really sensationally interpreted piece on the famous Melian Dialog - 'The rape of Melos: Thucydides as great thinker'.

A rather brilliant and austere analysis of the failure of Athenian democracy - 'Contemporary Analysis of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War'.

Much of the commentary for and against Donald Kagan's wonderful history of the Peloponnesian War is politically loaded and divisive, but nevertheless it shows up the precise corruption of language and manners which Thucydides analyzed in the fourth century before Christ. Here's the best:

'Thucydides = Spinmeister' by Neko Bijin. - superb and direct analysis. Especially read the comments.

Anthony Grafton in Slate's 'Did Thucydides Tell the Truth?' critiques Kagan rather than Thucydides.

Alan Gilbert at Democratic Individuality brilliant delineates the moderate position on public corruption using Thucydides in 'How public corruption happens - or Thucydides and the day by day removal of the word torture from New York Times' Reporting'.

Here's what seems to be a marvellously cogent take on Thucydides would-be perspective on the war on terror: 'Thucydides, Aquinas and the GWOT' which, alas, is cut short.

Here's a simply awesome re-vision of the passage in Book Three where Thucydides describes the breakdown in human nature after the Corcyran revolution: 'The Attribute of Manliness', by Eric Lippert.

Here's an earnest 'Lessons Learned from Thucydides' by a blog/person named Newrisks, connecting it with modern strategic war theory. He links to a superb pdf essay on the topic here.

Another contemporary crit of Thucydides vis-a-vis modern global politics: Herodotus vs Thucydides. argues against a narrow interpretation of Thucydides.

Now, against these temporal interpretations of interpretations of Thucydides, I want to contrast the scholarly lights of one Mike Anderson, whose fine web log on the ancients casts light in every direction without dispersing views into opinions.

'- The Greeks and their foolish attack of Syracuse'

- Pericles and the defense of democracy.

- The Peloponnesean War and its Causes.

- The Athenian Polis - Golden Age Decay.

I rate this weblog highly for its insight into the Thucydidean worldview. Because Mike doesn't form views unwarranted by the facts, nor does he tend to introduce modern political controversy, his views remain pristine and clear. He doesn't depart from the source of politics in ethics, it seems to me, and thus remains modest and humane in his views.

Finally, outside politics or perhaps meta-political, see the fine essay at Malaspina about the roots of our political thinking in Thucydides' mathematic worldview: Thucydides as Geometry. You need to scroll down to see it, but it's worth it for the insight into the way we think now.

For fun here's a few juicy quotes from Thucydides himself.

In conclusion, I suggest reading the primary author above these secondary and tertiary views. The work is illuminating in itself; the function of commentary is just to illuminate the primary text. If you read Thucydides now then I have here done my job well.

Fear and Loathing in the Ancient Peloponnese: Reading Book One of Thucydides.

2010-05-30T03:14:00.000-07:00

Last night I read the first book of the History of the Peloponnesian War.

Thucydides starts in high drama and vivid circumstance with the Cocyrians asking the Athenians for help. Let's combine our navies, the Cocyrians beg, and we will hold strong against the Corinthians.

Because of a peace treaty they made ten years before the Athenians cannot attack the Corinthians, but they can defend, so after much discussion Athens agrees to defend but not fight. A fine line there is crossed.

Next a long messy battle goes down over the Corinthian city of Potidaea. It creates bad blood. Cocyrians and Athenians descend on Sparta to beg Sparta to fight, to save Potidaea. The Athenians speak up and freak out the Spartans with their arrogance. So the rest of Greece decides they hate the Athenians and want war. Problem is, Athens has overwhelming strength in Greece, so they can't do anything yet. Less than a year later they fight anyway because Athens is so hated.

That's the plot of book one. It's a train wreck of a story, full of drama and outraged speeches.

But there's a load of really cool extras in book one. The dialog between the Athenians and the Cocyrians, the Introduction which gives the ethnology of how Greece was settled (written in a style very like Herodotus), the marvellous debate at Sparta which unsparingly shows the vitality and arrogance of the Athenians, and the awesome digression named the 'Pentacontaetia'.

The theme of the first book of Thucydides is that fear breeds fear. Just before war starts, Pericles speaks. He tells the Athenians to not give into Spartan demands because that will make them look scared. But the Spartans made the demands in the first place because they were afraid of the overwhelming power of Athens! The fear seeded in Cocyra and grown in Potidaea bears fruit in the Spartan diplomatic demands.

What are we to make of Pericles' argument that they have to treat Sparta with consistent defiance? No doubt Pericles is correct when he says "there is often no more logic in the course of events than there is in the plans of men, and that is why we usually blame our luck when things happen in ways we didn't expect." This obscure statement is is Rex Warner's translation, Book 1:40.

Let's look at two other versions:

Crawley: "For sometimes the course of things is as arbitrary as the plans of man; indeed this is why we usually blame chance for whatever does not happen as we expected."

Jowett:"The movement of events is often as wayward and incomprehensible as the course of human thought; and this is why we ascribe to chance whatever belies our calculation."

Translation gossip aside, Pericles seems to be saying that since the plans of others and roll of the dice of luck cannot be relied upon, at least we, the Athenians, can pursue a consistent policy of zero tolerance towards the Spartans. How confident his words must have fallen on his countrymen's ears, and how misplaced his pride in the power of Athens! He would better have been able to practice some small humility and conceed:- but even as I write that I see it's foolish: nothing Pericles or the Athenians could have done would have avoided war by that time. Things already had gone too far.

And that is why, when the famous 'Pentecontaetia', a marvel of concision, tells how Athens came to be so very powerful and arrogant over the previous 50 years, it is so bittersweet to read: we read it foreknowing the end of Athens. This 'Pentcontaetia' sharpens the urgency of the present moment; we feel the fear of the Spartans and the thirst of Athen's enemies for power, and we sense the largeness and centrality of the Greek consciousness becoming both narrow and fanatical as expressed through the Athenians.

Perhaps, I thought as I read this, perhaps the Greeks have not changed at all throughout history? Perhaps the one great Greek virtue and vice is their shining individualism, and, as Pericles suggests, throughout time they keep a single consistent policy of bright selfishness?

Perhaps the chaos of history and chance has not changed Greece one bit from ancient times to today, and the fanatical and ferocious and intellectual and political powers displayed in Thucydides are actually the attendant spirits of the main genius of the age, its vibrant and unrivalled sense of the power and potential of the individual human being?

How to Read a Difficult Book.

2010-05-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

Thucydides is next on my reading list, and I'm highly motivated to read his book 'The Peloponnesian War'.

The problem is, it's a long and complex story. I read the two legendary passages in a previous pass - the Melian Dialog and the Funeral Oration of Pericles. Then I tried to read it through and got stuck. I need help.

So what I've done is great guidance for reading any difficult book.

Start by doing one of these two things first. Either:

- Read through the introduction and notes briefly looking for single words or phrases that praise the book, seeking to just appreciate the text and get a bit of positive emotion flowing. (For example, the intro to Thucydides calls his prose "muscular" - which I find interesting!)

Or:

- Simply count the number of pages of the actual text only. Don't count the opening pages, notes, and outside matter. For example, the introduction to Thucydides is 30 pages long. The text, minus the notes, ends at 600 pages. So the text to read it 570 pages long.

Either get an objective measure of how much you must read to complete the book, or generate a subjective sense of how much you could potentially enjoy the book. Simple!

After you've done that, then you can extend both the subjective and objective approach further.

I'll start with objective.

Thucydides' book is 570 pages long. He divided it up into eight books. How many pages per book roughly? Well, eight times seven is 56, therefore each of the eight books of Thucydides is on average seventy pages long. That's the size of a medium sized novella.

Now for the subjective:

If we examine how the writer organized the book itself into eight books, the book seems to suggest is that we read Thucydides not like a 570 page history, but like eight novellas about the same topic. Immediately I can feel relieved knowing I can read an eighth of the book and put it aside for a week to do something else. I don't have to hold the whole thing in mind. Instead of one huge book, Thucydides is now eight short books.

So, if the 'Peloponnesian War' is really 8 books in one, what are they about? How do they relate together?

There are three ports of call to answer this question: the table of contents, the opening paragraph of each book, and the closing paragraph of each book. Reading all of those will let me find nice dramatic interesting titles for each book. And notice it's a fun way to get subjectively engaged with the book, once again?

From a glance at book one, I wrote "Fear Brings War." That's my personal title for book one of Thucycides - the way I think about and feel about that text. This creates a sense of engagement and ownership of the meaning of the text. It's my book, not just any old book.

Book two - Noble Athens under pressure.
Book three - Civil war in Cocyra.
Book four - Athens kicks ass.
Book five - Athens violates integrity.
Book six - Athens versus Sicily, and the treachery of Alcidiades.
Book seven - War at sea.
Book eight - The end of democracy in Greece.

Now, many of these will be inaccurate or irrelevant; the point is not truth but stimulating interest and passion to read. The point is to engage with the text. At this stage of reading I just want a hook to get and keep me interested.

I will be dipping into the first book now looking for what interests me most. In a sense I will be creating the text in myself rather than passively allowing it to pour into me like historical sludge.

In conclusion, a hard book is not a hard book unless you read it in a hard way. If you read a hard book like you would read Harry Potter, by starting at the start and just pushing through, then you'll probably lose your way at the first difficult passage.

Instead:

1 - engage with the text in nonlinear ways
2 - move between gathering information on the structure of the book and appreciating the qualities of the book
3 - find words and ideas that get you excited and motivated to read on.

If you do this, you'll certainly enjoy the best books more and more, no matter how difficult they are to others.

Reading the Jewish Book of Samuel, Part One and Two

2010-05-25T06:15:00.001-07:00

I was delighted to read the two books of Samuel in the old testament in the last week, as part of my Great Books readings.

The two books form one story, which is the transition of the rulership of Israel from priestly judges to kings. One can assume this is the shift from oligarchy, or perhaps a federated tribal system, to a centralized monarchy.

In many ways the books of Samuel parallel the Annals of Tacitus when he writes about Tiberius. The same transition from a loose system of government to a focused one is taking place. But in the books of Samuel the transition is located in a kind of primitive mythical state of consciousness.

That is not to say the history is not good. Rather, the characters about which the history are written think in simple terms about complex issues. For example, time and time again, reading about Saul's psychotic jealousy and David's brutal and ruthless realpolitik, I find evidence of the most base desires and instincts in these folk heroes. And what are we to make of Jahweh himself, a character who seems at best whimsical? At times the god of the books of Samuel kowtows to the Israelites, and at other times he reacts with brutal unfairness. The Jahweh of the books of Samuel makes Homer's Zeus look positively humane!

In any case, the way the story is written is remarkable given its antiquity and coherence. I found it an enjoyable read somewhat similar to reading a Robert Jordan fantasy novel, and just as barbaric.

Some subjective impressions:

I keep wanting (as Harold Bloom adjures us) to admire King David, and finding in him nothing to admire beyond the machiavellian intrigue of a Renaissance head of state. I find his brutality disarming. Is this is the blessing of Jahweh, the mercy of the Israeli's? Obviously harsh times require barbaric measures, but more than once I find myself dismayed by David's ethical conduct.

Absalom is an sympathetic character. The tragic dimensions of father against son seem obvious to me, with Greek drama under my belt, but to the historians of old Israel they see only a harsh justice against he in whom Jahweh is not pleased. Absalom dies and David triumphs, but one cannot help but wonder what kind of king Absalom would have made instead of Solomon.

I notice the high quality of the story. Knowing the end of the story from earliest childhood, I cannot help but find these histories exciting reading. At times I try to reconcile this violent and primitive folk story with what I know of Jesus, and cannot. The books of Samuel fall so far short of the gospels as to be hardly of the same dimension of existence. Jesus is to David like salt is to sand; Christ accumulates on top of the ancient king's story without being at all the same as it.

Henry James and His Path to Individuation in 'The American'

2010-05-15T19:19:00.000-07:00

I just read Henry James' novel, "The American".

I was inspired to read it by the Great Books suggested novels list. I looked it up on Amazon and it sounded fun and easier to read than the later James novels, and so it was. The style is wonderful, humorous, and vibrant. The prose is luxuriant and jewels up into a bon mot every few pages.

It starts with Christopher Newman, a charming character with a kind of flexible moral fibre that can take almost any kind of shock - except those shocks entailed by the plot of the novel.

Newman is very much a free American, and so he is attracted to the bondage of old European values as his path to individuality and wholeness. His attraction to Madame De Cintre has all the hallmarks of a shadow attraction - the inner feminine draws Newman into contact with his vengefulness, hatred, bitterness, narrowness, and evil side - in other words, his shadow. The solitude and loneliness of Newman's character at the end of the novel can be read as a kind of belated adolescence in him - he finally has come to grips with his shadow side as represented by the Bellegarde family.

The Jungian typology is quite convenient for explaining James' novel, because he plays the opposites of European and American with an open hand about his mixed feelings for both sides of the Atlantic. The charged polarities of emotion represent a sort of gateway for the reader into the authorial consciousness itself, which for me is the deepest and most satisfying experience of reading Henry James.

(James is just a wonderful man - the experience of his living consciousness through the text is ineffable. I do not feel I know him yet, but I should want to, and I intend to read "Daisy Miller", "What Maisie Knew", "Turn of the Screw" and "Portrait of a Lady" to discover more about him.)

But back to "The American".

It is as if by externalizing his European-ness and American-ness, Henry James becomes something larger than both. The effort at becoming aware is tangible by the number of times James reverted to the material of the novel in his long career.

Henry James sought perhaps that intoxicating liberty from culture that came from transcending experiencing itself, and instead, it seems, fell into entrapment in the gravity well of Great Britain's culture. Anglophilic became British. Plain-spoken became ornate. The image of the American unconsciously became something more universal through Henry James' conscious rejection of American moeurs.

On Henry James: 'the Simpler Manners of Men Live Forever'

2010-05-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

In discussing Henry James' influences, Carl Van Doren in 'The American Novel' writes thus:

'Balzac, of course, James greatly preferred to either Flaubert or George Sand, for his great range and close texture: “He has against him,” James however added, “that he lacks that slight but needful thing—charm.” '

I laughed when I read this. How often have I read some clumsy attempt at graciousness in Balzac fall flat! You read it and say "Well, he tried!" but the fact is he kept trying and trying to charm and failing quite completely. The interest of the Comedie Humaine seems less in its charm than in its vitality. By attempting, Balzac would make it so. But words alone do not a novel make.

In concluding his brilliant commentary, Carl Van Doren writes this remarkable and lucid passage. It is written as a single par but I have broken it up for the medium of a blog:

'James’s essential limitation may rather accurately be expressed by saying that he attempted, in a democratic age, to write courtly romances.

'He did not, naturally, go back for his models to the Roman de la Rose or Morte d’Arthur or Sidney’s Arcadia or the Grand Cyrus. But he did devote himself to those classes in modern society which descend from the classes represented by the romancers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His characters, for the most part, neither toil nor spin, trade nor make war, bear children in pain nor bring them up with sacrifices. The characters who do such things in his novels are likely to be the servants or dependents of others more comfortably established. His books consequently lack the interest of that fiction which shows men and women making some kind of way in the world—except the interest which can be taken in the arts by which the penniless creep into the golden favor of the rich or the socially unarrived wriggle into an envied caste. James is the laureate of leisure. Moreover the leisure he cared to write about concerns itself in not the slightest degree with any action whatsoever, even games or sports. Love of course concerns it, as with all novelists. Yet even love in this chosen universe must constantly run the gauntlet of a decorum incomprehensible to all but the initiate.

'Decorum is what damns James with the public. In one of Chrétien de Troyes’s romances Lancelot, on his way to rescue Guinevere from a most precarious situation, commits the blunder of riding part of the way in a cart and thereby brings upon himself a disgrace which his most gallant deeds can scarcely wipe out. Sensible citizens who may have happened upon this narrative in the twelfth century probably felt mystified at the pother much as do their congeners in the twentieth who stare at the wounds which James’s heroes and heroines suffer from blunders intrinsically no more serious than Lancelot’s. How much leisure these persons must enjoy, the sensible citizen thinks, to have evolved and to keep up this mandarin formality; and how little use they make of it!

'Only readers accustomed to such decorums can walk entirely at ease in the universe James constructed. But they have the privileges of a domain unprecedented and unmatched in modern literature. It is not merely that he is the most fascinating historian of the most elegant society of the century. He is the creator of a world immensely beautiful in its own right: a world of international proportions, peopled by charming human beings who live graceful lives in settings lovely almost beyond description; a world which vibrates with the finest instincts and sentiments and trembles at vulgarity and ugliness; a world full of works of art and learning and intelligence, a world infinitely refined, a world perfectly civilized.

'In real life the danger to such a world is that it may be overwhelmed by some burly rush of actuality from without. In literature the danger is that such a world will gradually fade out as dreams fade, and as the old romances of feudalism have already faded. Elaborate systems of decorum pass away; it is only the simpler manners of men which live forever.'

The Goddess as the Sublime: Anxiety and Exhilaration in Beyonce's 'Single Ladies'

2010-05-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

This glorious pagan production manages to be both tasteful, tasteless, and transcend taste altogether. Viewing this clip you see the Sublime in its present cultural incarnation.

Notice the long chords represent anxiety underneath the song and whirring sounds?

Here is a song which can be understood by a toddler and an old-timer. Everyone gets the sense of the song - everyone. It is quintessentially human.

Notice the dance. If you try it out for yourself you feel the meaning of the song. The meaning is: anxiety and exhilaration blur into a single motion of the core of the body-muscles. The body is not about sex but about society - the body belong to society. That is the Sublime invention of the body in Beyonce's 'Single Ladies'.

It is not a Lunar song, not Venusian. Note how relations reflect on inner feelings, rather than on other people? Lunar. Notice how the constant motion of dancing moves in and out of darkness and luminosity? Lunar. Finally, note the three dancers represent the 3 Fates in motion - the weaving and bobbing motions symbolizing the power of the Divine Feminine to shape, cut short, and create human life.

Beyonce herself symbolizes the Lunar Fate that cuts, shortens human life - Hecate, the Dark Side of the Moon. And by doing so she symbolizes the female power to create and end relationships. Simultaneously she cuts us off from reality - the dream of 'Single Ladies' is lunatic, a strange, giddy, emotional high. She signals the capacity of the moon to inspire dreams and reflections, ideas and images, by secluding oneself from everyday life, and also the lunar capacity for distraction and dazzlement at the modern era. And as such, 'Single Ladies' is very much the image of the moment.

A middle path between gradual reform and revolution in Australian politics.

2010-05-11T18:44:00.000-07:00

Gradual reform is not working. Australia can manage her finances prudently by backing into a corner whereby corporations globalize or vanish into backwaters, but she cannot manage her politics that way. The only way is to turn around and take the bull by the horns. Australians need to come to grips with reforming capitalist democracy.

But the commonest middle path between reform and revolution is based on evolution. This posits a blind force which selects for advantage in the moment, thereby giving rise to advantage for the greater whole. But trusting nature leads to winners and losers. Nature to be compelled must be understood, and we can see through the eyes of evolution that change proceeds through disaster, stochastically by chaos, if we take the evolutionary route. This ought not be allowed to happen.

I want to suggest that evolution is not the mean between reform and revolution. I want to suggest evolution is a false friend, and a mimic of the true change we are seeking for. It is by asking for a new way to change we find it, because open questions reduce us to first principles. At the level of first principles we are equals, and that is where I propose to search.

Aristotle proposes an ethics as the basis of a politics. His Nichomachean Ethics follows directly before the Politics, and one echoes the other substantively. Putting aside the theory for a moment, the form itself teaches us that before we can presume on political reforms, we must be clear on what ethical reforms we might want to make to ourselves.

Confucius makes this point explicit when he states that in order to have a good country we most need to be a good child to our parents, a good parent to our children, a good spouse to our partner, a good worker to our business, and a good leader to our community. Practical politics starts and ends in every day ethics.

So the form of political reform must reflect real world and actual ethical reforms. Practical politics advances from hypocrisy to hypocrisy - we tolerate less the more civilized we become, and we must refine our brutal measures of control the more sophisticated we become. I should say, practical politics advances from brutal hypocrisy to cruel hypocrisy to invisible hypocrisy. There is nothing wrong with being a hypocrite - we all fall short, are only human, and can be trusted to let ourselves and others down sometimes. The ill is in failing to try.

Without ethical reform there can be no political reform - is this true?

If so, then ethical reform is the path of choice for capitalist democracy to move forwards.

Australian Political Reform and Global Business Leadership

2010-05-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

A Dose of Political Reality...

As democratic citizens, we Australians have 1 choice every 4 years between Liberals (who care for Australia globally) and Labor (who take good care of Australia locally).

We swing between the two because Australia as a quasi-corporation swings between credit (Liberal rulership) and debit (Labor rulership).

Australia Ltd. performs so poorly financially because as a democracy we are hampered by the need to keep up the appearance of civil liberties.

Therefore any issue other than Australia's financial accounting is IRRELEVANT to real-world political dialogue.

Furthermore...

The Australian Greens, Democrats and Independents merely foster the illusion of democratic process, while remaining well outside the range of a voting mandate.

Because nothing else matters other than the profit/loss statement of Australia as a business, the impotence of the Greens and Independent is reflected in their lack of leadership-level voting.

Bottom line...

ALL Australian politics is just financial accounting and keeping up the appearence of democracy.

The only useful way to talk about Australian politics is talk about the reform of capitalist democracy.

The rest is media spin, "democratic" white noise, failure of courage and lack of imagination.

How to Buy Great Poetry Books Using Spot Criticism

2010-04-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

Here's how to do on the spot criticitism of poetry books:

1. Go into a bookshop and pick out two to four books of poetry.
2. Buy a coffee and read the opening lines of the books. Read no more than twelve lines of each unless they are compulsive reading.
3. Imagine that you must decide whether or not the whole book is worth reading based on their opening lines.
4. Ask yourself about how you feel:
- Do I find the opening lines interesting or dull?
- Am I surprised by distinct impressions?

5. Ask yourself about the strategy of the poem:
- What is the strategy of the poet obvious from the poem's opening lines? Is it obvious?
- Can I predict how the poem will go?

6. Ask yourself about the precise nature of the poem by looking for its center:
- What is the emotional or intellectual center of the poem?
- Given all this, then, is this book worth pursuing further?

7. Take the book you learnt was worth pursuing. Dip into the openings of two to four poems within that book.

8. Ask yourself:

- Are these openings of the same quality as the first poem I read?
- Is this book good enough to buy?

And you're done!

Buy or not buy, following this strategy with speedily educate you about modern poetry and poets, and let you get on the inside track of poetry publishing.

Mortimer Adler on Reading the Great Books For the Sheer Pleasure of It

2010-03-30T07:36:00.000-07:00

"It is a far, far better thing to have read a great book superficially than never to have read it at all."

"Note that I did not say this is the only good way or even the best way to read a great work. I said that this admittedly superficial reading is the best and only way the first time around. I grant, indeed I urge, that the great books are infinitely rereadable, that we discern more meaning in them the more we read them and the more we bring to them. But we must start from where we are and with what we are -- with our present age, experience and insight -- and let these works and writers communicate to us here and now."

"This is a good time to recall that the reason why we reread a book is not merely to grasp what was lost or blurred in the first reading, but also to enjoy again what we enjoyed the first time. Exactly the same impulse is at work as the one that impels us to see again a movie which we particularly enjoyed and admired. William Faulkner, remarking on how he continually reread the literary classics, pointed out that with these "old friends" you do not have to begin at the start and go on to the end. "I've read these books so often," he said, "that I don't always begin at page one and, read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you'd meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes." This is all the more reason to read through and enjoy a great book the first time. Without that initial acquaintanceship and pleasure, the stage of familiar friendship and repeated enjoyment can never be reached."

- Mortimer Adler.

Reading Hippocrates

2010-03-14T06:53:00.000-07:00

Today I read Hippocrates' piece on how the environment creates health or illness. The core idea is that a harsh, dry, mountainous, unfriendly environement gives rise to a courageous and strong people, while a soft, swampy, luxurious environment gives rise to weak and soft people.

Hippocrates tries his hand at some ethnology too. He compares the Scythians, Persians, and Europeans. His views don't seem very cogent. But the most interesting part about his opinions is his views on the causes of the impotence of the Scythians. His diagnosis of the Scythian's commonplace impotence is fascinating. I have to wonder if he borrowed it from someone who had lived among them, though. Hippocrates does not seem much like a travelling man.

The piece is called 'Airs, Waters, Places'. It's quite a sensible paper when you read it in historical context. Hippocrates apprehends the malleable nature of humans, and tries to grasp how humans fit the environment without recourse to myth or religion. In that light, his first efforts are very good indeed.

All Hail the Goddess!

2010-02-24T05:17:00.000-08:00

The Goddess is the energy of movement and power. Society, laws, authority, considerable accumulations of capital, without the sense of aliveness wither and fall. We, without the sense of aliveness, are dead meat struggling at the animal swamp of instincts.

Conscious reverence of female power flowers with freedom. Why? Because the sacred feminine lights up our lives. Our lives are not ours alone, not about our personal wishes or preferences. We are not biologically determined, socially-determined, gender-determined, or ideologically-determined - these are just other words for self-centeredness.

We have a single choice. We are only free to choose life. We are not free to not choose life, but we can neglect the gift. In the light of the Goddess, your wishes do not matter. All that matters is the aliveness, vigor, and vitality you bring to the act itself.

Nature says "Show me." Go on; get up and do the dances. Show her!

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On Reading the Gospel of Matthew.

2010-02-20T15:50:00.000-08:00

I set myself the task of reading the gospel of Matthew as if I had never read it before.

This failed completely: I know so much about the gospel that the best I can hope for is a clear-eyed look at my own complete emmersion in Christian culture and society. The operative work here is "clear-eyed"; it yielded some fine stuff.

Let me say first up that the same uncanny mix of humor, myth, legend, epic, folk story, teaching, poem, and inspired visionary text that one finds in Genesis, one also encounters immediately in the first gospel - the book of Matthew. The form is the same, but everything is different.

Chapter One. The opening echoes the kingly lists of Chronicles, detailing distinguished lineage but this time in the utterly revolutionary context of the prophet Jesus. But already we are on strange land, because Jesus is a kingly prophet. It is as if Isaiah and Solomon were born in the one man. Nothing quite like it existed before. And then comes the divine omens.

Chapter Two. The gorgeous myth of the birth of Jesus is so mediaeval in its telling that one almost forgets it is not a stained glass window. How are we supposed to take this tall tale? The middle ages has colonized our imagining of the gospel. We cannot see beyond the images of those centuries to the true tale.

One thing we can say: this is not the normal style to be reading a miraculous birth-of-a-son-god type of tale; not at all; the tone around it is historical, factual, realistic even. The interpolation of the ooh and ahh of the miracle birth is surely not calculated to blemish the historical record; rather, the simplest explanation is that it is to stun the unquestioning pre-rational audience into acquiescence.

Augustine tacitly acknowledges this difficulty with the gospels in his autobiography when he confesses that the gospels must be read in a very simple and uncomplicated spirit. I agree. They are not addressed to a reasonable, scientifically educated, and literate middleclass. They belong to everyone.

But because of their universal quality we find ourselves in the deep time of human consciousness, looking through the pristine simplicity of Matthew's eyes at the unaccountable astonishment that was Jesus. Is it any wonder Matthew invented fancies to compel his bovine audience to some faint sense of the incredible nature of these events? It is no wonder that the out-wondering wonder of Jesus should attract the ornaments of myth?

Chapters Three and Four. The tale of John the Baptist and the temptation in the wilderness suddenly moves into fact from fancy. John's tale is so remarkable that it must be true, and yet it validates the prophetic angle of Jesus' ministry so perfectly that it simply piles up more compelling evidence of the man.

The three temptations of Christ clearly delineates, in a visual format, the actual advanced spiritual work that have been researched, described and corroborated in modern times by Doctor David R. Hawkins. This is simply how it is; one can question the visual images, but not the content which is pristine to the universal nature of advanced inner spiritual work.

So the opening 4 chapters work to present Jesus as an authority. Chapter one presents his kingly status. Two presents him as a prophet. Three presents his inner qualifications, for those in the know, as an spiritual entity of surpassing purity, having refused the temptations of power and personal gain. The masses are suitably stunned by the first two yarns, and the spiritual students ought to be suitably sobered by the third. Then come the teachings.

And what teachings they are!

Hawkins calibrates the level of consciousness of humanity at Jesus' time as 100. I would argue that Jesus, being a teacher of all humanity, addressed humanity at exactly the level we were at. In other words, imagine Jesus speaking directly and lovingly to a very very scared entity called "humanity". Imagine Jesus speaking to a frightened being, a being lost in terror and darkness of fright and horror, a being run like a robot on its own wishes to avoid further pain. That is the level of consciousness Jesus addresses in his first teaching. And what he says corroborates this presumption: he speaks of the poor, of the meek, of the grieving - all levels of consciousness below 100. On the Hawkins scale, he is speaking about the apathetic and the grief-stricken - those who have been shattered by life and cannot have any illusions about the human hell of that age. Jesus is speaking about those who have broken down denial about the frightening reality of human nature in his age. He is speaking TO the fearful, reminding them of their brothers and sisters who are lost IN grief and apathy. His words, so strange at first hearing, are simply an outpouring of compassion and well-wishing for those who have seen the terrible truth about human nature being hopelessly stuck.

Jesus reminds his listeners of those less fortunate than themselves, who also have less illusions about reality. He blesses people who are free of illusion, but also bereft of hope. Then he turns to integrity. And what does he say?

He blesses those who desire for integrity. Now desire is the level immediately above fear. Jesus is consciously contextualizing human consciousness within the levels below and above it. The entire field of potential for human consciousness receives his attention. Next he blesses those who are merciful, in other words those who give up anger, the level of consciousness above desire; next he blesses the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those who are persecuted. What do all these have in common? They are all social expressions of integrity - making peace, being persecuted. Jesus is talking about being at the level of pride, the level of looking good rather than being good, the level of hypocrisy.

In one dazzling passage, Jesus has recontextualized human consciousness in a totally new light. The grieving and apathetic have seen the truth. Those stuck in desire are really hungry and thirtsy for truth. Those stuck in anger are really seeking mercy. Those stuck in pride and hypocrisy are really only after a pure heart, peacemaking and feeling justified in their victimhood. Notice how Jesus does not condemn these negative energy fields - he simply sees them as love, love in action, love in intention, love in expression. He sees love in human consciousness, and thus it is.

Versus 11 to 16 describe the world of level of consciousness 200, which Jesus calls heaven. It is hard to imagine that human consciousness today, here and now, is at the remarkable level of consciousness overall of 206. That means that we the living of the modern world are in a world which to the humans of Jesus time would seem like heaven. One can hardly underestimate the shocking difference between human nature in Jesus' time and human nature in our time. It is like night and day.

Versus 17 to 37 seems to me like sound traditional morality. Was it anything new in Jesus time. No; Jesus say it is the law of the prophets. Is it just me, or has Jesus just finished with the carrot and now is applying the stick? Certainly he shows sound motivational psychology with his warnings. But let's take a close look at the rhetorical intention.

The opening verses of the sermon from the start to 16 recontextualize human consciousness as love in the process of unfoldment. Then the moralistic verses from 17 to 37 warn about being very moral using fear as a motivating tool. The level of consciousness of the listeners is Fear, level 100 on the map of consciousness. So first Jesus recontextualizes all the levels of consciousness AROUND fear, and second Jesus leans quite heavily on the fear stick and makes a big impact, no doubt, on his fearful audience. He first loosens up the field around fear, then he uses fear to stimulate moral behavior. Or so it seems. But look at what he does next:

"Love your enemies". "Turn the other cheek". This is the value of unconditional love. Where on earth does this come from? Suddenly we have moved from instilling fear of ethical failure to instilling a visionary economic program, without any warning. I think a few of the links in Jesus chain of thought are missing at this point personally. Where is the link between conventional moral scrupulosity motivated by the animal fear of hell, and the humanistic ethos of universal brotherhood, other than in Matthew's torrid ethical imagination?

Chapter Six begins with Jesus teaching his frightened cattle-humans the principle of anonymity. Don't do good acts to be seen in public, he says. Small words for clear images of real things - no further evidence that Jesus is talking to men of little brain is needed than this remarkably lucid explanation of the power of personal anonymity. If no human notices me doing a good act, Jesus explains, then God sees it. A toddler could comprehend this.

The principle of anonymous prayer brings up the basic Christian teachings on prayer: don't try to program God to give you stuff, just ask for what you need today, make sure you stay straight with your fellow humans, and remember to ask God to lead you into a positive energy field because you can't find your way there on your own. Which is all simply factual if you are open to the research on prayer by Doctor Hawkins.

6:14 and 6:15 describe the right relationship between me, God and others. If I'm good with others, then God will be good with me. Real simple. But if I'm not good with others, then God won't be good with me. Karma in one easy lesson!

6:19 to 6:23 I don't understand. Are they esoteric references to light bodies? What are "treasures in heaven" precisely? I am going to assume, from the discussion preceding it directly, that Jesus is talking about karma still. Treasures in heaven means karmic merit. The light of the eye is referring to consciousness itself: literally if I do ill, my consciousness becomes dark and I cannot understand spiritual matters automatically, and if I do good my consciousness is lit up, again literally. I don't think they are esoteric references: I think Jesus is being dead literal about spiritual and karmic fundamentals.

6:24 to the end of chapter six I have often read as anti- or non-materialistic references by Jesus, and in the light of Jesus' status as a wandering mendicant faith healer, this is easy to assume. But I think by putting these references in the context of his audience a different picture becomes clear.

Jesus' audience is at the level of fear. With the addition of the energy field of Jesus himself, as well as Jesus' recontextualizations and inspiration and teachings, they will quickly ascend to the higher energy field above fear of desire. And in that precise instant the downside of desire, greed and lust for gain, will take hold. So Jesus is, as it were, heading them off at the pass. He is trying his best to block off any excuse or evasion of integrity in his audience.

His audience is to avoid showing off (thus dismantling Pride, 175); they are to forgive everyone (thus processing out Anger, 150), and they are to avoid greed (thus minimizing the downside of Desire at 125). His audience are at 100. If they take on board everything he has just said and apply it, they cannot but end up over 200, the crucial line of integrity. Another way of putting this is that if someone in fear takes to heart these few lines, he or she can move into courage by simply applying them to their situation. This is a pretty remarkable claim, an enormous leap by any standards in consciousness from fear to integrity, and Jesus accomplishes it in fewer words than most people take to share dinner with their family.

Chapter Seven consists of various legendary admonishments. Jesus warns people who fail to apply his teachings with the "house built on sand". He warns against occult gyrations with those who cast out demons but don't have integrity so are not recognized by God in Heaven - ie, as integrous. He warns against fake spiritual teachers in a beautiful phrase "wolves in sheep's clothing". Jesus is obviously really trying to make sure his hearer get what he is saying. Integrity, Jesus is saying, integrity integrity integrity. And his audience is responding "Baa-aaa!"

Chapters 8 and 9 are sundry miracles. In these chapters the ooh and ahh factor of the miraculous birth is intermingled with sage titbits from the Master. It functions kind of like an integration of the miraculous and the historical. Then in 10 the real ministry begins. Jesus gives instructions to his disciples. They are extraordinary, bizarre instructions.

Jesus might as well have suggested his disciples go forth wearing fruitbowl hats and dancing traditional Hawaiian dances as suggest what he actually says. Is this guy for real? A life of poverty, dirty clothes, faith healing and testimony is in store for the 12. No wonder the harvest was great but the laborers few: Jesus was a tough boss!

I also find it remarkable that none of the disciples puts up his hands and asks for some exemption from the rules. Either we are to suppose Matthew was portraying Jesus as far more hard-arse than he actually was, OR we must assume that Jesus selected the 12 out of a prior organisation that they were already part of. Given the political implications of John's ministry and Jesus' birth, the possibility one considers is that the 12 arose out of the political organization of which Jesus was the focus. But Jesus tells the 12 to heal and teach, not organize sit-ins and sign petitions. So what Jesus is explicitly doing with this ministry is, it would seem, taking people from a political organization around him and putting them into a spiritual order. Clearly the disciples are, well, disciplined. Were they from a paramilitary political order? I am not thinking of the Essenes here; I am willing to assume perhaps that Jesus' influences arose from the Essene tradition, but one must also concede that the disciples did not arise out of nothing. They didn't pop into existence as a miracle. Jesus recruited them from some prior organization, probably political in nature.

I resist attempts to politicize Jesus' message, personally. I think he arose from a political context into the universal ethical and spiritual contexts of his teaching and healing ministry. But the incredible fortitude of the disciples revealed in chapter ten indicates they likely had a military origin of some kind.

Chapter 11 shows Matthew's poor logical organization. It consists of Jesus giving a kind stream of consciousness impression of how things are all going. It's sort of like Jesus as us are watching the disciples go out doing their think and ruminating about how things are progressing. But it's loose and baggy and mercifully a short chapter. It has various legendary sayings in it, of course, that any civilized person would commit to memory and use in their right place.

Then suddenly in chapter 12 the disciples are back, or these are different disciples maybe. And Jesus is bickering about the Law with some conservatives. The conservatives, no doubt somewhat arch about faith healing and the taint of revolutionary politics inevitably attached to some of Jesus' more vociferous disciples, beat up the issue of the Sabbath. But this is the old left and right, conservative and liberal opposition all over again - this is not about Jesus but about the culture of the time.

Chapter 13 begins the parables. 14 is miracles with food. 15 and 16 are Jesus bickering with the conservatives again, ending with a foreshadowing of his death at their hands.

Chapter 17 is an exact match for chapter 3, which describes in concrete images some advanced spiritual work done with James, John and Peter. The interesting thing here is how the four men 'see' Moses and Elijah. I take this to mean the statement that at the highest levels of consciousness one experiences what the sages who passed through that condition also experienced, experiencing it as oneself at the same time as the individual. So I think Peter, James and John experience what Moses experienced, and become that which Moses had become also. Which would be a condition on the map of consciousness in the mid 700s. I think chapter 17 describes the enlightenment experience of James, John and Peter.

Chapter 18 addresses spiritual egotism and the problem of specialness - both common issues for spiritual students. How does one deal with ego and pride at spiritual attainment? And, how does one deal with the glamour of being special?

Chapter 19 would be more kvetching with the conservatives only, were it now for the final lines of this chapter making some remarkable statements. Jesus says, in Matthew 19:26-30, that man needs a savior to be saved, and cannot be saved on his own efforts, but he adds a statement which seems to imply in a veiled way that the conservative factions addicted to legalism will be judged by the spiritually advanced disciples. This is very interesting indeed. It is as if Jesus' twelve disciplines are set up as an alternative for the hopelessly-mired-in-negativity twelve tribes of Israel. Individuals replace tribes, Jesus seems to be suggesting here. All very interesting ideas, and very relevant for the Roman world and for our world today.

20, 21, 22, 23 represent a melange of 3 elements: parables, miracles, and Jesus putting up patiently with the conservatives' bitching. But in 23 Jesus really loses his cool and starts cussing up a storm against his enemies. They have finally and officially pissed off the son of God, and it's not pretty.

24 and 25 are fascinating chapters for us precisely because they describe the modern world. We live in a world where integrity matters. We live, then, in a world where the kingdom of heaven, integrity, is here and now; a world where one is taken up into integrity while another remains, unable to see or even know the different dimension the integrous occupy.

The traditional interpolation of doomsday occult visions from the book of Relevations is unfortunate. According to consciousness research, the end of the world scenario in that book is simply flat out false. So what Jesus must be talking about in Matthew 24 and 25 is not some imaginary apocalypse, but rather a real world emergence of integrity as a practical way of being in the world for most people. In other words, Jesus is talking about ordinary life in the West every day. Another day in paradise.

26 to 28 tell the tale, in choice few words, of Jesus' arrest and death at the hands of the conservatives. We all know the ending; what is remarkable for me is how brief the story is in Matthew.

Why did Matthew write this way? We have perhaps a quarter of a book of Jesus speaking, as it were, straight into Matthew's microphone. We get the raw feed on Jesus' instructions to his disciplines, Jesus' rant against the conservatives, and even a little chapter where Jesus is sort of rambling to himself somewhat loosely while his disciples are off discipling. The rest of the book, shorn of its mythic opening and tragic ending, is endless bickering and miracles of healing and feeding. Jesus mostly seems to have brought health and food and moral guidance in this book.

The most remarkable part of the book of Matthew is the sermon on the mount. Once it is put into the context of the listeners to whom Jesus is addressing his comments, it brilliantly illuminates Jesus' model for teaching and inspiring others. Jesus makes himself accessible as a savior through this sermon.

I suppose the other value in the book of Matthew is for convincing the credulous to follow Jesus. There are no appeals to reason to be found here, and many appeals indeed for the sheep to follow the Shepherd.

So, that's my clear-eyed take on the book of Matthew. It has taken me two hours to re-read it and keep running notes on it as I go, and I am glad I did. It is a wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone. Get a copy and underline all the cool statements in it and commit them to memory. Try out Jesus' views on prayer. Read the sermon and pursuade yourself that only integrity is worth living for, even if you already 'know' the sermon' and its purport. It's a fine piece of work, worth many readings. I certainly enjoyed the chance to share it with you.

How Negative Beliefs Can Be Deconstructed and the Past Forgiven

2010-02-18T06:12:00.000-08:00

A few years ago I moved in with an eco-nazi who scolded me whenever I washed a plate under a running tap.

"That's a waste of water!"

"It only takes a few seconds," I mildly pointed out.

But her shaming scowl did the job which her words could not. I took on the negative belief system that there is not enough water to go around, and that I was not entitled to have as much water as I loved trickling over my delighted fingertips when I washed dishes. I felt shamed.

Then tonight I was washing my rice bowl under the cool tap and the intense feelings of shame and judgment came up and I recognised them from this lady's mean-spirited and thoughtless act of cruelty.

"Fuck off," I told her. "I am not part of your negative program! Fuck off and keep your limiting belief. I am an unlimited being. I love water. I live in an abundant world. There's more than enough water for everyone."

The same instant I saw that I had associated water with emotion, feeling. I came to believe by extension that there was not enough emotion to go around, there was a shortage of good feelings.

"I am in the flow of life," I said. "I love and accept all my feelings. I am free from the past and joyfully aware of my present."

Now I understand why I had such trouble forgiving her. Her obsession with the woundedness of the planet was just a straw man for her own traumatic and damaged psyche. I wasn't a target for her bullying, but just a safe object for her to vent her self-hatred upon. She didn't hate me at all; herself was what she hated.

Tonight I realise this while doing the dishes, and I finally forgive her completely.

I love the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

2010-02-05T19:38:00.000-08:00

Imagine having the perfect uncle.

Not only does he introduce you to the world at large, but he is a relentless adventurer. He travels far and wide in search of brilliant trophies.

Your perfect uncle (or aunt) knows all the best stories. He knows all the best places to go.

But more than that, imagine he is of the highest discretion and so only speaks to lead you out into further adventures of your own. Imagine his tact and forebearance allow you to explore exactly what you need to at your own pace and depth.

This is what the Gateway to the Great Books are.

"The works in that set [the Great Books] have a certain magnitude, but they also occupy a unique place in the formation and development of Western Culture. Each of them represents a primary, original, and fundamental contribution to man's understanding of the universe and of himself. It has been said of them that they are books which never have to be written again, that they are inexhaustibly rereadable, that they are always contemporary, and that they are at once the most intelligible books (because so lucidly written) and the most rewarding to understand (because they deal with the most profound and important subjects). It has also been said of them that they are the repository and reservoir of the relatively small number of great ideas which man has forged in his efforts to understand the world and his place in it; and that they are over everyone's head all of the time, which gives them the inexhaustible power to elevate all of us who will make the effort to lift our minds by reaching up to the ideas they contain."

The above sustained and sublime piece of prose is from the Introduction to the Gateway to the Great Books. From the prose style I believe it may be written by Hutchins, but it doesn't say.

I read and reread this paragraph with wonder. The Great Books are larger than my comprehension. And it is the Gateway to the Great Books that have enlarged my sensibility bit by bit so that I can appreciate the truth of these words.

For the last 18 months I have been taking a liberal arts degree through the Gateway to the Great Books. I am just over half way and feel my sense of myself, the world, other humans, nature, and God has been profoundly deepened by this study. It has been liberating. Becoming an autodidact has been empowering. And sharing what I have learnt has been enriching.

What Prose Style Can Teach Us About Moral Character: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Macaulay.

2010-02-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

I do not like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I find him an irritating sot, a malignerer, and a kind of prose poet whose sentimentality repulses me. But I get that Fitzgerald has made virtues out of his necessities, and even though his vices may repel they nevertheless glitter with the sprayed-on gloss of honest and vital emotion.

So I sat down to read 'The Diamond As Big As the Ritz' with little expectations of more than a pretty read a la the Great Gatsby. And so it was!

Macaulay's prose reminds me of Gibbon's, but Gibbon's is the purer style. They are very similar, so contiguous that the distinct quality of Macaulay's is obscure. Gibbon's style is nobler, less opinionated, and more just; Gibbon's fine way of applying multiple verbs to a single actor is so stylish and unique that it has no compare anywhere; I am so impressed by Gibbon's style that I can only find him a better writer - I was about to say a better man - than Macaulay.

I do not dislike Macaulay. I don't know him well enough from the one essay. But I receive an overall impression of journalistic quality in his work which leaves me cold.

Please let me clarify that view.

Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli goes to pains to contextualise Machiavelli in the social context of his times. When he compares the social context of his (Macaulay's) own time with Machiavelli's time, I became skeptical. Macaulay is trying to be an apologist for Machiavelli by shifting the blame for Machiavelli's 'evil' onto the entire Italian people in Machiavelli's time and place; and instead of making sense of Machiavelli's morality, by asserting that every age has its own morals he relativises moral considerations into nonexistence. Macaulay implies that every age has its own morals, which are incommensurate to another age's morality; if this is the case, why do we even bother to judge the morality of people and nations outside our own time and place? How can we learn moral lessons from history if morality is incommensurate from age to age? It is a nonsense argument.

And the review of Machiavelli's works, while interesting, seems a little irrelevant; we are only really interested in the political thought, and the moral questions around that. Macaulay rambles here.

So too the comparison of Machiavelli with Montesqieu. Macaulay reckons Montesqieu is popular because of the sentimental fads of his day, not because of the excellence of his book, the Spirit of Laws. But if this were true, then why is Montesqieu in the Great Books and Macaulay is introducing them? Macaulay accuses Montesqieu of matching a far-flung example to a principle, instead of finding principles to fit the proximate political circumstances. This is just to say that Montesqieu argues his case as best he can, and Machiavelli does too; to question the evidence is not to invalidate the theory's weight, and Macaulay does not broach the theory behind the Spirit of Laws.

So as you have read so far my impression of Macaulay is that he writes like a journalist. No doubt more will be revealed.

I don't mean to be censorious of these guys. I believe the character of a writer matters, and vices and errors in superb writers are even more obvious because of the overall excellence of their prose. Both Fitzgerald and Macaulay are urbane and erudite sophists, and fine stylists. If either man were a poor writer then their defects would not be so clear.

Montaigne on Managing the Will.

2010-02-05T18:48:00.000-08:00

Michel says "In my opinion, a man should lend himself to others and only give himself to himself."

This is good food for thought!

What does it mean to lend oneself? He says to lend your faculties to another is make yourself a slave to them. You need to be thrifty in lending yourself out. What does it mean to give oneself?

Is happiness more in being fully involved in life, or in detachment, or in involvement without attachment, or in something else? Montaigne says it is in involvement with detachment.

Soon I find myself agreeing with Michel. When we act without passion for outcome, we act freely and happily. We can lend ourselves wholly to the task and keep ourselves for ourselves. To give all and keep all at once is the wisdom of prudence indeed!

Montaigne's prudential guideline1 : want only what is near and free.
Montaigne's prudential guideline 2: the reasonable man prefers peace and avoids disturbance above all else.

Is this quietism? No; in Montaigne's age is was realistic. Confucius agrees: when the leaders are vicious the wise men act stupid.

On Mozarts String Quartets 21 and 22

2010-02-05T18:47:00.001-08:00

A string quartet is a conversation between four sensible people. Here those four sensible people are aspects of Herr Mozart speaking along conventional lines with subversive subtext.

Because, for the Mozart String Quartets 21 and 22, the manner of the conversation is as important as the subject of the conversation itself, the values of the string quartet are implied in the style. Beauty is the object, yes, but what kind of beauty does not have goodness as its discourse on some level? So the topic of the string quartets is goodness through the style of beauty.

Just how good is the style? It's supple. Balanced. Everyone has their say. Everyone is in agreeance. Everyone has their individually beautiful quality cherished. Mozart's String Quartet's are a conversation that goes they way a conversation in heaven would.

And no-one says any more than what is their place to say. Perfect justice prevails - Mozart is auditory Platonism. The Platonic Forms are the modal structure of these pieces.

My only criticism is in the intellectual content: since the four instruments must at times be as one, and at other times must be utterly individual, the key idea behind the music must be the one and the many. Since I hear a commercial recording, I hear only the one, and the careful parsing apart of the sections of the music itself through the ear and mind must bring out the many voices hidden in it. Which is a pity.

I would have these String Quartets 21 and 22 focus instead on the conflict between the demands of the conventional form (of unity) and the requirements of individual virtuosity. In other words, the pacing before and after individual instruments might be idiosyncratic - everyone pauses for a different time before they respond to what has been said.

And I would have the distinction between the one and the many in the music further heightened. By creating deeper contrast, I would ornament the single voices of the individual instruments, and make plain with the most staid conventionality those parts where the four instruments sing in unison. This policy would greatly heighten the dramatic tension in these string concerts, and by bringing out the conflict it would help listeners discover the kind of conversation a quartet is, and how they might be able to have just such a conversation themselves.

Because the wider intellectual content of the Mozart String Concertos is surely that of friendship! Who but a true friend would sing together so charmingly? It is the felicity of good and lovely friends that makes this music sing out to our hearts and back again. Have a listen and see if you don't remember some great conversations you have had in the music!

Reading Dostoyevsky For Kicks and Giggles

2010-02-05T18:11:00.000-08:00

Every few days I read a bit of Augustine; he is magnificent reading, but difficult, irregular, and strange.

I read Augustine in the middle of the day, in snatches.

Even in his word choice I can feel the chaos and confusion of his age. In the irregularity of subject and the novelty of the autobiographical voice, we see for the first time what I call the Christian difference. Before Augustine the chief figure of the age were nobles. Augustine was a common school teacher, and a bishop. After Christ, it is the common folk who make history.

But the palpable darkness of Augustine frightens to me. His profound seriousness is the only relief from human nature. His century is a frightening place.

In comparison to Augustine, Dostoyevsky is a blaze of light.

Before I sleep I read as much Dostoyevsky as I can. Before sleep is best - his work is liminal - that is, on the edge of unconsciousness. Reading him when you first wake up or after meditating seems altogether too cheerful to me, but in the dark hours Dostoyevsky shines.

I'm reading Demons; the new Penguin translation is flat out fine work. Translator was Robert A Maguire. I love how well Penguin has translated his work. Maybe the choppy rough Russian just moves better into modern English than the French? I don't know.

Demons is confusing and superb. First I had trouble with the names, and had to bookmark the cast of characters list at the end of the text and refer to it constantly (I still do a bit). Second I had to deal with the allusive and hysterical way characters have of delivering major plot points. My thinking goes something like this:

"So... Stephan Verkovensky is maybe betrothed to some nobody called Sonya or Dunya who is the protege of his patron Vavarya Stravogina, for manifold deeply suspicous and impure reasons other. But Vavarya's maybe looney son, is returning home soon, bringing along with him Stephan's son who is an unknown and sundry complications. And Kirilov thinks everyone should commit suicide to prove there is no God. And Liputin is a vile gossip who seems to know everything and say nothing. And there is a new governor in town whose wife doesn't like Vavarya Starvogina. And everyone speaks French when they're excited, which is all the time, which is tiresome to deciper into English but simpler than having to stop to look it up in the stupid notes at the end of the Penguin Book because you know what it means anyhow if you stop reading for a minute and dig out the French vocab but that means you have to stop reading to translate French."

Jeebus himself couldn't sort out this kind of absurd mess, but it sort of makes sense, if you ignore the many maybes in the plot. Reading a summary online would take away the surprise and leave the hysterics.

At 17 years of age, when I last read Demons, I doubt I understood it anyhow.

Do you know why I find him funny? Because I really enjoy Dostoyevsky's company. I really like Fyodor Mikhaylovich the man. I empathize with him. I feel his wild humor. I see how he sees the Russian people. Dostoyevsky cannot see the future, the Bolsheviks and the present Russian Mafia kleptocracy. Instead he sees the foolishness genius and passionately misplaced devotion of the Russian intelligentsia to French frivolity and sentimental vacuity a la Russe. He sees it clearly, and sees it fully, accepts it all in himself, and he laughs.

Do I love Dostoyevsky most of all because he laughs at himself? I don't mean him to reduce him to a character out of Gogol. He is much more than anything Gogol could invent.

Hm. Please allow me to help non-Dostoyevsky readers understand what kind of experience they are missing out on:

Reading Dostoyevsky is like being trapped in a big hessian sack with twenty-seven affectionate lapdogs: it's unpleasant at the time but when its over you secretly enjoyed it so much. All those flickering pink tongues. Mmm.

How To Get Unstruck When Writing a Story: Michael Swanwick on Character Triangles:

2010-01-17T06:50:00.000-08:00

Just in case you weren't aware, Michael Swanwick is a genius and writes science fiction. These are his words:

"A story requires at least three characters. So the triangle a useful tool when analyzing why a story-in-progress doesn’t work. Make a diagram of all the characters and who they interact with. Look for triangles. If there are none, then you’ve identified the problem:

"A protagonist needs to be pulled in two different directions, so there can be a resolution that is a synthesis of interpersonal forces. A protagonist and an antagonist (who would be represented by two dots connected by a line) don’t enact a story – they’re just playing tug-of-war. Which is no more a story than is a football game.

"So a man falls in love with a woman. Either it takes or it doesn’t. No story. A woman has to choose between two men. This might be a story. Draw the triangle.

"There’s a line from her to Man A and another to Man B. But is there a line between the two men? What is their relationship to each other? Usually when such a story isn’t working – when it doesn’t feel like a story – it’s because the two men have no direct relationship with each other, but only interact through the woman. Ask yourself how you can make their relationship interesting. Are they best friends? Father and son? Astronauts competing for a place on the first rocket to Mars?

"The insight can be extended to ask related questions. Is the relationship on one side of the triangle significantly weaker than the other two? Are there more than one triangle in the story, and if not should there be?

"As you can see, the utility of this is extremely dependent on the specifics of the story in question. The one universal that I insist upon is that the triangle is descriptive rather than prescriptive. We can all think of perfectly valid stories that don’t have character triangles in them.

"And it does no good to start with a triangle. Let your story find its natural shape. If you get stuck, diagram it out and look for the triangles. If the story doesn’t get stuck, don’t give it a second thought."

Reading the Aeneid of Virgil, Blow by Blow

2010-01-08T07:31:00.000-08:00

I read books 3, 4, 5 and half of book 6 of the Aeneid tonight (so far). Publius Virgilius packs a lot of story in his text. I can best appreciate this work in the light of Homer, the tragedians and Plato; the summation of all story up til his time is simply remarkable. It is is as if Virgil in his epic has set out not simply to tell a story, but to give all Story, the archetype of story-ness, the All-Story. But he is not summing up like Homer; characteristically Roman, Virgil seeks to engulf the memories of stories past. Virgil's Aeneid is a colony poem in more ways than one.

And what about the person, the consciousness of Virgil? I must admit I read Virgil through the more accessibly humane Dante. So much of Dante is clearly enriched by Virgil, that if the character Dante had not kept him at his side the strength of Virgil's poem would have overcome Dante the poet. Keep your literary influences close - this seems to be Dante's approach to Virgil.

Virgil sometimes comes across as a bit of a patchwork man. The story leaps from reference to reference of other men's work - and it works, it flows, but we do not clearly get a sense of the cohent consciousness of a work. At least, not yet. Maybe I ought to read on before I judge the man!

The poetry is fine. I have fiddled with many translations, and chanced on the Fagles-like one by Kline, which is superbly lucid compared to the Dryden (best of the olde translations). Tony Kline's Aeneid is free online, and has the benefit of having the books subdivided into the more precise episodic structure. This means the reader gets to rest without losing the thread, and gets reminders of what the thread was, and the sense of the story stands more clearly out than if we just have books one to twelve. It really helps the read. Also, Kline's version renders words that past generations might have called the 'moral sentiments' into plain emotions, which is a bit more real.

Kline's translation of Aeneid is not fancy, but neither is it pedestrian - the poetry reads simply and roughly into Virgil's luminous verse. Compared with ye olde Englishe translations, with which one needs to stop and mentally retranslate into modern English every dozen lines, Tony Kline's translation is a pleasure to read.

Update: I'm now at book 8, and the patchwork is becoming clearer. It makes better sense how Virgil's exercise in epic poetry is not an end in itself but a means to justify the Roman empire. But I can also see how, by making the poem a means to a political end, Virgil undercuts his personal source of inspiration. One cannot turn such sophisticated and urbane critical and aesthetic faculties onto the legends of the founding of Rome without also uncovering something of a critique of the beautiful lies of armed force. Virgil's falterings really illuminate why the Romans were relatively scarce in creative genius: it is hard work being a good Roman!

Update: Finished. I can see why Virgil didn't finish the poem. love the first half of Aeneid, but the second is like reading Rupert Brooke's war poems for a few thousand lines. Pathos becomes bathos. Lyrical emotion become prim patriotism. By the time Turnus dies it is just dreary, and the rage of Achilles has become the duty of Aeneas. Meh.

Part two Aeneid sucks more than Scylla's whirlpool. I suggest prospective readers read up until the Trojans land in Italy and stop there. For reading pleasure, the first half is superb. Trust me on this one: the Trojans settled Italy just fine.

On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

2009-06-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

On Reading Andre Gides Journals.

2009-06-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

When I was sixteen years old, I got Gide's Journals through an interlibrary loan, my first such loan. I felt the librarians had done me an enormous favor. Perhaps they had; they charged nothing for the service.

They were two blue bound editions, quarto sized, printed and bound with glorious good taste. The peccantine librarians had vulgarly clad them in white laminated plastic emblazoned with the words "INTERLIBRARY LOAN"; I ripped them off as soon as I got home.

I remember the cool old blue cloth cover in my hands, and how my heart beat when I opened volume one. I read them through in a month and returned them with regret and gratitude. I would have been hard pressed to explain the secret hold over my imagination Gide exerted; but since I hesitate to anatomize the man to explain the magic away, let me simply speak of Gide in the same way I have heard Will Shakespeare praise good men:

Gide is an immaculate prose stylist, a strong moralist and comic ironist par excellence; a blending of intellect and emotion, with only sensuality and solitude to bring his luminous flights to ground every so often; a character shoveled with fits of sentiment and fires of redemption which his airy emotional nature could never bear to fully actualize; a man, in short, in whom all the fruits of the intellect grew delicately from the moral sentiments without any intervening sense of individual labor, private hope of restraint of instinct or release from reason, or evasion from the duty of his talent.

Soon after I bought the Penguin edition of Gide's Journals. I found myself disappointed. What magic had been in the text? - I could not recapture it. The book was water damaged and stiff after some years in my mother's basement, and when I re-read it this year it sounded as if it had been never written but only translated. The Penguin translation of Gide's Journals was execrable. Let me see who the job fell upon... Justin O'Brien. Seems he also wrote a frigidly inadequate introduction.

Last week I came upon the old blue bound books. They were forty dollars in the snobby overpriced antiquarian bookshop on North Terrace. But after I verified they were the same books I had devoured so eagerly as a teen, I longingly put them back on the shelf. Better the memory of a magical read than the disillusionment of a mediocre second read. Or was it simply that I did not wish to fall in love again with that luminous prose, and thereby find myself spending forty dollars on the Journals?

Crikey - It's Proust!

2009-06-29T09:11:00.000-07:00

Reading Montaigne on the train today I came upon this:

"The men whose society and intimacy I seek are those who are called well-bred and talented men; and the thought of these gives me a distaste for others. Their kind is, rightly considered, the rarest that we have, a kind that owes almost everything to nature. The purpose of our intercourse is simply intimacy, familiarity, and talk; the exercise of the mind is our sole gain. In our conversations all subjects are alike to me. I do not care if there is no depth or weight in them; they always possess charm, and they always keep to the point. All is colored by a ripe and steady judgment, blended with kindness, candor, gaiety, and friendship... I know my kind even by their silences and their smiles... Hippomachus said truly he that he knew a good wrestler simply by seeing him walk in the street."

I read this with a shock of recognition. Crikey, I said to myself, he's talking about Proust!

It is no good telling me that Proust and Montaigne live three centuries apart. Just imagine Montaigne and Proust in conversation! (I consider myself humbly fortunate to have friends who can follow my conversation at all.)

Neither it is any use telling me that Gide or Saint-Beuve could fit the bill. They do not. Saint-Beuve is Montaigne's disciple, not his mate; and Gide - his diminution.

How to Be A Great Friend: The Great Books of the Western World on Great Friendship.

2009-06-22T08:53:00.000-07:00

These are the basic readings on friendship. If you want to be a great friend, here is how.

1. Start with Lysis. This is supposed to be about friendship but actually Socrates is just teasing. Listen in on how Socrates uses the passion for Lysis to direct him to a wise end? This is one aspect of being a great friend: direct your friend to their own greatness. The Lysis of Plato is the single best instruction manual on making friends with young people, because it shows intead of tells you how.

2. Next, read Cicero On Friendship. If the Lysis is the best guide to young friends, the dialog On Friendship by Cicero is the best instructions on how to make friends with elders. Notice how wonderfully Gaius and Quintus draw Laelius out; can you see how they manipulate him with words to show his best qualities? Since it is no deceit to bring out good qualities in your friends, the text of this short dialog really shows another great lesson in friendship: use words to draw out the best qualities in your friend.

3. Finally, we come to a crucial parting point in the lessons on friendship: whether to follow the heart or the head? Francis Bacon is a friend of the head variety, whereas Michel de Montaigne is a friend of the heart. Both have essays entitled ¨On Friendship¨. Between them you must choose your lesson. Which is more important to you? Which is more important to your friend? And, are you aware of the consequences of either path? Among friends with worldly goals and practical concerns, this is the essential thing to know. So the lesson these two men suggest is: Be aware of what kind of friendship you are in, heart or head, and what consequences flow from that.

4. Last but not least are the ethical analyses of Aristotle, the reasoning of Epictetus, and the essay of Seneca. These mordant analysts cover the same material as Cicero with less charm. And they instruct me in the finest lesson of friendship, which is: Be friends only with people who make you happy and who you love to make happy. Because anything that lasts must make the effort to be charming. This

There they are: my four lessons of friendship:
1. Direct your friend to their own greatness. (Especially in young friends)
2. Use words to draw out the best qualities in your friend. (Especially in elder friends)
3. Be aware of what kind of friendship you are in, and what consequences flow from that. (Especially in peers)
4. Be friends only with people who make you happy and who you love to make happy.

Cicero On Friendship, aka, De Amicitia

2009-05-30T23:27:00.000-07:00

I'm reading the Great Books syntopically on the subject of friendship, and Cicero's number came up to receive a jolly good reading.

The essay on friendship by the Cice honors a great mutual mancrush between one Scipio Africanus and Gaius Laelius. Laelius extols his dead buddy Scipio (aka 'Skip the African'), shares his definition of friendship, and gives rules to be observed in regard to said ship.

Cicero's On Friendship contains a preface where Cicero dedicates the essay to one of his dear pals. Then two younguns suck up to Laelius to extract the good oil from him.

Cicero's a straight talker. Virtue equals friendship. This means never asking for an unethical favor, not letting passion, politics, or pain intervene in virtue practices, and learning and sharing knowledge together. S-weet.

It's about that simple. The Cice ends with another extolatory clusterfuck and some sweet words to the effect that virtue practice is the be all and end all of friendship. It's an inspiring read and unlike this piece of writing contains absolute zero percentage of hot chicks.

A hard man but a fair one that Mister Cicero.

On Two Classic Novels: Moby Dick and Tom Jones

2009-05-30T23:06:00.000-07:00

Ah, Tom Jones and Moby Dick. Henry Fielding and Hermann Melville; hm!

Reading Melville I feel like he had written four or so sea tales of the commonest kind, stories strictly for men of the mediocre make, perhaps, and one day woke up and decided that if he didn't quit playing it straight this very instant then he might actually explode from lack of sincerity. So he quit pleasing paltry readers and wrote a sea story that revealed to the whole world his amazingly oddball personality.

Let me be very clear: Hermann Melville is a very strange fish. Just as Flaubert (pronounced 'Phallus-butt' in English, fyi), used to say "Je suis Bovary", so Melville can justly say "Je suis Moby Dick".

And after all, you know, after all, I mean, WTF? What is a reader to make of a book in which the writer's inner self appears to be symbolised by a spermaceti whale, and the reality principle seems to be represented by an insane PTSDed sea captain named Ahab? The really funny thing in this read is to notice how tremendously Melville enjoys himself. Like a carrion wind, Melville's good cheer never ever lets up. Laughter streams through the tone and transforms the horrid plot into a fearful symmetry such as would make Mister Blake quake.

Now to Tom Jones. Don't you think there is something snivelling and shabby about a world where everyone is a hypocrite except the hero and his missus? And when I see how tawdry Tom himself is even in his boldest conceptions of virtue, it quickly goes from discouraging to disgusting.

Yeah, I GET that Fielding wants us to clearly see how variable, moonish and instable a thing is virtue. And it's funny for a few hundred pages; but then it's not.

It doesn't help that Fielding's emotional life doesn't engage me. Here is none of the delightful sinister laughter of Dostoyevsky, and even less of the gallows good cheer of Melville. I like Henry Fielding best in legal and ethical questions, in which the disquisitions of his lawyerly mind find their field of muster.

I dug the allegorette (that's to say, the mini-allegory) of the Christian Thwackum and the platonist Square. It reminds me of William James' pragmatism. But I think the problem here is that I just don't care enough about Fielding, Jones, or their respective girlfriends.

Bottom line: Only the English find hypocrisy funny, but evil amuses forever.

Asimov's Foundation and the Great Books of the Western World

2009-05-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

The Foundation Series and Great Books of the Western World have many common points. Both Foundation and GBWW are concerned with the preservation of the civilizing influence of reason and Western culture. Both address theories of knowledge and power. Both attack ethics and the sentiments with great feeling and strong views.

But as the Great Books of the Western World is a real life conversation spanning the ages, it is about true things and actual stories, which even though fiction are based in true cultures and times. The Foundation Series is fiction through and through, fiction in the best, the Aesopian, sense of the word. The world of Foundation cannot and could not ever exist.

But in a deeper sense Asimov's Foundation is poetry; it is a fiction that shows more truth than a history can.

The underlying context of Foundation occupies the same epistemic space as Plato's ideal republic. Socrates insists that reality can be measured; how much more does the fictional Hari Seldon force nature to yield up her secrets through psychohistory! The Encyclopaedists of the Foundation represent the Platonic educational ideal, and the various scurrilous derring-do of the first book of Foundation represent symbolically much of the political dialog that followed in the wake of Plato's work these last few thousand years.

Finally, in the annoyingly analytical smugness of the psychohistorians, starting with Hari Seldon himself, we can see Aristotle's rational and dry wisdom at work.

The key point of dissimilarity between the Great Books and Asimov's Foundation is simply that Asimov has a far more narrow view of knowledge than the Great Books. Asimov's Foundation, when exposed to the harsh, humane, realistic light of the Great Books, reveals itself to be marred by a narrow scientism and cramped by reductionistic cliches.

Nevertheless, as Harold Bloom would put it, the Foundation Series expresses considerable anxiety towards the centralized authority of the Western tradition. The Empire is doomed, but the Foundation will endure through the dark age of irrational faith and mystical, magical thinking. Asimov's effort to assert reductionist scientism makes the Foundation Series (at least in the first three books) vital and genuine.

Finally, comparison with the Great Books casts a new light on the latter books - ie, 'Foundation's Edge', 'Foundation and Earth'. If the heroic effort to ward off the forces of gaian wholism in the latter books of the Foundation Series is not entirely convincing, then the fault is perhaps not in the vitality of the writer but in the weakness of the material.

A New Nonlinear Way to Read Dante Alighieri.

2009-05-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

You can get at the nonlinear and visual construction of Dante's Commedia can be got at by the mind by just reading from start to finish, if you want, passing through Inferno to Purgatorio to Paradiso.

But what tends to happen as the reader traverses Inferno is that they stop short somewhere. Perhaps they pause at the gates of Purgatory to watch Venus rise. Or perhaps they stop half way up the mountain at Vergil's second lecture of free will. The mind falls short of the passion of Dante's design. Failing to grasp the beating heart that is the whole piece, intellect grows cold at the foot of the mountain where it ought to fall silent in the transcendent presence of Beatrice at the crown of the summit.

Why?

The answer is the failure to invoke the vegetative soul in the recitation: or, in less Aristotelian terms, the failure to extract the juice and excitement that comes from getting the whole work in a single hit of image, light and song.

Here's the problem: Dante's Commedia is nonlinear. The book unfolds in an acausal structure: Inferno mirrors Purgatorio illuminates Paradiso and back again. And that is on the most gross level of the plot: at the deeper level every image calls to image, like three friends chanting at one another from three mountain peaks in perfect harmony and consonance.

So the Commedia of Dante forms a single field of inspirational power, a matrix of image and idea that must be sensed whole in order to be "read" in any realistic way. In a word, you only begin to read Dante once you have read the whole poem from start to finish and have closed the book and started reflecting.

With that in mind, here's a fresh new nonlinear way to read Dante Alighieri's Commedia:

Start with the three books of the poem in front of you.

Read through Canto One of Paradise, then Canto One of Purgatory, then pass through Canto One of Inferno.

Stop, reflect; then repeat.

Continue moving DOWN from Paradise to Purgatory to Inferno, canto by canto, until you get to Canto 15 of Inferno.

This is the pivotal point in each of the three books. In Canto 15 Inferno Dante is about to ride Geryon into the Abyss to meet those who are actively vicious and aggressive against God. In each book at this point we move into the zone of heightened aliveness after this point.

Now there's a small hitch: the same pivotal point I point to in Inferno 15 occurs in Purgatory in Canto Sixteen and in Paradise in Canto Seventeen. In Purgatory Sixteen Dante ascents on an Eagle's back to the midway gate of the actively virtuous and pure. In Paradise Seventeen Dante attains the vision of the Heaven of Mars, of the warriors for God.

So the suggested nonlinear path is as follows:

Read up to Paradise 15, Purgatory 15, Hell 15.

THEN, reverse the order of readings to put Paradise last instead of first, thusly:

Read Purgatory 16, Paradise 16, Paradise 17.
Read Hell 16, Purgatory 17, Paradise 18.

At this point you will be able to compare the three pivotal points (Hell 15-16, Purgatory 16-17, Paradise 17-18) in the plot. All the threads will come together in the martial action of the midpoint of all three books.

Reflecting on the midpoints, note that Dante deals respectively with vengeance, anger, and courage - the vices and virtues of Mars, and the uses and misuse of the vital energy of the vegetative soul. Notice your gut level reaction to the images and feelings. And notice especially how much Dante has grown as a person from the start of the book to the midpoint.

These are also the points in the poem where the personal psyche ends and the transpersonal realm of begins. From these three midpoints in the poem, Dante the man becomes less important than Dante the Everyman. The universal Dante shines forth.

These pivotal points are a great place to pause and check in, get an overview of the poem, and really stir up a bit of passionate motivation to finish the adventure by taking it all the way to the finish. The Mars archetype acts as a spur to motivation to complete the recitation of the poem.

So, to summarize: we read from Paradise DOWN to Hell through the personal realm, correlating all the expressions together of Dante's individual psyche as it expresses in all three realms, then at the midpoint of each realm we reverse the order of the books and begin the ascent into the transpersonal:

Read Hell 17, Purgatory 18, Paradise 19.

Continue until the end:

Read Hell 34, Purgatory 33, Paradise 33.

The latter half of the three books gives a sort of transcendent play of image and idea that, to my mind, best resembles the leisure of the Olympian gods.

I firmly assert that only readers who have first grasped Dante the man are equipped to make sense of Dante the visionary poet-prophet. In my opinion, we meet Dante the man himself in the first half of each of the three books and Dante the poet in the last halves of the poem.

By reading the first half of each poem to become acquainted with Dante, we motivate ourselves to read the entire poem and discover the entire "good of the human", as Dante puts it.

How Reflection Creates the Past: On Reading Conrad's 'Youth'.

2009-05-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

Joseph Conrad writes with great style and heart!

I just read aloud 'Youth'. Into this little book which Conrad wrote as a youth of 24 years he poured all the experience of aliveness and joy from his formative years.

Reciting 'Youth' disclosed the breath and the silence and the difficult play of words in the author's throat. So when the narrator, old Marlow, asks his listeners to pass the bottle of claret, I reached over and sipped my cup of peppermint tea, and mindfully breathed a moment. Conrad means you to rest when Marlow rests, because he requires you to work when Marlow remembers. If you do not rest when Conrad/Marlow rest, you will probably miss much of the meaning of the story, which is encoded in the emotion and style. This kind of reading is great fun, too!

"...the whole terrestrial globe had been one jewel, one colassal sapphire, a single gem fashioned into a planet."

See how Marlow piles up the three clauses on one another? He uses this technique for three quarters of the text. It happens whenever young Marlow, the hero of the story, is powerfully moved. The effect when recited is rhapsodic - it builds complex waves of feeling and image - it crests and foams into the last quarter of the story, which is written very simply. If you do not follow the waves, you probably will not feel the impact of the simply written last scenes. That is why recital is best for this story. But it also expresses the emotional rollercoaster of being young so very well!

If being young is like being asleep, or like being in a dream, then becoming an adult is like waking up and remembering the dream even as it fades from memory's lips and leaves a faint bitterness. Likewise, I didn't understand 'Youth' until I had slept on it. When I woke up all of a sudden the mind cleanly took hold of the whole story as a single object, and I understood what Conrad is up to.

This is not a coming of age story at all. This is a dream of youth and age, as mythical as the sport of the gods, and as golden. The sweetness of immortality and the bitterness of age come together and heighten one another. The authentic taste of the passing of time is here in these pages, intangible and subtle.

"Allegory" is a dead word for a living form. According to wikipedia it comes from αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public". Wiktionary tells us that allegory is "the representation of abstract principles by characters or figures". I see many problems with the use and meaning of the word (too many to go into here), because it presupposes a break between presentation and representation, between the abstract principle and the concrete image.

In my experience, sometimes the abstraction IS the character - these is no difference between Achilles and vengeful wrath, is there? Likewise, in Conrad's 'Youth', there is gap between abstract and real, presentation and representation. The thing is the idea is the thing.

And in this case the thing is Youth and Age. The story shows the essence of both so well, so powerfully, that is is almost jejune of me to speak of it with ordinary words. It is a very powerful presentation of poetic truth!

The entire story of 'Youth' is an allegory for the nature of youth, complete with invocations to Jove, the god of juveniles. The moments when Marlow uses the triple repetition signal the efforts to hold back the unconscious contents of the actual event - the twining repetitions of threefold horrors are gorgonic snakes of words that ward off the actual experience of youth from Marlow's weather-beaten consciousness.

Marlow's story, with its rhetorical flourishes, is old Marlow's defense against the authentic experience of youthfulness. The story is not just about a sea adventure, but about the life Marlow has lived since then. That is why the first three quarters of the story are charged with such sorrow and sagacity.

And what about the actually young Marlow? We remember pumping water til the cook goes mad, waiting in dry dock til the rats abandon ship, and sailing til the ship burns and sinks. But what do we feel about all this stuff we see of the young Marlow?

We feel the moody turbulence of adolescence in the constant rain and water pumping. We feel the sense of waiting to become an adult in the social embarrassment of dry dock. We feel the fiery concupisnce of puberty in the smouldering invisible fire beneath the vessel which bears a freight of fragile human lives to a new unknown world in the East.

Conrad's 'Youth' is a precise allegory for adolescence! Every detail provides an exact imagining-forth of the essence of being juvenile. So 'Youth' is immortal. And so what? Every adult of character has been through the same transformation in her or his own way.

Old Marlow's perspicacious warding-off of genuine feeling breaks down at the end of 'Youth'. This is signalled by the loss of complex language when young Marlow wakes to see the faces of the East, loses the repetitions altogether. It is simply written. The faces of the East are an image out of dreamtime; consciousness has been broken down by the storms of adolescence, but in being broken, has become adult.

And so what? We wouldn't want to repeat the ordeal of losing these sweet illusions so bitterly, nor would we want to forget the pleasure that the delusions of youth brought us.

For old Marlow in his drink youth is a bitter illusion, until the moment when he breaks through to the direct experience of young Marlow once again, and for a moment the old man is soft and vulnerable once again.

But Conrad seems to be saying also that as adolescence dreams of the man he is to become, so the adult who reflects on her adolescent dreams can always take the opportunity to make them real... reflection is the work of a well lived life.

This is the greater attainment of 'Youth': Conrad through the voice of Marlow realizes his own adult self through reflexively investigating, probing, testing and deepening his perceptions of his own youth.

The Place To Meet Milton: On Re-reading Paradise Lost

2009-05-15T01:02:00.000-07:00

I just finished re-reading Paradise Lost.

My impressions? It's very Christian. The end goes all prophetic. Really it's like four poems.

Paradise Lost Poem One tells Satan's comeback from his wee setback of eternal damnation.

Paradise Lost Poem Two is Archangel Raphael and First Human Adam's chitchat about this and that - war in heaven and the creation of the universe and sundry other cosmick gossip.

Poem One and Two are the great science fiction style parts of Milton, and show what he learnt from the speechifying of the Ancients and Mr Shakespeare's productions.

Paradise Lost Poem Three is the Action: vis, Eve and Adam eat and Fall. It's, um, a psychosexual drama with angels.

Last we get Paradise Lost Poem Four, the prophetic wrapup where God judges, the Son sacrifices, Heaven hurrahs, Eve repents and Adam hallucinates the future on a hilltop with Archangel Michael. Then it's out of the garden and into the book of Genesis.

What to think? It's hard to appreciate deeply enough the science-fictionality of Milton's Paradise Lost in context of a world where SF didn't yet exist.

Certainly the poem compares not unfavorably to Homer's work (Poem One and Two), Dante's (Poem Four), Shakespeare's (Poem One's psychological portrayal of Satan and Poem Three's portrayal of Adam and Eve), and D.H.Lawrence (Poem Three's frank eroticism). In the light of the Western Tradition Milton is indubitably great.

Dante, Milton's opposite in temperament, best shines a light on the artist John Milton. Where Dante's art is delicate, tinted mercurial (being a Gemini as he informs us) Milton's is darkly sensuous, visionary, and monumental art.

Milton's effects strain the imagination; much is left to the reader to imagine, and much of Milton is dark to the moral eye not through obscurity but through largeness of imaginating. These effects become vivid only when the reader's sensual and moral temperament happens to concur with Milton's.

Image making in Milton is moral AND sensual; he sees no break between the two natures of the animal and the angel in a true Christian. This view, so alien morally but so modern in its acceptances of sensual desire, at once endears and distances us from Milton.

We feel he is serious, and noble, and a man disappointed in his sex life, and yet we sense a rich inner life of emotion and sensuality survives the disappointment, an inner life sustained, to our modern consternation, not by healthy adult relationships but by mere moral fortitude! Milton becomes uncanny, heroic, when we consider him as the figuration of the Human. What kind of pragmatism is involved in such a moral-sensual stance? Perhaps outside the author of Paradise Lost we cannot imagine another such man.

Ultimately the greatness of Paradise Lost comes down to incommensurates: I find myself liking John Milton more for himself than for his poem. Paradise Lost becomes the place I meet Milton in rather than the poem I read.

On the Lysis of Plato: "All will be your friend if you are wise."

2009-05-13T02:09:00.000-07:00

If you are wise, Socrates says, all men will be your friends and kindred because you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, mother or kindred or anyone else will be your friend.

This is Socrates' juicy snare for the friendship of Lysis.

Just as for Aristotle the chief good is reason and the sum of all goods happiness, so also for Socrates wisdom is the chief good and love between friends the sum of all goods.

How to account for the paradoxes of friend and enemy Socrates lays out in the Lysis? I think he draws the paradox from the biological and spiritual meanings of friendship. A friend may be useful to practical ends but a bad person ideally speaking. Socrates is being sophistic.

Prudent friendships, as Aristotle reveals, combine usefulness, mutual affection, and pleasure in one anothers' character by doing kind services. And even Aristotle fails to observe the developmental curve: friendships evolve from being mostly useful to being mostly pleasant then to being mostly based in affection. A sound friendship has all three aspects, but at any one time only one aspect is dominant: pleasure, utility, or affection. But all three belong, because we are physical beings as well as spiritual.

(Taking the Aristotle cap off...)

Socrates says "God draws like to like" as friends. True enough. But like in what sense? Clearly what makes friends like one another are questions at the core of human nature. Why are we the way we are? To what extent are we like angels and like animals? In the answers to these questions a view of friendship can arise. But again it is between the animal and the angel that human friendships become possible.

I challenged myself to come up with my own view of friendship. Here it is:

"There is no cause of friendship: all friendships arise in accordance to the field of consciousness as expressions of their own self-nature. Different loves arise from different self-natures. Each kind of friendship is incommensurate to another.

"Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of friendship: horizontal alignment, vertical alignments, and mixed horizontal-vertical alignments. Horizontal alignment friends are mostly based in affection and supportive development of one anothers' full potential; they are heart-based. Vertical alignments are mostly based in utility and issues of control, power, exploitation and predation; they are solar plexus based. Mixed horizontal-vertical alignments are mostly based in pleasure.

On the Map of Consciousness, then, horizontal alignment friendships begin above level of consciousness 500; vertical alignment friendships begin below 199; and between 200 and 499 levels of consciousness of the Hawkins Map of Consciousness are mixed friendships, featuring aspects of both horizontal and vertical alignments."

On Othello 5: the Character and Death of Othello.

2009-04-08T00:04:00.000-07:00

Othello clearly has issues.

It's not just critical thinking skills Othello lacks; some sausages are missing from Othello's barbeque. And he dies strangely content with the memory of a cruel act of justice he once dealt to a Turk, a non-Christian like he once was. Does Othello recognize his karma coming back as a tragedy from that act of rough "justice"? I think so.

Where Desdemona's death is the shock of the play, Othello's is a relief. I burst into tears reading Desdemona's last lines; how could I have read this play four or five times as a teenager and NOT wept, I wonder? Nothing could underline the difference in kind and degree between the teenager and the adult than the fact that only the adult who is experienced in the extremities of suffering can be adequate to comprehend the astonishing moral victory of Desdemona's last words. Desdemona reveals herself a warrior; by forgiving, she defeats Othello.

Coming back to Othello: Othello seems to recognise that his brutal nature is the true man at the end, but does that mean that the noble and sophisticated Othello of act 1 to 3 is fake? This is clearly false, but not an easy charge to avoid.

Othello of act 1 to 3 IS the real deal, but so is the completely different Othello of act 5. The intervening tormented Othello (act 4) is merely the alembic of Iago's alchemical psychiatry, not a man but a patient, a case study. What are we to make of these two different Othello's? And what are we to make of the transformations of youth and adulthood, whereby the same individual can become as different in himself as night from day?

The key lies in Iago's silence.

Is Iago the first psychiatrist? Undoubtedly.

I can't feel anything other than genuine satisfaction in Iago's total silence. Iago is complete, having returned to that avenging Element from which he arose; we feel the human aspect of the man was merely for show, and that in his silence the real man at last is revealed. We feel relieved, not of his speech, but to know him as he really is; Iago is not a human agent, and by his silence shows this is so.

Iago's silence illuminates the character of Othello as a product of primordial darkness and ignorance. Recognising the aboriginal depth of Othello in ourselves, we are humbled. How can we be sure we are just and wise? We can't, unless we become intimate with that darkness which we foolishly disown as evil in ourselves. Othello signifies that intimacy with our blackness, and the terrible cost of becoming estranged from our soul.

How Reflection Creates the Past: On Reading Conrad's 'Youth'.

2009-04-04T06:27:00.000-07:00

Dan and I Visit Open Day At The South Australian Governor's House

2009-04-03T23:17:00.001-07:00

Dan and I visited the governor's house on March 29 2009 and here are the most memorable aspects:

The governor of South Australia has lots of mirrors in his house. "Because," Dan says, "he needs to make sure he looks good all the time."

All the art is either distinguished portraiture or realistic landscapes. Why? We decided between us that it has been decorated by previous governors, with a consideration of the taste of future ones and the dignity of the previous ones; and if it is bland it is nevertheless in excellent taste.

We come across two unfortunate activist friends in the ballroom. Their suits are too tight; they seem puffed up a little with anxiety; unfortunately, their tight suits are matching green and maroon.

They show us their document, which is unintelligible. It asks immediately for something undefined for big group of people. It uses exclamation marks and the words "we demand". Like I said, unfortunate.

I hand it back and smoothly lie: "It's clearly written."

"It's been through many drafts," they tell us, "We're going to present it to the governor today."

Dan, fortunately, has noticed something shiny which requires we attend to it instead of arguing with fanatics. I reckon Dan's social graces make Michelle Obama's seem gauche.

Out in the yard a crowd of about forty tourists have gathered around a tree where two Kookaburras laugh. Other nations have governors' maisons galore, but no hilarious avians. The crowd is still there discussing the event excitedly when we leave.

The pool is meagre - private enough for a nudie dip, but not large enough for embarrasingly fatal set of swimming laps while drunk.

I spot the Great Books of the Western World in the main office, with great satisfaction. The office is roped and officiated.

"What does the governor do?" I ask the official.

He rambles about presiding over occasions requiring a show of pomp domestick. I nod until he lapses into silence, and for a few more seconds while he looks at me.

"He's a figurehead really," the official says sadly.

"And what," I ask, "does he symbolise? What values or ideas?"

He surprises and delights me by giving a really great reply:

"The governor symbolises the Westminster System of law. He stamps all the legislation that goes through State Parliament, just as the governor general stamps legislation through Federal Parliament."

"Cool.. thanks mate!" I tell him. His reply inspires me with considerable respect for the position of state governor.

Later Dan spots in the ballroom a little man in a shiny suit puffed up anxiously into his shoulders and chest half bowing as he shakes old ladies hands who cluster around in a dense cloud of perfume. Dan whispers "It's the governor!" and I spare him a glance.

But respect goes to principles not people. And I have already met the governor in my conversation with the official in the office.

Augustine's Four Rules of Reading A Book

2009-04-03T22:37:00.000-07:00

Today I learnt how Augustine read.

His style of reading reminds me of Dante's letter to his patron Can Grande - no doubt Dante learnt to read through Augustine. But what I was unprepared for was how very wide the gap between Augustine's view of reading and the modern view.

Augustine's rules for reading are (to me at least) still relevant. They are four, and I state them as principles rather than practices because of their general usefulness:

1. PURITY - reading that subserves cravings and appetites distorts the mind's ability to read the text. Maybe a text serves the lower appetites; nevertheless, the meaning of it can only be got at with a mind free of bias and a pure appetite to understand.

2. FAITH - You must suspend disbelief, but you must not suspend belief, in reading. That is to say, faith must be present in reading, and cynicism must be suspending in reading, for comprehension to occur.

I would add that faith can be conditional on historical context or limited to the space of the reading of the text, but it must be present according to Augustine in order to read well.

Faith in the text is primary in making sense of it. Why? Because reading is an inclination of the will and appetite towards clarity and freedom, therefore right from the start the will must be freed from doubt, the enemy of good faith.

These two rules for reading, purity and faith, pertain to the appetites and the will. Purity of appetites and a faithful will are the ends of their application.

3. LOVE - I read Harold Bloom's criticism from love of his mind. Why do I love Bloom's work? Because he has taught me that only by love can I win access through the text to another person's consciousness. For me, as for Bloom, Augustine and Dante, love is the only entree into the mind of greatness. A strong love will take you to the heart of any text.

Simply put, love makes reading and writing worth while. Since reading involves the love of that which reads - in other words, reading is intellectual vanity - the most literate books win the greatest love, since they most intimately put us in contact with that quality of intellectual vanity which does reading. Even more deeply, the love that creates a text and the love that reads the text are the one substance, and the love that carefully appreciates a text arises from the same kind of love as that which created the text. Love is the common human factor in reading and writing.

Criticism without love is worthless. A critic without love, even in the form of courtesy, respect, or polite restraint from abuse, is not worth a hearing. Any misreading (in the sense of Harold Bloom's map of misreadings) that adds love to the text is good or at least harmless.

4. MULTIPLICITY - Simple, clear passages of a text offer a meaning which is unarguably revealed by purity, faith and love. The consensus of informed opinions around a great text is fairly fixed, and there is little freedom in it. But Augustine offers a view of free interpretation of the text in the case of ambiguous passages.

Multiple readings, imagined, invented and supposed, are good and useful when the text is ambiguous and poetic, and when they do not violate the good faith of the text. Obscure passages provide freedom to play and explore the text more fully.

These are Augustine's four rules for reading a book, then. Let's put them in their historical and intellectual context now!

Augustine came to value the pagan tradition negatively, as an example of ignorance and error in human thinking. So much of his rules for reading concern the Christian and Jewish religious writings of his time, many of which came to be our present day bible. Augustine's reading was informed by a deep seriousness or purpose, and a moral and devotional aim.

Perhaps the primary challenge to we moderns is Augustine's stark vision of the human good to be got from reading. But Augustine differs not greatly in this from Samuel Johnson, who read voraciously and judged by very high standards of moral purity.

I suppose the biggest difference from we moderns is the more broad sense of what is proper in books - we are less offended and less corrupted, I suppose, by impure and appetite-stimulating images or words. Perhaps it is because we are so constantly overfull with stimuli, that we end up becoming accustomed or unaffected to the tides of vicious and sex-loaded content or screens and pages wash up. Certainly we seem to inhabit an alien and noisy world compared to the agrarian north African environment of Augustine.

Take these rules, then, as you will... a stimulus to your reading more spiritedly, or a window on a kind of reading past and long gone.

Saint Augustine on Sex and Body Image

2009-04-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

Augustine is authoritative on body image and sex issues. He ought to have his own column.

Here's my rendering of his key idea from out of fusty antique English:

"So there's no need to insult God in our addictions and errors by blaming the body, because the body is good in its own kind and in its own degree. Being human means accepting both body AND soul on their own different spiritual terms.

"A man who goes on about the soul as if it were the highest value, and condemns the body as if it were evil, I assure you is trapped in his body by his love of his soul as much as by his hatred of his body."

Saint Augustine's striking recovery from sex addiction has a lot to teach us all.

It seems that sex addicts like Saint Augustine only recover when they accept the body on its own terms of what is good, and appreciate the body as good in its own degree and kind. Sex addiction seems not addiction to sexual pleasure, but addiction to conflict in regards to sexual pleasure.

Similarly we could usefully describe eating disorders as an addiction to the body expressed as hatred, or perhaps the false expectation that the body to provide the quality and kind of satisfactions that can only be derived from the living soul.

Augustine's quote above strikes to the heart of the nature of the imbalance between soul and body, and the lopsided otherworldly view of spirituality which denigrates the body, and seems to me to call for discernment in relation to body image issues.

What Do You Think of These Four Dante English Translations?

2009-03-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

It's customary to comment on parallel translations. Instead I will invite you to read and judge for yourself which is superior. I will say just that the great translations here seem to me a foregone conclusion.

Dante and Virgil are in the middle of the circle of the lustful, and Dante has just seen the damned and is describing them, so it's Canto V of Inferno, lines 40 to 51.

James Finn Cotter

And as the starlings are lifted on their wings
In icy weather to wide and serried flocks,
So does the gale lift up the wicked spirits,

Flinging them here and there and down and up:
No hope whatever can ever comfort them,
Neither of rest nor of less punishment.

And as the cranes fly over, chanting lays,
Forming one long line across the sky,
So I saw come, uttering their cries,

Shades wafted onward by these winds of strife,
To make me ask him, "Master, who are those
People whom the blackened air so punishes?"

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Longfellow:

And as the wings of starlings bear them on
In the cold season in large band and full,
So doth that blast the spirits maledict;

It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them;
No hope doth comfort them for evermore,
Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,
Making in air a long line of themselves,
So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,

Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.
Whereupon said I: Master, who are those
People, whom the black air so castigates?

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Cary:

...As in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;

So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
On this side and on that, above, below,
It drives them: hope of rest to solace them

Is none, nor e'en of milder pang. As cranes,
Chanting their dol'rous notes, traverse the sky,
Stretch'd out in long array: so I beheld

Spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on
By their dire doom. Then I: Instructor! who
Are these, by the black air so scourg'd?

XXXXX XXXX XXXX

Mandelbaum:

And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:

now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.

And just as cranes in flight will chant their lays,
arraying their long file across the air,
so did the shades I saw approaching, borne

by that assailing wind, lament and moan;
so that I asked him: Master, who are those
who suffer punishment in this dark air?

XXXX

What do you think?

On Othello I: On the Character of Rodrigo.

2009-03-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

The mystery of Iago's darkness is compounded by his headless and heartless nature. As the gnostics have an absent and uncaring god, so Shakespeare has an absent human nature in Iago.

Iago says he would rather be a baboon (without reason) than drown for love like Rodrigo wants to. The heart for him is a blank space that erotic will pierces and destroys ("A lust of the blood and a permission of the will").

His seduction of Rodrigo is frightening like few horror stories. Iago makes sure that Rodrigo might make money and forget his own soul - lose the good of the human, in Dante's terms. For this one speech in Act One of Iago to Rodrigo has embedded in it a truly fiendish hypnotic double bind:

- the soul is trash.
- money will win you your soul back
- I will win your soul back for you with money.

These are the terms of the devil's bargain embedded in Rodrigo getting Iago to win Desdemona for him. But here is the double bind:

- I (Iago) am evil, therefore giving me money to win your soul is ill spent, therefore your soul is evil too.

With a single speech of less than a single page, Iago damns Rodrigo's soul.

On 'Othello' I - The Character of Othello

2009-03-21T07:31:00.000-07:00

Othello reminds me of Caesar; the same daystar persona inspires conspiracy and hate. Othello and Caesar's nobility and courage seem to draw vindictive hatred to them like iron filings to a magnet.

As for Desdemona, for having no trance of a shadow side in her, she is no help to Othello; their romance is a pipe dream untested against their unconscious defects. Shakespeare (I nearly said Freud) Shakespeare shows light of consciousness without shadow in Othello and Desdemona. I want to shake them both and shout "If it looks too good to be true, it probably is!"

Iago is a speaking darkness. Iago is no fallen angel; he is rather the abyss into which angels fall.

Watching A Eugene O'Niell Documentary

2009-03-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

Proust teaches us that some life events are so big that they overflow into the past and present. O'Niell's plays and life show how the pervasive impact of tragic events can be transcended by great art.

"Stammering is the nature of eloquence for us fog people," his character Edmund in 'Long Day's Journey...' says.

Likewise, by confessing our defects we begin to transcend them. We learn from 'Long Day's Journey...' that by lovingly struggling with our birth family it becomes possible to embrace the human family in a universal way.

When I read it as a teenager I wasn't adequate to O'Niell's tragedy. Even Othello was just lovely verse to me back then.

The documentary presents these and other fascinating insights.

Every time - when it works - every time we go on stage, we break time. We become able to dream only when we confess our shallow theatricality. We are washed up from eternity on the beach of time; have we got the will to be shipwrecked again and again for a dream? Like Gulliver, we risk bitter disillusionment for our ideals when we sail our of harbour. Like Ishmael, we seek by pilgrimage out at sea an inner visitation with our own oceanic majesty and pomp.

O'Niell's great tragedies are such pilgrimages. Above all, it's time I reread Shakespeare's tragedies; I've been away from them long enough.

'Mind Your Own Business' - How We Are All Living In a J.S. Mill World

2009-03-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

John Stuart Mill wrote in 'On Liberty': "All that makes existence valuable to anyone depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the action of other people." This striking quote is a good entry point to Mill's consideration of freedom as a choice of what kind of coercion we submit to.

In Mill's life, I see that there are two forms of opinion:

1. Reasoned Judgments with evidence supporting,

OR

2. Love and passion backed with experience, true motive and practice.

JS Mill has both forms. But here is a man who lived a virtual world, feeling false passions, loving what he was always taught to love, and praciting his father's will until he fell in love. That he didn't abandon intellectual life altogether is a pretty grand drama to me.

The question which Mill seems to have lived is: what does theory look like in practice? What role does idea play in forming motive passions that infuse powerful opinions? From these questions arises the theory of representation and his (in my opinion) extreme views on liberty.

Mill's first principle: the only good motive for coercion is self-protection.

This is flat out useless as a practical standard of political power. The 'self' that is protected of a gang of thieves is not the same 'self' that is protected within a cloister of monks. 'Self' is a moving target, dependent on context for validity. So this rational ideal of coercion is only valid for rational agents. And, to be honest, rational agency is a little thin on the ground in human history so far.

Mill qualifies this standard by limiting it to those who can be convinced or pursuaded, but again... this is a hopelessly idealistic burden for reason to carry alone. Mill quite overrates the power of reason to effect pursuasion in my opinion - but this comes back to my enquiry on theory and practice, reason and passion.

Freedom that matters, for Mill: the right to go chasing your own unharming good in your own unharming way. This is the liberal enlightenment view of freedom without an end (telos), or freedom as an end in itself.

What is the latest application of freethinking liberal philosophy for Mill? I can sum it in four words: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.

From all this, I conclude that we are living in a John Stuart Mill kind of world. When I walk down the street and nobody says hello to me, that's because they are free not to. Courtesy and community are secondary or irrelevant. The key consideration of a liberal society is that you mind your own business.

This also accounts both for the intense sense of alienation in the West, on the one hand, and the strong sense of purpose and rational passion in Western liberal movements. All three of these qualities - the alienation, the passion, and the MYOB - are all essential traits of JS Mill's personality.

When I walk past a sloppy drunk, a glossy hiphopper, a neat businesswoman, a greasy mechanic, and more ethicities than i can name, with a perfect equanimity and complete indistraction from my own affairs - when I walk this way I see I live in the world of John Stuart Mill's imagining, from almost two centuries ago.

Contra Niall Ferguson and Moral Relativism

2009-03-21T05:57:00.000-07:00

I watched Niall Ferguson's propoganda piece on the end of World War Two thisafternoon on SBS Australian TV. Ferguson takes the view of Primo Levi that the war was a "tainted victory".

This is a specious claim and a truism, not a wise judgment. ALL wars are tainted, victorious or otherwise, morally and emotionally, for both sides. War is tainted - so what?

Ferguson props his view up with poor Primo Levi's authority. Because Levi was a sophisticated intellectual with scientific training (he was a chemist), we impute the authority of good judgment to his views. But Levi's judgment is that of a suicide overcome with horror and despair - not of a survivor. Levi's view of the war is not just not good for life - it's anti-life. He willfully rejects facts that may make meaning of the event. You only have to compare Levi with Viktor Frankl's 'Man's Search For Meaning' to see that Levi left historical documents while Frankl left great literature as a result of the same experience of interment.

So Niall Ferguson is culpable of propagandizing this despairing view in his documentary. Let's look at his claims:

First: Bombing of civilians occured out of a desire for vengeance.

FALSE. Allied bombing arose from the practical need to break the will of the enemy. The Nazi bombing of civic populations was motivated by vindictive hate; the Allie motive was to end war.

Second: The Allied colluded with the evil reign of the Soviets at the end of the war.

FALSE: the Allies spent 40 years to defeat the Soviets after the war. (That was called the Cold War - remember?) In addition, starting a war against Russia immediately after defeating the Germans was not feasible; the Soviets were not an immediate threat, and we had no responsibility to save the Russians from their poor choices of governance.

The most evil aspect of Niall Ferguson's documentary is implied, because if it were clearly stated we would see its falsity immediately:

Ferguson implies that the Allies were morally no better than the Axis powers, that the atomic bombings were not preceded by the most painful and delicate moral deliberations; worst of all, Ferguson implies that human nature is inexplicably evil and without a reliable source of absolute goodness and truth in the world. It is this last implication that reveals Ferguson for the bleeding moral relativist, and really sinks his propaganda piece.

Because we are still here and alive, and for the most part happy and free, Niall Ferguson and his relativist crew are proven wrong.

Liberty and Revolt Against Heaven: Why Read Greek Tragedies?

2009-03-10T23:41:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Greek tragedies. Since I read them last, at 17 years of age, they have improved.

In fact, they speak across the ages now, man to man, from lips that have been dust for twenty five centuries into this ear that still sings a beat of human blood. And what is the bridge over 25 centuries except our common suffering, imposed and accepted, and our common liberties, upheld or revolted against?

But to connect these Greek tragedians - Aeschylus' Agammemnon, Sophocles' Antigone, Euripides' Bacchae - to the great ideas of liberty, imagination, pain and pleasure, is to add more meaning to them than they need. After all, all the pleasure of reading these men comes from the pristine clarity of song and reason.

The whole reason for the remaining fame of the Greek tragedies is that they are delightfully and joyfully fulfilling experiences. That is all the reason they need.

Literary Tonglen: Reading the Gateway to the Great Books of the Western World

2009-03-07T21:36:00.000-08:00

I spent a few hours last night integrating what I had learnt from grade one of the Gateway to the Great Books. Seeking and making connections between stories, images, themes, feelings. Sensing forwards and backwards into experience for meaning.

The key to it leapt at me from the ABC's monthly magazine, Limelight, to unlock the first grade of readings in the Gateway to the Great Books. Limelight notes brain studies that reveal that, while people are reading books, the brain lights up as if it is actually engaged in what the reading describes. In other words, reading is not escaping reality but practicing it!

Now in that light, consider what grade one's stated purpose is:

The introduction states that the first grade is for readers either limited in life experience or about the age of 11 and 12 years old. The readings are adventure stories, stories of sea and nature, stories of heroism and teamwork, and stories that give rare entree into exclusive social millieux of the great and living dead.

We imagine the adventures at sea and land of working men. We see the ordinary challenges of daily life in a new light. We read adventures that draw out our inner resources. The great adventure stories, far from being idle daydreams, imperceptibly infuse new courage into undertaking daily difficulties. Havings stretched ourselves to live the extraordinary adventures in books makes common challenges more doable.

Not only that, but many of the readings introduce us to great men - Caesar, Lincoln, Xenophon, Socrates, Jesus, Solomon, Napoleon, Aristotle - and introduces us also to their great ends. So imperceptibly the first grade provides a critique for our own ends, means and motives. How do we compare to the greatest of the past? By contact with them we are enlarged.

On the deeper philosophical level of greatness, the first grade first introductes us into the Platonic Form of the Good. It does this through the obvious Platonic reading of the allegory of the cave in 'Republic', but also through fine literary criticism pieces of a general nature.

Why, we ask ourselves, do we need literary criticism? The introduction to the Gateway answers: literary critics direct us to the best, which is another way of saying they show us the most good quality beauty, in books. Not only that, they draw out the precise nature of the good through definition, demonstration, and comparison. So the beauty of a work is augmented by the good judgement of the critic, and refined by the true discernment of the critic. The critic reveals the complete Platonic form of the Good by describing the truth and goodness inherent in the beautiful work of imagination. Best of all, good criticism challenges our own judgment to improve in the light of their judging. The good, true and beautiful make up the Form of the Good, and literary criticism demonstrates this and whets our desire to become better acquainted with It.

Thematically many of the grade one readings pit social morality or natural justice against individual choices. Inevitably individual choice fails, but in doing so it shows us our natural limits as human beings.

I could imagine no more useful and freeing tragedy than one which shows precisely and overwhelmingly the exact nature of the limits by which human nature is circumscribed, and shows no more than that.

The overall impression of the first grade of the Gateway to the Great Books is that they provide a gradual course in what I call "literary tonglen". Tonglen is the Buddhist practice of giving the ease and joy you have away and taking the pain and suffering of others into yourself. So literary tonglen is the process of educating the heart to consider and align and share with the sufferings and joys of others. Literary tonglen is the process of becoming a full human being, for better and worse, richer or poorer, til death parts us from the brute world.

Unspeakable Nature in Wordsworth's Prelude: A Poetry Recital

2009-03-05T19:05:00.000-08:00

Tonight I read Crashaw's 'The Flaming Heart'. I recited poorly but the poem didn't bear repeating. Crashaw's 'Flaming Heart' is a fiery rush of sexual-religious rhetoric.

The poem is inspired by (a better word would be 'ejeculated from') Crashaw's reading of the life of Saint Teresa: the resulting gush of verbiage represents his unmediated transposition of female orgasm into Crashaw's intellectual process. That is to say, Crashaw's sustained passion for Teresa's piety, the images of fire and melting, the forceful accumulation of ornate figures that when read aloud are so isomorphic to a desperate squirming of the body - all this and more makes Crashaw's poem 'The Flaming Heart' just NSFW.

Crashaw's poem is an example of that obscure subgenre, Catholic erotica, at its finest.

Then I turned to Wordsworth's 'Two Part Prelude (1799)'; altogether a different order of poem. Really for the first time I got the shamanic darkness of the poem. As I read I heard a roaring in the inner ears and felt, as if from a shadowy second body which stood right behind me, mine and yet not me but the body of a dream, shadowing the physical body.

I'm not ashamed to say it frightened me a bit, this darkness and motion and words that name things which I knew no names for. I stopped reciting and turned on the TV.

But it was no use: the entire field of awareness went on vibrating inexplicably with the impact of Wordsworth's greatest poem.

The unutterableness of Wordsworth's poem, neither pre- or trans-verbal, has that quality of Nature Herself which also storms uneasily beneath the verse of William Shakespeare.

Perhaps it was the recital of Crashaw that evoked it; the darkness of Wordsworth was drawn by the fire of Crashaw. I don't know.

It made me uneasy all the next day.

This is just to say

2009-03-03T20:48:00.000-08:00

A lil homage to William Carlos Williams: click the title for the original WCW poem.

This is just to say
I have read
Gateway to Great Books,
Grade One.

I am sorry -
Educated so finely, I am
Becoming a human being
At last, at last -

I could not resist.
Virtue is so delicious,
Desire for freedom
So sweet.

Dancing Hands At Catholic Mass

2009-02-12T20:05:00.000-08:00

Today I went to afternoon mass with a Catholic friend. It was quarter of an hour past noon, and St Francis' church was three quarters full. We stood for the opening prayer, then in the middle of the prayer we all said amen and the priest said "Now we will pray" even though we had just been praying.

Later we said the Lord's Prayer (the only one I knew by heart), but when they got to the part that starts "...for thine is the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory, Forever and Ever, Amen", the priest just interrupted the prayer to put in his own words, and as we never got to say that end bit I murmured it under my breath so that the prayer should be complete. All inexplicable.

More standing and sitting, apparently without purpose, pattern, or signal.

Mumbled responses. I grew quiet and relaxed inside, but outwardly remained watchful among the papists lest some flimflammery ambush.

The sense of the vast range of inappropriate behaviors possible in such a narrow social millieu beckoned my imagination. I thought of the uptight spiritual folk I knew, men and women who rather than communion need to take a full emotional and intellectual enema and forgive themselves for having funny animal bodies. I thought of my desire for vengeance and my wish for freedom.

I thought of the good people around me doing piety with their lips and knees and holding their bodies so firmly on the spot. I watched all this and as I did became aware of the Presence of God in my heart, loving me and shining like a star. And I felt as if I was the only man with sight among the blind, until I saw that the Presence was also with the priest.

When I watched the priest's hands and ignored his lips he was nice. The hands spoke so much more sincerely and lovingly than the lips; they formed delicate mudras like a baby gesturing before its Mother's Nipple. The priest wasn't just going through the motions; he was being a good shepherd, so to speak, for his sheep. His shapely little white hands danced over the altar like the rememberancer of a lost sensuality, an Eden concealed behind the turbulent rivers of tradition, convention, pretension and pomp.

We left at communion. We had no desire to taste the wine overly fortified with spirits that they served.

The Great Writer as Adolescent: Re-reading Andre Gide's Journals

2009-02-10T21:41:00.000-08:00

Re-reading Gide's journals tonight, I am struck by how he obsessed over his image, over how others saw him. It is a little jejune for Gide to fret over what impressions his ideas and books make on others AFTER he has won public notoriety with his sex life. And how could it have been otherwise - I admit he was in a sore spot with Corydon and his autobiography - but still the overall impression of the journals is of adolescent angst.

Gide's introduction to Montaigne is a case in point. Andre Gide thinks he adds sharpness to Michel de Montaigne when all he is adding to Montaigne is Gide. Gide's Montaigne is 'risky' and 'impudent' because Gide has failed to discern his good taste from his ego.

Then there are Gide's assays into fields he is ignorant of. Three specific great writers he mentions in his journals he has signally failed to come to grips with.

First there is Marx. Gide's flirtation with communism is embarrassing because it reveals his adolescent-level political consciousness, limited (as politics should be with adolescents) to a passing enthusiasm.

Then William James. He thinks James' 'Psychology' is boring after a few pages, because he cannot understand the way James has reinvented the human soul along scientific lines without any loss of humanity or grandeur.

Finally in Freud he can see only the value of Freud as a de-mystifyer of sexual matters. About Freud's compulsive prose and striking insight into inner realities, not a word. He likes Freud because he is 'impudent'.

Gide consistently gets these great writers in a nutshell but misses the nut. And it's not simply a failure of his time or place, but a failure of imagination. Gide is too busy being 'impudent' to read these serious writers for adults.

I love Gide's work and personality, but the truth is he is basically an adolescent playing at being an adult much of the time. And it is a bitter pleasure to have outgrown his tutelage, and seen his limitations for what they are. Andre Gide is no less a great writer for the truth about him being less than complimentary. In fact, the pleasure of seeing the truth about him has inspired me to read his novels again.

Judging Proust's Book From An Aristotlean Point of View

2009-02-10T21:27:00.000-08:00

Marcel Proust's failure to play well with others; his lack of prudential or practical wisdom; and his insistent cognitive games - these three factors eventually win a beautiful relationship with others through the massive confessional that is Proust's art. The Book of Proust is practical wisdom on a biblical scale, as revealed via Marcel's practical foolishness and refined via a practical skepticism on a par with Montaigne's.

And the prose? Virtuistic, supple, sinuous - instinct rebels against this new snake in the garden. Because Proust fails to shock, like so many of his French colleagues, he nevertheless does not fail to build a relationship (a single unitary friendship on a grand scale) with his readers which is shocking in the way it involves readers in his neurotic verbal-emotional-worldly games.

Does this reader want to bitchslap the author? Sometimes. But since Proust is basically innocent and silly (albeit in a shrewd and wise way) I would regret it.

Some of the High Moments From Plato's Meno

2009-02-10T20:12:00.000-08:00

The Meno seems to present the original Socratic formula in the most basic terms. But because it has distinctive and important ideas in the beginning, middle, and end, it somewhat defies clear cut analysis. It is too good a piece to analyze without some measure of arrogance. I think that if you are not honestly baffled by the end of this dialog, I must impute your intelligence with rude names.

Socrates deftly prises the definition of virtue free from commonsense and common practice in the opening. It starts bad and gets much worse: not only don't we know what the Good is, but we seem to imagine there are many different goods.

Then in the middle, Socrates neatly demolishes the easy commonplace that education educates people to be good. We finish hardly even sure how learning itself occurs. Education goes quantum in Plato's Meno - it seems as if we become virtuous by some kind of spooky action at a distance.

Then in the end we figure out that we can't define any of these terms without first defining the ultimate context in which these terms occur. That is, 'education', 'goodness' and 'virtue' all occur in the ultimate context of the reality of a divine maker. Like it or lump it. But the deux ex machina is no easy answer here. The discussion of opinion versus knowledge that crowns the dialog completely undercuts any easy certainty you might place in the guidance of religious faith.

I'm surprised Meno didn't take his life there and then from philosophical despair. But the fact is that Socrates is quite definite in his faith that these things are knowable. And that once you begin to listen to the Socrates, something in his faith gives you faith and you begin to respond with genuine feelings, from disquiet to outrage, against the easy certitudes that falsehoods parade as under the name of "common sense".

Socrates show how uncommon true commmon sense is, and the Meno is an indefatigable guide to demolishing falsehood in the search for truth.

New Insights on the Good Life of Aristotle and Adler

2009-01-24T21:33:00.001-08:00

I've spent the afternoon in the state library reading Mortimer Adler's book 'Aristotle For Everybody'. I'm pretty excited about my reading: it demonstrates to me that I've discovered some new knowledge, something new under the sun.

Here's how: I informed Aristotle and Adler's views on the ethical and good life with the philosophical views of Vedanta, the teachings on skillful means in the Dhamma-Vinyana, and the basic view of not-self (Buddhist) or the non-linear Self (Hindu). The result is something new and pleasing, and to my mind a more accurate description of the constituents of the good life heretofore created. Sadly, it is not appropriate to go into it here. But I do love this stuff!

I also read two books on autodidacticism. From Adler's book on the topic (very slight!) I picked the following fruit: poetry and philosophy are the two transcendent Goods of life, because one has to do with making things to the ultimate degree (that is, poetry makes meaning), and the other has to do with knowing to the ultimate degree (that is, philosophy answers all valid questions, and refutes all invalid or pseudo-philosophical questions). Marvellous insight!

I found nothing new in Adler's 'Ten Philosophical Mistakes' beyond a moment of existential vertigo at reading the summary of the first philosophical error - the notion that the stuff of mind is a representation of mind, and mind is not accessible to consciousness. This staggered me for a second: I cannot know my own mind!

Then I remembered Freud, and Proust, and Jung, and I understood the need for this indirection, and the possibility of direct knowledge nevertheless through poetic means.

I learnt today that philosophy cannot disclose direct experience, but poetry can. Thus the great sages like Freud and Proust and Jung are best read as poet-shamans, conducing one into a realm which if not for their assistance would remain inaccessible - that is, into one's own self.

A Chance Meeting In Aristotle After Buying Plato's Gorgias

2008-12-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

“Corgi-arse” seems to be the correct pronunciation. I don’t suppose the ancient Greeks had Corgi-like dogs.

I got it from Mary Martins for 13 dollars. I read Polus’ lovely sentence in Gorgias on the way home on the train about art and experience versus chance and inexperience. I had a chuckle at Socrates’ generally inquisitorial tone. I don’t think our friend Socrates was a very nice man.

As it happens, I contemplate Socrates’ key idea every day: “Every man does the good, the trouble is that they don’t know what the good is, therefore humbly accept that you don’t know anything and live from there.” This idea is a brilliant summary of Socrates, but no-where yet can I find the precise formulation of it. It is all in parts, scattered across the Gorgias and other texts.

To my delight, when I got home I read the first few pages of Aristotle’s Metaphysics before falling asleep on the couch with it open on my chest. Aristotle happened to mention Polus’ speech. It was like running into a stranger who knows a mutual friend.

The pleasure of books is the acquaintance with the wise. The pleasure of thought is the acquaintance with your own self through mind. And the joy of philosophy is to go beyond thinking out of love of truth.

The Power of Primary Texts

2008-12-10T00:53:00.000-08:00

If you want to learn philosophy, read Plato. If you want to learn metaphysics, rhetoric, politics, or psychology, read Aristotle. If you want to learn about reason and faith, read Thomas Aquinas.

Don’t settle for second best. Go to the source. Read the primary texts.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. You will probably be able to rediscover a few things on your own, but you don’t have twenty six centuries to consider them. Only fools, rebels, narcissists and young people try to go it alone intellectually. You have one life to live and wasting years on reproducing a conclusion you can learn from Plato or Aristotle is not smart. Start at the start with Plato.

Can’t understand the primary texts? Neither can I. But in saying that, we need to draw a distinction between two kinds of difficulty with these texts.

There are difficulties in primary texts that should be avoided, and difficultiesin primary texts that should be embraced.

The best way to show you this is give examples from my own experience:

In reading Plato’s Republic the first time I recognised that I wouldn’t be capable of understanding most of the middle books of the text without more effort than I was able to give the text this first reading. I learnt this from reading the introduction of the Penguin Classics version. This kind of difficulty is worth avoiding until I am more capable of comprehending them, and more motivated by a broader base of understanding. Had I ploughed through, I would have discouraged myself, then dispirited myself, then demoralized myself (had I kept going: I would have quit the moment I became dispirited rather than be demoralized).

Then there are difficulties with primary texts which are what Harold Bloom calls the “difficult pleasure” of a classic. Simply put, what some people might find a problem or a hassle, I find a stimulus and a challenge in these texts. The marvel of these texts is that on the other side of the difficulty is a stark simplicity that comes from their irreducible basic truth.

Intellectualism that does not respect and honour the past is snobbery and arrogance, and in fact fake or pseudo-intellectualism because it leads to circuitous ramblings which mainly appeal other to other poor people seduced by intellectual falsehood.

The basis for genuine intellectual ability is humility. Specifically, being humble enough to accept that most of the things you can usefully think have already been long since thunk by Mister Aristotle and Mister Plato!

A Socratic dialog turns Proustian.

2008-12-09T22:31:00.001-08:00

Tonight after the group meets I walk up to my favorite cafe with Samuel and we get a burger, look at girls, and discuss martial arts. On the last topic Samuel, with years more experience in the field, makes a very provocative comment:

“The secret of this type of martial arts is relaxation, plus connection, plus aiming,” he says.

I ask him to repeat it and when he does, I plunge into deep contemplation for a few minutes.

Samuel is as fascinating as a character from Proust. When we walk he directs our steps and expects I walk with him. We wander down Grenfell Street.

“I’m such a creature of habit,” I say. “Normally I walk along Rundle Mall and look at the menswear in the shop windows on the way to the Adelaide train station.”

“Listen to you, you’re such a faggot,” Samuel says.

“I’ve been doing it for years. I now own some of the menswear I used to wish for in the windows,” I say, not even bothering to defend myself. Samuel doesn’t care what you think of him, so any defence I can mount is a waste of our time and energy.

He follows me into the literary bookstore, and listens in on my superficial conversation with the bookseller without adding a single disapproving word. But when we come to the local men’s fashion emporium he finally balks, refusing to look at the clothes. “I can’t stand the music,” he says of the dance music blaring from the store.

“Too much high culture for you,” I jeer. He doesn’t reply.

We walk down King William Street deep in conversation. Eventually the talk comes around to the person he had a phone text message dispute with over our dinner. A mutual friend, it appears. Apropos of the dispute Samuel begins to speak openly and with perfect naturalness about his character defects.

“It’s not that I mean to be arrogant. I am just being myself and other people take offence.”

“How do you know when you’re just being yourself and when you’re being arrogant?” I ask.

“Oh I know,” he says, with perfectly unconscious arrogance. “Even if I’m saying I’m not being arrogant I know deep inside when I am. I feel it.”

I watch his face carefully, fascinated by the notion that gut feelings might be any sort of reliable guide to social truth.

He talks at length about his defect and his natural personality. His view on personal responsibility is what inspires his legendary bluntness and impoliteness, he reveals:

“If I say something and you get offended, that’s your choice. You choose to be offended. Fine; no harm done. But if you get hurt and angry and cry at how I hurt your feelings because you took offence, then I have no time for you. You’re playing the victim when you think someone else can make you feel anything.”

“But isn’t offence an emotion?” I ask.

“Offence,” he says, “is a mental state. You don’t choose to be offended, but you do choose to feel the associated emotions with it. I speak bluntly to some people and they couldn’t care less, and I speak the same way with others and you’d think I’d taken their firstborn, they get so upset.”

“That is fascinating, Samuel. Thankyou for explaining that for me, now I understand what that behaviour’s all about,” I say. I had been wondering what motivates his bluntness for several weeks, and to have him simply explain himself to me without my asking is an unexpected boon.

But I do not speak my mind until the conversation has ostensibly moved on to other topics and I can bring up the subject of his vanity without fear of causing offense:

“I notice some people habitually take offence because of political correctness. That is to say, because I am a female, you can’t say that; because I am indigenous, you can’t say that. For such people, offence and emotion is one and the same thing.”

Samuel heartily agrees. So I continue:

“You know neurologists have found that being able to restrain your emotions is one of the last traits to appear in adulthood. It’s associated with the frontal lobes and generally finishes growing in the thirties, so many people either have brain damage or they haven’t grown the proper brain structures to be able to restrain themselves from getting upset,” I say. “So when a person without the ability to stop themselves reacting feels upset, would it not follow they would automatically be offended?”

But Samuel is not interested in examining his own views. He says: “Imagine what the world would be like if drinking alcohol was unpopular on a Saturday night.”

“People would be playing chess in the square,” I say. We are sitting at the bus stop in Victoria Square as I say this.

“Giant chess with human bodies,” Samuel adds whimsically.

“There would be comfortable couches in nightclubs, and they wouldn’t have to fear people ruining them by spilling alcohol all over them.”

“Nightclubs would be so different. Comfortable.”

“Quiet.”

“People would be playing instruments in cafes. Jazz, rock bands.”

“String quartets in nightclubs. And wouldn’t it be cool if you could go to a yoga class at 9.30 on a Saturday night!” I say.

He looks at me oddly, as if doing a yoga class on a Saturday night is just completely beyond the pale. His disturbed look just makes my night. I am delighted. Sometimes Samuel finds me very strange indeed, and this is one of those times.

“Here comes my bus,” he says, standing. “You’ve missed your tram.”

“I have, and I’ve had the compensation of a very interesting conversation,” I say warmly, and we part ways.

My behavior tonight was half-way between Proust and Socrates. The Socratic desire to cross-examine my friend’s absurd views on causing offense was overcome by the simple pleasure Marcel Proust takes in the gentle unconscious comedy that comes from enjoying the implaceable bad defects of those we hold in high affection.

How to Develop the Healing Power of Gratitude.

2008-12-09T22:25:00.003-08:00

Love and gratitude are the most powerful healers on the planet. Gratitude is love in operation, so to speak. But many people when they try to practice gratitude find it difficult.

Gratitude is difficult because it develops over time. Most people are at the basic level of gratitude, and therefore cannot imagine it being an easy and natural way of life.

Just knowing that gratitude will develop and blossom eventually into something marvellous can be reassuring. It will get easier to practice gratitude. But knowing what stage you are at helps you understand what is ahead too.

I will describe four stages of the development of gratitude. They aren’t distinct phases, just points of reference along the way. Can you tell where you are on the scale of gratitude?

The four stages in developing gratitude are:
1. grudging gratitude
2. forced gratitude
3. balanced gratitude and
4. inspired gratitude.

Grudging gratitude is casual attention on things that are ok, or not significant problems in your life. It has little power to heal, and is centred around satisfaction of desires and appetites. The real power of grudging gratitude is in re-sensitizing you to the good aspects of every day life. For example, if you see a certain car you think is cool and remembering to grudgingly give thanks for having seen something you would like, then you will be now sensitised to seeing that kind of car more often, and more likely to enjoy your day as a result. Most grudging gratitude happens at the level of daily attention.

Forced gratitude is what you write a gratitude list because you want to feel grateful even though you don’t. You write the list, and some small degree of balance is evoked throughout your day, which feels pleasant or at least feels less unpleasant. It mostly deals with the senses and sensory ideas. It evokes excitement and emotional highs that don’t last, but they feel okay. Forced gratitude is more powerful than grudging gratitude, usually because it is written down or shared with a friend. It has the power to inspire. It takes effort, but the effort is worth it!

Balanced gratitude is when you see clearly with your mind how problems and opportunities both serve you. You ask and answer questions to yourself. You consciously seek the perfection not by positive thinking mood-making of yourself, but by looking at how an event serves and harms you, by seeing both sides at once.

When you see both sides of a thing, it is a relief from resentment and indulgent infatuation. You are free to see clearly. It feels wonderful, but in fact it is merely relief from the constant pressure of emotionalised perception. Balanced gratitude is how it feels to live in accord with reason and education. Balanced gratitude is normally done through a formal written process, and only gradually internalised with education, skill, and life experience, as well as formal repetition. Balanced gratitude is connect with our ability to be reasonable. This balanced gratitude has the power to bring peace and satisfaction, and is a powerful healing resource for caring professionals like doctors and nurses, but also a potent inner resource for anyone who wants to cope with life more effectively.

Inspired gratitude is itself a gift and a revelation. It discloses itself when conditions are right. If you are inspired you can say thankyou to problems as they arise; you can meet opportunities with equanimity and balance; you can swim upstream to the source.

The prerequisite for inspired gratitude is that the mind is balanced, because in inspired gratitude the heart is wide open and inspirational guidance streams through consciousness.

If this sounds like a bit of hard work, then consider how hard it is trying to force yourself to appreciate things with a closed heart and confused mind! It is so much less effort to simply balance your perceptions of a situation using your reason and education, and if you do that enough, inspiration is inevitable.

Gratitude, love, inspiration, compassion, reason and that gracious inner balance the world only knows under the word “charisma” are idle potentials unless shared. As the proverb says, a friend sharpens another friend like iron against iron. Likewise your friends can blunt you. In grudging and forced gratitude, exposure to the negativity of others must bring you down; in balanced gratitude, you get free of the negative of others.

How does balanced gratitude deal with negativity?

The hidden blessing of negative, irrational and limited people and experiences is that you can own their faults – somewhere, sometime in your own experience you have behaved the way you see negative people behaving. And when you can own it, you are paradoxically free of it. The saying goes, If you can spot it, you’ve got it.

Owning others’ negative qualities as your own returns you to gratitude and allows you to challenge those negative people to see the hidden blessing inherent in their difficulties. And because you have identified with them and “been there and done that”, they have no basis to reject your words because you are simply sharing your experience.

Real power inspires and heals through balanced gratitude. The kind of power that brings tears of compassion to your eyes can melt even the hardest heart and open even the most rigid mind to the balanced truth that we are all on the same journey to the wholeness and peace of gratitude, our true condition.

How Emerson Out-Thinks Us All.

2008-12-09T22:25:00.002-08:00

Vanity makes my friend Samuel interesting to talk to. For example, this Saturday night he reminded me that I was reading Emerson.

“Yes, I’m reading his essays from his youth.”

“I love some of his quotes,” Samuel says.

“Emerson is fantastic,” I say, “Whenever I read him I see my own thoughts. He is the original American free thinker. If I try to think for myself I learn I am either doing it in resistance to him or along the lines he laid down.”

“I don’t think so,” Samuel says, frowning and looking down.

“Emerson is bigger than us,” I tell him. “His thinking is larger than ours. You can’t be self-reliant without to some extent relying on Emerson’s guidance, unconsciously or not.”

But it was evident by then that he had not actually read Emerson, beyond the occasional inspirational quotation, so we changed the topic to talking about Mark Twain, another writer he had not read but one he could talk about with more of a veneer of saving face.

On The Incredible Badness of Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Coming of Arthur’ With Sundry Slurs And Personal Smears Against the Poet Laureate

2008-12-09T22:25:00.001-08:00

Tonight I read Tennyson’s ‘Dedication’, and ‘The Coming of Arthur’. I suggest we consign ‘The Coming of Arthur’ to the Office of Dead Bad Books. That we just forget it existed.

Let’s look at what ‘Arthur’ has got. Tepid sentiment. Rancid blank verse. Chilling second-hand reports of vapid inactions and trite offstage discussions between faceless characters.

Tennyson’s ‘Coming of Arthur’ is Milton left to go cold, reheated by Keats, then left to go cold again and reheated and served up as if fresh meat. Tennyson’s blank verse reads like three day old stew. Spenser in comparison is an imagiste.

I read aloud the opening four lines no less than four times to make them sing:

Leodogran, the king of Cameliard,
Had one fair daughter, and none other child;
And she was fairest of all flesh on earth,
Guinevere, and in her his one delight.

This scans like handful of mud. “Fairest of all flesh” – is she a lump of meat or what? “Of all flesh on earth” – and at what butcher shop the unearthly or heavenly flesh is to be got?

And what’s with that last line? “Delight” clinks against “child” in a nasty ole mis-rhyme. And, reader, you must read aloud the last two lines to really get for yourself how stilted and idiotically tuneless this poetry is.

Then I read three times the passage where Arthur decides to take Guinevere as his girl. The first read through I thought, “Sweet, a half decent poetic figuration!” and so re-read the lines to get at their meaning. But on second reading, I discovered that the figure (a rich expanded metaphor of Arthur and Guinevere as the alchemical and magical enaction of social unity), was in fact my own imagining projected onto the lines, and if present at all, it was not quite articulated.

Tennyson had just plain failed to put the idea across, and I read it a third time in disgust just to make sure that poor Alfred’s disaster was complete. I cannot quote it; it is too poor. It’s lines 81 to 93; Arthur is speechifying.

I quickly read the rest of the ‘Coming of Arthur’ so I could be sure there seems to be absolutely nothing of lasting value in it, and passed on to Plato’s superb ‘Theaetetus’. I even glanced forward over the chronological selection and realised that when I first as a thirteen year old kid read his short poems I had got the best his work.

I mean, did Alfred Tennyson have a stroke or just start taking anti-psychotic drugs? All his work from ‘In Memoriam’ on features lots of grinding rhythms, and precious little romance, music, color, and life, and woeful verbal fluff combined with vague imagery. It’s like a detailed record of really bad sex.

I want to suggest that Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ is in fact composed to commemorate a series of painfully ill-executed headjobs which Alfred got from Parisian whores, including a series of stanzas on the trauma of painful teeth grazings, and a sequence on Tennyson’s treatment for syphilis. I suggest this as the real meaning of these poems not because I believe you can read that into the text at all, but because any topic would be more exciting than the unpersuasive panegyric on the death of a friend that poor Alf has has inflicted upon posterity.

Why Read Proust?

2008-12-09T22:25:00.000-08:00

Why Read Proust?

There are many good reasons not to read Marcel Proust’s great novel A la Rechere du Temps Perdu.

It is uneventful. It can be boring. The narrator is a bitchy snob. It has too many outright lies in it to be autobiography, and too much tiresome bickering to be considered a novel. And it is too long.

It is cynical: all human relationships except close family are false, fake; naked unconscious self-interest and vanity drive all social interactions; childhood habits once broken can never be recovered; insomnia, poor health, jealousy, sadomasochistic urges, ungovernable impulses – all of these completely overrule and overdetermine the individual’s sense of reason.

It is capricious: a huge cast of mostly irrelevant characters caper about uttering strange irrelevancies, whose total sum is some kind of mysterious calculus of snobbery cloaking intense animalistic urges, which Proust seldom deigns to explain to readers living in a less uptight culture. Cruelty is commonplace between characters that are considered friends, and sexual compulsions bind everyone together invisibly and inseparably.

It is disorganised: the tone changes from page to page, from book to book, without warning, guidance, or apparent reason. The paragraph divisions are completely useless, presenting the book messily. The chapter headings are either hopelessly irrelevant or simply nonexistent; the reader is left to impose his own structure on the book if he is to make sense of it.

So why read Proust? If the good is the enemy of the great, surely Proust’s book is its own worst enemy? But if you read merely good books, then you are condemned to mediocrity. And since Marcel Proust’s book is both bad AND great, it provides the most uniquely vulgar amusements in the midst of the most sublime art. I don’t dispute its greatness; its goodness I sincerely doubt.

So why read it? I can tell you must read Marcel Proust. I can tell you it is great. But I cannot tell you why. Harold Bloom blathers on about identity and memory; I don’t know about that. I can only tell you that I do, you must, it’s worth it – that is all I can say.

Addendum: Okay, okay, so Proust is funny, charming, insightful, sweet. His language is beautiful, delicate, tough, and sinewy. His ideas on love are shocking and wise in equal measure. And the badness of Proust’s book makes the great qualities all the more astonishing. It is as if it were discovered that Thomas Aquinas has been, in addition to writing his Summa Theologica, the author of some pornography – I kid you not: Proust is THAT shocking.

Phone cushion and toilet readimg

2008-10-01T10:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after I made my morning phone calls, I sat down on the long floor cushion where the phone lies and picked up my copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

Visually stunning, it dates from 1946, and there I read with all credibility about Jesus suspiring out of the ground as spring time, and listened to Khayyam's terrible and beautiful laughter at the ways of the world, and gazed a long time at the picture of Omar pouring himself a cup of wine while an army in full glory rushed by to a sure death in the opposite direction.

Then I dipped into Shelley, and read the end of Act III of Prometheus Unbound, where the spirit of the hour tells how the human world has changed with the advent of the new golden age of science. I read with pity these lines, the beating heart of youth's ideals:

My coursers sought their birth-place in the sun,
Where they henceforth will live exempt from toil
Pasturing flowers of vegetable fire.
And where my moonlike car will stand within
A temple, gazed upon by Phidian forms...

I read to the end of III how men and women free of tyranny could somehow also manage to live free of their animality as well, wandering around the new earth in rapt rationality. Sigh.

I turned to Milton, and read the speech whereby the snake tempted Eve. Milton sure makes that devil argue well. I would've gone the way of Eve too, I think. Any why not? I think our mythic mother really did know best in this instance. I also find the way Eve speaks in Milton sexy: she reminds me of Seven of Nine in Star Trek Voyager.

Thismorning I read a few pages of Plato's Critias, how Socrates missus whined that it was the last time he'd hang out with his mates. Then after my one morning phone call I read Tennyson's 'Lucretius', some of In Memoriam, and the start of the Idylls of the King, which is impeccably well paced. Lucretius is an odd poem. Do you think Tennyson had a low opinion of women? And all this man-lovin' stuff in 'In Memoriam'? The guy who died must've been giving Alf sexual favors to get this kind of praise.

You can tell what Will Shakespeare's sexuality must've been (WS was evidently what we now call bi-curious hetro), but not Alfred Tennyson's. The guy could've been an alien for all we know about his animal nature. And it makes me uncomfortable reading him.

This afternoon I bought Samuel Johnston's Selected Writings, Robert Grave's hilarious I, Claudius, and Fielding's Tom Jones (which Johnston disapproved of, I immediately learned). Three funny guys - Johnston, Graves, and Fielding - who will make great company over the coming years.

I looked at various copies of Montaigne today too, but I think I will hold out on buying the Screech version for the one Harold Bloom recommends. I forget the translator (Mason?). I read much of the Screech edition of Selected Essays of Montaigne today in the bookshop, so I guess I can't justify buying it if it yields its contents so quickly.

I also looked at many many Roman and Greek classics. Xenophon's Socratic Writings and Persian Expedition grab my interest the most, but I want to wait until I have the full picture of Plato's view of Socrates before I take on Xenophon. He strikes me as a vulgar kind of writer, kind of like an ex-Marine who writes thrillers in his spare time while he plays the stock market with hedges and cheats on his wife by sleeping with crack-smoking single mothers as a hobby. That's just my first impressions of Xenophon, mind you. Once I have the full picture of the facts from Plato (who of course is self-evidently a trustworthy man) I will take on Xenophon. But not until then.

I have so much to be grateful for.

NY Times Conservative/Academic Agitprop

2008-10-01T10:16:00.000-07:00

According to a NY Times article, conservatives are paying hard cash to influence academia right-wards:

- Religion-focused Where's religion in all this?

- Apologist for cultural marxism. "They also understand, however, that any mature academic discussion has to take into account the fact that numerous groups have been historically marginalized and excluded from the discourse." Awww...

- The logician wonders why conservatives don't simply argue their case. (Arguing this case would look something like Socrates' conversation with Protagoras.)

- The testosteronic rightists who comment that "It's about time we purge the leftists from academia!" - a la Stalin I suppose?

- Is the left leaving academia? Finally there are the perplexed, who at least are decent in perplexity.

I would like to make some comments.

First and foremost, the source of the information is the New York Times. I have been led to believe the NY Times cannot be considered a reputable newspaper.

Second, look at the tone. Clearly the way the original article is written is calculated to drive newspaper sales... it's inflammatory, it emotionalizes the issue, and it irresponsibly fails to give any practical sense of the context of the issue. Because of the lack of context, the blogosphere must invent one, which leaves it up to the bias of the writer.

Naturally, the story gets picked up by those who are attracted to emotionalized material, and so the most obvious responses are from the most extreme positions. You get the strictly logical critique, the hawkish rightists, the leftist evasions... all of which have simply added their own context to the story.

You want to know what I think?

I think the New York Times is simply not telling the truth.

I Visit The Great Books of the Western World in My Local Library

2008-09-30T08:33:00.002-07:00

I visited the South Australia State Library on North Terrace, with excitement in my belly. I was off to visit the Great Books of the Western World. To my astonishment, the State Library didn’t have the books. The librarian looked it up for me at Adelaide University Library website, and found them in the marvellous Barr-Smith Library.

I zipped behind the State Library, across the State Gallery grounds, down the physics building carpark and carried the bike down four steps to then cruise along the main side street of Adelaide University on my bike, my long blonde hair flying in the wind, feeling fairly astonishingly great.

I trotted down two flights of stairs and circled around the stacks of books, sneezing a little in the dust, til I found them… the complete collection of the Great Books of the Western World.

I sat cross legged beside them. The Great Books are nestled beside the stairwell window, so as I settled in I glanced up and got nice view of the young people’s legs as they sashayed upstairs and downstairs, adding significantly to the sensual pleasure of the finely printed and bound hardcover classics. I read the reading plan introduction, taking notes, rephrasing key points, and soaking up the glorious insights.

Gradually I entered a heightened state; I sat cross legged there forgetting myself completely until my legs went numb. An hour must have passed.

Then I took the books entitled “The Great Conversation” by Hutchins and “The Syntopicon, Volume One” by Adler, and went and sat down. I kept expecting someone to walk by and see me sitting there glowing and exhilarated almost out of my body and demand I leave shouting “No intellectual joy allowed here, sir!”

I read the entire “Great Conversation” book. It was irresistible; compelling. Among our contemporaries, where else can you find genuinely timeless erudition? It’s almost unknown, a forgotten excellence. And Hutchins made it seem effortless. Most remarkable, perhaps his brilliance really is effortless.

Imagine talking to such a man in person. I counted the great authors and came to 73 men (excluding the trio who wrote the US constitution; Jefferson alone suffices.) I imagined a great shadowy vault of a room where these men sat and conversed together through the ages, and the world outside the portals and the eaves of this quiet room trembled to their words. I imagined this and my body fairly shook with gratitude.

I started on the syntopicon with the essays on "Angel" and "Animal". I almost made myself late for my evening appointment reading - it was a huge rush to get to Glenelg on bike in 35 minutes. And I suspect as soon as my present batch of book reviews is done I will be spending a LOT more time by the window to the stairwell in the State Library.

Reading Tacitus Gives Me A Nightmare

2008-09-30T08:33:00.001-07:00

Late last night I read in Tacitus how Germanicus died.

The significance of Germanicus to Roman history is that he was (or Tacitus makes him seem) the most decent candidate for emperor – almost the only decent person on stage at this part of Tacitus.

Apparently Germanicus never considered becoming emperor. After his bold victories in Germany, did soldiers remember Julius Caesar? Twenty centuries later, I think it. And yet Germanicus, unlike Caesar, was a decent soldier, administrator, and Roman, and no more.

His death is simple. Germanicus travelled widely, so he caught an infectious disease. Modern consciousness research as developed by David R. Hawkins validates the infectious disease view, and in addition vindicates Piso of his murder charges – twenty centuries late for Piso.

Not simple are the consequences of his death. Recall that the Romans would not have understood the infectious disease model – to them Germanicus did not simply “catch a bug”. Some darker force at work in the world was behind the death, the Romans must have felt.

And the legal case against Piso is significant too. The Roman people wanted Piso’s blood. All Piso was guilty of was ruthless political ambition - it doesn’t necessarily follow that Piso poisoned Germanicus.

I put the book aside with a feeling of deep scepticism about human political processes. How to ensure decent leadership? Was Roman decline inevitable? Is Western decline inevitable? How must Tacitus have felt, watching Imperial Rome dissolving into the tides of history?

I slept and dreamt that a great man had magically enslaved another. I watched with dread and fascination as he stripped his slave of humanity and made him into an instrument of his will. I took pleasure in the master’s evil power and felt the horror of the slave at the insult to his sovereign will.

On waking, I saw that the zombie in my dream was Rome under Tiberius.

The reason the Roman people reacted to the death of Germanicus with superstitious horror was not for the sake of Germanicus himself, but for the loss of the potential for decent leadership. After Germanicus no hope for a good leader remained, only passive obedience to an Emperor they did not love. And the shock of this loss of hope drove the Roman people to hound Piso to his death.

The ability of Tacitus to show the decline under Tiberius becomes still more impressive when you consider that Germanicus shows no inkling of being aware of the decline. It took more than the intelligence and goodwill of a Germanicus to detect the course history was taking; it took the genius of a Tacitus.

J. S. Bach’s Worldly Concerts

2008-09-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

I have been listening through Bach’s Worldly Concerts (der Weltliche Kantaten). As I listen I read the notes and mark the distinctive features on the music files on the computer for later enjoyment. It’s amazing how much more interesting a bit of information makes a piece of music, and it becomes a obsessively interesting when this compelling music is going on in the background, demanding you make some sense of the actual structure of the music from the meagre cd notes and track listings.

In between constant typing I take a moment to reflect on how anally retentive the classical music world seems to be. Instead of translating “Weltliche Kantaten” as “Worldy Concerts”, it needs to be “Secular Cantatas”.

The German librettos remain untranslated. The sensible thing would be to post translations online and provide a link to the non-German speakers, even if they had to use Babelfish to autotranslate it’s better than battling with German dictionary in one hand and track info in the other. (Incidently, in the cantata ‘Hercules at the Crossroads’ (BWV 213) the cd notes translate ‘Wellust’ as ‘Vice’, and the German dictionary gives it as ‘Lust and lasciviousness’. Hm!)

Few of the Bach cantatas are given sensible titles – sensible in that they are easily identifiable to almost anyone. So I name the concertos after the topic – for instance, Worldly Concert BWV 203 is now known as ‘Bach’s Italian Lovin’ Concert 203’. Much better, that.

I also go through and change “recitativo” to “recital”. I was tempted to change “aria” to “song”, but the more precise translation would be an “air” which is in English is an archaism as repulsive to the ear as pretending to be a drunk Scot at an Anglican wedding, and in any case the word “song” shears off enough extra meaning to justify keeping “aria”.

The cd notes scatter the relevant information far and wide – what character is singing is in the text notes, and whether the singer is alto or tenor or whatever is on the back cover of the cd. They couldn’t have made it harder to follow the story without actually omitting the information. I put all the information together as a new title for the song, so I can actually enjoy it more later on.

I messed around with BWV 36, BWVs 201 to 210, and BWVs 213 to 215. They all rock, and they are all rendered inaccessible in various ways to various audiences by snobby or ignorant notes and complete lack of any guidance as to their enjoyment.

Classical music companies, hello? Classical music companies, do you honestly prefer to give snobby names to great music OVER speaking plainly at the risk of attracting a huge listening audience of excited common folk?

How long before we see “Bach’s Worldly Concerts” coming out? Let's just hope the Cantatas survive into the civilisation after ours.

My favorite at the moment is the alto song from the worldly concert 207; I call it the Jagged Song, because the violins do this unusual jiggering-jaggering sound throughout the whole piece while the flutes and alto do a slow swinging motion around one another like I don’t know what. The alto plays the role of ‘Gratitude’, but I have no idea what’s grateful about the piece – it just sounds weird. And that’s why I like it.

In all Bach’s work there’s nothing like the Jagged Song. Check out the alto aria in BWV 207… it’s a real trip.

Joy, Death, Misery, and Beauty: My Friday Night

2008-09-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

Tonight I met James and Mick for an epic walk from the city to the Payneham Community Center. We took 110 minutes, half of it barefoot. What fun!

It brought back those childhood days of darting through sidestreets with friends in the dusk while everyone cooks their dinners and the moon rises and the sweet spring air intoxicates the senses til you are wild and tired and vital all at the same time.

We arrive with flowers in our hair.

Afterwards at Al Frescoes Cafe Zoe and Dave and I sit and talk about death.

Deb, Dave's beautiful wife, died just over seven months ago on February 28. Dave goes into detail, describing how his beloved's pelvis melted, for example. I force myself to sit still and say nothing. I feel so young around Dave and Zoe.

And Zoe has an medical operation next week. She asks me for some classical music to recover to and I have the pleasure of having on me a cd called "The Most Relaxing Handel Album In The World... ever!" It's exactly what she needs, and that makes me so happy.

Later, after a pizza and some reading, I take the last train home. The carriage is full of under-23 year olds.

What can I say? Obviously I am disgusted and repelled by their ill-dressed, unformed, skinny bodies, that stink of alcohol and poor hygiene. The nonsense they speak lacks even the virtue of being happy nonsense.

Misery is cool if you're born after 1985. Clever animals lost in the cracks of the world, the Y Generation are post-literate casualties of a cultural marxism that makes it seem as if all human values died sometime in the 1980s and now only senseless pleasure remains.

It makes me angry. I think of my own years of willful ignorance... I can't think clearly in the stink.

As soon as I get home, I put on Mozart's Requiem and think of the dead I love, and the living I care about. I listen to the Kyrie on repeat. Mozart's Kyrie is a fugue, which is a musical form but also latin for "flight" and I remember hearing that kyrie on my walkman while I had a terrible cold and I went running at night and I ran like a dog, trying to run from the body, sickness, and fear of death. I think of the young people in flight from reality.

As I listen to Mozart’s kyrie,
I cannot run fast enough,
Cannot bow low enough,
Cannot honor the spectacular
Human world enough

To outrun, outrun, outrun
(Forever and ever
Kingdom and the mystery be
For thine is the Glory
For this is the) Death.

Two Things

2008-09-23T08:44:00.002-07:00

Two things have interrupted my liberal humanist reading.

The first is the choice to take on book reviews for a self-help magazine.

The second is my focus on Doctor David R. Hawkins empirical ‘praxis’, from his book “I: Reality and Subjectivity”, which occupies the time I'd normally read in, with an investigation into subjective awareness.

Much of the focus has been on validating and verifying the basis of his conclusions in my own subjective awareness. My head tries to whine about how hard it all is, but in all honesty this kind of inquiry is a powerful experience of self-intimacy.

Above all I am grateful that through no particular virtue of my own I am able to explore the praxis with enough inner clarity to get some of Hawkins' concepts experientially. I am extremely fortunate.

It is springtime here, and in the green is something so beautiful. I don't know what. But I feel happy knowing it is there.

Bill Clinton’s prisoner’s dilemma of the stock market.

2008-09-23T08:44:00.001-07:00

One more thing from last night:

Clinton added that the ultimate basis for the present economic recession is trying to make money out of thin air through financial instruments, rather than by investing it in someone with a sound business to produce something real.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma applied to the stock market:

The short term big gains seem to come from destructive greed. The long term medium gains come from trust and co-operation, but if you choose trust and another chooses greed you gain nothing. And worst of all, you must choose trust or greed without first knowing what others choose.

So Clinton’s solution is decent people. In the remarkable view of Mr Clinton, the world seems to be full of decent people choosing financial instruments representing real businesses over financial instruments that seem to make money out of thin air.

I have faith his view is correct.

Bill Clinton talks economics on David Letterman.

2008-09-23T08:44:00.000-07:00

I am so impressed by the simplicity and kindliness in the approach of Mr Clinton seeing him on Letterman tonight. He continually plugs in his sober, off-hand way his partisan interest in renewable energy. Which was kind of dull.

But then David Letterman asks him about the economy and somebody runs electricity through his chair. Suddenly the chirpy, charming, president is back. He explains smilingly that when tech stocks lost value after the dotcom bubble burst in 2001 the money had to go somewhere, so it went into housing.

So, Letterman asks, who’s to blame?

Clinton explains that if you work on Wall Street you get paid on how many deals you do, and at the time the best or only deals going were in housing. The money needed somewhere to go. It went into housing because it had nowhere else to go. Indeed, we need new opportunities (such as renewable energy) for investment money to flow into.

The financiers used financial vehicles to stretch the money further, to leverage the money into more and more housing deals. They used derivatives, representing say 30 houses by the money it cost to buy one. They used the subprime system, which promised low mortgages for a few years to get people buying houses. The short term problem of mortgage foreclosures, oil prices, low consumer confidence, a nervous Wall Street – all these problems help point to the lack of good investments (such as renewable energy).

El Presidente waxed chirpy about the position of the incoming President. “If you follow game theory now would be a good time to take the top job, because at least things aren’t going to get worse,” he joked.

The truth is there is no-one to blame. The money needed somewhere to go. Wall St gets paid on how many deals you do. The industry requires tougher regulations, guarantees, reserves, and new opportunities (such as renewable energy). We need clean energy incentives. The basis for the housing bubble was not enough good opportunities, and too many bad incentives.

Mr Clinton quotes Churchill: “We [Americans] always do the right thing… after discarding all the alternatives.”

I reflect that Clinton touched on a raw nerve there in the American psyche. Much can be made of American optimism and energy, but the real dynamo that supports Western culture seems to me to arise directly from our experience of “hitting the rock bottom”.

Because when you consider it, there is no such thing as a rock bottom. There just arises a moment when you decide you’ve had enough and you need to change. And the joy of the United States both as individuals and a people is that they hit real rock bottoms – they frequently decide they’ve had enough and they need to change. They don’t suffer in silence. They don't let a recession become a depression if they can help it.

And I intuitively feel that the idea of “hitting a rock bottom” originates from American culture. The magnificence of folk like Mr Clinton is that they can walk through terrible times and come out the other side with their head up and their dignity, intellect, and genius intact. That’s really something worthwhile. And I feel tonight he probably inspired a lot of Americans to do the same.

Reading Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws

2008-09-19T22:35:00.000-07:00

I read Charles Montesquieu today. What a nice man!

Just the title says it all - 'The Spirit of Laws' - and you get immediately that this guy is switched on to things. Then you read and have the pleasant realization that most of his ideas have actually been put into practice in present day democracy; followed by the even greater pleasure of recognizing ideas about democracy that are completely new.

Why, for example, have we not considered eliminating a standing army (as he suggests for democracies) and conducting a kind of limited temporary draft? Montesquieu suggests either drafting the rich and independent farmers (and wouldn't they have something to whinge about then!) or else use the criminal class as cannon fodder. Edward de Bono would be proud.

Then again, some things Monty says are outright bizarre. He reckons you can't have big democracies because of two problems. First, people care less for large states, and care more for a state the size of a city. Second, the Rupert Murdoch's and Bill Gates' of this world can use their wealth to sway democracy towards their favor.

The first problem seems largely solved by federalism: we can feel patriotic about being a "Texan" rather than a US citizen, or a "New South Welshman" instead of an Australian. The second problem is simply solved by anti-trust and anti-competition laws, as part of the apparatus of economics. But then again, economics is evidently not Baron Montesquieu's bag.

But the explanation of checks and balances, and the outline of the guiding principles behind the rise and fall of democracies, monarchies and tyrannies, is brilliant and obvious the moment you read it. How could he have anticipated the bushels of bureaucrats that would arise from his simple principle of having different authorities balancing one anothers' power? And, can we do better now?

I think we can do better. Doctor David R. Hawkins' new science of diplomacy, based on consciousness research, can identify the false balance from the real now, and detect from competing authorities whom is the true, and whom the false. But David R. Hawkins' exciting work is another story altogether.

Montesquieu's writing is cool and simple. I found his distinction between the form and the substance of the laws remarkably eastern, and the subtlty of his distinctions refreshingly open-minded. He doesn't tell you, but invites you to look at it with him. Nice guy, Montesquieu.

How Montaigne Manages to Knock Out Masterpieces Without Reading Others' Work

2008-09-18T19:56:00.000-07:00

Montaigne is really an amazing pig of a man. In his essay on the Art of Conversation he admits to not having read for more than an hour in twenty years of life, and then to having read Tacitus' Histories in a sitting.

What a freak. First he only dabbles in books for 20 years then he reads a whole book in a sitting. And that whole book is TACITUS, for goodness sakes.

Then I got thinking. How can Montaigne be so brilliant if he hardly reads? Two answers: first, he has a very good memory; second, he marks up his books with great skill. I wonder if we still have books from his personal library 400 years later? I would love to take a peek.

Another question. When he suddenly devours a whole book, why does Montaigne choose Tacitus' Histories? He says he finds Tacitus highly amusing.

Thinking of Montaigne, I read Mortimer J. Adler on how to mark up a book, and he mentions marking up Plutarch's Lives. This sparked my interest. Evidently there is good reason to be scribbling in my Roman history collection!

So I went to the shelf, took out my Tacitus and a pencil, and on the bus today I marked up chapter one on the bus.

And you know what? Montaigne is right: Tacitus is a funny bugger. What he didn't tell me, though, is that Tacitus laughs at the darkest of ironies. And when Tacitus talks about the sinister Tiberius' ascession to power his humor is positively soviet. Tacitus, the Roman Dostoyevsky - who would've thought?

Chew Your Food.

2008-09-15T19:04:00.000-07:00

“Chew your food,” Shane says.

Shane is an introverted and anxious guy. He has barely shaken my hand before he gets to the point.

“Like Gandhi did,” I respond,“chewing food into liquid before he swallowed it?'

“Like Gandhi did,” he agrees. He stands to one side of me, as if we are admiring an invisible picture together. “It’s a Gestalt thing. Gestalt therapy. Fritz Perls. Oral stage, I think. The mother gives beast feeding until the baby has grown a strong sense of individual will, then the child is ready to start the anal stage I think.”

A micro-expression of embarrassment and fright flickered across his face as he says “anal stage”. We once had a flustered conversation about Franz Kafka where I came away feeling like I had been trying to catch birds in my hands, so frightened he had seemed by the topic.

“Do you understand what I mean?” he says.

“Not at all,” I say.

“Gestalt. Perls. Fritz Perls,” he repeats, shifting from foot to foot. “The mother stops breastfeeding early. The child gets traumatized by the perceived rejection and gulps down its food. It fears it will be taken away. The result is a personality which over-intellectualises, and gulps down ideas.”

“So over-intellectualising is a way of rejecting the feminine power of physical nourishment before it has a chance to reject it. You’re suggesting that chewing my food is the cure for over-intellectualism?” I ask.

“If you chew slowly, you sit and rest, and you breathe slowly and your mind moves more slowly, and you stay still and give your thoughts time to digest.”

“I tend to gulp my ideas, then let them go for the unconscious to digest for me.”

He glances away anxiously. I have only really ever seen Shane comfortable around women. “So it all sifts down, ferments inside the unconscious, mostly forgotten.”

“Not if it’s important stuff,” I gesture at the meeting we’ve just concluded. “I get reminded all the time of it. It’s always on the boil.”

“True,” he gulps.

“So if I chew my food mindfully, I’ll have greater awareness of my intellectual digestion of ideas,” I summarise.

“Exactly,” he says, relieved he can go now.

“Thanks Shane. That’s a good suggestion. I’ll try it out.”

Food as mother; what a putrid idea.

Perhaps I am trying to please him by taking on his suggestion. I wish Shane would quit his anxious persona and speak in full sentences that stick to the rules of logic. I wish he would give adequate explanations of his context and paradigm before blurting out a suggestion or concept. I wish a lot of things, and most of them don’t happen.

I like Shane. I understand that Shane’s monkey mind drives him to extremes of anxiety, isolation and social discomfort. But I am quite content with intellectualism; I honestly love the intimate feelings of connection to tradition that a liberal education gives me. Within appropriate limits, reason is my bliss.

And tonight I try to find that feeling of connection and intimacy which I normally experience with the wonderful world of tradition as I chew my food.

I chew my food slowly. I chew my food with loving attention on the body. I chew my food and think about Shane.

Ladcafio Hearn’s ‘Romance of the Milky Way’.

2008-09-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

“…in the silence of transparent nights, before the rising of the moon, the charm of the ancient tale sometimes descends upon me, out of the scintillant sky,—to make me forget the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space. Then I no longer behold the Milky Way as that awful Ring of the Cosmos, whose hundred million suns are powerless to lighten the Abyss, but as the very Amanogawa itself,—the River Celestial.”

Ladcafio Hearn is writing this final paragraph of his magnificent ‘Romance of the Milky Way’. What can I say? It’s the good stuff. The very best. The essay as a whole presents the Great Goddess and at the same time performs Hearn’s simple-hearted obeisiances to Her. What a beautiful man.

Science fiction can only apply to a very narrow band of readers – those who can accept “the monstrous facts of science, and the stupendous horror of Space”. Indeed, modernity and reason is a limited condition, inaccessible to most. By and large the human race lives in tradition, like a child drinking milk from her mothers breast while he sleeps, and begrudgingly becomes interested in science only by great progaganda.

Did I say “propaganda”? Whoops. I meant “education”.

How to Make Proust’s ‘Finding Time Again’ Easier to Read.

2008-09-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Proust rarely uses chapter divisions, and it makes the books harder to read. Having learnt that in advance, tonight I went through ‘Finding Time Again’ and found the chapters beforehand so that I have a sense of the structure of what I am reading, when it begins, climaxes, and ends, and the general nature of the settings and meanings I can expect it to lead to. My read will be easier now.

Reading Proust takes skill and a bit of preparation. Reading books that yield a difficult pleasure is a different experience from reading for casual stimulation. Most books are not complex enough to relate to as one would a real person; those few that are that sophisticated are actually revered and celebrated for their difficulty. But what is the difficulty but the normal work involved in considering the feelings, views and world of another whom you love? Such a difficulty love makes no difficulty at all.

Books that you can live with as you would a real person are the genuine AI or artificial intelligence. They might win at chess, but no computer can yet come close to ‘A la Rechere du Temps Perdu’.

So here are the chapter divisions for the new Penguin paperback translation of ‘Finding Time Again’, reverently translated by Ian Patterson. Enjoy.

1-29 – At Tansonville with Robert Saint-Loup and the Goncourt journals.
29 – 1st Paris visit. 1914. Great War starts.
63 – 2nd Paris visit. De Charlus. 1916.
118 – Jupien’s hotel.
162 – 3rd Paris return ‘Perpetual Adoration’.
226 – The Masque ‘Bal des Tetes’.
304 – La Berma
308 – Time Found Again.

Starting Marcel Proust's Prisoner.

2008-09-12T17:50:00.001-07:00

You can imagine my disappointment with Proust after going from ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ to ‘The Prisoner’. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is divided into small sections, 2 to 10 pages, most about 5, which function like individual dreams and mostly conform to the same structure.

(The section structure goes like this: the narrator reflects on something (or else jumps straight in with someone saying something bold, to which we could imagine immediately what Marcel’s silent response – thus inviting us to partake in the narrator’s voice as if it were our own consciousness). Then there is a short brilliant exchange of social fripperies, following by observations and jokes, more concluding social palaver, then the section concludes with a 55 word plus metaphor for which Proust is justly famous: at once the concluding sentence hypnotizes us with an image, fulfils our desire for aesthetic pleasure, summarises the foregoing with a bon mot, cracks a joke, and returns to the sublime tone which is first introduced at the start of the novel series, that of the dreaming half-awake author imagining his past back into existence. It is an incredibly subtle literary device, comparable in English to the lines in Spencer’s Epithalamion where Spencer converts the pentameter into a hexameter for the final line of each stanza, but in Proust, elevated to the status of prose poetry, the final sentences of sections concludes with a Whitmanesque precision of tone and color. They are really remarkable and deserve a piece about them alone.)

Anyway, these small sections induce a deepening sense of entrancement in the reader, and though each piece invites deep reflection and comparison to other parts of the novel, the reader soon discovers that he will become completely bogged down if he stops to comprehend the waking dream that is Proustian prose, and – if he is to ever finish the novel at all – submits to the most light reading of the sections. The resulting experience is buoyant, humorous and delicate: reading Proust quickly can be compared to floating down the Mississippi with Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain, a kind of series of little heavens following one after another.

Then, all of a sudden, the dream ends. Marcel asks Albertine to come back to Paris and live with him. The next novel, ‘The Prisoner’, begins, and immediately it strains all loyalty to Proust to the limits.

First up, Albertine would never be allowed to come stay with Marcel. Second, Marcel would never, never, have the funds to support her in the fashion he does. Third, and worst of all, the tone of the novel reverts to the realism of the Odette sequence in ‘Swann’s Way’, a dry, almost didactical feeding-out of facts and observations about other people’s business - mostly Albertine's - with almost none of the rich wild intimacy of Marcel’s voice in the previous novel.

Maybe Marcel means to imply he has projected his inner life onto Albertine, and has become empty. Maybe – doubtless – Proust invites comparison between Swann and Odette’s jealousy and Marcel and Albertine’s codependent relationship. Maybe Prisoner needed revision it never got, Proust dying before he could edit. Whatever, the return to reality is dull, and I quit reading Proust for the last four months after finishing the superb 'Sodom and Gomorrah'.

Writing this piece has been a way of getting my mind ready to begin reading Proust again. I hope you have enjoyed it. If you decide to go sailing in an ocean of words as large as Monsieur Proust I suggest you write your impressions of it with a similar piece of writing as the foregoing, as a kind of life-jacket to keep you afloat through the rough waters. They do get choppy.

Secret Societies and Hidden Selves - Marcel Proust’s ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.

2008-09-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

Marcel Proust starts his novel ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ with a shock, and end it with a miracle.

The shock is that the narrator Marcel (who is not exactly the same person as Proust the writer) discovers a secret society.

The modern sense that everyone belongs to a secret society, moves in multiple social circles which have little or not relation to one another, and everyone keeps secrets, is the great theme of the twentieth century novel. From the very public novels of Dickens and Eliott, from novels like Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoys where every shame is made public eventually, we pass into an altogether more mysterious social sphere with ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.

Or perhaps the notion of social spheres is useless now, and we pass into networks of social information, personal meaning shared or withheld. Whatever the case for the change in social relations in the early twentieth century, Proust is onto it in ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’.

The shocking hidden world of the homosexual forces young Marcel to revise everything he has learnt about the world. Everybody is scrutinized and re-scrutinized, the past is revisited again and again in the light of the new data. The shock awakens Marcel to his own mixed and hidden motives towards others. Marcel considers why and how he keeps secrets, and ruthlessly notes how others fail to keep their secrets. The shock of that discovery reverberates through the novel.

The miracle of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is that Marcel imperceptibly adapts to the new reality, and carries us with him into a radical new perspective of human relationships. (A perspective which, we will learn in ‘The Prisoner’, the next novel on, is not without its risks).

The miracle of ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ is that in order to read it I must be willing to be changed. And I must be willing to accept change in and of itself, with or without meaning or purpose or even conscious awareness. I must be willing, if I am to read this book, to see the world in a radically different way from the simple, realistic narrative approach which Proust takes in ‘The Way By Swann’s’.

‘Swann’s’ is a realistic and naturalistic French novel in many respects – at least in the Swann and Odette sequence anyway – and ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ tells a story with a sophisticated perspectivism which is at once a miraculous liberation from realism, and at the same time gives a heightened sense of actual felt experience in the moment and a far greater intimacy with Marcel’s voice. I feel like Marcel is whispering in my ear; as if I share his private inner space. And that space is sacred ground.

You know, it’s funny to call Marcel Proust a wisdom writer in the same way you might a nineteenth century writer. I’m thinking of George Eliot here, who takes pains to point out the moral with the utmost seriousness. In Proust the wisdom is thoroughly assimilated into the story itself. It’s not that Proust is not aphoristic or inclined to moralize – it’s more that even the bitterest moralism is subordinate to the exquisite lightness and eccentricity of tone, which makes Marcel’s voice so hilarious throughout.

For the first time in wisdom literature, for Proust the tone of voice IS the moral of the story.

Satanist alien energy field sacrificial slave-gang scouser mass murderers on the high frontier… indeed!

2008-09-09T21:54:00.000-07:00

Reading Peter F. Hamilton’s ‘Reality Dysfunction’. It’s a fine book. It’s strange to see the tropes of triumphalist golden age American SF transposed into the cynical postmodern British context. It’s also got some passages which are not strange so much as outright weird, even oddball.

Satanist alien energy field sacrificial slave-gang scouser mass murderers on the high frontier… indeed!

But Peter F. Hamilton really fails at representing religion accurately. His religious characters are weak and often outright culpable. The notion that humanity could split over biotech is fascinating, but not feasible: people are at once more sophisticated and more messy than that.

To his credit his utopian visions have their psychopaths and narcissists. And while he is not casual about evil – indeed he often lingers over the fruits of evil for dramatic effect in a way which is (sorry) just vulgar – he is also not entirely sincere about it, using violence for effect in a way which seem kitschy in the Dickensian sense (the child that sees the dead man’s face with a white worm in its mouth “like a diminutive tongue” is one unforgettably bad turn of phrase), and he relies on liberal dollops of casual sex to convey his characters’ values (ie, good sex to the good characters, nasty painful sex to the bad guys).

Like John Scalzi, Hamilton posits an Earth who is denied advanced technology. But the comparison is revealing: English Peter F. Hamilton sees Earth as denied advanced technology by backwards collectivist belief systems and ecological limitations (people must live in arcologies). American John Scalzi shows Earth wilfully isolated by her colonies to protect her from the social reality of constant interstellar war. Scalzi – and American SF in general one might say – stays close to the competitive and evolutionary reality of US society, and their work benefits. Hamilton shows a regressive and collectivist vision of Earth which is pure Thatcherism.

Hamilton has some moments of the purest Elizabethan Englishness when he takes us to the hedonistic space habitat Tranquillity. High culture, even royal culture, he represents by superb extremes of fatuous wealth, erudition, high art and a wild party scene – Tranquillity is superb. The reason for its founding (a royal’s long term wish to preserve human civil mores) is also revealingly English.

For the Americans, however, every self-reliant man is the center of human society. The notion of a civic center of human civilization is just irrelevant. The US might have a centre of capital (New York), genius (L.A.), or party life (San Francisco), a focus of civic business (Houston) or diversity (Miami) – but culture? “The center cannot hold”, Irish W.B. Yeats wrote, but he did not immigrate to the States to see that fear fully realized.

Anyway, culture aside, it is a fine book.

I remember a fantasy writer asked Sean Williams how long his book should be, and Sean replied “As long as it needs to be to tell the story”. Did Hamilton need so many words to tell his tale? A shorter book might have been more appropriate to the scale of the story itself.

But the condition of entry into Peter F. Hamilton’s imaginative worlds is willingness to take on the long novel. I just can’t believe he wrote three hulking great books in this series, any one of which would have made an ordinary trilogy in size. It must’ve taken years.

Cooking, Politics, and Bestiality

2008-09-03T19:04:00.000-07:00

I attended a committee meeting tonight with paperwork and a request for funding for further work, and left with my role taken over by another, simply and efficiently. What a mix of feelings I felt!

I felt afraid I would be seen as incompetent for having simply done the bare minimum requirements for the role. I felt resentment towards myself because I hadn’t seen any need to do more just to keep up appearances.

I felt dislike for the officious woman who took over the role. I had once witnessed her verbally attack a woman in front of an entire group, and since that essentially mean act I had not trusted her, had avoided speaking to her, and basically learnt my lesson about her character flaws. But I suppressed these feelings of distrust and dislike because she got the results, and never mind that she was inconsiderate towards me by not mentioning beforehand her actions. I can’t reasonably expect consideration from her. Neither is it my place to judge.

Afterwards, I walked with Ryan and Darrel, both silly kids in a way, both in a program together so in many respects peas in a pod, and I happened to mention my distrust of verbally aggressive women, and so Darrel decided to cheer me up by showing me a bestiality clip on his mobile phone, while Ryan laughed with suppressed shame and embarrassment. I gave it back to him before it finished playing. Approving of it would have denigrated me as much as it did women.

But the science fiction writer in me wanted to discuss whether (non-uplifted) animals are capable of consent to a sexual act, and if animals as a class are not capable of consent whether bestiality should be considered a sex crime, a perversion, or animal abuse. All of this I restrained myself from saying; they just wanted to share a joke as a way of lightening up the mood after the committee meeting. I am grateful they tried to distract me from my mood.

At Victoria Square we ran into Dave, a newbie. I joined Dave and said farewell to Darrel and Ryan, and Dave and I walked up King William Street as the other two went down Wakefield.

Dave is interesting. Intelligent, articulate. We talked politics. He wanted to discuss specific injustices with emotion. I wanted to illuminate general principles with compassion. After several rounds of this we got onto personal stories and I learnt about the incidents that brought us to meeting. Bitter, strange, and hilarious tales. He missed three buses home while we spoke.

Then I excused myself and walked along Rundle Mall.

- Past two plainclothes police busting three youngsters;
- Past a crowd of workmates, all male, who had gone to dinner together;
- Past the window of a shop where I admires the glistening elegant leather man-bag;
- Past Mick and Roy, a gay couple whom I had last met on the train arguing bitterly with one another

In this way I walked down to Rundle Street East to my favorite café, Al Frescoes, and a nice guy invited me to drink my coffee with him sharing the heater at one of the outside tables. His name was Ben, and we talked about geek stuff. After my first coffee and half a second, he left, allowing me to do the written work of the curriculum I’m engaged in at the moment for half an hour.

Out of twenty one questions I answered twenty, and the last one I still need to do before I sleep. I am half way through the curriculum, and it has taken two years to get here.

Feeling good, I walked briskly up to King William Road through chilly empty streets. On the bus home I sat under the light and wrote a prayer expressing my hopes and dreams and sense of anticipation for the good things coming to me. Then I planned my day tomorrow, and I was home.

I walked across South Road and down behind the stationery shop and down to the train tracks where I picked some fresh rosemary and put it in my pocket.

At home I petted Shakti my Siamese, emptied my pockets and bags, and plugged my laptop to the power. I read online interviews with Kim Stanley Robinson for half an hour before my stomach said hello. I drank three glasses of water but the tummy wanted food.

So I heated grapeseed oil in a nonstick frypan and threw in the hand-rubbed rosemary and hand-rubbed mixed herbs. A sweet smell rose. I leaned over, inhaled, and felt great.

I added chopped garlic, ginger , ground black pepper and half an onion. As it all simmered down nicely I put on a pot of hot tap water and added oil, salt, fetuccini pasta and pre-soaked borlotti beans from the fridge. (I had forgotten I soaked the last of my borlottis two days ago and the discovery was sweet because borlottis cook fast. Not quite as fast as the pasta, which would be a bit too soft, but fast enough to cook in the pot with the pasta without reducing the fetuccini to fudge.)

Then I took the frypan off the heat and added two spoonfuls of basil pesto that hissed gently and stuck to the translucent onion.

Soon the fetuccini and borlottis were soft. I drained the graywater and threw them into the rosemary sauce and mixed them through and through. I sat down in front of the heater with Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Blue Mars' to read for company while I ate.

Yum.

Saint Augustine... Sex Addict, Shock Artist, Zen Master

2008-08-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

Last night I downloaded Saint Augustine's Enchiridon and Confessions.

As I may have mentioned before, Augustine is far and away history's most famous sex addict, and honored for having recorded his recovery from the illness of sex addiction in the Confessions. His illness and recovery are his defining story. The fact that he is a spiritual and intellectual giant impresses me less than the astonishing personal transformation.

Good translations are important. As you know from reading my blog, it gives me great pleasure to seek and find a vigorous English rendering. Last night I quickly found very fine translations of Confessions and Enchiridon from the superb online library, Ethereal Christian Classics. New, classy font; verrry nice. I compared with the Pusey translation from Project Gutenberg and within two paragraphs preferred the Ethereal Christian Classics version of Confessions.

The opening paragraphs of the Confessions were fascinating - a series of emotionally charged questions that you couldn't have answered - at least I couldn't answer them. Maybe you can.

Confessions is a shock. Confrontational. You sit down to read Saint Augustine, guessing his life story will be a nice little drama for an evening's amusement, little expecting to be body tackled by the saint himself in full moral flight and dragged along the pitch, a human football kicked at the goal of a spiritual awakening. Somehow you don't expect Saint Augustine to be so... unsaintly.

But on starting the Enchiridon I instantly noticed how beautiful the ideas were (beautiful ideas make for beautiful prose), and decided to read the latter work first. The form is smooth but obscure and rich as pure butter - you would be familiar with the kind of writing from modern Zen writing. Augustine is like a Zen master pointing out the utterly simple fact of his experience for you to ponder. Again the saint surprises: Augustine as Zen master. In the darkness of the humbled mind and heart, a Mystery.

From the translator of Confessions I learnt two more fun facts about Augustine:

1, that Saint Augustine (in his magnum opus 'The City of God') invented our idea of a society. I was surprised when I learnt last year that Aristotle invented the notion of energy, so pervasive the concept is, but after a few instances of hearing some basic idea was invented by so-and-so, you get used to the shock of the old.

2, that a confession cuts both ways. First and obviously a confession is a record of false thoughts, feelings, and actions; tossing out stock-in-trade thoughts and feelings which have caused nothing but pain; and noting your responsibility for having created it; thus the sign of a successful confession is a sense of gratitude. Second, and more mysteriously, confession is an act of recognition of a Higher Power. When you or someone you know, then, embarks on a course of deep therapy, a spiritual inventory, a searching memoir, a period of directed journaling or a similar type of inner investigation, it is worth remembering that the ultimate motive of our mucking about in negative and painful memories is a more joyful connection with a Higher Power.

One more thing: Augustine's mature writing in Enchiridon is a striking, basso profundo voice, like Prospero in The Tempest. Augustine's is a listening prose, and the audiobook of Enchiridon must have quite an impress. Augustine's style really reminds me of the late Rvd Billy Graham's - a voice not to be blinked at.

That's my dish on hanging with Augustine last night, August 22. I find him fascinating. I think you might also find him fascinating.

PS - I must add that Augustine also invented the genre of the memoir with his Confessions. Knowing the rash of 'mislit' or misery literature on the shelves of Borders, this is one of the few books that actually scratches the itch.

New computer

2008-08-15T00:19:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago I got my new mac. Today I got the new power cord and within thirty seconds I was on the computer and for the last six hours that's about all I've done. I'll have more to say tomorrow when I'm more used to being wired again.

A Lost Classic - Aeschylus' Proteus - Reimagined From Homer

2008-07-20T21:31:00.000-07:00

I spent the night reading Aeschylus' Eumenides, Oresteia part 3. What a letdown. I guess the lost 4th play Proteus was the thing to catch the king.

I googled "Aeschylus Proteus" yesterday afternoon, but for once Homer's Odyssey is a better bet than the world wide web. Menelaus tells Telemachus the story directly, and I can easily imagine how Aeschylus would change it.

Homer brings Menelaus home for a tragic grief scene. In the satire play, Aeschyus would make Menelaus visit Athens. Menelaus, deluded by Proteus to imagine Athens to be his native Argos, shows how absurdly pompous Athenian leaders are in comparison with the returning hero. Then he meets Orestes his nephew, still living in Athens, now a sophist and teacher of youth, who tells him the tragic tale, and ends the four plays on a bizarre note of Menelaus realizing that he has got everything wrong. The home coming hero returns to the wrong home.

Greek Yes, Jewish No

2008-07-18T01:04:00.000-07:00

The Greeks say Yes. The Jews say No.

From these great Yeas and Nays the singularity of the West emerges.

Historical singularity begins with Herodotus, who sets the tone. For Herodotus many small singular facts lead up to a wonder. Many wonders combine in the imagination to create the modern world, the cosmopolitan millieu of the sixth century before the common era, which is a singularity.

The pattern goes like this: facts -> wonders -> millieux -> singularity.

For example, the wealth of Croesus of Lydia, a wonder supported by many facts, gives rise to his astonishing attempt to attack the Persian empire, then ruled by Cyrus. This in turn leads to the behemoth of Persia turning attention towards the Greek peoples who lived beside the Lydians, and the singularity of the Persian wars.

In Thomas Mann's Joseph novels, by contrast, the language is delightfully marked with missing ideas, concepts which the writer has negated from the text as a way of highlighting them: the past for Mann is a well which no-one can guess the depth of, and the figures of the early Jewish nomads are the combined myths of many men of the same name. Multiple Jacobs, manifold Abrahams - the entire Jewish tradition negates image and passively accepts textual interpretation. The effect is of sophisticating out of existence clear assertions one way or another. We are negated towards truth.

Greek and Jewish patience underlines the difference. The Greeks struggle against the circumstances, creating tragedy and comedy thereby. The Jews accept and move with their sufferings, crafting from the living stuff of everyday and historical pain something indestructibly true and actual.

The Cure For Stupidity: A Reading of Chekhov's 'Cherry Orchard'

2008-07-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

Last night I read Anton Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard'. Today I read the first two plays of the Oresteia of Aeschelus, 'Agammemnon' and 'The Libation Bearers' and the book length essay on the trilogy by Robert Fagles, and would've finished the third play 'Eumenides' were the first two of the trilogy not so depressing. But I want to share my impressions of the Chekhov here, not the Greek.

'Cherry Orchard' was frustrating. Having a fair idea of what Doctor Chekhov's on about now, I found many of the ideas in the stories tucked away out of sight in the play.

But what am I to make of it, after all?

I feel that I watch Dr Chekhov dissecting something which gives every indication of being a cherished and valuable living family system. If I were to discover this is an illusion I would be mollified, but I do not: the family and the world the Doctor dissects for our delectation is revealed for nothing more than entertainment and a night at the theatre. Human fables and follies are clinically exposed. It is perfectly barbaric.

I kept saying aloud to myself as I read "Oh my God these people are so STUPID!" Their stupidity, which Chekhov courteously justified by grief, madness, alienation, loose morals, and a variety of other straw men, is the salient feature of the play. Everybody is irredeemably stupid.

Robert Anton Wilson once asked if there is a cure for stupidity. Anton Chekhov presents, no not a cure for stupidity, but a purgative. Here is Doctor Chekhov's presciption:

An ordinary middle class life, free from slavery, lived for the sake of some basic common ideas - say, dignity, cheerfulness, liberty and productive work - this life, this life alone, in itself without any dogma, afterlife, metaphysics or creeds, this life is enough.

It may be that the cure for stupidity is found in the audience of a Chekhov play, if they only remember, and laugh - and then remember to laugh when they themselves commit the same follies, believing in the same ridiculous fables, as Chekhov's characters do.

An Essay On Responsibility, Complete!

2008-07-16T23:29:00.000-07:00

Here are all the links of the Essay on Responsibility. They have proved popular and useful to readers.

Part One - Positive and Negative Responsibility.
Part Two - Responsibly Paying Attention (by Vagueing Out).
Part Three - Response Rituals and the Power of Confusion.
Part Four - Responsibility Rituals Applied.
Part Five - Responsibility and Sponsorship.
Part Six - Responsibility and Emotional Freedom.
Part Seven - Three Response Skills: Administration, Mindfulness, Surrender.

More advanced levels of skill are in the notion of overresponding. But that is another blog entry, for another time.

How to Squeeze the Slave Out of The System: Anton Chekhov on Anton Chekhov

2008-07-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

Write a story about a young man, the son of a former serf, and a small shopkeeper by profession, who sang in the church choir; who, as a schoolboy, was brought up to show reverence for the officials, to kiss the hands of priests, to bow before the opinions of others, to be thankful for every slice of bread he ate.

Write a story about this youth, who has been flogged many a time, who had no overshoes to put on in winter as he trudged through the snow to give his coaching lessons; who fought other boys; who tortured animals; who liked having meals at his wealthy relatives’ house; who played a part before God and men for no reason at all, perhaps for no other reason but the awareness of his personal insignificance.

Describe how this young man gradually, bit by bit, squeezed the slavish self out of his system, and how he awoke one fine morning feeling that real human blood was flowing through his veins, instead of the blood of slaves.

The young man is Anton Chekhov - first of the freed Russian generations.

Chekhov better than anyone described how the human problem is not in the times or rulers but in ourselves, that we accept enslavement. Every middle class person has risen from peasants and slaves.

Only Chekhov expresses the hidden moral dimension of the middle class - the reality that each person must make something decent of themselves through their own efforts, no matter what their origins. Middle class decency is not protestant or orthodox or hindu, but simply the recognition that all free souls must earn their freedom.

"I gradually squeezed the slavish self out of my system, and woke one fine morning feeling that real human blood flowed through my veins instead of the blood of slaves"

What a magnificent sentence!

Design Playtime - How to Design a Bank that Actually Works Quite Wonderfully

2008-07-16T01:19:00.000-07:00

I do not like banks. Banking constantly frustrates me. I decided to overrespond by play-designing a bank which I would find cool.

First up, I have a problem with the word bank. It projects an old-time trustworthiness I deeply distrust. And with good reason. Banks try to bank on the illusion they are disinterested servants of your money. The fact that they are money merchants out to grab what they can should be put up front if they wish to be trusted. My first design move then:

- Quit calling it a "bank". Be honest. Call it a "money shop".

This gets rid of the most blatant dishonesty, but some subtle forms of sleaze remain. Top of the list is suits, ties and other formal business drag: suits convey an authority a money merchants simply does not have, and a seriousness they don't need. So:

- Drop the suits and ties. Wear real people clothes.

Wearing casual clothes can mean the silicon valley uniform of jeans and casual shirt and loafers. This is an excellent start towards making the environment a little less anally retentive.

The next thing to address in my money shop is the structure. Doesn't it bug anyone else that banks, like evil modern day Robin Hoods, steal from account holders to give to shareholders? The solution is simple: make anyone who opens an account automatically a shareholder:

- Quit robbing customers. Profit share with partners.

Bankers, you want passionately loyal customers? Put your money where your mouth is and institute a cooperative corporate structure rather than a competitive shareholder based one. That'll also win you enough press to make other banks consider casual dress for their employees too.

- Institute a cooperative corporate structure, such as a union, rather than a competitve corporate structure.

The dishonesty of the banking experience cuts both ways, however. Banks sleazily allow anyone, no matter who untrustworthy or unpleasant, to bank with them. By allowing anyone to open an account, they devalue the experience for everyone and render it common. My money shop must only be for partners and merchants who are willing to play well with others.

The answer, then, is to have the basic responsibilities of money merchant and partners (that was to say, customers), clearly displayed and agreed to up front. Transparency, goodwill and responsibility are sufficiently universal values that both merchant and partner can agree on, and by holding to principles both parties are allowed to dispense with the tiresome and vulgar dishonesty of pretending to be professional.

- Partners and money merchants both agree to be transparent, benevolent and responsible.

- Actual principles that partner and merchant agree to behave by displayed on the wall.

I reckon banks are naive in how they treat conflict. By letting the front of house staff deal with conflicts, they let a golden opportunity slip through their fingers. Instead, they should cherish their negative feedback.

- Have a agreed-upon conflict resolution process.

I have a few more ideas here which may take some working out, they are so forward thinking, and none more radical than putting a human being at the end of the phone line:

- Actually answer the phone. With a real life person. Immediately.

The benefits in loyalty far outweigh the costs of hiring a money merchant.

- Refuse to merchandise. Design financial products on the fly.

This notion, so unradical to me, would be a major way to expose the ripoff merchant tactics of banks. Imagine going to your money shop and actually working on a loan which seems good for both you, the account partner, and the money merchant? Astonishing. Designing a financial product on the fly also means that the account partner is forced to understand the actual terms of the deal, creating a more responsible consumer.

- Refuse to educate or promote. Instead, partner with businesses that give financial educations, and rely on word of mouth to attract customers.

This idea is just to focus on core business, instead of pretending to be our friends by offering dubious information in tacky pamphlets while smiling and ripping us off.

Banks are a leftover from the industrial age. Most of their business is out-dated. I am surprised banks still exist in their present condition of subtle sleaze and lack of taste. I hope these ideas can help them on their inevitable demise. I would be interested to see if a reader could design a better bank. Good luck!

Want summary? Here you go:

How to Design a Bank that Actually Works Quite Wonderfully:
- Quit calling it a "bank". Be honest. Call it a "money shop".
- Drop the suits and ties. Wear real people clothes.
- Quit robbing customers. Profit share with partners.
- Institute a cooperative corporate structure, such as a union, rather than a competitve corporate structure.
- Partners and money merchants both agree to be transparent, benevolent and responsible.
- Actual principles that partner and merchant agree to behave by displayed on the wall.
- Have a agreed-upon conflict resolution process.
- Actually answer the phone. With a real life person. Immediately.
- Refuse to merchandise. Design financial products on the fly.
- Refuse to educate or promote. Instead, partner with businesses that give financial educations, and rely on word of mouth to attract customers.

Robot Cats, Business with Lobsters and Brains in Bottles: the Structural Elements of Charles Strosses' Accelerando

2008-07-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

Accelerando is a family epic novel in the form of nine stories. The family, the Mancx family, are all major players in the technological singularity. The technological singularity is a hard science fictional proposition involving runaway increases in computing power, sentient artificial intelligence, and various social propositions located somewhere between magic and madness.

Much of the fuss about Accelerando is because it is the first novel to treat very precisely the social, legal and economic consquences of the technological singularity. The underlying ideology and philosophy of the novel is dense, providing both the structural elements of the nine stories and the intellectual and emotional meat of the stories beyond their superficial dramatic value as science fiction.

The simplest way to view the stories is as a battle between an idea and a reality. On one side, the antagonists, are the technological singularity itself and good old Mother Nature (the realities). On the other side, the protagonists, are the three grand philosophies of the West - conservatism, socialism - and liberalism, (the ideas) represented by characters and plotlines. Pamela, Sirhan, Sadeq and the United States are conservative; Manfred, Amber, Europe and their friends are mostly liberal; and Annette, Gianni, Pierre and the lobsters themselves are socialist. (And yes, traces of Scottish legalism can be discovered in the text and the author, despite avowals to the contrary.)

Here's a breakdown of what I consider, perhaps mistakenly, to be the key questions encompassed in the plot. If there are spoilers here then I must say you are easily spoilt - these stories are far greater than their themes - so please read on.

1. Lobsters. What rights, responsibilities, duties and privileges should uploaded minds have?

2. Troubador. What rights, responsibilities, duties and privileges should artificial intelligences have?

3. Tourist. How do you define humanity when much of the sense of self is located in hardware and software?

4. Halo. What is the ethical way to proceed when the rule of law violates individual sovereignity?

5. Router. How do uploaded human minds retain an intact sense of civil society and the social contract in the absence of biological constraints?

6. Nightfall. How do transhuman uploads fare within a mature technological singularity?

7. Curator. How do you retain a single sense of self when you have a multiplicity of identities?

8. Elector. What survives of liberal democrat political processes in the wake of a technological singularity?

9. Survivor. What survives of human nature in the wake of technological singularity?

The answers to these questions are fascinating, but for now I just want to pose the questions themselves. They are the backbone of what makes Charles Strosses' Accelerando a great book. Many of these questions we already deal with in everyday life, on and off line, so the answers have both a predictive and a practical value.

PS - the text of the book can be found here.

Barbarians in the Cathedral

2008-07-11T02:02:00.000-07:00

I read a summary of the critical reception of Anna Karenina today.

What these critics miss, except for D.H. Lawrence who overstates the case from pagan zeal (and he has Raskolnikov's axe to grind), is that Anna Karenina sets the consciousness of the reader ringing like a bell! Anna Karenina resonates in precisely the same way a grand cathedral filled with constant plainsong might. I mean this very literally. It is sacred.

Who cares what the book means? What does 'means' mean?! In the face of the cathedral purity and aesthetic primacy of the book, intellectual criticism is flat out inadequate.

Yes, the words might be critiqued, but only by aesthetic illiterates; Anna Karenina exists as a transcendent and Platonic solid, a symbolic and timeless space of play, a temenos, an ideal realm - the reader who knows this must revere, then, and keep his head's mouth fast shut.

Laughter of the Devil: Re-reading Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov

2008-07-11T01:29:00.000-07:00

I've had an eventful month. I haven't posted here for a while: having a broken computer really lends itself to getting quality reading done.

Last night I finished The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's a remarkable book. I love it; I really do. Maxime Gorky said Fyodor proves in it that he is a sadist. Karamazov is not a cruel book - it is a funny book. Gorky missed the joke
A hard joke, a difficult and passionate joke, but still - Dostoyevsky is bullet-to-the-head humor. If it doesn't knock you down like it did Gorky, do you think you even have a soul in you?

Penguin translator David McDuff pinpoints the main characteristic of Brothers Karamazov: it is the work of the devil. He falls short: the real devil in Karamazov is Dostoyevsky. The outrageous humour of the Evil One himself dressed as the teacher and sage of Tzarist Russian peity and patriotism is not to be missed.

Brothers Karamazov also reads forward in time to Kafka, Nietzsche, Gide, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, providing a context and critique to the future. It is prophetic if you suppose the horrors of the future can only be endured by horrible mockery. Dostoyevsky is a nasty insect, and to read him is to shed a carapace made from the purest hysterics and mocking laughter. What remains is the Devil himself.

McDuff translates as 'crack-ups' the chapter where all the main characters go mad. It's as good a word choice as any. For Dostoyevsky, then, we all crack up when shame and guilt makes us act in a hateful way - and for him this crack up is the only thing that has the power to bring you to accept God's Will. That's how I read it: Dostoyevsky's Devil is the guide to God, and his frightening laughter lights the way.

Practically speaking, for those considering reading Karamazov, I recommend skipping these chapters as tedious:

- Book One, part three - 'Voluptuaries' tediously demonstrates the Karamazov vileness which part one describes in fewer words.
- The entire Public Procurator's speech is just a wasteland.
- The Chapters on the life of the Elder Zosima; they are merely background color to render the monks more ridiculous. Since they already are silly, it can be omitted.

For a first time reader I suggest you start at the moment the family visits the monastry, and then return to the long introductory chapters on Fyodor Pavlovich's life, which are less interesting material. I am re-reading these chapters now, for the fourth time, just for the pleasure of Alyosha's childhood and Fyodor Pavlovich's amusing life.

The most remarkable chapters in the piece, for which the greatest attention should be preserved, are the Onion, the Wedding at Cana, the Grand Inquisitor, the entire hilarious Crackups Section, "It's always interesting to speak with an intelligent man" (this requires the most precise attention, and the outrageously black and funny three talks between Ivan Fyodorovich and Schmerdyakov, and "For a moment the lie becomes truth", which is the only sublime chapter untainted by satanic hilarity.

I read Karamazov as a teen and in my mid-twenties. Reading it now at 34 years of age, I finally get the joke. It's a comedy of the sweetest and most sacred kind, and to be approached in a reverent way. I had little realized how profoundly it had influenced my own book, Savage Things. Now had I realized the effort it must have taken Dostoyevsky to utter his book - enmeshed in the absurdly uptight society of the time, he managed to utter a few free words. Compared to his, my own Savage Things exists in an existential void where the upmost freedom of choice is available to all characters, but like Gide's Michel, no guide or signpost as to what actions are right or proper to a free man.

As it happens, I am reading Chekhov's stories and plays pretty constantly this last month and the next, so many of these questions find original answers in the generation after Dostoyevsky. I cannot wait to read Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Even now, reading Chekhov has cast an incredible light onto Isaac Babel in explanation. I love and take a lot of joy in Russian literature at the moment; they seem to me the natural inheritors of the Greek Enlightenment (6 century BCE) and French Enlightenment of the 17th century.

I has a brocken cumpatta

2008-06-13T00:02:00.000-07:00

My computer is broken. I have gone through enough emotional stages to make Elizabeth Kubler Ross proud. It's stuffed for the time being. I cannot even generate a lolcatz image to express my sorrow appropriately to the blogging world.

Grumpily I resort to pen and paper. Piles of written work in draft or outline pile up. I don't know how to deal with physical copies of a draft any more!

I will be back. Soon.

On Authentic Aesthetic Pleasure

2008-05-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

The sure sign of authentic aesthetic pleasure is that we forget where we are, lose awareness of what amount of time passed in the enjoyment of the pleasure, and for a blessed moment shuck off the isolated ego. This happened to me four nights ago while reading Chekhov's short story 'The Grasshopper'.

Chekhov set out to write a story about a secular saint. In a way, the hero of this story is the bastard child of Dostyevsky's Idiot of the enopymous novel.

I resisted buying the cheap edition of Chekhov's stories because they featured "short, humorous sketches". Instead, I brought the second of the attractive and unobtrusive three volume Penguin edition, which chronologically arranges his stories around stylistic periods, entitled 'Ward No. 6 & Other Stories'.

I began to read 'Grasshopper' in the vaulted Adelaide Railway Station as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony played over the loudspeakers - it was Saturday night and Mozart has been found to sooth the violence of the drunkards and drug-addicts passing through the turnstiles. It is profoundly reassuring to me that in Australia even the most vulgar can find some useful end satisfied by Mozart.

But in combination with Chekhov the music of Mozart produced a sort of exalted absent-mindedness, a condition which reminds me of nothing so much as the ecstatic fugue preceding an epileptic fit so amazingly evoked by Dostoyevsky in the Idiot - the clear mild euphoria that precedes the aesthetic experience, subtle and pure like life-giving water, the original mind of zen in which insight becomes if not possible then potential.

I don't remember getting on the train. As the train streamed express to Goodwood through the downpour and darkness I finished the story and closed the book and looked around.

Where I am? I wondered. Had the train stopped already? Had I passed my home station? For all I knew at that moment, the train had been moving forever in accordance with the fixed stars.

The next day I tracked down Chekhov's literary child and grand-child in the University library. I could not hold back my eagerness. I read Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I read Cheever's 'Goodbye, My Brother'. A cloud of mozartian grandeur spilled over from divine zimzum, chilled me into reverent silence.That day I got two Cheever books secondhand. It was a day before I spoke about it.

Yesterday to Dan then I showed him Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I asked him to read it, then I explained the aesthetics of trauma - that is, how profound shock in literature will alienate the reader unless it is couched in a kind of ecstatic lyricism. Then we examined the words themselves of the opening two pars. I asked him to listen while I picked out the violent words from the apparently innocent description of the Polish landscape.

"Stop," he said. "It's positively morbid."

Dan's comment was a relief to me. Thank goodness somebody else could see it. I suppose I wanted to reality test the words to make sure the effect was in them and not simply in my imagination alone.

As we went out to dinner I popped into the secondhand bookstore and discovered the very rare Morison translation of Babel's Collected Stories, for only eight dollars. What a treasure!

I feel so blessed.

On Harold Bloom

2008-05-16T08:51:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to get a little pissed off with Harold Bloom's ideas.

Perhaps it would help if I had his astrology chart -- then I could interpret him from a purely pagan and nonverbal perspective and place him outside the veritable cloud of interpretations he surrounds himself with

Bloom as an invoker of haunted figures of rhetoric seems himself haunted with his own figure. He is easy to overdefine or underdefine, hard to evade, subtle to prefigure and alone on the field of a battle of his own imagining.

I have been reading his work for 15 years and I just now seem to be finally arriving at a clear impression of Harold Bloom's ideas. I feel strongly and negatively about his ideas. Specifically, I feel negatively impressed by his faith, negatively amused by his taste, and negatively entertained by his criticism. And I feel the need to put these three aspects back into perspective.

1. Harold Bloom's Atheism.

Mister Bloom calls himself a gnostic. What this means is that he finds athiesm unaesthetic and prefers to pretend to believe that God is absent from reality. In other words, he is an athiest who likes to pretend God exists.

I am negatively impressed by the high spirits of this enterprise. I mean, who gives a shit about the ironic delicacies of Jahweh as they relate to King Lear. But Harold says he is haunted by them, and I suppose it's as good a pastime as any while you wait for death.

2. Harold Bloom's Aesthetics.

The Big Haitch sez in his Western Canon that Joyce memorised a passage of Beckett's Murphy which is so miserably over the top that it is funny.

What I suppose he is aiming at here is the proper sense of the camp aesthetic - the outrageous as the real. The long string of outrageous books Bloom has had published testify to his own preference for the camp aesthetic over the merely sublime or beautiful. But he consistently mixed the camp with the terrible, the unbearable, the monstrous. There is no relief. He persistently appreciates a book or poem's uncanniness.

He says otherwhere ('The Best Poems in the English Language') that poetry is marked by wisdom, aesthetic power, and cognitive strength. Falstaff and Joyce's Bloom are examples of this expansive power. So where is the joyful campery in Harold Bloom? As with Freud, his camp is grimly embedded in his understanding of the reality principle and his reality testing. Never in Bloom does a flight of pure fantasy end well. Never in Freud does a joke end up funny.

I guess what I am trying to say is the Harold Bloom is just not gay enough. I prefer my bad taste to be lovely and sublime, Bloom prefers his bad taste terrifying.

3. Harold Bloom's Hermeneutics.

Let's look at Harold Bloom's hermeneutics in pieces:

The Big H-Bloom compels attention with his refined and superb treatment of the Kaballah of his ancestors in 'Kaballah and Criticism'. 'Kaballah and Criticism' has the advantage of being at once usefully dispassionate for the discerning esotericist, and overwhelmingly left-of-center to the normal run of literary criticism.

I suspect 'Kaballah and Criticism' is Bloom's own stab at canonical strangeness. It reads like the dude's channelling Borges, like a light piece of fantasy metaphysics. It's good fun.

On the darker side, Bloom's Freudian reading of literary criticism in 'The Anxiety of Influence' is enough to induce anxiety just trying to understand it. But there's a punchline to 'Anxiety of Influence': the family drama of writers through time turns out to be just good clean competition. What a relief: literature is really actually sport! Whew. But the lack of laughter in Bloom's literary criticism is revealing: in this literary Olympics we are not dealing for the most part with good sports. And in the process a lot of fun literature loses its joyful humor.

Next, throughout his books on Romantic poets and 'The Western Canon', the H-Bloom delivers for the first time I have seen a full-blooded Yankee approach to literary criticism, with his Emerson-inspired reliance on his own views and experiences as a reader. It's fun and lively writing, full of his fascinating personality and views.

Finally, 'The Western Canon'. Like Henry James and other astute modern American intellectuals, he situates himself between Europe and the United States as a complex, shadow-haunted figure of rejection and acceptance -- he puts himself between the Old and New World like a filtering mechanism, saying (in his imagination) Yea or Nay to which texts cross the Atlantic west into the promised land -- and by standing between the two Worlds, implicitly buys into the idealist and utopian notions of America that fuel the daydreams of political extremists of both the left and right.

'The Western Canon' reads like a season of Big Brother with great writers as housemates. One by one the writers are evicted until only Shakespeare is left winner. And I have to wonder, not that the voting process has been hijinked (I do not doubt that Shakespeare rocks) but whether it is really Willy S. or just the Bloom in sly Shakespearean drag.

We have four approaches to interpretation, the Kaballistic approach, the sport-based pagan approach, the individualistic Yankee approach, and the Canonical reality-tv style. What are we to make of this mess?

Tracing out the H-Bloom's hermeneutics are like doing a study of who has had sex with whom in a gay ghetto in a large American city -- not only it is salaciously personal and intricate, but it is also substantially frivolous.

Investigating H-Bloom's frightening and frightful sense of the camp aesthetic, which he uses to interpret the highest kinds of literary excellence, we discover at the essence a mordant sense of horror such as might excite Stephen King's complete indifference. We can interpret this through Borges or through Freud or through Jahweh Herself should we fancy - but any interpretation suffers from belatedness - that is, the subject of Harold Bloom is already sufficiently fogged up with interpretation, even to the level of becoming useless for the actual work of literary criticism.

Yes, art does relate to politics and gender and class and elites. No, in my opinion we have not clarified precisely what this relation is. But I can draw three major distinctions from things so far:

- Bloom is a pagan, not a Jew (or Christian or Muslim). He cannot be expected to treat non-pagan topics with the same brilliance as he treats pagan matters of aesthetics and competitive poetic excellence.

- Bloom likes the frightening form of the camp aesthetic, not the joyful forms. He cannot be expected to blossom with a life-giving camp, and he can be admired for his gothic charms without wishing he were different.

- Bloom is an American first and foremost, not a European. He cannot be expected to accept the interpretative traditions of Europe and their corresponding European-specific biases. That said, however, Bloom seems to have made significant progress towards an expressly American literary criticism. Harold Bloom's sense of bad taste may be a bit Emily Dickinson, a tad Gothic in his love of the uncanny, but his interpretations are of an all-American individuality, delivered with such a sunny Yankee disposition -- I reckon even Mister Emerson might've approved!

On John Steinbeck.

2008-05-16T08:41:00.000-07:00

Either deadpan or straight-faced, Jonathon Yardley in the Washington Post writes:

"The only reason I can come up with for the high esteem in which Steinbeck is still held is his transparent sincerity. It has long been my pet theory that in the popular marketplace, readers instinctively distinguish between writers whose work draws on genuine feeling and those who rely on art or artifice, and that they reward the former while repudiating the latter. From Jacqueline Susann to Danielle Steel, from James Michener to James Patterson, readers have recognized the sincerity of feeling beneath the utter lack of literary merit, and have rewarded it accordingly."

Yardley links Steinbeck's sincerity with his popularity. This implies that insincerity - or more generously, irony, art, rhetoric and artifice - is the realm of great art. Certainly Steinbeck's novels are deeply felt and badly written, but forget the books for a second - Steinbeck himself is considerably more charming than his contemporaries like the preachy Sinclair Lewis.

John Steinbeck's writing interests me only insofar as I get up close and personal with the author. He fascinates. Steinbeck encapsulates the symbol of Pisces, the elusive fish of classical paganism. Divinely dodgy, sweetly two-faced, a successful loser, and an inspirational figure via the agency of his profound inadequacies as a writer - how can we fail to appreciate this man of paradox? I would do him.

The fact that John Steinbeck is assigned to school children is depressingly Leninist - which is to say it lacks even the redemption of bad taste. Who does not find Steinbeck's downtrodden poor folk boring - it's like 'Les Miserables' without Valjean, or Gogol without the jokes.

I am sure others find Steinbeck's books dull, unless soul clap its hands and sing, and they recognise the man behind the melodrama. Otherwise, assigning Steinbeck to school-children in order to increase class consciousness is, as the little darlings say, "completely douche".

The Aesthetics of a Bad Afternoon

2008-05-09T03:04:00.000-07:00

It has been a bad afternoon.

Getting off the train tonight from the working crowd, I smelt the stale smell of men sweating into the aluminium of their carcinogenic deodorants, their rancid lamb chops and coffee bitters leaking into the cotton of their business shirts; I smelt the rotten flowers and putrid spices of the female perfumes conceal the outrageous failure of vaginal hygiene in western women, a yeasty and bloody bloom of which three or four whiffs rose which would make a libertine celibate for a week; I smelt the schoolchildren with their smell of old tomato and soggy lettuce, a mysterious musk of chalky rancidity covering the freshness of their flesh, not yet contaminated by the shit-waves and mud-storms of testosterone and ostrogen.

My gorge rising, I got off and separated from the group as quickly as I could, wishing only for the nausea that the smell of westerners inspires in me to diminish, longing for the company of sweet vegetarian South Indians or the pleasant spice of any other races. By the railway many roses bloom, and I inhaled and held my breath as the last woman stinking of rotten perfume left, her obnoxious high heels and sickening stink of hygiene finally fading in the whole smell of the rose. My nausea faded.

Miserable, I rounded the corner to my house and saw the sunset. The western sky was pink and blue, and suddenly I cried and couldn't contain my relief at the sight of a simply inhuman beauty. I immediately thought of an image...

The sky looked as if Venus were rising as the sun, her pink flesh rosy with love, and murdered before more than he thigh could touch the horizon, so that in the sweet living pink flesh of the goddess was interspersed a morbid blue of dead meat. At once I felt cheerful, as this image reminded me of the dead woman in The Great Gatsby and how Fitzgerald had depicted her with her right breast ripped off. This sadistic touch symbolises the lack of inner nurturance of the jazz generation; it was Fitzgerald's way of biting off the nipple that he had drunk milk from, a symbol for Fitzgerald the alcoholic's loss of soul-milk.

The pleasant contemplation of the sickness of great art, and the awareness of my own perversity, both cheered me enormously, and I wanted only to come home to record the relief with which my numb and weary hatred for the merely ordinary stink of humankind converted into a sense of the actual experience of being alive. It is for such ends that literature makes effective use of violent and sexual imagery: sometimes, to shock the numb and self-centered awake from the nightmare of the ordinary, only violence and sex with suffice.