Essays in Idleness

Reading Czeslaw Milosz through the afternoon; and now I realize I cannot set the “L with stroke” that would be necessary to spell his name correctly, or that of any other poet in Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Wymysorys, or some other language wherein a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative might be required. Worse, I cannot set verse properly, in any language, owing to my own high-tech ineptitude.

One can, however, reading through the Collected Milosz Poems, come to appreciate how many were written in Berkeley, California, where he settled into a perfessership after exiling himself from Stalinism. (Read: The Captive Mind.) A magnificent translator, too, back and forth through Polish and English, he has that poetic quality of translating himself, into his original, as he wanders.

Now, the reader must pretend this is typeset properly:

“You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime, / And kept a pack of fools around you” … continues as a sonnet until … “you’d have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.”

This from three-quarters of a century ago, about when he first landed in the United States, as the cultural attaché of a “People’s Republic.” He was also a survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, whose life was saved from the Nazis by a nun, and various other crises of modernity, often parallel to Saint John Paul II. Their works yield many fine mottoes.

It is amusing to think that Milosz, and the father of Kamala Harris, were teaching at Berkeley about the same time — the one among the most learned and eloquent opponents of Communism; the other a moronic socialist activist. Indeed, Ms Harris was brought up in an academic household in Berkeley (and in Montreal), but has substituted working-class Oakland in the family tradition of lying. Her nature is revealed in her “joyous” cackle, … “bursting into laughter at the crime.”

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IN OTHER POLITICAL NEWS. — One of my most reliable correspondents informs me that Larry the Cat, about whom I wrote extensively (on July 13th, 2016), refused to be photographed with “Sir Keir” Starmer, the unlikeable current prime minister of England. He (Larry) would not participate in the latest cute publicity shot, for which he was called “a little shit” by the Scottish Secretary. (That was rich.) Too, Larry was slandered as “the most miserable animal you’ll ever meet,” and blamed for ten years of Labour defeats. But Larry despised Rishi Sunak, as well as Mr Starmer, and outpolls both with the British public.

Chatting with my priest, the late Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, about death — a topic on which he is so much better informed — I recall his warning. We, who have been in the habit of making a splash, whenever splashing was possible, look ahead to some glorious final play. We will be surrounded by our admirers or, almost as good, by the people who detest us as we are martyred. Either way, it will be a scene of victory.

But perhaps there will be no one watching, no living creature, not even a cat. No one will be in the least startled, not even the medical performers, who see this sort of thing every day. This is especially likely now, when family deathbed scenes have gone out of style, and the Batflu provisions (or whatever succeeds them) specify that everyone must die in isolation. Indeed, “Medical Assistance In Dying” is the only way to get an audience.

Among the advantages of being a “Far Right” person (apparently about three-quarters of the population) is that, short of some splash that will be recorded in “the media,” no one cares what happens to you. This means that, whether the audience is present or absent, you will be under no obligation to entertain them. This makes the impending conversation with Christ something on which you may focus entirely.

The more devastating if all He has to say is, “I do not know you.”

Note: one may not get His attention by “making a splash,” for instance by much moaning. Holiness doesn’t work like that.

Part of prudence is to care what will be the result of one’s ministrations. For if you don’t care, the results will be nearly opposite to what you are promising. Of course you care, but you are more careful about yourself, and to take credit, and so forth. In the course of which, your care for the results of your ministrations shrinks to the zero it usually does among politicians.

It would be unreasonable to expect perfect sanctity in public life. This is why only very, very stupid people, like President Biden, say that Kamala Harris “has the moral compass of a saint.” I don’t even think Donald Trump has the moral compass of a saint, and to their credit, I don’t think any Republicans do.

But does Trump, in addition to his narcissism and whatever, care for the results of his political actions? Is he actually trying to “make America great again”? (Or at least a little better?) Or is he largely indifferent to the pain and death he spreads about him, except for the personal political consequences? Yes, Trump is, along with his personality defects, above all but a few American politicians. And Ms Harris is well below them.

Politics, with its elections, comes very close to a “zero-sum” game in which such comparisons are necessary. It is also zero-sum long after the election. All a politician can do is negotiate some kind of trade-off, in which he will ideally try to get as much good as possible, in exchange for as little evil. He cannot deliver any absolute, and this is why all (not most, but all) socialists, “liberals,” progressives, &c, should be absolutely dismissed.

“The people” know nothing about how to run a state, and that’s why, in a democracy, we must have such foolish politicians. Their idea of a trade-off is more services for less taxes.

From this you may guess that I am not an “idealist” in politics, or in anything else this far away from God. The world works within the constraints that the world works within. Note the tautology. These constraints are real.

A German, Father Bruno of Cologne, founded the first holy brace of Carthusian monasteries. One would usually say, of this XIth-century saint, that he was “founder of the Carthusians,” except, I don’t think that’s how monasteries work. They may be started by anybody, and indeed, back in the East, many monasteries were started by Buddhists. But in Christendom they have been, necessarily, under the patronage of Our Lord. This we can know from the many miracles that have attended their foundation. And what depends on God only lasts until God’s patronage ceases. I think that is what happens in Buddhist monasteries, too, for as Christ said, “I have other flocks,” and will have these “gentiles” brought into His fold.

Father Bruno was among our greatest saints, and if you will, a model for how to be a saint in all ages. He was surrounded by famously good men, and some famously bad ones, had pope and cardinals as his pupils, and various passing rôles in the Church, yet was consistently humble and aloof from power. He had courage and decision; without hesitation boldly sacking the corrupt, declining an episcopal appointment for himself, and in many other ways “being his own man.” Within the Grand Chartreuse, and other enclosures of the Ordo Cartusiensis (we call them “Charterhouses” in English) his spiritual echo is still heard, after a millennium of adventure, including violent persecutions in “Reformations” and “Enlightenments.”

They were warmly hated. (But, “Know that the world hated me first.”) Their priories were the source of much charity, and of course this led to multiple conversions.

What appeals to me in Saint Bruno and the Carthusians is an unhurried focus on contemplation and art. They do arduous toil, too, in silence, and they do not intersect with “the community.” They are not missionaries or preachers, except perhaps through their works, for they have been the manuscriptorialists.

They are opposite to what is promoted today, through apps and Internet. They are not a virus or infection.

O ye of little faith, and much stupidity! … There are atheist assumptions in modern atheist science and philosophy. I cite a scientific and philosophical tautology. I include the self-proclaimed “agnostics,” who also study the world from behind blinders, blacking out or censoring evidence of the Creator, and the miraculous in everyday life (such as, that people get up in the morning). For the moment I pretend to be a “theist,” which is to say, the opposite of an atheist. By me, and the other theists, the evidence for God is received.

This does not mean it is quackishly insisted upon. Natural theology does not offer only “proofs” that God, or any other person, exists. It is instead quite comfortable with reality. It is a game we sometimes play, idly, with God.

Faith is not formally rejected in modern, high-tech-pagan investigations. Neutrality on belief systems is assumed, as if the investigator had no stake in his inquiries. He has the higher indifference to his fellow beings. But it is not complete indifference, for what makes him atheistical is that he expects, eventually, to be freed from all irritations, and not even to remember the divine. God will not be necessary for him to get up in the morning.

But meanwhile, he has, like the Marquis de Laplace, “no use for that hypothesis.”

The advance and proliferation of neuroscience and artificial intelligence gives the children of Laplace, and the rest of nature’s behaviourists, a fond hope. Christian and all other theistical beliefs are necessarily vague, as scientific statements, and logic can attack them with sharp precision. They may be used to throw the believer into doubt and confusion.

But they may also be used the other way.

As Auden observed: “Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.”

The “arts” of printing and typography, of paper-making, and inks, and book-binding, have been delighting and distracting me since my father first slipped into my hands an edition of Pookie, some time ago. The page was abnormally large for a two-or-three-year-old (though now, measuring it, I find it was only ten inches high); so I paid it abnormal attention; especially I attended the letter “g,” which resembled my grandma’s eye-glasses, turned sideways. Within less than a year, I had learnt all the other letters. (Perhaps I am prideful.) Within two, I had written my first book, in manuscript.

John Ryder’s very tasteful (illustrated) manual for amateur printers (only seven inches high) came out in the same era. After seventy years, I do not think I can do it much good by reviewing it, but I would like to mention a point made in the introduction. Mr Ryder recommends that the amateur not take up printing as a money-making sideline. This, like most money-making, is drudgery, and a distraction from the pure pleasure of type arrangement. Indeed, he recommends the production only of ephemera, because setting line after line for hundreds of pages can get boring. Instead, have the ambition to make each item very beautiful.

To be practical, could two or more poets share the cost of some type-setting and printing machinery, and set their respective texts from it? No, definitely not! They would never get along.

The idea of doing things, which count as labour, and not charging for them, which counts as business, has been lost on the contemporary world. (In this respect alone, we are too masculine.) At least nine in ten advertisements I see on the Internet, for instance, are for “products” that should never have been made, let alone advertised. There is a great noise about things that are “free,” and are not, or are available too cheaply.

We should try to annihilate all the producers of such goods.

“O, when Degree is shak’d! …”

Thus spake the noble Ulysses, as he expounded the great chain of being in Troilus and Cressida. Slipping into that play now (and thus into the Grecian camp, by Agamemnon’s tent) — for perhaps the first time since writing my then-girlfriend’s master’s thesis in 1975 — I am reminded how slight and hopeless my commenting has been on the important topics.

Ulysses, via Shakespeare: “Take but Degree away, un-tune that string, and hearke what Discord followes: each thing meetes in meere oppugnancie.” Things that once pulled together, now vie with each other to pull apart. And, “strength should be Lord of imbecility.”

It has been some centuries now since the links in the great chain of being, the corresponding planes, and the cosmic dance, were universally acknowledged, as they still were among the Elizabethans.  The aristocracy is gone, or rather, it persists only as a superficial “elite” of power and wealth. It began to break up from the moment the mediaeval order, or the mediaeval conception of order, was trashed and replaced by the modern conception of “equality.”

For Christian man (or, “peoplekind,” as wee Clown Justin likes to say) had invested centuries in pursuit of political, social, and religious harmony, often failing. But these Catholic ancestors realized that they had failed by their sin. The very possibility of success is what we have since surrendered.

We hear, more and more frequently, about the population crash “that is coming,” because urban people don’t want to have children. By “urban” I mean those who live in vast conurbations, where most people live these days. It is only a century or two since this began to happen, and when only a city or two was so large that one could not walk out of it. Soon, there will be no country in the world in which urbanites are not in the majority, and very much in the majority of most. Moreover, an increasing proportion of the country bumpkins are not really rural. When they get money they buy pretty cottages with all the urban conveniences, including nearby supermarkets. They do not contribute to agricultural productivity, as the great majority of citizens once did. Almost everyone makes money either from the government, or by doing something that is “private” and equally unnecessary.

Note: this much could be said without even referring to statistics, the way city people do. My country-boy preference is for real things, not numbers. (Although I really live in a huge, and very ugly, conurbation.)

An incidental discovery of the government intervenors, who are everywhere, is that women can’t be bribed to have more children. Some poor immigrants can be bribed, but not for long. Soon, most Western countries will be filled with poor immigrants in cities, while the countryside is depopulated. Who has not realized that children are an unrewarding expense? Ah well, the welfare state will be vomiting more money into the problem, as it expands. And then, thanks to inflation, the welfare state will collapse.

My view of this is the same as my view of America, after Kommie-la and Tampon Tim have won the November election. The catastrophic effects of this are easily predictable, but as Mencken would say, the Americans will have got just what they voted for, good and hard. For urban people believe in words, not things, and prefer comfortable, and fanciful, lies.

But what does this matter if the world is depopulating? To a free people — inwardly and actually free and agrarian — this is a problem that will go away. Modern urban people will have exterminated themselves (how sad!), leaving the farmers and fisherfolk to get on with it.

It seems only fair that some Dutchman should have invented the microscope, but they are a disputatious breed, and their claims and counter-claims drive the inquirer to distraction. It is the compound microscope I am discussing, which has two lenses, not the single spherical lens of melted glass that Baruch Spinoza was polishing, in the XVIIth century. The Italians had been making spectacles from the XIIIth, because, really, the Italians invented everything; but the English polymath, Robert Hooke, made the first truly serviceable compound microscope, and started doing clever things with it — vastly extending the area of human observation, after 1700.

Indeed, he was a kind of British Galileo, for he identified the rotations of Mars and Jupiter, and came up with the inverse square law before Newton clinched it. He explained the refraction of light, and contributed the wave theory. He also manufactured the gas pumps for Robert Boyle (him of Boyle’s Law), and it would seem he was architect for half the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire. Indeed, his rivals found many reasons to hate him: over-achievers are generally despised.

In Hooke’s book, Micrographia, we first encounter the word, “cell,” which has had such a distinguished history through the last four centuries. More broadly, biology — in the modern, sterile, technocratic sense — only became possible with the invention of the microscope. (Think what Aristotle could have done with one!)

Nevertheless, biology, as a precise science, preceded the microscope in the West, and was the invention of artists. They were Italian, of course; but towards the end of the XIVth century the invasion of Burgundy, France, Flanders, and Germany by naturalism was rapidly proceeding. They — artists but also scientists by accomplishment — took interest not only in identifying the visible plants and animals (farmers and housewives could already do that, and city-dwellers already could not). The draughtsmen and painters observed and communicated from nature the perfect organic forms, in outline and in the minutest detail. Among their successors, too, only the artists have studied actual morphology, except in the spirit of engineering. Our botanical and zoological collections have likewise deteriorated, where statistical principles have triumphed, to match-box collecting. We collect death; the classical biologists depicted the living, in their “environmental” landscapes.

Biology — the major science of observation — became the principal stronghold of nescience when Darwin and the boys took over, with their (unrealizable) evolutionary obsessions. Prior to their triumph, a wonderful science had developed among nature-loving amateurs. (See, for instance, Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada, 1983.) For genuine “science” is (or was) not bureaucracy; it is done out of love.

We should discard the cloying propaganda terms, and restore the reign of Natural Philosophy. Let us start again with the Theory of Forms.

You are too late — if you were planning to get a free abortion or a vasectomy at the Democrat National Convention. Both services are gratis in Chicago this year, but all appointments have been snatched up. On the other hand, “Medical Assistance In Death” was not available, even for a fee. You will have to wait until the next DNC; or until Kommie-la and Tampon Tim prevail, and make death free for all the bright lights who are patiently waiting.

By this means, they will make more room for the illegal immigrants, … “all hopping through the frothy waves, and scrambling to the shore.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. Labour Bureau has revised all of its employment statistics for the last year, downward, by one million. This means that all of the post-Batflu records that the Biden administration had claimed were, in fact, bare-faced lies.

The joke is that the socialist policies the Democrats are selling, with such enthusiasm, have a failure rate of one hundred percent, throughout history, and around the world. Yet they continue to be popular among the power-hungry, and their ignorant followers; not just economic failure, but the unambiguous evils that accompany it. For after child-murder, what can be left?

The “Left,” Democrats, favour political censorship, but they also favour extinction — like the Canadian Liberals, and British Labour, who would ideally join them in a grand extinction event. The Republicans and Conservatives could then bifurcate, into the Pretend Conservatives, and the Frankly Reactionary Monarchist Party.

Should the Democrats fail to (fraudulently) win the American election, or if dwarf female secret service agents succeed in preventing the assassination of Donald Trump, the gentleman will again become president of the United States. I certainly have no objection. But what will his cabinet be like? Perhaps I could suggest at least one appointment.

It is, to make Elon Musk the “Secretary of Defense,” (or “for Defence,” as we British imperialists would put it). I’m sure not only Americans, but all the allies of the United States would feel safer if the boss of SpaceX, &c, would assume responsibility for this task, instead of some woke cross-dresser. Today, defence requires more technological savvy than traditional diplomacy and bureaucratic management. Russia and China will also back off, I think, when they see the Trump/Vance/Musk combination — such a tight string of monosyllables! Of course, Mr Musk should have some say in this matter, and Trump would need the “advice and consent” of the Senate, but I don’t think Musk’s African-American identity should stand in the way, now that he has become an American citizen.

Of course my further advice to Trump should remain off the record, but I don’t foresee any serious objections. The biggest advantage of my proposal would be fiscal: a great deal of money could be saved by withdrawing clumsy floating targets like aircraft carriers, and the other conventional gear with which the military is saddled. And who needs the Boeing Corporation, when we have Lockheed-Martin’s “Skunk Works”?

The wars of the future are already happening, thanks to clowns like Biden, and they need drones more than supersonic fighters. Drones are also much cheaper, and can provide a more pointed, detailed assault. Laser is what we need to stop incoming missiles, and to melt tanks if these will not be impeded by European environmental regulations; mobile (including orbiting) laser and maser delivery systems may be a costly item — but Mr Musk has experience in negotiating price. And Mr Trump is apparently gung-ho for an American “iron dome” to match Israel’s.

While we admired the “asymmetry” (if not the morality) of Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington, our thoughts should turn to how we might use asymmetric methods the other way. I think Robert B. Spencer might have some recommendations on this, and I could provide his telephone number.

But I am quite opposed to thinking “outside the box” — it invariably leads to disaster. “Elon” offers reliable, inside-the-box mental processes. None of my ideas are especially advanced, and most will benefit from the kind of little improvements that SpaceX engineers are famous for. I have no idea how to spend all the money we will save — reckless spending is the specialty of Democrats — I suppose just give it back.

Musicians are perfectly useless people, or at least, they can be. (I am droning on about the “Useless Man” — or woman, to extend my flattery.) Of course they can be useful to someone, or to themselves when they seek fame or fortune. (I, perhaps alone in Western society, do not wish to flatter Taylor Swift.) Rather, I think, to be able to sing one’s part, and be a voice from the chorus of the Requiem, is surely to be living a blessed life.

The musician is also free to marry and to have children and (in one case I am aware of) to have beautiful daughters with curls, who can also sing. Whereas, not the priest, nor the monk, nor the serious literary artist, although some liberals dispute this. Bach, as we know, had many dozen children, and went through several wives. It did not seem to distract him from composition, just as Martin Luther did not distract him from his Catholicity.

We define philosophy very narrowly, or else not at all, and I would tend to contrast Bach, and Mozart for that matter, with Immanuel Kant. This is not to despise Kant absolutely, for he did deliver an insight, that it is wrong, perhaps categorically, to use another person purely as a means. In this respect he acknowledges our souls. But he abuses everyone, including God, in the course of making atheism the default position in modern Western thought.

By comparison, Johann Sebastian used music to explain the working of God through nature, and Wolfgang Amadeus was privy to the principle of life — to put this in another way. Whereas, the accountant of Königsberg, in the worst moments of his critical philosophies, comes closer to being an angel of death. (He makes up for this in the best moments of the Urteilskraft, however; in my unqualified opinion.)

From these examples alone one begins to see what I am getting at, in my account of the “Useless Man” (which is hardly original with me), and even how this man differs from Lao Tzu’s “man who achieves everything by doing nothing,” although I would stress the similarity. He also has this triumphant, Godly quality, in East or West.

It is the primary virtue of the Useless Man: that he cannot be used.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I do not like to link anything, but an exception must be made for this, “just in.” It is a brief documentary on the opposite of a riot. It was the Marian Congress, at Ottawa, in June 1947, when half-a-million “useless” men and women descended upon what was then a town of 100,000 — a few short decades ago, when Canada was a Christian country.