Essays in Idleness

We have been asked, by correspondents twa, to abandon the pluralis maiestatis. Both queries were from Americans who find the practice unbearably arch. It was abandoned two Popes ago at Rome, & by the present Queen in England soon after she ascended (only then to be parodied for, “My husband & I”). It is condemned as a fustian & pompous conceit, by one of our critics, who came close to making us squirm; & by the other, who didn’t, as an encouragement to grammatical error. Surely, he argued, “we ourself” is inadmissable into English. But if ever it was, it got by Queen Victoria, who was never shy with that reenforcing pronoun.

In Fowler no ruling we find; only his fear of confusing one “we” with another. Not that we looked very hard, for our habit is to work from vaguely remembered precedent. Indeed, over the years, having found delicious precedents, we have picked many fights with newspaper sub-editors. They would proudly flag what they took for a solecism, in a writer obnoxiously prim. But we’d be waiting with the quote from some “classic” English author, in which the act prohibited had been unambiguously performed.

As we vaguely recall from school days, the question at issue can vex only moderns, for in Middle English there were no distinctions of number in reinforcing or reflective pronouns. Some nevertheless think an “-en” ending could make these plural, but they are wrong & one will find e.g. “yourselven” addressed to a single person, passim, in the Canterbury Tales; & in the up-so-doun world of the Wife of Bath, when it takes two to tangle, they are singularly “ourselven tuo.”

It is worth asserting that the pluralis maiestatis, called by some journalists “the royal wee,” is different in kind from “the editorial we,” which does require consistent plurals. This is because the conceit is instead to be writing on behalf of some editorial board, or committee. Sometimes it is used to feign the very existence of a larger entity, in the manner of the Wizard of Oz. But we prefer to keep our conceits on a higher level.

We share Robert Bork’s view of the Israeli Supreme Court — that it is the most liberal, activist, interventionist thing in the Orion-Cygnus Arm of the Milky Way — & stood ready to condemn it with a jerk of our knee, until we realized that the offending Judgment came from the Tel Aviv district family court. This was to take Kafka materials left by Max Brod to his secretary, & by her to her two daughters, & put them instead into the Israeli National Library. They must now emerge from flat & bank vault into the light of academic day.

Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924. He told Brod to destroy all his manuscripts, unread. Brod not only published The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, &c, but made a good living from them until his own death in 1968. The bulk of Kafka’s manuscripts, including diaries & correspondence, has long since been published; what remains to transfer is mostly Brod’s own scholarly & personal scribbling. The international media characteristically omit that little fact, acknowledged by the court in the assignment of future royalties to the sisters. They will need this income to pay the huge legal fees of the people who took their property, while demonizing them, in a case smeared over five years.

Let us admit to being a voyeur, for we have copies of all three novels mentioned above on our shelves up here in the High Doganate; therefore we needn’t mount too high a horse in protesting that Kafka told Brod to burn them. Each is a strange masterpiece (Amerika the strangest), & each conducts us towards real insight into the nature of our modern age (including, in the case of Amerika, its optimism). One might say: Kafka did not foresee Hitler, Stalin, or Obamacare, but did see through them. He gives memorable form & tactility, even humour, to nightmares.

Kafka’s stories anchor below politics, & below the malignant bureaucracies he depicts, in nature herself; & deeper into a kind of theology. His inspiration is essentially Hasidic, but it is a Hasidism twisted. Tales that he loved have been metamorphosed, through a personality that is fundamentally neurotic, sometimes on the verge of schizoid. From this dark he is presenting, in the final twist, man’s relationship with an inscrutable God. Now that we have them, these books are worth keeping, though we should read them in light of Kafka’s own self-doubt. At bottom he did not trust himself; & these are not books for children, or for the spiritually immature.

Has the author of unpublished manuscripts the right to burn them; or direct them to be burned, as an extension of that right? We think, yes. We think, to deny this right, when the author is not demonstrably insane, is to make him a ward of the Castle.

In this case, owing perhaps to Kafka’s own genius for confusion, paradox reigns. He used Brod sometimes as if he were one of the mysterious Officials, to whom he only surrenders ambiguously. None of these novels were ever completed, & in his editing, Brod, with a genius of his own, shaped them to his own conception of what a novel should be. It is unlikely that the ambitious scholarly effort to disentangle Kafka’s work from Brod’s, will get us to a better place. (It anyway requires work on manuscripts which Brod deposited in places like Oxford University; he wasn’t so irresponsible as the media accounts imply.)

Kafka’s peculiar voice & vision are captured in Brod’s structures, but when they are let out, as for instance in Kafka’s Letters to Milena (the most married & intelligent of the many women with whom he toyed) we glimpse a side of him we don’t need to know. For here is a man addicted to brothels & pornography, now posing as a puritan ascetic — performing vain & deceitful acrobatics to impress a sophisticated woman who pretends to understand him. Another mistress will be an illiterate chambermaid, another an earnest village schoolteacher; he seems attracted to a physical type. His relations with his father are similarly unedifying. He is extremely articulate, but he is often articulating nonsense, even in diaries to himself. His avoidance of war service through a job in the government insurance agency turns the bureaucracy schtick at a revealing angle; & his remarks on contemporary politics are consistently fatuous. Charming, when he wants, but unbearably self-serving: we didn’t need to know more, & shouldn’t have sought it.

We made the same mistake the other day by obtaining a copy of the latest & grandest edition of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. The editor has diligently aggegated all the Larkin sources, especially Andrew Motion’s biography, & reprints juvenilia & scraps from notebooks together with his exhaustive commentary to make a very thick book from what was previously a slim one. The net effect is to diminish Larkin, to encumber him with things not so good. True, in the odd quoted remark or passage from his correspondence, he is large, but his own carefully edited opus made him larger. And the more our attention is directed to the circumstances of his life & compositions, the more it is sidetracked from poems that resonate beyond those circumstances.

The modern mind, buzzing with & bleating for distraction, cannot leave well enough alone. The courts now assist in this process. From more & more we extract less & less.

Thomas Nagel’s latest work must have some merit: it has created a stir in the belfries. The book is, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. The author is the celebrated, John Rawls-trained, atheist and empiricist perfesser of philosophy and law at New York University.

I last checked in with Nagel some decades ago, in the days of “What is it like to be a bat?” — his bald philosophical paper of the ‘seventies, which argued that the question is deeply interesting. For after we have learnt every empirical thing that can be known about a bat, we still don’t know what it feels like. His paper was an attack on scientific reductionism, and must have been an early anticipation of his current large essay, in which he extends his attack to what we call “materialism” or “naturalism” at large. This invariably bestews an author in frankly Aristotelian pots of teleology (i.e. reasoning to final cause). For a universe consisting only of bona-fide stuff, evolving by bona-fide chance, and thus limiting itself strictly to efficient causes, would surely not bother with something so scandalously “inefficient” as consciousness.

The academic reviews of Nagel, from what I have seen in the electronic aether, are appropriately scandalized. The Neo-Darwinist Inquisition would hardly be worth its pay, if it did not promptly wax hysterical whenever a credentialled person drifts towards the shoals of Intelligent Design. This review in the Nation provides judge, jury, and summary conviction. These two in the Thrupenny Review provide some amusing sneers from the humanities gallery.

Nagel’s attack is dismissed as vague and amateur, since he has refused to buy into reductionist premisses to attack reductionism, and into naturalist premisses to attack naturalism. He stands further accused, by the Nation reviewer, of failing to abase himself in the presence of the high priests of empirical science. Can he not see that science gets results? Where is his Faith in Science? How dare he employ philosophical reasoning to an enterprise innocent of such dark things!

Now here is what we understand to be the Nagelian critique. A materialist or naturalist science should explain how things got the way they are, in terms that are ultimately plausible and likely. All the most obviously important results of the evolutionary process should be present and accounted for at the end of the day. And therefore, something as huge as consciousness needs explaining. Something so shriekingly volitional should not be presented as a kind of add-on or spin-off or side-effect or by-product of “sparks and drips at the synapses” (some Berkeley neuroscientist’s happy phrase).

Moreover, the “grey jelly” has an uncanny way, even in mere animals, of apprehending truths outside of itself. In the case of humans, 3 plus 5 equals 8 is astonishing: because it checks out with the universe; it emerges as an inescapable consequence of the “law of non-contradiction.” Math and logic are spooky like that, and so, as Nagel will apparently argue, are certain moral axioms. We may say that they “evolved” to assist us in survival; are “by-products of evolution”; but that doesn’t begin to explain e.g. “do as you would be done by.” This steps radically beyond what we required to deal with sabre-toothed tigers, into a realm of tautology (in the highest sense) that precedes (in the logical) any evolutionary explanation. If science means “knowledge,” as it formerly did, we will just have to deal with that bit, too.

This empirically-demonstrable fact of self-awareness, on the part of the universe in this location at least, is what lies under and behind the anthropic cosmological principle, towards which empirical science itself may be moving, on the strength of its unlikely discoveries. For we have a universe which, in no location, can ever be shown to neglect purpose. It does not merely spark and drip; it lays eggs.

Aristotle was not ahead of modern science in empirical research (how could he be, since that is cumulative?) but well ahead in his grasp that efficient cause does not complete the scientific transaction. Final cause may dance beyond our reach, but there it dances. Cheap parodies of teleological reasoning do not put it to rest: for if human beings had never asked “Why?” there would be no science. The Neo-Darwinians may try to arrest us at the boundary of efficient causation, but in the end their Berlin Wall will fall: for we have seen bright lights on the other side, and we want to go there.

There is so much said in the six short chapters of the Epistle to the Ephesians, that we cannot pretend to understand it all. Yet in outline, and essential message, it is plain sailing. There is an intense prologue, in two extremely long and involved Greek sentences, amounting to a hymn. This recounts the Blessing brought with Christ into our world. Cumbersome in translation, I once came close to hearing how it sings in Greek.

The hymn then segues into a kind of narrative solo: of Christ’s servant, Paul, apostle or “messenger” to the Gentiles, ending in a fervent prayer.

Tone and style change abruptly and quite purposefully, at the beginning of the fourth chapter, while remaining lyrical. We have an exhortation, in the unity of the Church, to the calling and duty of each member. This begins doctrinally, presenting what resolves into a schematic description of that Catholic, or universal Church; which is, “one body and one Spirit, … called in one hope; … one Lord, one faith, one baptism; … one God and Father of all, above all, through all, in all.”

This in turn devolves to relations between persons within that Church. The verses memorably include the central tenet of Christian matrimony, relating wives to husbands as Church to Christ. Paul invokes, here as everywhere, simplicity of heart, carrying into the reciprocal obedience and love owed between all children and parents, between servants and masters of all kinds. All share membership in their parts within one body of Christ.

And then, the clarion of true spiritual warfare, and the fight each Christian must fight, all for one and one for all. “For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

To which end: “Put you on the armour of God.”

From the salutation at its beginning, to its postscript commending Tychicus, Paul’s messenger and his old companion of the road, it is like the structure of a Bach Cantata. The Epistle to the Ephesians has provided the materials for a thousand commentaries and a million sermons. Most significantly, it does not merely “make an argument” for the claims of the Catholic Church. It unambiguously requires “the unity of Spirit in the bond of peace.” (That extraordinary line, which a recusant sonneteer from Warwick so tellingly inverted to: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”)

That the Epistle was written at Rome, during Paul’s first captivity about anno 62, comes from the Tradition, much attested and nowhere contradicted. It also comes confirmed, by statements in the text; a text which echoes in allusion through the earliest Christian literature: in Justin, Ignatius, Hermas, Polycarp, Clement of Rome; and too, in the Didache, since it was rediscovered. Origen and Jerome have not the slightest doubt of its authenticity or its authorship; even Marcion the heretic takes this for known.

There is a fair question whether the Church at Ephesus was the addressee, or rather more likely the point from where the Epistle was disseminated to the farther reaches of Asia Minor; for we know from Basil and other sources that the words “at Ephesus” were missing from the earliest manuscripts. But this is not a mildew question; it invites an understanding that is fresh, of a doctrinal authority that is unmistakeable.

Was Paul the author?

I have, on my shelves up here in the High Doganate, though perhaps not for long, a modern (1998) commentary on Ephesians of more than 700 pages, on each of which this is taken as an open question. Rather than dare say “Paul” the writer diligently substitutes “AE” (for “Author of Ephesians”), in deference to modern textual scholarship, which takes everything as an open question, and can make any factual assertion, however plain or innocently made, into an issue for perpetual, unresolvable disputation. By this means we are distracted constantly, and at tremendous length, from the Scripture itself; as ultimately from the chance of our Salvation.

Indeed, almost any modern commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians, whether nominally Catholic or Protestant, heads straight into the weeds from the first word, which is, “Paulus.” The same who (at 4:25) puts lying at the top of his list of sins his Christian readers must avoid. Are we to take it the Epistle was written instead by some pretender, whose first word was a lie?

Yet even to state that is to invite another journey through the weeds, the more tortuous because it must be in the company of tin-eared scholars making confident judgements on Paul’s vocabulary, syntax, and style.

The Epistle was from the earliest times paired with that to the Colossians. The two seem sometimes to play one theme together like a pair of violas. From that ancient useful hint, one may solve almost any puzzle that comes to mind, about the relation of Ephesians to the rest of the Pauline canon.

And if we read it on the assumption of Paul’s authorship, we grasp immediately the reason for adjustments in voice from Paul’s other Epistles: for he is writing here not to a local church he knew at first hand, but to new Christians he has never met, in the Church Universal beyond them; and condensing, poetically, what elsewhere he had once had the opportunity, more prosaically, to spell out. Thus, in a sense, he is writing even more directly to us than in his other Epistles.

That we would shoot the messenger of bad news might be understandable in some circumstances. But why tamper with the messenger of Good News?

One of the greatest pleasures in life, for those who were taught to read in childhood, is falling upon an unread book by a much-loved author. This happened to me, and if I add the scrupulously bibulous celebration of an old friend’s seventy-fifth birthday (now ten years retired as the last competent drawing master in what, before name inflation, was called the Ontario College of Art), I may explain the omission of posts on Tuesday.

The author was Bill Tilman (Major Harold William Tilman, CBE, DSO, MC and bar, 1898–1977), renowned mountaineer, pilot-cutter yachtsman, and raconteur, whose fifteen ridiculously understated memoirs of voyages and adventures supply something that went missing around the time of the Great War.

The book, entitled China to Chitral, is an account of wanderings up and through the mountains of Chinese Turkestan, especially about Urumchi and Kashgar, with his old climbing companion Eric Shipton in anno 1948. It could be praised at many levels, both for what it describes and what it ignores. Tilman crossed China westward when Mao Tse-tung and his Communist Revolution were sweeping the other way. But not once does Tilman mention this news, restricting his remarks on China and Chinese either to the timeless, or to the exactly particular. We hear more about a T’ang Dynasty general who led an army across the Pamirs against an alliance of Arabs and Tibetans, in anno 747.

He spreads learning almost in spite of himself: “My theme is mountains, unsullied by science and alleviated with Chinese brandy.” A culinary anthology could be constructed from Tilman’s passing mentions of food, drink, and hard tack. From his climbing descriptions a reader may find the whole jargon of mountaineering self-explained. He minutely discerns birds and animals, glaciation and geology, without the slightest pretensions. He makes sharp anthropological observations on Kirghiz, Turkis, Kazakhs, Wakhis, Sherpas, Tungans — of a kind that could be made only by a man whose survival depended on getting them right. Yet he observes with a drollness that would be severely reprimanded today, by professorial experts who know nothing at first hand, and little true at second. And his way is lighted with innumerable aphorisms, both original, and derived: for he was a man of very broad reading, able effortlessly to insert the perfect, jaw-droppingly apt quotation, then improve on it with a light touch.

The inward joy is fully derived, from a view of life that is totally incompatible with that of the modern world. He is traveller, never passenger, and so he tramps or sails, compulsively taking the hard way over or around each obstacle. Several other twentieth-century English travellers shared in that attitude (Wilfred Thesiger is another of my heroes, Freya Stark among my heroines), but Tilman exceeds all in the gratuitousness of his assaults upon the world’s least habitable places.

He ascended Everest, for example, without oxygen and in weekend hiking boots and a tweed jacket, to an altitude of 27,300 feet, in 1938. He and Shipton were the first human beings to physically penetrate the inner Nanda Devi Sanctuary, similarly ill-equipped. There is a long list of such accomplishments, for which he was half-prepared at best. His soldiering in both World Wars, whether behind enemy lines or leading frontal attacks, was the stuff of legends.

And at the end of China to Chitral, upon hearing a false rumour that, during his absence from civilization, another World War had been declared, he says:

“There was no time to be lost. Modern wars are such long drawn out affairs that it would not be easy to arrive too late to take part, yet it would never do to commit such a solecism. In a terrible stew, hot-foot and resolved to march double stages, I set out for Gupis and the beaten track which I could no longer shun.”

The man writing that was already past fifty. He undoubtedly meant just what he said. Carefully read, the short passage communicates a masculine nobility almost gone from this world — a form of incorruptible flippancy which we correctly associate with those knights of old, who dared without hesitation, and laughed at everyone, especially themselves.

“We are using our own skins for wallpaper, and we cannot win.”

This was among the quotes we had on our office wall, in the old days at the Idler maga. Since media mediocrities are currently obsessed with issues of attribution and plagiarism, let me quickly admit that I knicked this line from John Berryman (1914–72), the American poet. (Dream Songs, no. 53.) Now, Berryman said he took it from the German poet, Gottfried Benn, and my fact-checking department has traced this to Benn’s essay, “Artists and Old Age” (of 1954, translated in Primal Vision, page 206):

“Your art has deserted the temples and the sacrificial vessels, it has ceased to have anything to do with the painting of pillars, and the painting of chapels is no longer anything for you either. You are using your own skin for wallpaper, and nothing can save you.”

Benn was in turn mischievously interpreting a remark by Thomas Mann. And, Mann was commenting on a very old theme which, arising within the trunk of the Classics, branched through every European literature. Artists, according to this ancient meme, must be tough, not least on themselves.

Or as I might explain this to a fact-checker: “We can never be free of the ancient world, unless we become barbarians again.”

That’s another quote, from the same wall. It is from Jacob Burckhardt, in his Historische Fragmente. (Do you want the original German? I have it here.) Though truth to tell, I had nearly attributed it to Emil Staiger. (Shows you the importance of checking.)

We are becoming barbarians again. And so we are using our own skins for wallpaper, as perhaps Berryman came to appreciate most fully as he leapt from a Minneapolis bridge, into the Mississippi River. (Fact-check alert: “He didn’t land in the river, but near the second pier on the west bank, then rolled fifteen feet down the embankment. But as the autopsy showed, he would have been dead by the time his body made contact with the river itself. Please correct.”)

Berryman was an alcoholic. (You cannot libel the dead.) He was arguably manic, but unarguably depressive. (“Bi-polar?”) He was a deeply unhappy man, in the grimly uncongenial environment of modern American academia (which had already hog-tied literature and art, and was working on music). He burnt through three wives (if we have counted correctly). He was even cast, by the fashion of his generation, into the sadly inappropriate role of a “confessional” poet, when he longed for escape from his own skin. (Confessional poets often kill themselves; Berryman, to his credit, outlived most of his contemporaries.)

A distressing ego he may have had, but there were other facets. Many students remembered him as tirelessly devoted, both tough and kind. As poet he was a painstaking craftsman, whose turns, breaks, and very gravid pauses, show him fanatically avoiding the easy way out. He’d worry himself sick about keeping jobs, and paying bills, and keeping the very families he was about to abandon. He’d drive himself to the border of his sanity; then crack, and hit the bottle; brag, womanize, fight, slather, lie; and make an excruciating ass of himself.

His last, posthumous book, Delusions, &c (far from his best, and burning out around the edges) was also his most interesting. In de-tox in 1970 he’d had what he called a “sort-of religious conversion.” Instead of an abstractly transcendent God, he came suddenly to think that God might be Personal; might be interested in each human fate; might be capable of interceding in individual lives. He hit the bottle again; quit, hit, quit; struggling, apparently, against this idea. And finally he left that garbled, fragmentary, versified witness to something partially understood.

O gentle reader, pray for him. He was one of the innumerable lost: men and women of huge gifts, able to sing, but given no song; given instead freedom without purpose. It is, if you will, not entirely distinguishable from that “American Dream” that we heard invoked too many times in two recent political conventions: the self-made man in the land of laissez-faire, where nothing is impossible and “history is bunk.” (Which is not to condemn a little entrepreneurship.)

The “dream” stands unknowingly opposed to, “gather from the air a live tradition” (Ezra Pound, plagiarizing Dante through Villon). The critique here is more fundamental than, “You didn’t build that!” (when the real horror is often that they did). Men cannot lift themselves by their own ankles; they need that current of air to fly. They need even to be pointed and launched towards the Heaven. They need pillars to paint, and chapels, too. More than a country, they need a civilization.

Forty years have now passed since his passing. I remember from adolescence the thrill of Berryman’s “Henry,” and the strange architectonic of his Dream Songs; the hard poetical pedagogy in Berryman’s Sonnets, and the high lyrical pitch of his Love and Fame. (Though, Mistress Bradstreet made no sense to me.) I remember him showing me to the door of Emily Dickinson, and cutting a new trail through the Forest of Arden. And then, how I puzzled in the crash of his Delusions, and how he lay crumpled in a vaguely Catholic heap, after his Icarian fall. (Let God alone judge him.)

Turning a few more pages through the Dream Songs:

Bats have no bankers and they do not drink
and cannot be arrested and pay no tax
and, in general, bats have it made.

Crows are very clever; laboratory bird testers, not so much. Here, a simple case of correlation is presented as inference of a hidden causal agent.

Crows have been acing correlation tests since the day God created them. (One indication of how intelligent they are: I have never seen a crow reading Discover magazine.) They can trace causal agents on a scale so microscopic as to be non-existent; and they can infer things so subtle, that people who realize scream and run away.

But ravens, hooo! … Knock the smartest crow into a cocked hat. … They conduct empirical experiments on all the other species, and hide the journals  in secret places where they will never be found.

I have lifted my title from Yoshida no Kaneyoshi, better known as “Kenko,” the fourteenth-century Japanese Buddhist recluse and bonze. At a time when the Emperor Go-Daigo was struggling with the usurping Hojo family, and the world about him was in flames, Kenko retired to a cottage in the hills. Armed with brush, and apparently some quantity of paper, he wrote down anecdotes and reflections on many subjects, just as they came to mind. He then “posted” these, or rather pasted them on his walls, in no particular order.

I might refer the interested reader to the original text, collected and edited by Nishio Minoru in the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei series (Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1957). But as I myself read hardly a word of Japanese, I tend to refer to the translation by Donald Keene.