tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-53494722024-03-18T10:13:29.029-07:00moleIt 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.
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<em>------------ Kenneth Grahame</em>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.comBlogger2410125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-65630828185310580682024-03-18T10:12:00.000-07:002024-03-18T10:12:53.660-07:00Lever<p></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">Time is our home and death is our friend</span></i></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">-- Iain McGilchrist,</span></p></blockquote><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Knock when you come to the west door; be sure</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">to touch the river pebble in your pocket </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">for luck; forget your excuses. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Just answer the questions best you can.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">No one is trying to trick you here.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Today the long road, east and west, was tilted</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">to be level with the sun. I guess you were busy</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">with your pry-bar, Archimede! </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">That at least was an easy one to solve.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Lay it down on me: pull as hard as you like.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">That metal crossbeam catches the morning sun: </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">even second-hand, these tines of light </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">pull gently every strand of me apart:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">the brisket of me would fall from the ribs </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">at a nudge. I have been a long time in the pot.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">They say a friend might happen by for a meal,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">and welcome. I have kept house untidily:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">but friends will forgive the debris of a lived-in life.</span></div><p></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-46984731990514337202024-03-16T08:46:00.000-07:002024-03-16T08:46:04.676-07:00The History of Smoking. Not parsimony<p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">‘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.’ </span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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 <i>shorten your life</i>. 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.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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 </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">so long as you have the facts fairly in front of you, </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">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?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">------</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And the bell, ringing. "<i>What I do is me: for that I came.</i>"</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Iain McGilchrist, <i>The Matter With Things</i>, p 853</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"></span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-58255278327066768602024-03-06T09:44:00.000-08:002024-03-06T09:47:53.265-08:00March<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The clouds have not quite lost their grip on the mountain's hair<br /></span><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">blow though the wind blows, but<br />the fall leans away and misses the splash pool: March<br />is master here.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />The god whispers at my ear, rapidly and in Greek I cannot catch<br />some dialect of Olympus no doubt</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">why send a messenger I can't understand? <i>Do not fear but bring</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">these three as gifts...</span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">But the slap on my face will do, in place of understanding, the sting</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">of celestial fingers on my face;</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">swim in the Sound in spring and the jellyfish will lay their tentacles</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">across your nose and cheek, just so:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">many messengers, one message. You are asleep at your post. <i>Little enough</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">We've asked of you:</span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">Not even to understand: just to listen. The clouds tear free; red weals</span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">on the face of the mountain,</span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">which treads water and gasps. The swell is pale gray, mottled with white;</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">this time of year snags</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">buck silver and even the seals show them some respect: it is early,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">too early: but even now too late.</span></div></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-19400131165734583072024-03-04T10:19:00.000-08:002024-03-04T10:21:21.070-08:00Again, The Matter With Things<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_BaDqWMCIUb6-GM5P99L0n1yLEUUuK3-Ac9J1aSZXyF24vnaMl0FEfP6zFh7XFBrR1WC-YtiFO6srnnXZRokq8kSZUfbL-eOWHf72Foupa9Y53G9bP3FLUPx8ps7M-NILC3uCLxN2mY_cPVgh5S5QtYJLy_Z43Y0Zmhyg9bBtLoNEf911AqP-_g/s4000/MatterWithThings.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_BaDqWMCIUb6-GM5P99L0n1yLEUUuK3-Ac9J1aSZXyF24vnaMl0FEfP6zFh7XFBrR1WC-YtiFO6srnnXZRokq8kSZUfbL-eOWHf72Foupa9Y53G9bP3FLUPx8ps7M-NILC3uCLxN2mY_cPVgh5S5QtYJLy_Z43Y0Zmhyg9bBtLoNEf911AqP-_g/w300-h400/MatterWithThings.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><p><i><br /></i></p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Things-Brains-Delusions-Unmaking/dp/1914568060" target="_blank">The Matter With Things</a></i> is two weighty volumes, some 1,500 heavily footnoted pages, not even counting the appendices; and you might think I would have finished it with a sigh of relief, and turned to something else. Instead, I turned instantly back to the beginning, and began again.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(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 <i>The Master and his Emissary</i>, so I skipped reading it again.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">It is not often enough remarked that science establishes what is <i>not</i> 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</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And on the facing page, speaking of Coleridge's distinction between imagination and fancy, this anecdote:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: georgia;">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? Imagi<i>na</i>tion?! <i>Made</i> it all up.' p 767</span></blockquote><p></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-23013548396951570252024-02-29T09:26:00.000-08:002024-02-29T09:26:15.144-08:00Collapse<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There will be eddies: places almost untouched; surprising recoveries; it's not going to be unrelieved disasters all the way through. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-58794764557871125572024-02-11T10:35:00.000-08:002024-02-11T10:35:32.923-08:00Reprise<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Picture my astonishment, when reading Keiji Nishitani, to find a Buddhist Heideggerian soberly discussing <i>sin,</i> 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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">----</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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: <i>Adam lay ybounden, ybounden in a bonde... </i>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 <i>sin</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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. <i>Ybounden in a bonde. </i>The fact that it's an undignified struggle -- that's just one more reason to think it's the one to lean into. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">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.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-18891402060370100312024-02-08T10:01:00.000-08:002024-02-08T10:01:02.275-08:00Cathedrals<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A couple comments, here and on Facebook, gave rise to a discussion with myself, last night, as I walked under the night sky. Some people said, they have never had any interest in any religious topic, never had any religious experiences, and they were well content that it should be so.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In some moods, I think I could almost say the same; perhaps I have said the same. After all, have I had any religious experiences? Really?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One irrelevancy has to be cleared away at once. It is not at all surprising to me that people who equate religion with what happens in a typical North American church should be uninterested in religion, and devoid of religious experience. What mostly happens in those churches is lectures, by remarkably ignorant and stupid people, consisting of attempts to assert obviously false propositions, accompanied by crude petitionary prayers and maybe some mediocre 19th Century songs. At no time does silence supervene -- possibly for fear that God might get a word in edgewise. I would not blame anyone for a lack of interest in these proceedings. The boredom they inspire is intense, and is well-recognized even by the people who willingly attend them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So leave that aside. No, the question that I paused on, was "do I actually have any religious experiences at all, or do I just imagine them? Do I just make them up because at one point I had an audience that liked to hear me speak about them?" I walked under the restless night clouds and thought about that.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The trouble is that these experiences are fleeting and fragile, while the memories and descriptions of them are durable and robust. What I call to mind, when I try to bring them back, is my own words, and a few vivid images: poplar leaves trembling in afternoon sunlight; the blaze of a sunrise through wet twigs, forming a fiery circle around an intolerable brightness; things I have written about repeatedly, I'm sure. I grope backwards and find the words, and the images. I don't find the experiences. They're not to be summoned at will. "Not a tame lion," you can say: but anybody, with any motive, might say that.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">On the other hand, the analytical mind has its own weaknesses. It prefers to dismiss as illusory anything that is can't be frozen in time and broken into constituent parts. It's always questing after atoms, fundamental particles, <i>elements. </i>And these experiences are experiences of totality, of gist. No wonder the left hemisphere of the brain shrugs impatiently. They are not the sort of thing it can cope with.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I finally concluded: yes, I have had these experiences: though I had more of them when I was younger, and I have been very bad, lately, at putting myself in their way. You can't summon them, but you can invite them. "I don't go to church because God is there," somebody or other said, "I go to church so that if God does come, I'll be in the right place to receive him." Just as wise writers go regularly to their writing desks, not because inspiration lives there, but so that, if inspiration does happen by, they will be in the right place to make use of it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So when I speak of "church" I mean partly just any place or circumstance that make it more likely that God will happen by. The wild places, the sea and the mountains and the waterfalls, are obvious instances: and I must spend much more time in them. But a "church" is also a community, a sangha, that is oriented towards -- whatever it is. Because in groups we are more than we are as individuals, loath though we Americans are to acknowledge that; loath as I am to acknowledge it. We build ugly convenience stores: but we could build cathedrals. It has happened before and it could happen again.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-39838049264573681602024-02-07T10:01:00.000-08:002024-02-07T10:01:06.482-08:00Pretending not to Believe<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">This business of pretending not to believe -- like a scientist who devotes his life to discovering what is true, and pretends not to believe in truth -- that's what's exhausting. And that's why I called it quits with Buddhism: the fact is that Buddhists believe in reincarnation, and I do not. Buddhists believe in a pure realm, and aspire to it, and I do not. There are all kinds of ways to practice as a Buddhist without believing those things, but you finally end up like the scientist who purports not to believe in truth: your whole life is a tottering, jury-rigged house built on nothing, and you could wake up tomorrow with the walls fallen down and the wind whistling through. I think it's better for the scientist to admit he believes in truth, and it's better for me to admit I'm no Buddhist.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There are (at least) two ways to go wrong here. One is to say, I know so little, why not accept my ignorance and practice with whatever group may be handy? And the other is to say, I must lay down the total schema of reality and not talk to anyone else until I'm done, and then bustle about with a checklist on my clipboard and see if any church meets my specifications. Both wrong. But what then is to be done? I don't know. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I admire those people who, wherever they are, just walk into the nearest place of worship, of a Sunday, and take up whatever practice is to hand -- confident that if it's God's house God will take care of it, be it church or temple or mosque -- but I don't think I'll ever be one of them. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But though I don't know where I am, or where I am going, I am not lost. Finding my location and my path is not something I have to do before I can take up my work: it is my work.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-61043678539952181862024-02-05T09:42:00.000-08:002024-02-05T09:43:28.491-08:00A Blue-Behinded Ape, Home from the Hill<span style="font-family: georgia;">I am unfamiliar with the trends of literary fashion, nowadays -- praise be to God! -- so I have no idea how Robert Louis Stevenson is faring. Probably worse than ever. But remember that he wrote the two best auto-epitaphs in English. Both appeared in <i>Underwoods, </i>published in 1887. One is almost unknown now, I think:</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: times;">I am a kind of farthing dip,<br /> Unfriendly to the nose and eyes;<br />A blue-behinded ape, I skip<br /> Upon the trees of Paradise.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: times;">At mankind's feast, I take my place<br /><span> </span>In solemn, sanctimonious state,<br />And have the air of saying grace<br /><span> </span>While I defile the dinner plate.<br /><br />I am "the smiler with the knife,"<br /><span> </span>The battener upon garbage, I</span><div><span style="font-family: times;">—Dear Heaven, with such a rancid life,<br /> Were it not better far to die?<br /><br />Yet still, about the human pale,<br /> I love to scamper, love to race,<br />To swing by my irreverent tail<br /> All over the most holy place;<br /><br />And when at length, some golden day,<br /> The unfailing sportsman, aiming at,<br />Shall bag, me—all the world shall say:<br /> <i>Thank God, and there's an end of that!</i></span></div></div></div><div><i><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">The other is the sort of poem that gets put on ornamental plates, and is taken for anodyne by careless readers, who miss how it plays with time and point of view, and take it for bluff hearty stuff in the line of Kipling or Henley. It's nothing of the sort, and it will live a lot longer than we will:</span></div><br /><span style="font-family: times;">Under the wide and starry sky,<br />Dig the grave and let me lie.<br />Glad did I live and gladly die,<br /> And I laid me down with a will.<br /><br />This be the verse you grave for me:<br /><i>Here he lies where he longed to be;<br />Home is the sailor; home from sea,<br /> And the hunter home from the hill.</i></span><div><i><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></i></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Just now I'm reading <i>Kidnapped</i> to Martha, and we are taking deep delight in it, and mean to go on to <i>Catriona</i>.; and I'm going to tackle the second volume of <i>Underwoods</i>. I stupidly skipped it a few thousand years ago when I was first reading Stevenson, because the poems in that volume were in Scots; which at the time was a discouragement rather than an inducement. I was in a hurry then. Now I'm so old that I don't need to hurry ever again, so I have time to read it.</span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-35381505758598917412024-01-11T11:14:00.000-08:002024-01-11T19:08:42.987-08:00Quotidian<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Oh, man. I so needed a morning like this, a long morning studying at Tom's, equal parts of Juan Rulfo's <i>Pedro Páramo</i> -- which is a fabulous book -- and Greek. What with one thing and another my mornings have been eaten by dragons, lately. So this was restorative.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I need a vacation, and I will take one soon. Have to get the year-end letters out first. This year has been the nightmare calendar for getting gifts processed and thanked: I didn't even get the lion's share of the gifts until after New Year's, because of the way the non-post days fell. It meant I was all caught up on Christmas Day, which has never happened before, but I was only caught up because the bolus dose was yet to come.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I may have to force the issue of a vacation with Martha: say, "you don't have to come with me, but I am going away for a couple days." We're old, but we're not <i>that</i> old. And even if we can't find someone to feed Van Buren, he'll just do what he did before: break into somebody else's house and eat whatever he finds. He's not exactly a delicate flower. More a semi-retired brigand. He may wreak havoc, but he's not going to starve.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A cold snap coming, four days with the temperature never rising above freezing, so we'll have to lug the earthquake water from the shed back into the house. Maybe change it out while we're at it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Take good care, friends! xoxo</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-21045295146895651292024-01-10T10:27:00.000-08:002024-01-13T19:24:41.195-08:00Vanishment<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">That he is vanishing all men know: </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">a lift slant eyelid tells them so, </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">not that I think it's noticed much -- </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">not a vanishment as such -- </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">so much as shrinking from the touch,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">a disinclination to know at all, </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">all that he knew in time before.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Read the note, it's all in there; </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">the leaning angels twist their hair,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">and wait the interim music out. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nothing they have to show more fair </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">than tit for tat and this for that -- </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">he says he's gone</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">but he's said stuff like that before.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Gone, alas. How would you know? </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">His absence glows</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">like the moon from just behind the hill. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You used</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">to think him not so ill: </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">but he was much more cheerful then -- </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">his opinions more like those of men;</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">lately he has turned so queer.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I think you know his late career,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">the smell of tar, malignities,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">his patience with indignities,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">the twist of yarn between his fingers</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">catching on his scaled skin. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For the lingering sake of God:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">let him go, or let him in.</span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-6500617590097078932024-01-08T10:38:00.000-08:002024-01-08T10:38:20.486-08:00Swerve<div><span style="font-family: georgia;">So I practice. Visualize space not as empty, but as overflowing with sensitivity and awareness: not an emptiness, but an ocean. Picture each supposed atomic particle as a world of luxuriant life, too tiny to bother with the occasional comet-like photon blazing by. What if there is not a single still, dead thing in all the universe? Turn the whole thing upside down. "An object at rest tends to remain so," intoned Mr. Newton: but as it turns out there is no such thing as an object, let alone one at rest. Everything that looks like an object turns out to be an eddy, holding its character only so long as the flow of the river and the obstructions it flows against remain. And the river and the pylon in turn are eddies, arising from larger flows and greater obstructions. If you try to understand why an eddy behaves as it does by scooping up the water it's made of and examining it in a bucket, the progress you'll make will be meager. "See? An eddy isn't real!" declares the Newtonian, proudly displaying the contents of his bucket. "It's an illusion!" And before his back is turned the eddy is there again, swirling in the same way, entirely untroubled by the interruption. Not real. Sure.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">It actually matters, how we think about space. It matters dreadfully. We are sick from our delusions of vast empty spaces speckled here and there with inert particles, billiard-balls flying about from a dimly-conceived cosmic Break. This particle moves because something bumped into it, and that something moved because something else bumped into it, and so on. Why did anything ever move at all? Oh, that is a forbidden question! Only a very naughty child would ask that. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Lucretius saw it: that to explain movement at all you had to endow atoms with a capacity, an inclination even, to swerve. You can worriedly push the necessity farther and farther away and farther back in time; you can assert, rather improbably, that there was just One Big Swerve a long, long time ago -- call it the Big Bang, if you like -- but something, at some point, swerved. Is it not more reasonable -- since we daily experience ourselves swerving here and there -- to assume that everything everywhere is swerving all the time?</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Newton and Einstein, of course, were much smarter men than I am. The story goes that when Einstein first realized that his relativity equations accounted for the "wrongness" of Mercury's orbit -- its tiny but persistent deviation from Newton's laws -- he was shocked into silence for days. Had he actually seen into reality? Apparently so. </span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">But even he, though his faith was strong, could not demonstrate an deterministic universe. I am way beyond my writ, now -- I readily confess it -- but my point is, so are you. We know fuck-all about it. A little humility is in order here.</span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-90717960588251603892024-01-06T10:39:00.000-08:002024-01-06T15:50:27.507-08:00The Matter With Things<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3XZwJBxdBHk039y3yOWaEGDL4GnwBtGThW4tVW-2QSdx7N7OmJWtg2O_0aHhCiDHVzhs375KaJlUJaFQgz6hUOP9sHFrD74iJAadsAWQT650Iy8ak-Z6zfZWhLd7YA7LFWHZRkoVLLH1nIGRuyaMM9ao3Ym2kM59ov44Cj06xGuswqtwzxHs9RA/s4000/MatterWithThings.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4000" data-original-width="3000" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3XZwJBxdBHk039y3yOWaEGDL4GnwBtGThW4tVW-2QSdx7N7OmJWtg2O_0aHhCiDHVzhs375KaJlUJaFQgz6hUOP9sHFrD74iJAadsAWQT650Iy8ak-Z6zfZWhLd7YA7LFWHZRkoVLLH1nIGRuyaMM9ao3Ym2kM59ov44Cj06xGuswqtwzxHs9RA/w300-h400/MatterWithThings.jpg" width="300" /></span></a></div><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Finished <i><a href="https://channelmcgilchrist.com/matter-with-things/" target="_blank">The Matter With Things</a></i>, including all eight appendices, and now I'm feeling a little lost and forlorn. I didn't really expect him to end by giving me marching orders, but there lingered a wistful hope that he'd tell me exactly what to do and how to do it. Of course he didn't, and the whole point of the book is that there is not and could not be a context-free algorithm for what to do. The world is not like that.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Vervaeke, of course, coming like me from a Buddhist tradition, delivers practices -- meditations, contemplations, yogas: too many of them, probably. A lot of people probably just walk away from that part of his talks confused. We were already studying a three hundred page menu: adding on to it may not be the most useful thing to do. McGilchrist doesn't offer any practices. He doesn't advise you to walk down to the nearest church on Sunday morning and see what happens. He doesn't advise you to do anything: that's not his business. Which is appealing in its own way: as is his humble admission that he is just as damaged by modernity as anyone else. We are dug into a deep hole here, and nobody is going to just step out of it. The first order of business is to strike a match and get a good look what we've fallen into. For one thing, we're each in our own special, custom-made hole. Getting out will take some custom wriggles, in addition to general hole-climbing skills.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But I do come away with more direction, and more hope. I have been postponing practice until I knew what to practice. "My business, first, is to understand," I keep saying to myself. But it gradually comes into focus that I've misconceived things. It isn't that I need to understand in order to practice. It isn't even that I need to practice in order to understand. I need both of those things, of course, but the missing part, the part that McGilchrist supplies to me, is that figuring out what to do is in fact my purpose. The program is not to make the right guess at what God wants me to do, and then do it. I am God figuring out what to do, you might say; God coming into being. This confusion and aporia is a feature, not a bug. I'm in exactly the right place doing exactly the right thing. And so what I think actually matters. Like, really matters. In all my life I've never taken seriously the idea that what I thought could matter. But suppose it could? Suppose it does?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So many things fall away and so many things come in question, when I really shake free of reductive determinism. What had seemed so very rational and unprejudiced now looks in many cases more like begging the question. What if my family and my nation -- to take just two examples -- are as real as I am? Well, then the world becomes more complex. But it also becomes deeper. And we are so tired of this damned two-dimensional, schematic world we've made for ourselves. It's remarkably easy to convince people of the absurd hypothesis that this world is a simulation. Because so many of us have already made a simulation of it, and crawled inside our representation to live there. So the idea sounds right. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But it isn't. The world is quite, quite real. And so are we.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here I sigh, and shake my head, and resist the urge to highlight this whole post and hit the backspace key. The trouble with talking about God is that the moment you start doing it you start thinking you have a handle on Her. (Case in point: you assign Her, or Him, or It, a gender, which is patently ridiculous. You capitalize Her pronoun or you don't. The absurdities multiply inexorably) But the trouble with not talking about God is that you start to forget Her. Equally catastrophic, especially in the poisonous atmosphere of radical individualism. Hypoxia sets in immediately.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Around the time of the equinox, the sun rises and shines straight down Burnside street, and if you are walking east, the sidewalk and the wet twigs of the trees are all on fire, and they make concentric circles of light around it: you are in a fiery tunnel going towards a brightness you can't endure, and it's shockingly beautiful.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: georgia; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic;">“When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, `Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.'</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-16596555383390432072023-12-13T10:12:00.000-08:002023-12-13T10:12:45.371-08:00Squander<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiWsHv1X2dgouL3dH7WjSEvZD1aucGutzRN93dT0_Dtgc44vdHPhIAkauA4T9e9LBLLvQ8u4K5Ep0HvZLGhiIYYosGz3jwB5xkz8-Wl80VvkEFwsXbgIjaoKFI0DFBUZ9qYCW9n6Fi5Mc28zf9u9Oy0itEizYezV13UrUh7Hl0sAjFxq8Uu3oNDog" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><img alt="" data-original-height="223" data-original-width="189" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiWsHv1X2dgouL3dH7WjSEvZD1aucGutzRN93dT0_Dtgc44vdHPhIAkauA4T9e9LBLLvQ8u4K5Ep0HvZLGhiIYYosGz3jwB5xkz8-Wl80VvkEFwsXbgIjaoKFI0DFBUZ9qYCW9n6Fi5Mc28zf9u9Oy0itEizYezV13UrUh7Hl0sAjFxq8Uu3oNDog" width="203" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;">My Chinese office-mate, back at Informix, when I asked her for a Chinese surname, gave me this: fei4, "fey" with a falling tone. It is a surname, and it sounds roughly like the first syllable of "Favier." It is also a word-element meaning "squander." It seemed uncannily appropriate.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The sense that I am squandering is heavy on me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Immediately problematic to put it that way -- as wasting time: it is not possible to waste time. We all of us have all the time there is. To speak of "wasting time" is to take a ridiculous view, in which I possess a dwindling collection of packets of time that I can deal out to various enterprises. That is not what time is like, and only a rigorously trained stupidity can take it to be like that.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">No, the problem is nothing like an improper allocation of time-resources. The problem is that I am facing into a corner, and wondering why the world is so small. The solution is not to try to push the walls out. The solution is to turn around.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">The solution is to turn around.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I am old and tired and worried, but that's only to be expected of someone who stands in a corner gazing at the walls all day. What else would I be?</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-19233250517398775232023-11-21T10:32:00.000-08:002023-11-22T13:50:39.327-08:00The House my Stepfather Built<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In that house I would learn all I know about being unhappy: which is a considerable amount, for such an improbably fortunate person. I learned to consume treats continually, while reading books about impossible elsewheres; such chores or duties assigned to me, I simply ignored. I was much alone, and awkward in company. I slipped away to roam the hills at night and watch the stars. I thought myself the smartest person in the world: nobody else read so much, nobody else thought so much. Someday, I would find my people and be happy and admired.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I thought myself very different from everybody, and I was actually, for the time, somewhat peculiar. But I just a generation ahead: pretty soon lots of people would be experiencing life as I did, and considering themselves very misused and maltreated, while living in luxury and performing not a single duty -- the generation that J.K. Rowling catered to so successfully. We were all just terribly special and misunderstood, and somewhere was the Hogwarts where everyone would realize our greatness. Certainly there was no point in adapting to or serving in <i>this</i> world. This was just a tedious waiting room.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And so much of my life was paltered away, kicking my heels in the waiting room, which was actually the real world and the only world I would ever know. The habits I learned in that house have poisoned me all my life. Nostalgia? No, none. I would not relive my childhood or youth on any inducement. It was a bad time, and it left me warped and enfeebled for life. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It was actually a rather beautiful house, in a very beautiful setting, and I can at least say that I loved the hills and the sky. I knew the dirt roads and the trails intimately. I would like to live somewhere beautiful again, before I die, though it seems increasingly unlikely that I will. I'm glad I knew the night sky before it was littered with satellites, and glad that I learned black oaks by climbing them and griming my hands on their rugged pelts. That much of the lost world I do have in my blood.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Hush, now, and listen for the breeze that comes up at first light: watch for the bloody sun to spill over the hill crest and make the oaks into calligraphy against the pink sky. Not much longer now. There are not many threads to pick up, but I'll gather what I can.</span></p><p><br /></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-83123188119947561752023-11-19T09:33:00.000-08:002023-11-19T09:40:27.690-08:00Manifest Mistake<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">But that is not what I want to spend the little time left saying: there are plenty of justifiers of violence thronging the courts already: nothing I could say will be left unsaid. Turn; go back. Scuff the dust of these fifty years, and forget all foreign conflict. The wars are coming home soon enough.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My wife and my father both, last week, spontaneously, said "they're just evil!" </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Challenged, they would have walked it back, referred to media empires and information bubbles. I didn't challenge them. I don't even know that they're wrong. But true or not, it explains nothing. Half the country can't suddenly have achieved pure evil, while the rest of us walk in the ways of virtue. If they're evil, we must be too. And they perhaps perceive our evil just as clearly as we perceive theirs. We are all of us driving to perdition. Maybe we should stop.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A squirrel turns his white belly to the November sun: for a moment it dazzles. Then squirrel and sun are gone.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I am tired of being ill; more tired of being stupid. </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">G.K. Chesterton:</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><blockquote>The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives.</blockquote></span></div><p><br /></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-44040679972588189282023-11-15T12:03:00.000-08:002023-11-15T12:14:48.077-08:00The Israel-Hamas War<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Many of my (mostly Left and far-Left) friends are baffled by my finding this situation complex, and some of them are outraged by my heavily-qualified sympathy for the Israeli side. So -- to clear my head; I don't expect to convince anyone, or even to be heard by them -- this is how it appears to me. I distinguish two questions about justifying recourse to war:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">1) Is the war just?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">2) Is there a reasonable expectation of winning it?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">These are to my mind entirely separate questions from a third question, which is, </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">3) is this war being conducted ethically, insofar as such a thing is possible?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Let's take these in turn. My friends will be surprised, or maybe just baffled again, when I agree with them on issue number (1). Hamas had sufficient reason to go to war. Israeli encroachments, particularly under the Netanyahu government, have been intolerable. The viability of a Palestinian state has been deliberately (and also inadvertently) rendered impossible by the Israelis; their treatment of Palestinians as a helot class would be <i>casus belli </i>enough, even if you simply throw away all the various historical arguments (which I think for sanity's sake might be a wise choice, in this particular conflict.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So far, I and my lefty friends are on the same page. It's when we come to question (2) that we begin to diverge. Most of them would flatly deny the premise; in fact I suspect most of them would not understand its relevance. But it is a traditionally accepted test: for it to be right to begin a war, you must have a reasonable expectation of winning it. Hamas has no such expectation. They were never going to win this war. They are going to lose horribly. To begin this war, with not the slightest prospect of victory, was wrong, even though the <i>casus belli </i>was sufficient. So this is the first place we diverge.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">On question (3) there is an apparent agreement among everyone (except Hamas itself, and people who accept a drastically alternate set of facts) that the brutal massacres of Israelis in October were wrong, and constitute a war crime. But there is apparently a <i>crime passionnel</i> defense accepted by some of my friends: The Palestinians were so justly and repeatedly outraged that nothing they do can really be held against them. I understand this defense. I do not accept it.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">So now, flipping to the Israeli side. Their <i>casus belli</i> is simple and to me, beyond reproach: their people were brutally and deliberately massacred. They have not just a right, but a duty, to protect their citizens. To me their right to fight back against Hamas, and to destroy it, is clear, and I don't fully understand how anyone can dispute it. It's question (2) that troubles me. Is there a reasonable expectation of winning this war? At once we're faced with what the definitions of winning could look like. The expressed war aim, of freeing the hostages and eliminating Hamas, seems trivially achievable: that is to say. they can, at huge cost to themselves and a huger cost to the civilians of Gaza, kill or capture nearly everyone who at the outbreak of was identified as a member of Hamas, and possibly rescue a few of the hostages. Can they avoid creating, in the process of doing so, another generation of "Hamas," whether it goes by the same name or not? I doubt it. Israel desperately needs clarity on their war aims, for the sake of their own souls. There are some -- a minority at present -- whose war aim actually is genocide. To be unclear will be to drift that way. That's how the American genocide of its indigenous peoples mostly played out: haphazard, half-intentioned, half blundered-into. Without blazing clarity and resolution, Israel will wander down that path, and the "genocide" accusation -- which I presently think unjustified -- will gradually become true.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">And I suppose I must turn to question (3), since I don't seem to be able to convince myself to just be silent. For the most part, I think that the Israelis are conducting this war ethically. Siege is legitimate when an enemy fortifies a civilian habitation. As far as I can tell the IDF is not trying to kill civilians. They are trying to defeat Hamas. Our own War on Slavery hinged on the siege of Vicksburg, which was every bit as much of a deliberate humanitarian crisis. If you mean to win a war, and your enemy fortifies and defends a town, you conduct a siege. (And if you don't intend to win a war -- see question (2) above -- you have no business fighting it). So -- yes. I find the siege of Gaza horrifying too. But it doesn't look to me like a war crime. It looks to me like the war that Hamas has insisted upon. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Whether it's wise for Israel to let Hamas set the terms and chose the terrain is another question. </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">I don't know whether a cease-fire is the right thing or not: without a clear alternate path it seems as likely to be just prolonging the misery. And I do not know if</span><span style="font-family: georgia;"> there is some alternate path. The Israelis are possibly the most creative people on earth, and I passionately wish for them to get the hell out of this and come to clarity, and national unity, about what the end of the road is to look like. The road of unclarity leads to exactly one place, and they don't want to go there. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I've been very ill for the past few days, which may have given me some insight, or may have made me especially stupid -- probably the latter, since no one sensible would comment on this conflict, if they didn't have to. But I'm posting this mostly to get the damn ruminations out of my head. Thank you, to such friends as I still may have. Lots of love.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-79690790331792129352023-10-11T14:55:00.002-07:002023-10-16T19:02:14.738-07:00I Am Rebuked For Silence<div style="text-align: left;">I am rebuked for silence, while a carrier group <br />worth the assessed value of a midsize nation<br />sails into the Eastern Med, and fabulous sums are handed over<br />on my behalf. If you really can't tell: my silence is consent. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I understand that the game must be played out:</div><div style="text-align: left;">but there are certain roles I do not care to play.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />I am rebuked for silence: hear then my words, O Israel!</div><div style="text-align: left;">I love you beyond reason and beyond sense,</div><div style="text-align: left;">and the wheeling track of the stars knows </div><div style="text-align: left;">the darkest thoughts we've shared. I will not</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">repudiate my love. And this also is a silence, for which</div><div style="text-align: left;">I also will be blamed. So be it. If the shoe were on the other foot</div><div style="text-align: left;">would a Jew be left alive, between the river and the sea?</div><div style="text-align: left;">I've heard their words. I listen. Silence is good for that.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Do I therefore forgive your sins? I don't. I am not much</div><div style="text-align: left;">in the business anyway, of blaming or forgiving. My</div><div style="text-align: left;">business is grief, which I get on with, day by day.</div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-33092790796478807962023-09-20T10:21:00.001-07:002023-09-20T11:08:45.307-07:00"Everything is cut away but the Present"<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Kierkegaard suggests that we're depressed, in modern times, precisely because we're trying to live in the present moment: we have emptied the past and the future of all meaning. "Everything is cut away but the present; no wonder, then, that one loses it in the constant anxiety about losing it." In these conditions McMindfulness is more likely to exacerbate depression than to relieve it. Relying on the present moment to supply all our meaning was already overloading it: piling more on is not likely to help.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I still think most people will need mindfulness practices (very broadly construed) to have a life worth living. But I've joined the rebellion against locating the present moment as the place where reality lives. There's a lot of reality. Some ways of reaching out to touch it are historical, and some are soteriological. The fact that "we look before and after" is a feature, not a bug. Sure, it can get us in trouble. What can't? <i>Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A quiet Fall day.</span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-26672925499531812462023-08-30T12:06:00.002-07:002023-08-30T12:09:02.643-07:00Interregnum<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Interregnum. Summer has lost its grip, but Fall has not yet taken hold: cloudy, quiet, rainless days appear one by one and vanish. In the evening, Vega or Arcturus appear, dim and inarticulate, in the pools between the clouds, and vanish again, their messages undelivered. I am waiting, I suppose, for my two granddaughters to arrive -- one in Colorado, and one here. A pause, while Fall considers its approach; a long indrawing of the tide.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's California weather, of course, not Oregon weather. My parents' generation of Oregonians tended to move to California when they retired, and their bones got tired of the damp and chill: climate change has accomplished this move for my generation without the trouble of packing. At the moment -- why not gathers such crumbs as fall? -- I'm content to live in a dryer, warmer state. The September slant of the sun has always pleased me, and we get to see more of it, now. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">---</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">(Notes on Kierkegaard's <i>Either/Or</i>, continued.) </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 154. "As a passionately erotic glance craves its object, so anxiety looks cravingly upon sorrow." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'm nonplussed by this business of "the modern Antigone." Why? He must want to say something about the modern condition that just pointing out the ancient condition would not convey: but I'm not clear what that is. The sheer effrontery is impressive, of course, but effrontery is Kierkegaard's stock-in-trade.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Side note: K's sexism is the smarmiest, ugliest kind. I applaud any woman who has the fortitude to wade through this sewer. Thank God he never married: what a mess he would have made of it!</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 180. the fiction of the narrator in "Silhouettes" is that he knows all about love. Since K is obviously an awkward inexperienced young man, this falls on its face from time to time. K knows almost nothing about love, except what he's read in books. The farthest my generosity can stretch is to take all this as a species of literary criticism. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 198. It takes some doing to keep reading. My dislike of K is profound: I find him deeply, deeply antipathetic. All this analysis of seduction and its aftermath, which is all adolescent fantasy: and yet never the slightest twinge of what drove Shelley to imagine, "this could be otherwise: eros could be in service to agape."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Maybe K is right, and it can't be: but for God's sake, you want him to at least be tempted by the idea. Instead he goes on and on and on, clearly relishing the betrayals, lingering on them lovingly. No, I do not like this man: I find him repellent. For all his supposed sympathy with these Maries and Elviras and Susannas, he would not lift a finger to help them.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-37485062827379904662023-08-25T21:51:00.002-07:002023-08-25T21:52:39.157-07:00Either/Or, 2<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">There is an important metaphysical point being made in this apparently trivial issue of Don Juan, as archetypical "medieval" seducer, being only expressible in music. K is asserting that there is one single correct way to express the archetype, and that Mozart has done it. What this means is that Don Juan is in fact real, and that the expression of him must conform to his reality. It echoes K's assertion that Homer is <i>the</i> right treatment of the Matter of Troy, not just <i>a </i>treatment of it -- that the Matter of Troy demanded a particular expression. This is anti-modern, anti-Romantic, in the extreme, though to (say) Dryden or Pope it would have been a matter of course.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">It is in other words a refutation of the "flat ontology" of the Romantic/Modern, which says that there is matter, stuff, which is inert, and then there is shaping spirit: there is nothing else. To speak of matter "demanding" a certain form is, to a Modern, a fallacy. But that's precisely what K is insisting on.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 129: "Don Giovanni's life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life."</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">... what the actual fuck? The weirdest use of "anxiety" that I have ever seen.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Despite not knowing the opera, and not understanding the German philosophical turns of phrase ("qualified as spirit" probably means something, but damned if I know what) I think I have a sense for what K is talking about in this section: the manic phase of bipolar, when the force of one's desire seems (and sometimes is) irresistible. It's true that this is only really expressible in music.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 145: "... this age... automatically makes the individual responsible for his life... One would think that the generation in which I have the honor of living must be a kingdom of gods."</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 151: "Since it is at variance with the aims of our association [ the <i>symparanekromenoi</i>, the fellowship of the dead ] to provide coherent works or larger unities, since it is not our intention to labor on a tower of Babel that God in his righteousness can descend and destroy, since we, in our consciousness that such confusion justly occurred, acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavor in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature's infinite coherence, that an individual's wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality..."</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">This page-long sentence/paragraph is a tour-de-force -- pure Kierkegaard. The intellectual pressure is enormous</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-6830178196940892572023-08-18T18:23:00.003-07:002023-08-25T21:52:16.083-07:00Notes on Kierkegaard's Either/Or, 1<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">"language is bounded by music on all sides" p 69</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Even when K is blithering he comes up with such valuable things. (Why, why are we discussing language vs music at all? No clue so far.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">"Music always expresses the immediate in its immediacy. This is also the reason that in relation to language music appears first and last, but this also shows that it is a mistake to say that music is closer to perfection as a medium. Reflection is implicit in language, and therefore language cannot express the immediate." p 70</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">I have no idea, none at all, what K means by "spirit."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">But, as often, I must have patience. This entire book, I suspect, is a sustained definition of "spirit," and looking for a simple definition is looking to skip the book. It's like asking 'what does Plato mean by "the good"?' Socrates said that "the good" was what life was for, but he also said he didn't really know what it was. He wasn't being coy, he was being honest. All Plato wrote were partial, fragmentary attempts to shadow forth "the good," especially in the person of Socrates: to ask for a simple definition of it is to totally misunderstand Plato's project. And so here. K's project is to shadow forth "spirit," and I'm just going to have to move in and out the tide of his thought and hope that the movement stirs something in me.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">p 76 - 78: we're fairly embarked in actual discussion of Mozart's operas, here, and it may well be that reading the rest of this essay -- when I know nothing of Mozart, or of opera, or of music -- will be ridiculous and a waste of time. Certainly there's no point in reading this a second time without having at least some background. I'll persevere for now, but between having not the slightest notion of opera, and no idea what a phrase such as "desire is absolutely qualified as desire" may mean -- if anything -- I'm really not gleaning much here. Hopefully I'll do better with the upcoming essay on ancient tragedy.</span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-69302466056667878792023-07-27T08:56:00.001-07:002023-07-27T08:58:06.256-07:00Flowering<p><span style="font-family: georgia;">There's a course to be taken in between. The French existentialists -- I barely read them, but what a baneful influence they had on me! -- thought of life as a thing to be invented; made up, out of some primal creative fire, and then committed to, in an act of bold self-assertion. I don't think this conception stands up well under examination. Who, after all, does the creating? Where did *that* self come from, the one who makes the choices? Why, the self before the choices, of course, and you get a regress that's either infinite, or ends up in Mama and Papa and your kindergarten peers. This is noble independence? I don't think so. The thing doesn't make any sense: and anyway it doesn't correspond to anything I know or remember about myself. I didn't invent myself. I've gradually and painfully discovered myself. There is self-shaping that goes on, choices, and practices; but Dale arrived on the scene already Dale, just as both my children, as far as I can tell, arrived already themselves. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">At the other extreme is Buddhist thought, as I met it in the Tibetan Kagyu lineage. There is no self, they insisted: it's an illusion, a narrative -- as Joan Didion would have said -- imposed on the phantasmagoria of experience. It's a useful and enormously generative idea, and it leads to all sorts of discoveries and undeceptions. I'm deeply grateful for it. But I don't after all think it's quite right either. I remember my teacher Michael Conklin saying that what was striking about meeting an old friend after many years was the fact that they were a now a different person; and it was one of the few times that I thought he was just plain wrong about something. No, that is not what happens. What's startling is how much they are the same person, how very recognizable they are: and how much, through all the changes, they recognize me. There is a generative pattern at work, spinning out fractal variations: infinite variations, but it's recognizably that same pattern playing out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">That self is not a thing, of course, like a lamp or chair: It's more like a song. "Diamonds and Rust" can be sung by Joan Baez or by Judas Priest. It's not the same song, but it is the same song. It's like that. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">What this means is that the impulse to make narrative sense of my life is not, necessarily, self-deception: though of course it's peculiarly prone to it. I can try to understand this pattern, try to cultivate it, try to put it in the corner of the garden where it will flourish. I can aspire to a flowering of myself, in the right place and in the right season. </span></p>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-38794235095481014092023-07-23T18:31:00.000-07:002023-07-23T18:31:32.561-07:00Pail<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">On the kitchen floor, a chrome pail <br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">left idle for the moment<br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">stands in a flare of sunlight,<br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">surrounded by reflection:<br /></span><span style="font-family: georgia;">a white pool on the polished floor.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>an imposition of a narrative line</i></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>upon disparate images</i>, she said,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">and like a good obedient boy</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I chanted and believed, chanted and believed,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">but I am quite suddenly old and</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">(not as suddenly) wicked, and now</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I don't believe it. No. It's the story</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">that's real, it's always been the story,</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">the story makes the images, not the other way around.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">As if I </span><span style="font-family: georgia;">could make such things! Old and wicked</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">as I am: I'm not so impious as that.</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">And so much time given to those</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">old gilt cruel gods; so much time given</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">trying to sew a rag doll of myself. When</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I could have followed a single splash</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">spilled from the jar of the sun; a moment's</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">careless radiance; a story of its own.</span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5349472.post-2790659780435667722023-07-06T09:01:00.000-07:002023-07-06T09:01:07.616-07:00Resistance to Plato; Predictions about the Russia-Ukraine War<span style="font-family: georgia;">So start here. Whence the resistance to starting this morning? I’m supposed to pick up Plato’s <i>Republic</i> and continue reading Book VI. Why am I not? Some faint impression that I deserve a treat that I have not received? That there’s too much to do, and somehow not doing any of it will fix that? A suspicioun that I’m embarked on the wrong task?<br /><br />Some of all of those, I think. There are of course the enormous discomforts of Plato’s sexism, his authoritarian turns, his pluming on account of the superiority of philosophers over all other men. I don’t want to follow him into any of those; though the only one I’m really in danger of is the pluming. My political opinions are neither here nor there, since no one ever will (or should) pay attention to them. And my detestation of sexism finds nothing in Plato to challenge it. But thinking myself a better sort of person… ugh. I fall for that easily.<br /><br />But no: it’s not that. Really it’s the question of whether I’m doing the right thing. I think I am, that this reading and thinking is necessary, but I must be careful not to follow that with the notion that I am a philosopher, in the modern sense: that I have any business composing arguments and trying to persuade people. I have neither the training nor the intelligence for that. Nor do I think more arguments are particularly needed: and even if they were, I don’t think anyone would read mine. So no. I am not going to write philosophy. That’s not the point.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />No, the point is private and personal, and it is entirely negative: to clear away the false opinions and indefensible assumptions that are crowding my skull and making the place unfit to live in. I need to make room. That’s all; that’s enough.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">---</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I'll record some predictions about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to keep myself honest:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">1) I think the war will last for many years, on the scale of the Iran-Iraq war (which in military terms it closely resembles, though no one ever seems to make that comparison.) My guess is seven or eight years. The Russian army has been incompetent, for sure, but much of their apparent incompetence just reflects how difficult it is to advance far against an evenly matched opponent in modern warfare. Deceiving an enemy about where your reserves are, or what your <i>schwerpunkt</i> is, has become almost impossible, unless (as in the initially-successful American campaigns in Iraq) you can disrupt enemy communications and blind their intelligence. Neither side can do that here. People who expect a 1940's style blitzkrieg from either army are living in la-la land.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">2) Unless, of course, the Russian army collapses, or revolts. Possible, but two things to bear in mind there: one is, that any successful revolt in the next couple years would be not by pacific liberals, but by Zed radicals. What they want is total mobilization and escalation, not peace. In the case of a putsch or coup the war would intensify, not lessen. The other thing to bear in mind is that the Russian army does not need good morale to operate: it never has. They are not embarrassed by shooting their own recalcitrant soldiers. It's all in a day's work. Expecting them to collapse because their soldiers aren't excited about the war is absurd.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">3) I rate the chances of tactical nuclear weapons being employed at some point at about 50%. I don't expect it to go to a global exchange -- I rate that possibility at about 10% -- but I do expect the Russians to use tactical nukes if the Ukrainians are moving into genuinely Russian territory. (The question of what is genuinely Russian territory, to Russia's increasingly demented government, is not of course clear. It may include the Crimean peninsula; it may not. I don't know.)</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">I like to record my predictions, largely because it's good for me to be reminded of how often I am totally wrong about things. It's a useful discipline.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></div>Dalehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14523194846272870013noreply@blogger.com0