O sake us for God, and mend us for bendas, bensittay!
mole
It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said 'Bother!' and 'O blow!' and also 'Hang spring-cleaning!' and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.
------------ Kenneth Grahame
Wednesday, March 20, 2024
In Praise of a Huntress Moon
O sake us for God, and mend us for bendas, bensittay!
Monday, March 18, 2024
Lever
Time is our home and death is our friend
-- Iain McGilchrist,
Saturday, March 16, 2024
The History of Smoking. Not parsimony
‘You do not know your danger, Théoden,’ interrupted Gandalf. ‘These hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience. Some other time would be more fitting for the history of smoking.’
It adds to my pleasure in this passage that the enjoyment of tobacco is one of the many things regarded with puritanical horror by my people. It might shorten your life. Horrors! (As though a short life was worth less than a long. Lung cancer is a hard way to exit, I acknowledge: but many of the exits are hard.)
I don't, as it happens, smoke: I share the hatred of the corporate deceit about the health risks of smoking, and I prefer you to smoke out of doors and away from the cradles of my grandchildren. But so long as you have the facts fairly in front of you, I don't have the slightest desire to stop you -- let alone to prevent you from speaking about it because we're sitting on the edge of ruin. Where else have we ever sat?
------
And the bell, ringing. "What I do is me: for that I came."
Life, in its essence, is a making new: a wholly superfluous, superabundant, self-overflowing -- an exuberant, self-delighting process of differentiation into ever more astonishing forms, an unending dance, in which we are lucky enough to find ourselves caught up -- not just, as the left hemisphere cannot help but see it, a series of survival problems to conquer. If reality is ultimately just an eternal, unchanging, perfect unity, as some philosophies seem to suggest, life is going the wrong way about making that clear. To the degree that we can discern any governing principle to the cosmos, it is not going to be parsimony.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things, p 853
Wednesday, March 06, 2024
March
the fall leans away and misses the splash pool: March
is master here.
The god whispers at my ear, rapidly and in Greek I cannot catch
some dialect of Olympus no doubt
Monday, March 04, 2024
Again, The Matter With Things
I read ten or fifteen pages a day, in the portion of my sacrosanct morning time dedicated to demanding reading. I'm halfway through again, which means I've been reading this book for four months, without ever the slightest desire to desist or turn to something else.
(I guess scrupulous accuracy requires m to qualify this by saying that when I turned back to the beginning, really I turned to the beginning of Part Two: Part One is a fresh setting-forth of his brain hemisphere hypothesis, which I already knew well from The Master and his Emissary, so I skipped reading it again.)
It is just such an entertaining book, and so full of things! There's a hint of those old absorbing Medieval encyclopedias, that are stuffed full of fascinations: but unlike them, this is a sustained coherent argument that makes more sense of the world -- and what is presently the matter with it -- than any twenty other books I have ever read. To stay in the pedantic and literal mode -- the fact that it's ten times longer than most books still leaves it with twice the concentration of value per page. I opened the book today at page 766, and found this, speaking of the importance of negation:
It is not often enough remarked that science establishes what is not the case; that we are propelled into philosophy similarly, by the feeling that something widely held to be the case cannot, in reality, be the case. p 766
And on the facing page, speaking of Coleridge's distinction between imagination and fancy, this anecdote:
There is a story told of a Fellow of Merton College, a mathematician, who was irritated by the attention paid to J.R.R. Tolkien, a Fellow of the same Oxford college, by the fawning guests of other Fellows. One day in the Common Room yet another guest was introduced to the great man, and gushed, 'Oh, Professor Tolkien, I do so admire your writing, it's so -- so full of imagination!' The mathematician could bear it no longer, and from behind a newspaper was heard to snort indignantly: 'Imagination? Imagination?! Made it all up.' p 767
Thursday, February 29, 2024
Collapse
It is idle, I suppose. "Civilizational collapse," I intone, as if I knew what that meant, or what it portended. What it means is -- precisely that I don't know, that I can't guess. Bad times, at least, for a while. Possibly end times. But also huge opportunities arising, as the glaciers of the world's civilizations calve. We just don't know.
There will be eddies: places almost untouched; surprising recoveries; it's not going to be unrelieved disasters all the way through.
I see people who pride themselves on how dark their vision is; but really they're upset because they have been clinging to a rosier picture than was ever been credible, and now they're dealing with the possibility of it not turning out so well. Let me know when you're done with all that, and we can go on to building what we can, eh? In this mournful and battered world, rather than in the world of your fantasies.
I have no quarrel with fantasies per se, fantasies that are recognized as such. But your outrage at seeing your fantasies declined by the world shows that you were taking them as more: as the actual program of future events. It's time, it's long past time, to see that the future is totally unknown. That we can lose and be annihilated. Time and chance happeneth to us all. It's good that it should be so, actually, because we are a little, trivial people, pettifoggers, engaged in endless litigation, swollen full of indignation and self-righteousness, unable to endure a moment's quietness. Our disappearance is not going to be a bad thing. Suffering there is, and suffering there will be, but that was a given from the start. We are not capable of making a new world. We never were. Get over it: go home, change a diaper, wash the dishes, mend a window. Cold weather is coming.
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Reprise
Picture my astonishment, when reading Keiji Nishitani, to find a Buddhist Heideggerian soberly discussing sin, for all the world as though it was allowed, as though it were something that could stand the steady, corrosive gaze of a modern philosopher; as though it was something that had to be reckoned with. I have not yet gotten over the surprise. I still have not really read very much, and most of the modern philosophers I have met, by chance, have been timid creatures who want to live in orderly houses, where they can be depressed in decent comfort and privacy: they would certainly not admit a concept that might blow the roof off their house, let alone blast a hole in the floor.
----
So. The point is, that I was taking myself to task: I should be thinking about the One, in all its multiplicity -- of God, if you want to use that word -- and how I should or could or might turn towards it: but whenever I began I veered into trivial thoughts of what I needed to do to stop overeating and make sure I got regular exercise. For God's sake, Dale. Grow up.
But then I backed up a little bit and asked myself: are you so sure that these two things have nothing to do with each other? That they're not, in some difficult-to-grasp way, the same question? And as soon as I thought that, that little fragment of Middle English verse came into my head: Adam lay ybounden, ybounden in a bonde... and kept flittering around my head. These little tendrils of habit, this commitment to excessive comfort and relentless stimulation -- what if that is, precisely, what is binding me? And the two wheels converged. The same spin, the same speed. This is in fact one wheel. I don't know exactly how, but I know that it is; and that it stands in some relation to that queer foreign concept of sin.
It's not that I imagine God gives a tinker's damn, let alone one of his own, whether my pants fit. It's the contortion, the throttling of one part of my mind by another part. The striving and writhing in a narrow, airless space. Ybounden in a bonde. The fact that it's an undignified struggle -- that's just one more reason to think it's the one to lean into.
Not the only struggle, of course, nor one I can (or necessarily want to) win. It's a well-trampled ground and I no longer think that local victories and defeats are going to lead to sweeping breakthroughs: it's not that sort of fight . If I eventually manage to get some distance from it, it won't be because the battle's over, but because I'm no longer invested in it in the same way; which is not the same thing as pretending it's not going on. It's a flicker on wall, the pattern of lights a small boy glimpses moving on the wall as he falls asleep. Real enough, but due to be washed away by morning.