Do Snowbunnies Believe in God? (II)

They would not even understand the question;

they would think you were speaking in riddles.

Their language has no word for ‘God’,

any more than it has for ‘thankfulness for simply béing here’

or for ‘fact-of-being-a-snowbunny’.

They simply lead their lives in sleek serenity,

which comes to them  from somewhere beyond the snow.

Do Snowbunnies Believe in God? (I)

Snowbunnies are so peaceful and glad,

they sleep in their belief  as in a blanket.

They do not think about it,

but it keeps them warm.

[For an introduction to snow-bunnies,

try this:

https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/07/contributions-to-exobiology.html ]

Aufgehoben

My good friend and former workmate Dr Keith A. Massey, though happily still alive and well, is in some sense no longer quite with us, or not in the same way:  you might say that he has been (rather literally) “spirited away”.

For -- Laus Deo -- he has just been ordained a priest, in the Orthodox Church.  And as such, he now enjoys a new name:

~  Father Andrew ~

Properly understood,  such a step up  does not abolish the former self, which rather is preserved (though in no easily stateable sense) within a higher and more general complexus:  as we say in the trade, such a one has been sublated (or, as Hegel has it, aufgehoben).

~

There are many partial analogues to such an assumption-cum-subsumption, falling under the general rubric (in analytic philosophy) of Continuity of Identity.  Thus, to take a biodevelopmental example:  By moment-wise imperceptible  though ultimately (indeed, repeatedly) qualitative stages, the initial conceptus becomes successively an embryo, a fetus, a neonate or nurseling, an alalic but multimodally aware infant (etymological notelet:  a-lalia = in-fancy), a voluable toddler, a child, a teen, a Young Adult (a tweenie stage  for which Dr Massey has extensively catered, both pedagogically and novelistically), an undergraduate, a grown-up (that is, an active agent in societal self-regeneration), and ultimately, if matters so shake out (allow me a smile here) a Ph.D.   All these stages, most of us have traversed, disparate in appearance  yet inwardly united and aligned by an indwelling thread of ontological continuity.  The whole traversal is not less dramatic (though less sudden) than the development of caterpillar into butterfly.

Another example:  the Transubstantiation of the Elements.

Another (taken on faith, not seen)  the continuing presence of some version or analogue of our sublunary self, in nuce, in the soul post-mortem:  ultimately to be clad in the Resurrected Body.   What all that might be, we cannot imagine, any more than the dim embryo foresees the adventures ahead of it.

A practical, so to speak sociolinguistic perplexity, is how his old friends  who have not followed him on that path, are now to address him  I tried out “Father Andrew” subvocally, but that somehow does not work.  I soon realized why:  I would need myself to be converted, and welcomed into his congregation, thus meetly and meaningfully to address him.   So I shall continue to call him “Keith”.  But best blessings to those of his fortunate flock, who, as naturally as sipping water from a spring, may call him:  Father Andrew.

The Medium & the Message

Recently, my Maxima, faithful companion of almost seventeen years, gave up its mechanical ghost (escaping towards the heavens, like steam from a radiator), and departed this life, hopefully for a better world.

Dialing back the horsepower expectations, for an era and region in which it’s impossible to drive fast anyway, I settled on a sensible Civic, which (as though through influence of its very name) I had always associated with courteous drivers.  Being brand-new, it had various electronic doodads I wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole, but my wife loves them, so I have her that car, and took on the one she bought, used, a few years ago.  Even at that rate, it has a CD drive but no cassette drive (the old Maxima was the other way around).  Which means that the vast library of language tapes and the like, which I constructed piecemeal over years, and (dutifully) used to listen to on the way to work and back, are now obsolescent.  So instead I listen to sacred music -- Thomas Thallis, Palestrina, William Byrd, Josquin des Prés.  Quite a change.

Coincidentally, at work, I finally acquired a “green” machine with an internet connection, and thus am able to listen to a wider selection from the same genres (focussing on performances by the Hilliard Ensemble, Kings Singers, Thallis Scholars, and such) through headphones  while working on the “grey” machine.

There was a time, some years back, when I listened only to such fare, for religious reasons.  Whereas now, simply because I like the music, it is beautiful and soothing, and does not distract from driving or from Saving American Lives.   It is good for tranquility.  Also, it goes will with driving more slowly, and with extending courtesy to others who wish to merge.

~

For an earlier meditation on such musical monoculture, try this:

Imagine, indeed, a world in which, for a thousand years, music just was the Goldberg Variations – no other music existed, nor had anyone an idea of composing any new.  The score was thus like the text of the Mass – you didn’t meddle with it. 

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/06/goldberg-variations-variations.html

Langston

[In harmony with today's Google doodle, we repost this.]

“Our problems in America are very much like yours,” I told the Africans, “especially in the South.  I am a Negro, too.”

But they only laughed at me and shook their heads and said:  “You, white man!  You, white man!”

-- Langston Hughes,  The Big Sea (1940)

[Unusual first-name, common surname;  cf. Malcolm.]

I have lately been reading widely in European cultural history of the 1920s and 30s, and in that context, re-reading the second volume of Langston Hughes’ autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander (published  1956).   It is one of the best books I have ever read.  And it is far more gentle and ironic and humorous, more universal in appeal, than the impression you would get from the Wiki article on Hughes (which does not even discuss the book),  which pretty much sees him in the lens of identity-politics.   

In that memoir, largely concerned with European travels, his 1932 trajectory improbably intersects that of another of my favorite writers, Arthur Koestler:  and it is fascinating to read of their stay in Turkmenistan, first from Hughes’ perspective here, and then from Koestler’s (in Koestler’s own memoirs, and in the fine biography by Michael Scammell).   Their compresence on this outpost of the world-historical stage, at that fraught time, is impossible to summarize or even allude to in any illuminating way, absent the necessary background in the Zeitgeist of the time.  (Read The Invisible Writing; read Out of the Night; read Memoirs of Montparnasse ; read Mémoirs d’un revolutionnaire …)

I tend not to be drawn to books with titles like A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia (1934) (which title was quite possibly imposed on Hughes by his Bolshevik publishers), or Famous American Negroes (1954), since I am not a Negro.(**)  On the other hand, I am not an Englishman either, and I love Dickens.  It all depends on whether you are in the hands of a great writer.  And in some of his books, Langston Hughes is that.  -- Further, though a widely-traveled man of eclectic culture, he was very, very American.   Henry James, T.S. Elliot -- Europe can have ‘em.  Langston we keep.

(** : By contrast, the title of his story collection, The Ways of White Folks, is very appealing indeed, for I am fascinated by the ways of white folks, some of whom I number among my best friends.)

~

We have commented elsewhere on the current overpuffing of the literary merits (properly nugatory) of certain currently coddled groups (which both decorum and due discretion  bid leave unnamed) -- based largely, one imagines, on the profiles of who-all happens to work at the literary media these days.    Black men, by contrast, have been relatively quiet this past decade;  if one gets the red-carpet treatment in the news, when not for some notable recent achievement, it is likely not for being black, but for (something else).  But there are treasures, not much trumpeted.

Langston Hughes shares some traits with another noted American writer of mixed race, Barack Obama.   (Yes, I know, he became President;  but prior to that, his excellent autobiography qualified him as, indeed, a writer.)   Both had a virile, absent father, admired diffidently from a distance;  both spent a fair number of years, as children or young men, outside an English-speaking country;  both were well aware of their marginal status -- marginal with respect to just about any gestalt you could name.  (Langston may actually have been marginal in a further respect not shared by Obama;  don’t know, not important here.)   And both turned this predicament to ultimate good advantage.

There is nothing wrong, of course, from being a comfortable member of the dominant community (ethnic or religious or what have you) in your home country;  but that background does not, by itself, lead on to philosophy.   The minority, by contrast, cannot help confronting such matters.  If the confrontation collapses into futility, you wind up with Identity Politics.  If it serves as a path to insight, you get the world’s great literary observers.

~

One of the books I enjoyed during the years in Berkeley after I had dropped out of graduate school for lack of the wherewithal to pay the tuition, and lived (richly!) on literature  rather than food, was Langston’s The Best of Simple.  ‘Simple’ (or Semple, to the registrar) was, as the vernacular version of his surname might suggest, a Naturkind, an ingénu, a naïf :  and though this personality is archetypically American, the European designations (for which I cannot, at present, think of a good English equivalent), are in point, for I Wonder as I Wander provides a surprising hint at the genesis of this character:

I have an affinity for Latin Americans, and the Spanish language I have always loved. One of the first things I did when I got to Mexico City  was to get a tutor, and began to read Don Quixote in the original, a great reading experience  that possibly helped me to develop, many years later, in my own books, a character called Simple

-- a kind of blend, as it were, of Sancho Panza and the Quixote.

Another surprising detail from his Mexico days (since American literati of the ‘20s and ‘30s were not generally a devout bunch):

I went to vespers every night  in the old church just across the street, lighted by tall candles  and smelling of incense.  Sometimes I even got up early in the morning to attend mass.

(Laus deô.)

~

By a biographical accident, it was the work of Langston Hughes that first introduced me to poetry (beyond “Twinkle twinkle little star” -- not that there is anything wrong with that poem, either, in its place).  My parents were not bookish;  yet somehow, on their scantly-populated shelves, stood a “slender volume of verse” (in the classic phrase of the time), its rich yellow hardcovers  together actually thicker than the text in-between, called:

The Weary Blues

by Langston Hughes

(Itself already a kind of monostich, I noted with astonishment.)

One I recall from memory:

Bring me all of your dreams,   you dreamers.

Bring me all your heart-melodies,

that I may wrap them   in a blue cloud-cloth,

away from the too-rough fingers  of the world.

I hesitate even to quote this, for the very reason the poet cites:  the too-rough fingers of the world.  It needs to nestle in its octavo yellow covers,  being gently handled by my own slim fingers, aged nine.    (It is not, in itself, on the level of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”;  but remember:  Up to that time, I had met nothing much beyond the level of the Alphabet Song.)

~

Anyhow, here is a picture of the man, one that warms my heart.  I could easily have selected one less contentious;  but Langston liked his liquor, and his jazz, and the sweet feel of a woman -- and yes, he sometimes enjoyed a smoke.    He was never one to kowtow to pieties (not even those of the Left).   

Here's looking at you, kid.

[Update Sept 2014]  Cf. now this
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2014/09/in-re-rice-v-rice.html


[Update Feb 2015]  A searching, revealing assessment by critic Hilton Als, here:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/sojourner

Limbo Stick

The year was 1962;  America still had a year or so to go, in friendly frivolous teen and pre-teen revels, before the disaster at Dealey Plaza  drew the curtain across such carefree ways  for aye.    All the teenies and tweenies were wriggling and writhing to the beat:

Jack be limbo, Jack be quick

Jack go unda limbo stick

All around the limbo clock

Hey, let's do the limbo rock

Limbo lower now

Limbo lower now

How low can you go?

-- Chubby Checker, “Limbo Rock”

~

And now, in our own times (the moon, a ghastly leprous white, intermittently visible through slashes in the thunderclouds), we again are confronted with that question, though now in a different key.

How low can you go?

How low can you go??

How low can you go???

Answer:  Very low indeed; facilis descensus Averno.

Prominently featured in this morning’s French press:

Éloïse Bouton comparaît mercredi devant la justice pour «exhibition sexuelle». En décembre 2013, elle avait fait intrusion seins nus dans l'église de la Madeleine et simulé un avortement avant de souiller les lieux d'urine.

Elle termine son «happening» à la sauce Femen en urinant devant une assemblée interdite. Sur sa poitrine est inscrit un message en référence au «manifeste des 343 salopes», en faveur de l'avortement. «Noël est annulé! Du Vatican à Paris. Le relais international de Femen contre les campagnes anti-avortement menées par le lobby catholique continue, la sainte mère Éloïse vient d'avorter de l'embryon de Jésus sur l'autel de la Madeleine», communique alors le mouvement Femen sur les réseaux sociaux.

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2014/10/15/01016-20141015ARTFIG00015-une-ex-femen-devant-la-justice-apres-un-faux-avortement-dans-l-eglise-de-la-madeleine.php

The mealy-mouthed charges here are merely for “exhibitionism”;  but you can be certain that, had the perpetrators been from the milieu of the Manif pour tous, and the target of this vicious display been Judaism or Islam, they would already be in prison, denounced from all sides.

I tried looking up this story in Google News, but all it returned were French accounts:  the anglophone media are so far apparently mum (or else  for some reason  Google refuses to index the English media that do reference the story, content to return zero  rather than let them have their say.)

The group had earlier perpetrated an outrage against Notre-Dame de Paris.  In that case, the French legal system let them go scot-free.   Not that the courts can’t be tough when it suits their politics:

Le tribunal, dans une insulte au bon sens, a condamné à une amende les gardiens de la cathédrale jugés coupables d'un comportement trop brutal envers les activistes du groupe Femen.

(Weiteres zum Thema hier.)

Found Lamottian Monostich

“I think I’m a Christian,”  said Rosie.

“Except for the Jesus part.”

            -- Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart (1997)


[And for a kind of haiku,
 quarried from the same source,
click here.]

“Brideshead Revisited” Revisited

Thinking she was borrowing the classic TV presentation of Evelyn Waugh’s novel, with Laurence Olivier and Jeremy Irons, my wife checked out what proved to be a 2008 film remake.    Since I didn’t recall the release of this film, though I do follow reviews, I figured it must have been panned, or damned with faint praise, not even to register in memory.  I would never have selected it myself.

Well, serendipity.  The movie is splendidly well-made.  Indeed, but for the long shadow of its televisual predecessor, which blights all that might otherwise  grow in its turf, this film would itself undoubtedly have been hailed as a classic.   It cannot have been dismissed out of hand  save by critics ever looking over their shoulders at  the predecessor.

An additional pleasure is seeing a couple of “Harry Potter” stalwarts in vastly different roles, almost unrecognizable.   It shows that they really are actors, and masters at the game, not stereotypes.

[For an analogous experience of re-visiting an old classic in a new guise:  Fantasia and The Day the Earth Stood Still.]

*

Thus enthused, we naturally had to check out the TV version, which we had watched when it came out, in 1981.

When critics reviewed the later movie, their expectations were attuned to the TV.  Ours were now reversed:  having just seen the film, we saw the series in its light.

And the very first impression was not favorable.  It seemed … dawdling, padded.  Confusing, even.  What’s with the X-taped windows?  Actually it doesn’t matter, nothing to do with what follows. -- The film, like a man under a death-sentence (tel Boethius) had been more economical than that.

*

I first met Waugh’s work in college, reading several of his early novels.  “Wickedly funny”, as the jacket-copy accurately described them.  Emphasis on the “wicked”;  it was by no means apparent, from these japes, that the fellow might be “religious” -- whatever that might mean.  (I was myself, at the time, wholly unchurched.)

And, thus enthused, had proceeded to the much-touted (and as yet unfilmed) Brideshead Revisited.   And drew back.  “Where’s the funny?”

It sailed above my head.  I remember almost nothing of it.

*

And moreover, thus enthused, it was evident  we had to read (for me, re-read) the original novel as well.  We picked up a copy at the remainder store, the next day.

The book was originally published in 1945 -- an odd date, the result (as Waugh explains) of the “good fortune” of a wound that took him out of action and let him write.

Now, just as it matters, for the appreciation of the series adaptation resp. the film, which order you see them in, so does the (revised, revisited) edition of the novel load the dice for your reading experience.  For in the preface (1959) to the 1960 edition, in the very first paragraph, the author states, that the theme of the novel is:

the operation of divine grace

Class:  What is the theme of the novel we have just read?  There’s the answer right there!  It will be on the test!

When we saw the series, back in 1981, we were still unchurched;  but my bride was with child, and we’d been married by a man of the cloth; so we were both, you might say, “further along”.   And for both of us, the high point came when  the wastrel, Lord Marchmain, on his deathbed, surrounded by the breath-held attentions of his practicing Catholic family, at length and at last, in articulo mortis … sains himself -- God be praised !

But that culmination comes at the end;  we had certainly not experienced the many hours of the series, minute by minute, cocktail after teddy-bear, as an exercise in Catholic mysticism.  Thus, both the film and the series are cast in an entirely new light when revisited:  the river has changed color when next you step in it.

*

So -- the depiction of divine grace;  a worthy goal indeed, but a tall order.   Does the tale live up to it?

The film does not.  There is a reference at the end to Sebastian having turned his life around, and being the pet of the monks; and Lord Marchmain does his sign-of-the-cross thing, though somehow the scene lacks in anticipation and intensity, this time round.  For one thing, though Marchmain/Dumbledore has a lot of fun in the tiny slice of screen-time he’s allowed, we don’t really come to know him:  it’s like watching a stranger do that.  In the TV series, when Olivier does it, it’s riveting -- but the director leaves it nicely ambiguous, whether he has in fact converted on his deathbed to the full Catholic faith, or whether he was simply doing it as a gesture of charity and repentence to the family he’d abandoned, and which has been sitting there waiting for such a sign with bated breath.  (Of course, Grace is involved in either case.)

[To be continued, as time and life allow.]

A Cuppa Java

I don’t believe in the existence of infinitely many primes because of some philosophical reason;  I believe it because Euclid proved it.  And I don’t believe in the existence of this coffee-cup for metaphysical reasons;  I believe it on the practical and by no means logically conclusive grounds, that it has so far done a good job of holding my coffee. Should it turn out I’m only a brain in a vat, worse luck:  no coffee-cup after all.  But the number of primes will still be infinite.

Thus far the thoughts of a simple man, after a tasty cup of coffee.  Then come the objections:  And why do you trust your sense-perceptions of that cup?  Simple answer: Because that’s what creatures do; I’m like the bunny, trusting the carrot.  Surrejoinder: a years-long onslaught of the findings of philosophy and physics.  Somewhat chastened, I revise the periphery of my ontology in complicated ways, demoting a number of  entities to various levels of Meinongian subsistence.  But the coffee-cup stays just as it was.  There is still a frenziedly skeptical attack on that (the brain-in-a-vat bit), which I cannot logically refute; but I meet it with faith, which in this case requires no great leap.

As for the integers…Well I know of no attack that even needs meeting.  There are attacks on various characterizations of what numbers “are” (rather than, so to speak, what they “do” – divide evenly into twelve, and so forth);  these are harmless, perhaps even true.  They do not strike at the heart of numbers, any more than a bad statue or overidealized painting  strike at the reality of Napoleon.