Intruding Light

She woke up in time to see this sun sending up spies ahead of him  to mark out the road through the dark.  He peeped up over the door-sill of the world  and made a little foolishness with red.  But pretty soon, he laid all that aside, and went about his business  dressed all in white.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

A thin needle of sunshine

came probing in

between the drawn curtains.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  240

Personal Penguins

Upon suffering some tummy-trouble:

“It must have been that caviar,” he was thinking.  “That beastly caviar.”  He violently hated caviar.  Every sturgeon in the Black Sea  was his personal enemy.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  67

There is something reverent and respectful about have a personal relationship with each individual sturgeon, albeit one of enmity.   In the case of penguins, such a distributed relationship exists -- but in this case, one of amity.

And it was in that spirit that Doctor Justice set forth upon his visionary project of individually naming each and every penguin.  The project was a success, and is now famed throughout the civilized universe.   You can read about it here:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/04/doctor-justice-names-penguins.html

The Inner Life of Turtles (and the sagacity of owls)

“By nature  a tortoise may be no stupider than a bird.  But you must admit that its way of living doesn’t exactly encourage intelligence.”

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  102

That it does not; but, contemplation.

For a meditation upon the contemplative nature of our shelly friends, try this:

   https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2016/04/thirty-two-turtles.html

And, for those of us who just can’t get enough of these fellows, these:

 https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/turtles

 

~

The owl has met a variety of folkloristic fortunes around the world, being seen  here as a sage, there as a fool.  Being partial ourselves to the former image, we were delighted to stumble upon this passage

The prince was overjoyed to find the owl so deeply versed in topography, and now informed him, in confidence, of his tender passion  and his intended elopement, urging him to be his companion and counselor.

“Go to!”said the owl, with a look of displeasure.  “Am I a bird to engage in a love-affair? -- I, whose time is devoted to meditation and the moon?”

-- Washington Irving, “The Legend of Prince Ahmed Al Kamel”, in The Alhambra (1832)

But all turns out well, as the fowl allows himself to be persuaded.  After the adventure, the prince appoints the owl his privy-counselor -- “It is needless to say that never was a realm more sagely administered.”

First there is a Mountain

The sight of a dog  running across the road  just in front of the car  aroused her from her reverie.

How suddenly, how startlingly it had dashed into the narrow universe of the headlamps!  It existed for a fraction of a second, desperately running, and was gone again  into the darkness on the other side of the luminous world.

Another dog  was suddenly in its place,  pursuing …

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  79

First there is a mountain;  then  there is no mountain;  then there is.

Glimpses of Sick Light

Chicago on fire,  seen from afar:

the thickening haze

through which the sun shone

with a hellish red glare

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

In the red darkness

glinted

innumerable rubies

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 3 

(In context, the implication is likewise hellish,
 since the locale is the laboratory manufacturing babies.)

Dust Bowl:

In the spring of 1934, only sun, and no rain … A powder of humus and colloids, the topsoil of the country  blowing away.  And still the sullen sun shone.

On and on  the clouds whirled, some into the astonished East, spreading their baleful orange and amber aura.

-- Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (1959), p. 69

Note: “baleful” is an apt adjective here, as it echos the word balefire.

Compare, during an eruption of Vesuvius:

A lurid, baleful light  hung in the heavens.

-- Washington Irving, “The Story of the Young Italian.

The sky, darkened by moving storm clouds

was one of those invented by Gustave Doré

to emphasize important Biblical calamities.

A colorless light   filled  the empty quay.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

Truth and Truthiness, anew

[an update to this essay:

     https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/02/truth-vs-truthiness-updated.html

There, the examples cited were mostly political and snarky, in line with the comic coinage “truthiness” itself.  But there are many genuine questions concerning the penumbra of truth.  Here are some examples, from the years before Stephen Colbert was in nappies. ]

~

“Is she mixed up with the Consular people?”
“Oh, no.  Her work lies among the poor.”

This was a side-slip into truth.  The mother of Adrian was employed in a laundry.

-- H. H. Munro, “Adrian” (1911), in The Short Stories of Saki (1904ff), p. 157

~

“That’s only true with reservations.  And the reservations are the most important part.”

--Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 377

~

Re Baroque art:

It is not real cloud or real sun, and does not pretend to be; but it does, as it were, pretend to pretend.  It is theatrical; but a theatrical performance is not a falsehood, for it does not profess to be a fact.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

Despite the paradoxical sound of the phrase, people do indeed often pretend to pretend.  As, when Daddy mimics a bear or a pirate, to amuse the children.

~

So much for pinchbeck truth.  As for the pure gold:

Something is really true; true in every aspect  and from every angle;  true from the four quarters of the sky;  true by the three dimensions of the Trinity.  We turn from it  and it does not vanish;  we analyze it  and it does not dissolve.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

Granted, the things he has in mind are such as people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins  would actually hold to be false.

~

For further essays on truth, see:

     https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/truth

For truth’s truthitudinal poor-relation, these posts:

     https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/truthiness

(Those are the funny ones.)

tableau sur Seine

the Louvre

the river

the green  glass    sky

       [Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  311]

Two views of Mr Stokes

(1)   Old Mr Stokes, the gardener,  passed

          carrying a rake.

(2)  Old Mr Stokes,  recognizable

       by the four parallel pencil-strokes 

       issuing from his chin

       [Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  186]

Life in the leaf-litter layer

     The waiters darted about  almost invisibly,
        like leaf-insects in a forest

       [Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  280]

Motes in Light

     The leaning column  of yellow light   full of motes

       [Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  246]

“Like Shining from Shook Foil”

Portrait of Lawrence : 

The eyes were blue and piercing,

and the very fine hair,  a little on the reddish side of golden,

fluttered up  at every movement, every breath of wind,

like wisps of blown flame.

[--Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p. 93]

Sunrise monostichs

   the poplar trees   threw shadows

   longer than themselves

[Source: Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 249]

And compare:

From the crest of the Ciminian mountains

they first saw the sun.

[id., p. 331]

On patrol in Vietnam, with the Marines:

The largest sun I’ve ever seen

was beginning to rise   from the edge of the earth.

It was dark orange,

as sharply defined as the full moon  
but enormously larger.

-- Daniel Ellsberg,  Secrets (2002), p. 163

Ostracean Epigram

“If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God.
 You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters,

 when you can’t eat them without being sick.”

(Quotation from Aldous Huxley’s novel of 1928, Point Counter Point, p. 13.)

Ashes to Ashes monostich

The blue smoke floated up  and was  lost  along  the wind.

Requiescat in pace

[From:  the funeral scene in Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 337]

Tone Poem

the ghosts were playing oboes,

not for the sensual ear,

in the ruined sepulchres.

[Source: Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 299.

Behold the open notes of ghosts and oboes!]

Ur-Erde monostich

   The soil of the hills  was red,

   like that from which God made Adam.

[Source: Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves (1925), p. 276.

Read while traveling in Australia’s “Red Centre”.]

Rocking the Boat

She pushed away the plate of soup unfinished, and planted her elbows on the table.  Slipping her hands under the sleeves of her kimono, she began, lightly, delicately, with the tips of her fingers, to caress her own arms.   How smooth they were, how soft and warm, and how secret  under the sleeves.

-- Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (1923)

Having an idle hour at my disposal,  I take the liberty, contre mon habitude, of jotting down a little note concerning an amusing interview -- an incident, merely, no more than that, nothing rising to the level of an Adventure or a Case -- at which my polygraphic friend and amanuensis  Doctor Watson did not assist,  so that, unless I write it up myself, it must be lost to history.

It was a sunny autumn day.  I was contentedly at work on my monograph, Über die Methoden und Entdeckung der weiblichen Onanie (privately printed), when Mrs Hudson, the housekeeper, announced a Miss Kitzler, and ushered her into my chambers.   She proved to be a pretty brunette of around twenty years of age, fashionably and tastefully dressed in pink and crème de camélia,  with bobbed hair, bright eyes, damask cheeks, and a well-turned ankle visible beneath her crinolines:  quite a palate-pleasing specimen, I assessed, were I subject to the attractions of such things.  But what most arrested the attention was her wearing, though the weather was not chilly,  a rich muff of silver fir, inside which her hands could be perceived to be slowly revolving.

“Il y a quelque-chose pour vous, là-dedans…”

She alighted on the seat indicated, and sat primly, her knees pressed together beneath her dress.  “I dreamt” she said without preface “of a little man in a boat”.

At this  I laughed heartily, and refilled my pipe.  “You seem to have mistaken these lodgings for those of my esteemed colleague Herr Doktor Freud, who practices in the next street over.  He is an alienist by training, whereas I am a detective.  My practice concerns the investigation of crime;  while his, by contrast, is the unearthing of the concealment of a crime.”

This all seemed rather to go over her head, for she took no notice, but began fidgeting in her chair, and then went on.  “It is concerning a crime that I consult you.”

“R-real-ly,” I drawled, amused.  “You interest me exceedingly.  And just which might this ‘crime’ amount to?”  I puffed at my pipe, and penetrated her with my gaze.

Here she flushed.  “A--  a child is being beaten,” she managed to stammer, and then fell silent.

I made no response, thus forcing her to go on.

“A -- child is being beaten, a child is being beaten,” she chanted, rocking rhythmically back and forth in her chair.  

I fear I may have so strayed from my gaming-face as to cock a skeptical eyebrow.  “I see.  And just -- where is this … child?”  Knowing full well that it was “in the boat”.

At this she flushed crimson, and turned her face away.  “How -- dare you.”

Thereupon I smiled, not unkindly.  “I have just the thing for you,”  I said.  And, tearing a prescription-blank from Dr Watson’s pad, I wrote out, in a bold hand,

Veretrum normale -- dosim repetatur.

She nodded a curt acknowledgement, took the sheet, and whisked out of the room.

 ~

The enigma of a woman’s heart,

finally espied  by a Private Eye,

for less than the price  of a Valentine …

This Rose

[Kindle]  [Nook]

[Update, 16 March 2014/1914]   One hundred years ago to the day:  the assassination of Gaston Calmette, editor in chief of Le Figaro.   Illustrating other useful applications of the muff:

L'épouse du ministre, Henriette Caillaux, après la publication par Calmette d'une lettre signée "Ton Jo" que l'homme politique avait adressée à sa future épouse, alors qu'elle n'était encore que sa maîtresse et qu'il était marié à Berthe Gueydan3, se rend à la rédaction du journal, tue son directeur, qui venait de recevoir l'écrivain Paul Bourget, en vidant le chargeur de son pistolet automatique (un Browning modèle sac à main  caché dans son manchon).

Psychological side-note:   It was not only the wrist-muff that proved useful to the murderess (in concealing the murder-weapon), but the nether one as well.   In view of the attractions of the latter, the jury simply acquited her:  she served no time, and paid no fine.

For the best in detective fiction,

check out the website of those wise-cracking, gat-packing Private Eyes,

the Murphy Brothers:

http://murphybros.blogspot.com/

[Sidenote:   As well, a simple parasol, may serve as a handy murder-weapon, for a lady so equipped.    Read all about it here (footnote at the end of the essay): ]

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-umbrella-man.html

.

The Theometry of Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős was no atheist; rather, he had an adversarial relationship to God.  He pictured the Creator as hoarding all the best math proofs in The Book, not wanting to share.   Life is basically a board game played against this miser;  and though we cannot win, we can strive to keep his winnings to a minimum.

The adversarial relationship recalls the tragic case of Lucifer; yet nothing else about Erdos seems actually diabolical.   For Erdős does not oppose the Lord head-on, but at a bias.  Simply, Erdős sees the Deity, not exactly through a glass darkly, but under some distortion -- perhaps a projective transformation.

Now, the same transformation must apply to the rest of the celestial denizens.  We may surmise the results.  The angels get recast as mathematicians (not much of a stretch).  And the Holy Spirit turns into the Friendly Ghost, the S.F.’s mischievous sidekick.   So soon as the Big Guy isn’t looking, Casper scurries off, say to rural India, where he finds the lad Ramanujan puzzled beside a hayrick.

“Psst! You know how, you take the reciprocals of the squares of all the integers, and sum them all up?” (Whisper whisper.)
Ramanujan, suddenly:  “I see it!  Pi-squared over six!”

[Update]  It turns out Heine already wrote a sort of sotie on much this theme:
Die Götter im Exil

[Morphological appendix]

He had studied theology.  But if theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry;  why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy?  Why not theophysics and theo-chemistry?  Why not that ingenious toy, the theotrope?

-- Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay (1923), first page

 

On Contraception

[This subject, momentarily displacing abortion, has actually managed to make it onto the public square this past fortnight, in the context of the American Presidential campaign.  That arena, with its lies and hysteria, is hardly the place for judicious contemplation.  Hence we offer our own few observations  here.]

C.S. Lewis, lecturing the troops on spiritual matters during WWII, quickly found that discussing sins of fornication was utterly pointless.  The men had no sense of sin in this regard, so there was no point examining how to resist such temptations.  Much more fruitful, he found, was to take   as his starting-point  some sin that he himself had committed  that very week.   -- Since the sort of sins he was personally given to, tended to tend towards such matters -- or so I imagine -- as the Breaking of Promise in the matter of overdue library books, and (horresco referens) Pride, in the matter of witty little zingers he’d let fly in acerbic book-reviews, it is unclear how the troops would have related to these; but let it pass;  I hope to discuss the matter with him more at length, in another world.

Anyhow.

A fortiori  is the Church’s position on contraception   just … incomprehensible, to almost anyone, Catholic or not.   That does not mean at all that it is mistaken;  but it is so deeply lodged in an intricately reticulated world-philosophy, that to extract it from that context  is to kill the thing.   I suspect, indeed, that the Church is deeply right on this -- or rather, if she be right at all, she can only be deeply right, since  to every surface evidence of the senses, she is grievously in error -- and this, from the standpoint, not of the scoffer with nothing at stake, but of the ordinary Catholic:  compare such works as The British Museum Is Falling Down, by the excellent Catholic novelist  David Lodge.

Once again, we are confronted with an obvious analogy in Theologia mathematica:  So very much, from algebraic topology on up, is True but Incomprehensible (save to a few).  -- This observation is not, obviously, by way of proving any incomprehensible thing (be it the teachings of the Church, or of Grothendieck), but simply of refuting the notion that, if a thing be incomprehensible, in our lifetime, to the man in the street, it must needs be  baloney.

Note:  By coincidence, I am currently re-reading, for the first time since high school, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  It is a dystopian fantasy about a society that has carried birth control to its logical limits: there are no more births in the usual sense at all;  babies are synthesized in test-tubes.   Those acculturated into this system  shudder at the way things were before;  their historians explain:

There was something called Christianity.

Women were forced to be viviparous.

[Update]  Debate about contraception -- and, a fortiori, abortion -- tends to be so polarized, that neither side can hear the other.

A refreshing exception is this, from our friend and colleague Dr Massey.  He is Christian  down to the marrow of his bones -- and also a keenly logical thinker:

    http://magnaliadei.blogspot.com/2012/02/really.html

Excerpt:

What Christians should do is continue to challenge society to explore the logical basis for differing attributions of human life, liberty, and dignity.

(Emphasis added.)