Essays in Idleness

As my heading might indicate, “American Thanksgiving” can sound a little awkward in Canada’s other national language, which is why, in defiance of the Quebec language police, it is often altered from Jour de l’action de grâce américain to “Thanksgiving” — but pronounced in the basilectal joual. Too, in the Jour de l’action de grâce canadien, it is not about pilgrims. I have blathered about this before (here, and probably elsewhere).

While generally I advise the Yanquis against making any of their customs more Canajan, let me offer three suggestions in this case.

First, get rid of the shopping. We now have Black Friday sales up here, but they came from there, and so please, cut it out. As that gentle sage Steve Bannon says (here), we need less of that sort of capitalism, and more of the Christian sort. Moreover, le shopping belongs in the days after Advent and Christmas, and if everyone could remember this, there would be bigger savings.

Second, turkey is a dry bird, and while something may be done about this with bacon rashers, lard injections by syringe, and diligent double stuffing, still, a goose makes a better stove fire. True, it will provide what at first appears an unconscionable surplus of grease, but with foresight this can be collected and used to deep-fry exquisite frites, which is to say, the original “freedom fries.”

Third, if you have a secular humanist in your family, try to avoid goading him, which can only lead to scenes (like this). The Canadian way is to avoid or ignore any sort of visible conflict, hiding all disagreement behind a wan, puzzled smile. A good Canadian will sit quietly gobbling and guzzling, with an eye to the juicy bits left on the platter. He will create no outward disturbance at all, waiting patiently to settle his accumulated scores, without witnesses and entirely off-camera.

A little question on statistics afflicts me. It has to do with the abortion rate. We are told sometimes that it has fallen, slightly, in most Western countries, and too, that opposition to abortion is modestly growing. From the pro-life position things are getting better, mostly because modern technology, with which the living baby in the womb can be put on visible, live-time display, frees people from the illusion that women give birth to cats — or whatever they thought the “foetus” might be, other than a human child. More than half now get that in North America, according to most polls. The proportion rises much higher when the respondents are asked to approve the slaughter of that foetus after nine months — as remains perfectly legal in Canada, USA, and many other countries today.

My reminder comes via a little report from France. (This one.) The French state has upheld a ban which the French broadcasting council placed on a video about Down syndrome children. It showed several, from around the world, smiling. An award-winning piece, from 2014, it made a point that may be imperfectly understood: that “trisomic” kids are worth having; that they are not, as modern superstition holds, a greater burden upon their parents than other children. Not necessarily; and they often prove less.

On the contrary, as I know from first hand (my younger son is Down’s), they are an extraordinary gift, to those parents and to any siblings, or others, who are brought into contact with a love, a fidelity, an emotional attentiveness, a kindliness, a joy, an innocence, an orb of communicable experience and perception that enlarges and deepens us. I do not know if there are polls on such things, but I would guess the proportion of mothers who regret having given birth to such a child is extremely small — corresponding roughly to the proportion who are real monsters.

This, anyway, was the (urgent) message the makers attempted to convey in their short film. (Here it is.)

It was publicly banned, on the argument that it would upset mothers who had carried Down’s babies in their wombs, and who had had them aborted upon discovering this fact. In France, that proportion is estimated at 96 percent; it is estimated at 90 percent the world over — who would rather kill, than deal with this adventure in love.

At the centre of the controversy is that smile — that distinctly Down syndrome smile, more haunting than the smile on the Mona Lisa. To those who happen to have eyes to see, it is in itself a moral, and a mystical revelation. I have dreamt, towards Christmas, of the Child in the manger: surely Jesus smiled upon his mother like that.

Facts are becoming hard to gather because, in Canada and many other countries, progressive governments are now suppressing all statistics and other previously available information pertaining to abortions. Feminists demand that this subject be shrouded in darkness, lest the light cast prove too harsh. What I call “the woman’s prerogative,” not to hear the screaming of her victim, has become a mainstay of contemporary eugenics and family law. This I hold to be the ultimate in misogyny — for it is designed to hide women from the very possibility of redemption, which can only begin with acknowledgement of the truth.

The rate for Down’s children is the significant abortion rate. It exposes what is truly believed by the overwhelming majority of our contemporaries, when put to a practical test. Opinion polls can never do this, for opinion is “free” unless it costs us something. Actual behaviour is what matters, and we find in this proportion a black, terrible indictment of our age.

My views on art, recently over-expressed, extend to the art of war, and I have long appreciated Patton-style generals, though even more the Nelson and Wellington styles. And there are many other ways to be a sterling general, as we learn from the classics, having all in common clear heads and the pleasure they take in their craft. But I have touched on this before (here, for instance).

Too, let me mention that I am enjoying the Trump Transition more than I expected, and best of all the wonderful idea of appointing Marine General James “Mad Dog” Mattis as Secretary of Defence — straight shooter, and marvellously effective in Afghoon and Eye-raq. (Indeed my enthusiasm for him once got me called before the Ontario Press Council.)

Served under Obama for a stretch, incidentally. Whatever we may say against Obama (quite a lot), he did not appoint girlie-boys to important military positions, at least, not to the degree we feared. A red-meat President on several occasions, with a gift for delivering on what no one wants, I think we might have got along; had only he been a rightwing loon instead of a leftie.

But here I am living in the past. In thinking ahead to the fun we’ll have tomorrow, I should like to share with gentle reader some Mattis quotes, which I have gleaned from the Internet (via Business Insider).

Item: “There are some people who think you have to hate them in order to shoot them. I don’t think you do. It’s just business.”

Item: “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”

Item: “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: if you fowk with me, I’ll kill you all.”

Item: “We’ve backed off in good faith to try and give you a chance to straighten this problem out. But I am going to beg with you for a minute. I’m going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for ten thousand years.”

Item: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway. So it’s a helluva lot of fun to shoot them.”

Item: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.”

Item: “Don’t create more enemies than you take out by some immoral act.”

Item: “Keep your honour clean.”

Item: “Fight with a happy heart.”

I note his alternative nickname, “the Warrior Monk.” This is a category we have sadly neglected, since the glory days of the Crusades. General Mattis has never married. Nor has he left children, anywhere we know of. A studious man (who apparently owns seven thousand books), he has devoted his whole life to the chaste pursuit of war.

The question is not whether priests should marry. It is whether celibacy should be restricted to them. Surely painters, musicians, poets, soldiers and other artists, should be free of the encumbrances of family life, so they may devote all of their attention to their demanding and godly work. And the rest of us should beget more, to offset them.

“But pray that your flight be not in the winter …”

First snow in Parkdale, today, though not enough to gather. The temperature dropped, the winds rose, telling us that winter is coming.

To church, for the last Sunday of the ecclesiastical year; for the Old Mass.

In the New Mass, they celebrated Christ the King today, as the feast now stands, transferred from its proper place in the calendar to this, where it takes on a different colouration: more abstract, more diffused, more glib; more accessible to the thoughtless. Christ is presented as “king of the universe,” where the point was originally that He is King of us; Lord over every earthly lord; commanding our loyalty even unto death.

Viva Cristo Rey! was what the Mexican martyrs shouted, as they were done in by their progressive, secular lords in the 1920s. And likewise as they were shot in Albania, by the progressives there. And elsewhere: not “long live the master of the universe,” but, “Long Live Christ the King.” There is a subtle difference.

In the Old Mass, before the Bugnini desecrations, the Last Sunday turns our attention instead to the end of our world; to the abomination of desolation; to rescue and redemption and the coming of Christ in Glory. The Gospel for this day is the extraordinary apocalyptic passage from Saint Matthew, in Christ’s own words concluding: “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.”

Orate autem, ut non fiat fuga vestra in hieme …

For many years, I have been haunted by this phrase, coming back to me in the least likely moments: “But pray that your flight be not in the winter …”

Scenes from the apocalypse, echoed from the prophet Daniel, with this warning:

“Then if any man shall say to you: ‘Lo, here is Christ’, or ‘there’; do not believe him. For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders, insomuch as to deceive (if possible) even the elect. Behold, I have told it to you beforehand: if therefore they shall say to you: ‘Behold, He is in the desert’, go ye not out; ‘behold, He is in the closets’, believe it not.”

As the lightning out of the east into the west, He will come. The sun, out. The moonlight, gone. The stars, falling. I cannot imagine such things, in waking; I cannot even in dreams. Yet futurity is not constrained by my imagination.

Only let us grasp that in the end of the world, there will be no room for interpretation. There will be no media that we need to consult.

Yet I can imagine the humble pilgrim, at the end of days, setting forth. Him for whom the universe was made, and in which he yearns for the protection of his Maker. Or, every man and woman ever born, in the time of trial, as we run from evil.

“But pray that your flight be not in the winter …”

Never hold a job you’re not willing to lose. Give it up now, should you find it has so corrupted you. Keep it only if it has not, and you remain willing to stake it, whenever necessary, on one turn of pitch-and-toss.

Let no enemy surmise, that you will beg or bargain.

This is an attitude I learnt from my father, who showed real genius in the art of losing jobs; as well as in an associated field of moral enterprise: that of not getting paid. Yet a happy soldier, he never complained. He would have qualified my remark by advising: “Don’t go out of your way to lose it. It can be done quite naturally.” And, “It makes tactical sense not to take on the whole world at the same time.” And, “Never entirely forget that you must support a family.” For he was a moderate, reasonable man.

Notwithstanding, my electronic dossiers are filling with examples of people being driven out of their livelihoods, for their refusal to lie, to flatter, to participate in evils, to obey petty tyrants, or salute their howling mobs. Politics plays an increasing part in this, as should be obvious to anyone who ever reads some news. I think, for instance, of Catholics teaching in once-Catholic universities such as Georgetown, Providence, Fordham, Notre Dame, or St Michael’s here in Toronto. They are asked to sign on to things which, if gentle reader will tolerate understatement, aren’t Catholic; starting currently with “diversity,” as maliciously redefined. I don’t want to get into specific cases, no two of which are exactly the same, nor discuss personalities, in this post. Today I’m in a mood for vague generalization.

“Do not accept intimidation.” Ever. This, I realize, is more easily said than done; especially at a time when our public institutions are descending into the bottomless moral darkness of “secular humanism.” The “Saul Alinsky” rules — self-described as the devil’s own — are everywhere at work in the culture, carrying factional politics into realms where they will never belong.

While I do not agree with almost any of his policies (being no nationalist, no populist, no worshipper of material success), I note that Trump won in the USA by defying the forces of political correction, rather than by appeasing them.

In that I find some worldly encouragement; and more in the results of two by-elections this week in the Province of Ontario, that make this lesson clear. The Conservative opposition took one of them, in which they ran a nineteen-year-old kid who made no concessions to the prevailing Culture of Death. He won in Niagara with a margin significantly better than that of the former party leader whose riding it had been — an abject appeaser. Meanwhile, in Ottawa, the party ran instead a mediocrity — a rubber-duckling progressive wimp. Who lost badly. This happens when your own supporters find nothing to support. They think: why choose this gasbag over the other?

It is no coincidence that the backbenchers of almost every rightwing party in the West are more radical than the talking heads in front. These footsoldiers are an embarassment to every party establishment, whose leaders live in terror that the media will expose them as uncool. Those same media which are utterly distrusted by most of their customers, as we discover in poll after poll. (Trump won by riding his cart over them.)

Make a stand, and at worst, one may lose the election, though too, one might win. Appease, and lose one’s soul, … in addition to the election. For moral cowardice is never rewarded — not by Heaven, nor even by the Earthlings.

On matters of mortal importance — such as the “life issues,” every one — it is well to recall who has sent us into battle. They cannot be answerable to any party boss, who know that they are answerable to God.

Similarly, in all other circumstances. Once the progressive dogs smell fear, they are on you. They have a view only to your destruction; they thrive on your fear, your wish to cut and run. They will leap on your backside, the moment you turn. Your task is to turn the tables on them. It is to show that they have picked the wrong target; that you grasp the game is for keeps; that you will die, before you will surrender your children to these hyenas. And that far from granting them little concessions, for the sake of some momentary peace and quiet, you will take great pleasure in destroying them.

In the end we will take back the public institutions, one squalid mudfight at a time. Or, we will not, in which case they will crumble, and we must build anew, starting from the roots, underground. Either way; it doesn’t matter. For in the end Christ wins.

“Thou hast prepared a table before me, against them that afflict me. Thou hast anointed my head with oil; and my chalice which inebriateth me, how goodly is it!”

Or, in the more bashful and circumspect Protestant version: “My cup runneth over.”

This is an aspect of Christianity that has been progressively overlooked: the throwing rocks at the denizens of Hell part, that Hilaire Belloc (and Thomas Aquinas) so well understood. Justice must prevail, and by golly, will be seen to prevail.

We have so much to look forward to!

Those of sound body and mind, and those not, are instructed to proceed for six o’clock this evening to the Art Gallery of Ontario, for an Event. This will be the Toronto book-signing for Herman Goodden’s, Three Artists: Kurelek, Chambers & Curnoe. The work contains a Foreword (by me) that may help explain why you will have done this. Perhaps the best thing is to reproduce that below, and mention that further information about this author may be had from his new website (here). His most recent collection of Catholic essays (No Continuing City, 2010) should also be obtained, if physically possible. For here is one of those rare contemporary authors, who has something to say, about matters of importance.

*

Through a generation of “media,” or two or three, Western, Christian man has lost his way entirely. (He had been losing it for a long time before.) This is often observed, and it should be, because it is the big fact of our epoch. By that word, “media,” I intend an antithesis to poetry and literature, art and architecture, music and theatre and dance — “the arts” as we sometimes call them, for bureaucratic efficiency. We might also observe great mountains of skulls, still rising from the most violent of centuries, through the period I recognize as “post-modernity” — since technical progress blossomed in its ultimate accomplishment of planetary Total War, in August of 1914. Everything in this book comes after.

It is full of three artists who “valued what they had,” in a time and country that seems to happen after everything good is over. Kurelek, Chambers, and Curnoe — each a little universe in himself — set out by ignoring the big fact and retrieving the small. Without patrons, without rules and inherited customs, without any sympathetic audience to begin with, each was “driven,” or I think, “called.”

I say this with confidence because in each case, a primal arrogance was beaten down. In true art there is only reverent humility.

Herman Goodden himself, as well as the Canadian artists evoked and discussed in this book, belongs to what I will call the Lost Tribe of the Found. What I mean by this paradox is, that in a time when media have generalized and homogenized human experience, each of the subjects of this book found a place, a location, a strand of continuity or orientation; which Goodden understands because he has lived it himself. And each came to it through circumstances over which he had, for all his wilfulness, little control.

Two of these painters “discovered” the Catholic Church, Curnoe remained a diehard “post-Protestant” to his sudden death. But I find all three God-haunted — and drawn along a passage through this earth very far from the generic. Each left a record of witness, whose attributes include beauty and truth, found in the most unlikely places; as well as a “rightness” that passes through the moral towards the mystical. Each was “made into an artist” by an agency outside of himself.

What “repression” in each of these lives, as Goodden adumbrates them! What ripe territory for psychologizing! In fact we are dealing with the opposite of repression; with a kind of exaltation, instead. And you must read Goodden to comprehend this.

He tells the “back-stories,” and why they are important. To understand them, we must submit to the conditions each artist imposed upon himself, along the pilgrim way. None, in his way, strayed far from “home” in the painting he attempted. Each lived “as if” post-modernity hadn’t happened, in an almost shopkeeping homage to “location, location, location.” This is quite different from “living in the past”: the usual gesture of contempt we offer to those who step outside the confines of the insistent media present; who find a way towards a rich imagery, in a world full of beautiful particularities, seen as if for the first time.

Kurelek, Chambers, and Curnoe: all three are now “famous Canadians,” but the national term is nearly meaningless, for different reasons in each case. It is only by adoption, or even appropriation, that they have become members of some Canadian Art pantheon. Yet not even Curnoe in his anti-American slurs showed allegiance to any political entity. His “patriotism” was to a room in the mansion of space and time, corresponding to London, Ontario. He made it his Firenze, and bicycled through its countryside with the fanatic loyalty of possession. Similarly, Kurelek and Chambers found all the universal themes they could handle, immediately at hand.

Note that Florence, Italy, through its artistic and cultural prime, had a population never larger than that of London, Ontario in the time of Curnoe and Chambers, Reaney, Dewdney, and others. It is a social world that Goodden describes from the inside, providing insights that might apply to many other places.

Goodden is himself an artist, a thinking reed in prose and stagecraft. He has painted for us these three portraits, better than any conventional biographies. Yet he has diligently done all the homework, and made himself an expert on each man, from out of an intimacy not of friendship, exactly, but of seer and subject. His portraits can be ruthless and surgical, in moments; but he is always presenting a whole character, never a placard or silhoeutte. Through the transformation of his very faults each of these much different characters is proceeding along a pilgrim’s way: shedding the commonplace of sin in his passage, and entering into a vita nuova unlike any life before.

He further turns these portraits inside out. For Goodden plays an artistic trick on us. We begin to see not only his subjects as spectacles in themselves, but ourselves and our world through their eyes. We begin to understand their art in a way that eludes the staleness of contemporary “art criticism.” He does not omit the fine details. We begin to understand what the artist is witnessing. Or, we do if we are following with that attention which Goodden can enthral and reward.

The religious aspect of each painter’s career is not quietly overlooked, as it is in the contemporary gallery scene. The book is no Catholic religious tract; it is no catechism; but it has the quality of a spiritual topography. Kurelek and Chambers were very unlikely Catholic converts, through whose dogged resistance, I think, Christ Himself found paths, to His Church which is no merely human institution. All three show pilgrim roads through the hills, presenting a succession of vistas.

Without reserve, I recommend this book to the reader, of any age, who wants to know what it is to be an artist — a real one, depicting what is real, in reverent humility; as opposed to a media poseur. Indeed, this book is a “classic” in that genre.

Pontus is that country, within modern Turkey, that follows the south-east Black Sea shore, and inland is enclosed as by an amphitheatre of mountains. It is the more interesting, archaeologically, for having been often by-passed, in the movements of conquering nomads and armies, from Hittites and Hurrians to Arabs and Turks. The Greeks took it, because they came by sea. They kept it, till late in the day; so that even after Constantinople fell to our short-sighted Franks (in 1204), the Empire of Trebizond immediately formed, and Byzantium persisted in Pontus, as in Crimea and elsewhere, until it could be restored at its centre.

They became Christian early, and remained Christian late, just as the Assyrians and others now in the news — finally expelled from, or slaughtered within, the Dar al-Islam (“domain of peace”). This word I use, “Christendom,” embraces all these brothers of ours. For some we can now search only in deep time; or in the facial features and little habits of their distant descendants. But this does not mean they have ceased to exist; only that they have been deprived of their birthright.

We are trapped in the temporal view, so that we think of eternity as somehow in the future. We look forward as if to some earthly Utopia, when all on this planet may be made well. Or, to an “end time” in which this earthly utopian is prefigured, as if in another “war to end all wars.” We cannot see that it is with us now, and has always been with us, within, but also outside our chronologies. For we can look only forward, to death, until our eyes are adjusted to see beyond it. Yet even in death — on a certain day, of a certain month, of a certain year — is every man’s apocalypse, not to be gainsaid; the narrative climax of his own temporality.

God, however, would have another point of view, necessarily beyond our understanding. To us, He is somewhat Chinese. That is to say, the tenses we use in our language are not used in His speech, which is uninflected. (Part of the extraordinary condescension of Christ, in his descent from Heaven, was this divine concession: this agreement to participate in our own “before and after.”) Coming-to-be is an earthly affectation. I’m sure the angels understand the poetry of it, but have no need of the philosophy. It is but a small part of the “is” within the Kingdom of Being.

Yet strangely, it is beloved from on high.

Christendom comes and goes; and comes again and goes again, like one of those uncontiguous states within the Holy Roman Empire. We occupy this patch, here; other patches are scattered through space and time; and patches within patches, as worlds within worlds.

Pontus would be an example. Christians flourished there, for so many centuries; lived, died, and were translated from their native Greek, into that Heavenly Chinese. (“Eternity is in love with the creations of Time.”) Also Colchian, Lan, Svan, and what else was spoken into the Abkhazian mountains and gorges of its east, as we proceed towards the ancient and modern civilization of Georgia.

We sing, in the old liturgy today, of Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus (“the wonderworker”), mysterious figure from the third century when, under Roman rule, the Pontians suffered the persecution of Decius. (Our saint outlasted him, however). Those Romans were good news and bad. They kept the roads open; they often kept worse and more murderous pagans at bay. (But they weren’t doing such a good job of that in Gregory’s time and geographical vicinity.)

This Gregory was figure in a world in many ways more cosmopolitan than our “globalized” one: with more (real) variety and diversity, and yet in which one could wander about. He had obviously travelled. He was, we know, a disciple of Origen’s school, then predominant in Palestine; and an opponent of the heretical Paul of Samosata; he was an episcopal pillar in the Church of his age. As to his miracles — the wonders he worked for which he was famous — what can we say?

He had that faith which moves mountains. I will leave this at, “you had to be there,” and mention only my inclination to prefer the testimony of those who were there, over those who weren’t; especially when the latter are wearing that smug smile of self-satisfaction, which is the distinguishing mark of a liberal imbecile.

For me, a saint’s day like this is, in addition to the commemoration itself, an opportunity to hail our distant brothers, from parts of our material Christendom long compressed. Yet, as we will surely discover, in the moment we step out of time ourselves, were better than neighbours — living, as they were, in the same house. And through the Mass, we have dined together.

What would life be without “problems”? To my thinking this is an assertion (posing as a question) equivalent to, “What would life be without sin?” It would be unearthly. For “problems” are encountered the moment we decide to go against the grain of nature, of natural law, and of its clarification in divine law. To think through an apparently insoluble problem is to inquire into what we were doing wrong; where “we” of course includes other human beings: fellow members of the awkward squad.

The word is used so commonly and casually today, that almost anything can be described as “a problem,” or among the semi-literate, more pretentiously as “problematic.” It is asserted that there is no such category as “sin,” only problems. And yet, the moral basis is affirmed, often the more starkly as it is being denied, in the name of some primitive god, such as Science.

Rather than state a moral objection, a liberal will say, “I have a problem with that.” He has confessed at least to having a conscience — some interior sense of right and wrong — even if he cannot make a coherent case for either.

Ask him in reply, “What is your problem?” and he is likely to dissolve into what we now call “virtue signalling.” But the virtues he signals are themselves incoherent; and so, inevitably, their corresponding vices.

Ask him then to come back after he has identified his problem, and solved it to his own satisfaction, and feels able to describe it minus the cop-out of externalizing. Only at that point can he be helped, by priest or some reasonable psychologist. Meanwhile we have our own work to do.

One might encourage the fellow by assuring him that there are fewer sins than he has imagined, and that his dementias about e.g. racism, sexism, homo and other phobias may be safely dismissed, along with his political agenda. This will help him narrow his focus to something actually wrong.

Problems, and problem-solving, are the method of most practical use in the world of technology. From there, it seems to spread by analogy.

The problem, as my brilliant son once demonstrated, is that the little pins are crooked. The solution is to straighten them out. This will require patience and a steady hand, along with one’s smallest pair of pliers. Having identified that problem, one has identified the solution. It was that simple, and with patient concentration, it can be fixed. No emotional investment is required, and as this son once told me, to my shame (when he was twelve and I was forty-five), “It makes more sense to think about your problem, than how you feel about your problem.”

A real problem — as opposed to a rhetorical “problem” — has the ability to solve itself. From the moment it is properly understood, the solution is apparent. It is like an arithmetic puzzle. It is why an abacus works. Move the beads correctly, and the answer is correct. You have only to read the answer now before you. The one and only answer, if you wanted to know.

I think the same is true of almost any moral puzzle, when our brains are working. For the moral abacus works the same. Enter the elements and the solution appears. The difficulty is not in getting the answer; that is the straightforward part. The difficulty is in accepting, and acting upon it, when perchance you don’t like it.

By no coincidence, we live in a time when technical problems abound and multiply, until they become nearly insoluble by their vexing complexity; and in a time when emotional responses go unchecked. I think this has everything to do with our culture of disposal. Given money, or room on one’s credit cards, the solution to the “problem” is to get rid of the thing, and buy another. And similarly, with any other “problem.” The solution to an unanticipated pregnancy is to get rid of the thing. The solution to difficulties in marriage is divorce; to pain and hopelessness is euthanasia, &c.

These are merely variations on the universal landfill option, about which the environmentalists complain, in highly selective ways.

We declare moral bankruptcy and then, assisted by the latest laws of the democratic State, we start over, having learnt only that bankruptcy is relatively painless; that it requires little more than a thick skin. It is our Right, and only the people we owed get scrood. (Whether the debt be moral and grave, or only light and fiscal, when justice is foresworn.) And they are anyway likely to be large impersonal corporations; or small, defenceless entities, which we easily disregard. The former write off the loss and move on, having budgeted for a certain (gradually rising) proportion of customers who are shameless cheats. Only the latter, the small and defenceless, are likely to haunt us, as so many women, and men, have discovered after their quick fixes; their “procedures.”

Against which guilt there are specious arguments, and the twisted face. “How dare this non-entity question my prerogative” (not to hear the screaming of my victim). … How dare he rise from the dead.

Having reduced life to “problems,” we respond with “solutions.” Not abacus solutions, but those we have made up. There are other ways to think of life, and its little problems, but this one is currently preferred. Much can be enjoyed, we suppose, by “victimless crimes,” except — there are no victimless crimes. For even when it can be plausibly argued that the victim has no standing, or is consenting, or that no external victim exists, there remains the victim that was not counted. We have victimized ourselves.

This is a problem, the solution to which turns out to be the profound unhappiness one reads, less in the news media than upon the faces of the millions one passes in the streets — the victims of all those victimless crimes.

Castles are very useful things, or were until recently. They are built especially at frontier locations, and their purpose is to attract the enemy, and spite him into attacking them. This spares the civil population from a great deal of injury, loss, and trouble, for the enemy will take it out on the castle, and in doing so leave the people alone. You see, in the old days, before the modern inventions of Total War, it was thought disgraceful to slaughter non-combatants, or otherwise mess with their affairs. But that was merely a negative consideration: something the good sport will avoid. Positive charity required that things like castles be erected and maintained, so the enemy could have something to do with all his weapons.

Norham Castle, or what’s left of it, is right up there on the Scottish border, in Northumberland. The Scots took it many times, starting under King David I (after whom I am named). The English kept taking it back. It was first conceived towards the end of the eleventh century, and for some stretches in the twelfth and thereafter, would change sides every couple of years. Of course, cattle would also change sides fairly often, the Scots omitting to remember that the English cattle did not belong to them, the English vice versa, and so forth. This would certainly inconvenience the civil population, but what can I say? No war is perfect. But cattle being a good, except to vegans, it is well that at least some people should have the use of them.

Now, as gentle reader may have guessed, this evening’s little essay is on painting. I have before me as I write a reproduction of John Mallord William Turner’s late prismatic and shimmering oil, depicting Norham Castle in the light of sunrise. Every Turner enthusiast will know immediately to which painting I refer. (Here it is.) I used to visit it frequently in the Tate, in my youth, when I lived just across the River Thames. Museum entry was free in those days, and the Tate was usually on my route into town. Other late Turners dazzled me, but this one more than any. I’d seen a glossy photo of it before, but when I first saw the original I was … stunned. (Perhaps there is a better word, but I couldn’t move.) Among other things, it was then I first realized the darker blues floating to left in the middle ground must represent something architectural: the blue of the sky reflecting from water onto dark stone in the sun’s shadow. (Later I discovered that this actually happens in nature.)

Was this painting abstract? Was it, as we often say glibly, a hundred years ahead of its time, prefiguring the colour field painters of New York in the 1950s? I love the mood colour juxtapositions of Mark Rothko (even though I dislike him), who also plays with light displacements, and cloud-cottonwool effects; but it is not the light of the sun he is presenting. Instead it is the light of the studio, and theory. Now, that is abstract, and fervidly intellectual. Turner would never have gone there, much as he might (grudgingly) have acknowledged Rothko’s genius as colourist. He would have condemned the works as unnatural, however, in a tone that insinuated immoral acts.

There is a cow, a little brown cow, to the fore of the Norham Castle painting, dabbed in a few deft strokes, or rather brush-pokes by the artist. This cow must be drinking from the Tweed — the sunlight has caught her in its reflections both from above and below. The animal participates in the sunrise, whether or not she can know; as everything in the composition participates in the vortex of the sunrise. But there is nothing deniable about that cow. She vindicates others disappearing into the river bank. She is unmistakeably real: a living, breathing, rather thirsty cow.

For half a century, Turner had been painting that castle in watercolours, whenever he found himself in those northern parts; for a quarter century, he had been fixated upon the effects of the rising sun, in that very scene. Now, in oil, and in a formal landscape, albeit exploded by all that he had learnt — and in all possible honest candour, three feet by four — he brought his thoughts together. Turner was a man who could think without words; remember without words. This is a very unusual gift. His paintings abound in non-literal imagery. (The literal and historical tends to slow him down, make him awkward.) He is a kind of holy innocent like that.

The painting imparts to the mind of the viewer (how to put this?) some appreciation of what is “real” about reality. It tells us, as it were, what the light “means.” And after we have taken it in; or rather, the more we can take in of that splendour — the better it explains inexplicable things. We begin to understand why light and colour were invented.

But that cow is the key to the whole thing.

It is what we are missing in art today, and what must somehow be restored, if we are to escape the vanity of artists’ boring little “statements”; their ideas about themselves. It is what Turner, Constable, Gainsborough, and innumerable Frenchmen and Italians, were mysteriously capable of seeing.

The cow.

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the pundits,” as Dick the Butcher says, except, I think he may have said “lawyers.” No matter, they are all alike.

The whole scene is instructive (Henry VI, part two, act IV, scene the second), as Jack Cade and his psychotic henchmen anticipate the politics of our time. Shakespeare, whose reactionary views are on display throughout the Histories, knew what all revolutionaries must do, to win over the drooling masses. They will, invariably, promise to abrogate the least convenient physical laws, and then deliver stuff for nothing. This is how they inflamed the peasant hordes from the French Revolution, through the Venezuelan: lighting them up with the prospect of good stuff for free, once the wealthy and high-born had been denuded. It is the underlying principle of every progressive party; and any who oppose them — by e.g. suggesting that ninety-nine into one won’t go — are demonized.

All parties today are essentially progressive, as all the mass media — both Left and Right. In the Punch and Judy show just concluded, south of the border, we again received the inheritance through Jack Cade (from the Serpent in the Garden). The promises of “Judy” having apparently expired, we now have the redistributive offerings of “Punch.”

One feels sorry for the little demons prancing about the streets of Portland, &c, in response to the election result. Thanks to the brainwashings administered to them in media and academia, they truly believe the slogans they are spouting. Fortunately for the rest of us, few of these people can function once they exit the “virtual reality” in which they are mentally encased. They cannot even organize riots effectively. It will be hard for the media to keep them stirred, given the alternatives of pot and fornication.

The late Leonard Cohen had something useful to report, after decades of counselling from some Buddhist bonze. He said his Master taught him how to stop whining. If California Zen could achieve that much for others, I’d be prepared to recommend it.

But I also feel sorry for the Trumpistas, such as those who have been littering my virtual inbox with their potty-mouth’d abuse, because I don’t believe their new lord can deliver on his promises. I know they are hurting, even if I am not inclined to feel their pain. The world will not give them back their jobs voluntarily, nor will other obstacles agree to step aside. By slashing wages, and eliminating entitlements, America might well become competitive again. But “Punch” has been, like the Obamanation before him, promising everyone everything both ways; and the Law of Contradiction cannot be abrogated.

Those pundits could not even see that Trump might win the election. Given that blindness, what else could they get right? In the absence of hard core Christian religion, they are the authorities to which each nation turns for prophetic guidance. And now everyone wants to kill them, too.

So just what is this “incurable elitist” suggesting?

Live. Work. Act decently. Pray. Remain buoyantly aloof, and do your own thinking.

That time of yeeare, … when yellow leaves are shaken from the bough; and those, including them so young, that wear the poppies. Through sixtyish years of comparative peace, I have waited on the knell; for the two minutes of perfect silence; for the trumpet and the invocation of “Flanders Fields” — hoping the bastards will not again omit the last stanza, which makes the whole point. Or for the words from Laurence Binyon which, however often repeated, find the heart every time:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them. …

My papa’s flyboy monkey helmet is now folded into my grandpa’s field satchel, on a top shelf: the Second World War tucked into the First. Once a year I take it down to dust; dig out grandpa’s trench diaries, papa’s pilot log. Turn the creakling pages. Touch photos of these young men in their sparkling uniforms. My sister has sent a new one she has found, very sharp after more than seventy years, which startles as if just taken. That innocent smiling face: shipping out to Europe. Good Lord, he is just a kid!

Pause to pray, on behalf of our fathers, for all those buddies who did not come home. Whose mothers wept when they read the cable; whose fathers stood to attention, lost; whose little siblings ran about the yard. Think strangely of all the missing descendants, of those boys called from the Ontario farms (and from every quiet corner of the Empire). And of their time of trial, among bullets and bombs: terrified but indomitable. Of those who lay in the mud of battle; and those who lived, to gutter out in age. Of our dead who sleep under the winter snows.

Sinking, now, deeper in the earth, one with the veterans of Thermopylae.

A few observations after the USA election, occasioned by an amble around Greater Parkdale today, during which I witnessed two major anti-Trump psychiatric meltdowns; then several minor ones during a coffee-clatch discussion.

*

1. How easily the college-educated go barking mad.

2. The most reliable “safe space” is a padded cell. The least reliable ought to be on campus.

3. The new administration might want to consider “transitioning” several Ivy League universities into mental homes to serve an urgent public need.

4. If you think Trump is bad, you should read some history. It wouldn’t take much. His views, in the main (as stated, not as falsely attributed), would have passed as middle-of-the-road liberal about one generation ago. On many of the issues, Trump is farther Left. By traditional standards for despots and demagogues, he strikes me as fey.

5. Which is why I despise him. I didn’t like liberal mediocrities then, and I don’t like them now.

6. On the specific question of his taste in fixtures and furnishings (including likely cabinet choices), we must be firm. On the basis of his Manhattan apartment alone, I’d be inclined to appoint a Special Prosecutor.

7. I will hope he is sufficiently Machiavellian to nominate Ted Cruz for the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court.

8. And then he could make a personal appearance there, shouting and waving his little hands. That could create three more vacancies.

9. Melania and Michelle should do a sitcom together. (“Transition Team.”)

10. As of three-thirty a.m. the night before last, I achieved a state of happiness I had not enjoyed for a long time. And this was with the help of only one (1) 750mL bottle of strong Belgian monastic ale. (Chimay, the red label, from the Pères Trappistes of Scourmont.) As I have indicated, I do not much care for that Donald fellow. But the defeat of Hillary was exhilarating.

11. Several gentle readers have written to congratulate me for correctly predicting the result of the election. But the truth is that I thought the Republicans would win by more. My private prediction was at least 7 percent on the popular vote, which would translate into an Electoral College landslide; plus substantial coat-tail gains in Congress; and every available Statehouse. I may have misunderestimated the number of dead people who would be voting, however; for dead people tend to vote Democrat.

12. He (Mr Trump) is, it should be said, a dangerous republican. He has already eliminated two political dynasties, within the USA (both the Bushes and the Clintons). Monarchists in Europe take note. Do not invite this man into your castles.

13. Up here in the Great Frigid North, we will have to build a wall, to stop Americans trying to cross our border. Most of them are, I admit, fairly harmless, sad-sack, refugee types, unlikely to overstrain our medicare system. But mixed in with them may be rappers, terrorists, CNN personalities, professional journalists, and Hollywood movie stars. Our airports may also have to be quarantined. This could cost us a lot of money, and we should send the bill to Trump.

14. Oh, I forgot, the Liberals won the last Canadian election. So instead, let them all in, and we’ll move to where it’s warmer. (Swap houses?)

15. I gather that Trump’s grandmother was a unilingual Gaelic speaker from the Outer Hebrides. This is where my maternal ancestors came from, too. Given the continuing hold of identity politics, could there be money in this for me?

16. One learns such things from e.g. The Buchan Observer, published near where Trump owns a golf course. Hence their headline yesterday: “Aberdeenshire business owner wins presidential election.”

17. It is said that the President-elect scares people; foreigners especially. This is the good news. The more they fear him, the better chance of peace.

18. Have you noticed that people who accuse him of hate crimes are frothing at the mouth? … No? …

19. I have.

As I have previously confessed, I became a Tory at the age of six. This was riding home from St Anthony’s, on the crossbar of our family servant’s bicycle, through an angry crowd in Lahore. He’d been sent to fetch me from danger. This beloved man, Bill, whose turban revealed him to be a Christian, chose a long route home, to skirt the crowd. But there was no avoiding them, and in the course of our wild ride, I distinctly remember blood and corpses. The crowd was demanding, as I recall, death for the hostages from a hijacked Indian aeroplane, but in the absence of its intended victims, began taking its violence out on itself. Yairs, a lurid spectacle.

I was not so precocious: it took me twenty more years to sort out what I might mean by the word “Tory.” But the view itself began in Hobbesian fear, that day, with my discovery that “the people” stink. They are mindless animals, and put some wrath in them, they will lose their bashfulness. And of course, not only in West Pakistan; for gradually one makes the further discovery that “the people are the people are the people” everywhere. They need to be tamed, cautioned, repressed, sometimes caged. My response to misty-eyed rhetoric for “democracy” is unfavourable. “Populism” is, in my sight, unambiguously evil — even when its cause be, for the moment, just. Given more time, and the inevitable failure to achieve immediate goals, the cause itself will turn rancid.

(This, incidentally, was the meaning of Father Faber’s aphorism, when he said, “All change is for the worse, including change for the better.”)

Father Schall writes today (over here) on my hero Socrates — judicially murdered by an Athenian assembly, for telling truths they did not want to hear. This antique Greek is the patron saint of the Toryism I espouse — the “old testament” to Saint Thomas More of the “new.” These are men whose loyalty to God preceded their loyalty to crowds and powers; men who could never be “elected,” except in the heavenly sense. Between them, Christ himself formed a “majority of one,” in the face of angry crowds and earthly powers.

“We must vote for Trump because the people are angry.” This is, possibly, the most stupid argument for voting I have heard. And yet it must have landed in my inbox one hundred times. (Together with the wrath of the senders.)

If you are angry, you do not belong in a voting booth; rather under a cold shower.