Essays in Idleness

A friend of mine — an artist — is a proponent of euthanasia. Or more precisely, as he holds that euthanasia is immoral, he advocates public executions. Or rather, private ones, but in clinics covered by the medicare plan.

He thinks: “Everyone should be put down on their eighteenth birthday.”

“Sorry, eightieth birthday did you say?”

“No, eighteenth.”

When I asked him to qualify “everyone,” he refused. He said that it is true, some need putting down more than others, and some (he mentioned Shakespeare, Dante, Michelangelo, Titian) would actually be worth keeping around. “But it would be invidious to pick and choose.”

His argument is that, in most lives (he reckons nearly all), everything interesting has happened by the age of seventeen. This includes every experience that can be freshly apprehended, and every exciting thought that will ever be entertained.

“After age seventeen, not one in a hundred is still mentally alive, or has anything to express beyond his immediate appetites. From that point they’re just fixated on sating them, in a highly repetitive way.”

He figures that by simply banning contraception and abortion — which he anyway considers to be “moral imperatives” — enough orphans would be produced to sustain the population. But when I queried the implications of this, he demurred.

“Details, details,” he insisted. “I’m not a policy wonk.”

Up here in the High Doganate, we like to keep an open mind, and consider proposals from all possible angles. (Blame Aristotle for this; blame Thomas Aquinas; blame cheap whisky.) But we rebel against hypocrisy, and naturally we asked our friend how he had allowed himself to reach the age of sixty.

He was hardly surprised by this question.

“You’re being obtuse. Suicide is another thing, I’m entirely opposed to that. It is morally insupportable; as you have said yourself, it is a form of murder, ‘self-murder’. You can go to Hell for that.”

“But isn’t killing others a form of murder, too?”

“Not when it is an established state policy, and everyone is treated equally.”

I had to admit he was perfectly democratic.

“But how would you sell it in the public square?”

“Oh, that part is easy. It can be presented as a remedy for anthropogenic global warming; as a way to preserve the Amazon Rain Forest, and species diversity. Not that I care; I’m not a politician.”

“But wouldn’t people towards their eighteenth birthdays try to run away?”

“Not in Canada, they wouldn’t. Peer pressure would make them turn up punctually at the clinic for their execution appointments, with their tax forms all in order. If anyone didn’t, the outrage would be huge. Their own friends would hunt them down; there’d be no place to hide. But long before that, the scofflaw would have thought better of the matter.”

All good points. He understands the Canadian character well enough.

“But in the States?”

“Yes, I can imagine a few making it to the outback down there. But hey, the very fact there were redneck survivalists would make the rest all the more eager to obey. Remember: these are people who elected Obama. Twice.”

“Hmm, interesting,” I concluded.

That people believe what they want to believe, was among the discoveries of my adolescence. Reading obituaries of Robert Conquest (1917–2015; died Monday), the shock of this discovery comes back. I was then both an Atheist and a Cold Warrior. This insight into human nature and denature appeared to buttress both of these convictions: for it seemed to me that the Communist Party and the Christian Religion were products of blind faith, perpetuated by people who “wanted to believe,” and therefore believed what they wanted.

Much was once said about the Alice-in-Wonderland parody of the Roman Church that the Communist Party offered. Immortal Christ founded the one, infallible Marx the other. Officially-recognized “apostles” followed from each (Peter, Paul, John, in one case; Lenin, Stalin, Mao, in the other). The Party like the Church is a bureaucracy, under a hierarchy to be obeyed without thought or hesitation. Each has a form of “confession,” and all the other “sacraments” can be paired. Advancement requires strict fidelity to doctrine. Both institutions hunt “heresies” and canonize “saints.” They thrive on persecution. The utopia of perfect Scientific Socialism is a destination like Heaven. And so on: I haven’t the energy to redraw the whole chart.

That the Communist faith is “materialist,” and that of the Church “spiritual,” makes the parody more amusing. One might also say that Satan is a parody of Our Lord. In logic, however, a parody does not constitute a refutation.

Briefly in passing, my own later discovery that the Christian Religion is true, did not at first exhilarate me. Not in the least, with my pride invested. It made me feel quite the fool, and I flinched at the prospect of telling old friends — especially the Christian ones — that I had been so wrong, when I had been so smug about it. I could not possibly have “wanted to believe” what I now found myself believing: that Jesus Christ had “really happened”; that His claims were valid in the terms presented, and truthfully recorded; that the whole history of the Christian Religion (I certainly wasn’t a Catholic yet) followed, however implausibly, from those scandalous facts. Somehow, I would have to cope with this embarrassing revelation.

Well, I found myself comprehensively wrong on the subject of Christianity. History has absolved me, however, on the subject of Communism.

It has absolved Robert Conquest even more. His grand works of historical investigation — The Great Terror (1968), documenting the incredible extent of Stalin’s purges; and, The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), surveying the catastrophic effects of his collectivization — were books of remarkable ambition; of bold conception and real consequence. Other writers had (often at the cost of their careers) reported upon Soviet failings. But they had done so in ways modest enough to be ignored, or dismissed by the fashionable Left as “biased.” The broad, massive, systematic nature of Conquest’s researches was something new. It cracked even the faith of many diehard Communists. The history he told fit together; it was all meticulously sourced; it was overwhelming. There was, as it rose on the horizon, too much to deny.

Yet others could still simply block it out. For people believe what they want to believe, and may resolutely look away from what they do not want to see, or even chute the cocksure laugh, in the face of the mounting tsunami of evidence that finally washes them away.

Conquest was also a light or minor poet, and verse translator, of skill, talent, and integrity. He moved, privately, more in literary than in political circles. His closest friends were such as Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; another was Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

He was no ideologue, and judging by the way he burned through wives, not a moralist either. Outwardly, in the tiny glimpse I had of him, he was not passionate or irascible. Inwardly, he was surely “driven.” But I would count him as a detached artist, working in a rather unusual modern genre: the author of elaborately proven epics of debunkment.

It was not Conquest, incidentally, but Amis who proposed that the revision of The Great Terror, published after the Berlin Wall fell, should be re-entitled, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. But Conquest was content with, A Reassessment. He presented his facts emotionlessly. This magnified his impact, as historian. When he had a provocation to offer, that he was entirely unable to resist, he would put it safely into verse form, so that it wouldn’t be noticed.

*

Questions of what really happened, in history whether ancient or modern (and “all history is modern history,” as Wallace Stevens said), can never be ignored. We cannot build a mighty edifice upon a squalid lie. It will collapse.

From the beginning, the Christian Apostles (and apologists) earnestly insisted the events they recounted had happened in fact, unenhanced by imagination. They were not, by character, storytelling men. The consistency of their testimony, to death, was part of what convinced me nearly forty years ago that they were actually telling the truth. Since, my experience as a journalist has reinforced my judgement: that these narratives have the ring of truth, in the main, as in so many small details.

The Epistle today, on this Feast of the Transfiguration, is from an encyclical by our first Pope (II Peter 1: 16–19). Saint Peter expressly denies that he, or by extension any other Apostle, is a fabulist, a “cunning deviser” of useful and convenient tales. He adamantly insists that he witnessed the Transfiguration himself, along with many others then still alive. Peter, like Paul, puts everything on the line. If he is lying, Christianity is not just an inspiring story, parts of which might possibly be true. For in that case, the whole thing is a lie, a fraud, an imposture, and not one part of it can be trusted.

Peter is meeker in the way he puts this; Paul is more forceful; but all the Apostles said the same — that they were there, that they saw things with their own eyes. That Christ is Risen.

So that, either they are telling the truth, or all are shameless liars — and too, ingenious liars, with a curiously inhuman ability to stick to the same pre-arranged story, over decades and over thousands of miles in their evangelical wanderings; and under torture, and to the death. This is hard, irrefragable stuff: a plain either/or, leaving no room for wiggle. You confront the alternatives.

Or, you look away, and steep your life in bullshit.

The Christian who thinks he can take what he wants from the Gospels, and leave the rest — that he can believe what he wants to believe — is deluding himself. He has banked his soul on the proposition that the Apostles were dishonest, calculating men; that the foundation of the Church lies in the same squishy muck as the foundation of the Communist Party, and every other humanly-contrived institution; that its long survival can be attributed only to luck. That, necessarily, Christ is a lie, a cheap lie designed to sucker and manipulate the masses. Certainly this is the Marxist view.

But for my part, I just can’t believe it. For as far as I can see into history, no conspiracy on that scale has ever been pulled off, nor could be. If it happened it would have been a miracle in itself — a demonic miracle. In which case, all the Saints are in Hell.

Nobody knows what country music is, or if someone does he has concealed it from me. I took it for an aerial collision of hillbilly boogie and cowboy swing, crashing into a honky-tonk bar with a banjo and a scatter of Gaelic fiddles. But I could be wrong.

As a lad I took to country and folk, in opposition to rock and metal, by the same instinct that drew me to Bach and Purcell and Mozart. It was musical. In retrospect I see that it was also religious, in the very broad sense of being animated by spiritual “concerns,” starting from a tragic view of life, yet hopeful, at the boundary of sin and redemption. As opposed to just sex and drugs. In that country universe, a melodic and harmonic and often comic joy carries a narrative in which things do not always work out; in which people don’t always get what they want, or even what they deserve; in which one mistake leads to another, until something bad happens. But as good narrative, it does not preach. It just sits back and describes.

I also took to jazz, with the help of my father, but I am writing here of low-class popular music, such as was shared and actually sung by e.g. my fellow high school students in an Ontario small town, dangerously close to a big city. Some time in the late ’sixties they began to divide into two camps. I will call this in my ignorance the country/rock divide. The rock people would migrate to the city, where they would live prosperously sterile lives; the country people would stay home and get hard jobs and raise children.

Not always in practice, or course, but consistently in principle: rock was from the outset an expression of alienation, starting from one’s family and immediate neighbourhood, and ending with an alienation from music itself. (To say nothing of sanity.)

Counter-currents should not be discounted, entirely: there were rock bands whose members had some musical training and might know, sort-of, how to play their instruments — the band Chicago swims into memory; along with irrepressible poets like Dylan, Simon, Cohen, or even a Beatle or two — a folk stream within the stone rock that broadened its melodic and lyrical capacities and made it, sort-of, compatible with country music.

Something should be mentioned of rhythm here, and the thumping base that inculcated “tribal.” It was barbaric, but also, hypnotizing. It pulled things into itself, like a black hole, dislocating the brain; it required drugs other than alcohol to appreciate. It should never have been tolerated. It went with lyrics that were rude and lewd, and I would guess some learned person, with tremendous stamina, or indifference to pain, could trace the further decline through punk and rap.

One could also hear, as the years passed, country music being lured into this hole, by the scent of money — into this death trap of contrived “relevance,” with its inevitable “rights” posturing, and the lifestyle that was rich and famous. But I know so little of popular music, today, that I cannot trace this history myself, and will be content with a swathing condemnation.

The music of the Church is another matter. Chant is its natural condition, and the Baroque assimilation of the new, “classical” genres worked only when they were carefully adapted to the strict requirements of the liturgy (of course, usus antiquior), and the internal, spiritual movements of the Mass. Modern hymns (Romantic era and forward) have, to my mind, no place in a church, though lots of room outside it. They are instead part of an “outreach,” or Christianizing of the world beyond the narthex, which we re-enter going down the steps. In a healthy society (one that is not poisoning itself) the “secular” music, or music of the streets and the taverns, will be shot through with nutrient religion.

For the musical mission of the Church Catholic is, as I see it, two-fold at the present day. First, to chase irreverent music out of the sanctuary, in the spirit of Christ whipping the money-changers. Then second, to invade their larger “marketplace,” systematically, with a view to eradicating godlessness entirely. We need, in effect, to re-invent country and folk traditions, from the hymn to the ballad, and the dancing jig, as loving expressions of life itself. And this, I suppose, is where Protestant and other converts can help us, for as a result of the desecration of the Mass (novus ordo), inside, we Catholics have also become deaf and unmusical outside the Church. Music is crucial to the binding of family, and neighbourhood, and to the direction of the human soul. We cannot simply surrender it to the Devil, in the Islamic manner.

This does not mean a cheap moralizing music, but a recovery of the poetry that embraces life in all of its facets, including sin and its explication. Great music, as great literature and art, conveys truths. It is the theatre of the world, in which the truth happens; or more succinctly, “the music of what happens” (Seamus Heaney quoting an ancient Irish definition of poetry, I think).

*

Woke this morning with an old country song in my head. Not that old: less than forty years, and therefore from the terminal phase of this art in its decadent, Nashville form. But it is good in its kind and will do as an example of something that embodies “truth to life,” without a heavy hand. I transcribe the lyrics below, minus repetitions, from the way Emmylou Harris sang it, back when she was young and before she became a “landmine commie.” (My crush on her is incurable, however.)

I’m sure she didn’t write it. (Gentle reader can do my homework for me.) She just knew how to sing it, perfectly with the fiddles.

Note, that the movement of the language is Shakespearean. Which is to say, like that of the later Will Shakespeare, it plays recklessly over the demands of drawing-room syntax and scansion, to convey movements of association, thought and feeling, that formalized language would only stiff. Colloquial, one might say, but not what the liberal academics mean by that. Rather, sharply elevated colloquial, tuned to serve the dramatically explosive:

Mary took to runnin with a travellin man,
Left her momma cryin with her head in her hands:
Such a sad case; so broken hearted.

She say, “Momma gotta go, gotta get outta here,
“Gotta get outta town, tired a hangin around:
“Gotta roll on, tween the ditches.”

Lord, she never woulda done it if she hadden got drunk,
Hadden started runnin with a travellin man,
If she hadn’t started taken … those crazy chances.

She say, “Daughter, let me tell yabout the travellin kind,
“Everywhere they goes such a very short time:
“He’s a long gone, before you know it.”

She say, “Never have I known it when it felt so good,
“Never have I knew it when I knew I could,
“Never have I done it when it looked so right.”

Down in the swampland, anything goes;
It’s alligator bait and the bars don’t close:
It’s the real thing, down in Lou’siana.

Didj y’ever see a Cajun when he really got mad?
Really got trouble like a daughter gone bad?
Gets a real hot, in Lou’siana.

Oh, the stranger better move it or he gonna get killed,
Gonna hafta geddit or a shotgun will:
Ain’t no time … for lengthy speeches.

Just an ordinary story bout the way things go,
Round around and no body knows
But the highway: goes on forever.

We are, and always have been homo rumoris, according to Jonah Goldberg in his (often) weekly newsletter; if not homo rumusculi, or homo fabulationis. Well, homos of one kind or another. That is to say, the whispering mob of rumour mongers, triflers, fabulists and storytellers, benign or possibly malign, was around long before the discovery of electricity; and in Goldberg’s view, as mine, it can have a useful function.

Morality requires shame, and the vindication of justice requires shaming people. The question has never been, should people be shamed? It has rather been, what should they be shamed for?

I would pause here, to consider the Catholic approach, embodied in the Sacrament of Penance, and contrast it with our North American Puritan conventions, going back to Salem, Massachusetts. That is to say, the focus on reconciliation with God, as opposed to reconciliation with peer pressure, or with the whited sepulchres who by their righteous sermons inspire the crowds. But this does not change the fact that we are, regardless of our religion, all humans — with copious actual sins to confess.

Are God and the mob always on the same side? Now there is a question that answers itself promptly.

Even the West Mercia Police were able to distinguish them, during an incident in Telford, Shropshire, on 14th March. It was one of those wee passing items in the news cycle, that grabbed my horrified imagination, so that I flagged it for this later use. Though in itself, only one horror among many, many.

A poor, distraught man had climbed to the top of a multi-storey car park, by the town’s shopping mall. Even from a distance, his emotional state could be seen; and from his position on the ledge, that he had contemplated suicide.

A crowd of teenagers gathered below. It was a Saturday, school was out, and the inmates lounging about this palace of consumerism. And there were some older, too — full adults — also with their social media in their hands, to capture the scene. (“Citizen journalists” shall we call them?) According to witnesses, at least twenty at a time were filming this exciting piece of “breaking news.”

But the man did not jump; he was frozen.

And so the crowd, getting bored, began to taunt: “Go on, do it. … Jump!”

The police were trying to reach him; trying to talk him back to safety. But the man could not hear them; he was mesmerized by the audience he had somehow summoned. They were screaming. He could see people running about, from one side of him to the other, to get better pictorial angles for their iPhones. He had their full attention; he had become the focus of a public demand to be entertained.

Time passed: more than two hours. The crowd’s frustration was growing. But with the man still at the edge of the car park roof, frozen by despair, they could hardly tear themselves away. A narrative like this requires a resolution.

“Go for it! … Now! … Do it! … Stop effing about! … Jump! … Do it!”

Finally, he obliged.

So that now he is dead, and beyond democracy. He cannot hear “the voice of the people” any more.

A second mob quickly formed, on the Internet, in response to the news report — to shame the members of the first. Clicking from their armchairs, cubicles, and car seats, the middle-class English declared themselves appalled. Mild, by the usual standard of public outrage, and utterly ineffectual; yet the noise was there. And when I looked for Comments, I found that these spokesmen for a forgotten mercy and compassion were, to a man, blood-curdling in their demands for retribution.

The West Mercia Police were likewise infuriated, promising legal action against those who had physically and verbally interfered with their work, if people would kindly step forward and identify the malefactors.

“Ah, to be in England, now that Winston’s out.” (That was how Ezra Pound put it, with his usual perspicacity as idiot savant.)

*

A mob is a mob is a mob. I was struck, too, glancing through Comments on articles about the shooting death of Cecil the Lion, by the bloodthirstiness. Most wanted the hunter dead, if not first tortured. But if, I should think, they had the means to kill him, another angry mob would come forward after that, to shame the shamers, and demand their punishment in turn.

For the time being, the Internet is mostly virtual. Further advances in technology will be needed, to allow for the dispensation of populist justice in “live time.” At present, unless one has command of a national guard or other armed forces, one must make do with information alone, such as broadcasting workplaces and home addresses.

Or, in the case of the AshleyMadison.com hackers, the identities of 37 million customers, who use this “matchmaking” site specifically to arrange adulterous liaisons. They may be “named and shamed” — curiously from the motive of punishing the website for inadequate attention to “privacy concerns.” And there is consternation about this, even though (as Goldberg mentions) adultery is considered an insignificant thing, these days. To many, it is no more a sin than sodomy, so what is the big deal? Yet oddly, it continues to matter to the adulterers’ live-in mates, and to their children, so far as their moral and emotional callusing is not yet complete. And so: “Let them suffer!”

Goldberg calls himself a Burkean conservative. (I think of myself as more the Jeremiah type.) There will always be something to shame; there will always be moral indignation. We can never become true libertines, for we are inextricably human; and seem to be “hard wired” to judge and to punish, others as well as ourselves. And by some kink, others in preference to ourselves.

Nothing has changed in this regard: the Internet is wringing with moral indignation, and the pundits are kept busy by it. Goldberg rightly sees that the effect of the imposed, ideological libertinism — as it is taught by our current elites, through the schools and the media and the courts they control — is only to change the rules of the game. The game itself continues. What is condemned was previously applauded; what is applauded was previously condemned; but the mob moves on. So long as it is still provided with scapegoats to damn, in the Forum of public opinion, one sin will do as well as another. And, new sins will always be invented to fill the spaces from which the old sins were winkled; the Macbeth witches promised no less.

Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum; but it is important to discern that the Devil does not. He flourishes, for the vacuum has ever been his pleasure; his tube into the human heart. For him, the vacuum is like the caress of a breeze on a warm summer day; or like the puff of feather fans, as his enablers pump the air out of the old, crumbling Christian civilization; that gentle sucking action. Hell itself, like the inaudible whoosh of the black hole, a music to his ears; and all of God’s creation to be sucked, downward ever downward, as we glide down, to death beneath death beneath death.

[Recycled, and slightly rewritten from a couple of years ago.
One does this sort of thing in August.]

*

There is a nice alpine orogeny, running from Afghanistan, across the roof of Asia, then into Yunnan, through most of Burma, upcountry Thailand and Indochina. It is all contiguous, all elevated, all rather wild — this vast territory enheaved, where three continental plates collided. (Supposing one buys into the hypothesis of “continental drift,” which I’m beginning to find “too plausible.”) About a decade ago it received a name from the Dutch historian, Willem van Schendel. He called it, Zomia, from a root that means “highlander” in many Tibeto-Burman languages. Think of it as Appalachia, but on a hundred times the scale, and of twenty times the historical depth.

Notwithstanding my Gaelic genes, I was schooled to despise, or glibly to romanticize, the Highland types. (Two sides of the same flipping coin.) Everyone was schooled to do this; and with great ease, government and media have since “stereotyped” enemies of the State who lurk in such remote places as, “The caves of Afghanistan!”

But of course, the intrusion into their midst of rudely psychotic persons with post-modern ideologies, and lethal post-modern weapons, is what actually occurred. The Pathan and other hill tribes of the “Northwest Frontier” came to serve Al Qaeda as their ancestors often served the British: at gunpoint.

From my own experience, travelling in such parts, I would say the hill people wanted only to be left alone. To travellers they have no objection; are hospitable to a reckless degree. Their violence is directed instead against invaders; and they have little difficulty distinguishing an innocent tramping fool from an embodiment of evil, such as a government official. They had, they have, no aspirations whatever, to conquer the little creatures down on the plains, who call themselves “people” but seem to lack many of the defining characteristics of full-fledged, free-born men and women.

I cannot get my head entirely around Zomia, owing to its size. The scholars who now employ the term as a geographical concept disagree about its extent; van Schendel himself excluded everything west of Ladakh. The Tibetan massif is a different world from the lower mountains to the east and south, both geographically and culturally. The latter territories are more densely and variously populated. Inhabitants of the former (that massif) have more in common with the pastoral “hordes” of Mongolia and Central Asia; but were once more secure in their mountain fastnesses. Historical migrations from there and from elsewhere, through mountainous southern China and into South-east Asia, were vastly more complex; and whole peoples passed over and by each other at different altitudes.

Yet it is true to say they have all, always, been Enemies of the State, up there in the mountains — hence, too, our sneaking rightwing attraction. In the 1950s, thanks to curmudgeonly sociologists, even the highlanders of Appalachia were enjoying some good press. This spread to the liberal anthropologists when they began to realize that these Hillbillies had preserved folk customs and attitudes from the earlier and freer society of the rebellious Thirteen Colonies; and that there might be some point to their counter-cultural rejection of the later mass-market America. (In other words, the mass market for Whole Earth hippiedom was being conceived.)

It is of the easternmore reaches of Zomia that Yale’s celebrated anarchist anthropologist, James C. Scott, characteristically writes. A recent book is entitled, The Art of Not Being Governed (2009, and already out-of-print). I seldom read such books, but skim them with enthusiasm. The professor, who also raises sheep, has been at his hobby horse for nearly half a century now, starting about the same time my own father was travelling among “the Hill Tribes of Siam,” and learning to love them as this author does.

During the Vietnam War we got to know these people — “Hmong” has become our generic term — as perhaps our most effective allies against Uncle Ho. They truly hated Communism, and a few other things, in common with hill people everywhere: slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labour. And, epidemics. For they often live to advanced ages, and fear Lowlanders less as soldiers than as carriers of disease. Verily, territorial warfare strikes the Highlander as one of the diseases the Lowlander is carrying (according to Scott with my enthusiastic, if tacit, agreement).

In a sense, these are the things — various forms of legislated slavery — that define the State, or arguably, Civilization in the narrow (“civic”) sense. Men are put under burden, and told it is for their own good. They learn to salute Power; to obey, to conform, to march, and to serve the poster politicians, shouting Heil! as each new, fashionable, Dear Leader motors by. But there are men who don’t like to do this; who are too independent to appreciate “democracy,” and would rather move to the hills. Or else, they get chased there.

My own Caledonian ancestors showed all the traits, including the murderous contempt for Lowlanders. They showed, too, as if Zomians, considerable wit in the invention of methods for remaining stateless. They dodged the bullet for centuries, until the Highland Clearances finally caught up, and the jackboots of the Modern State kicked them over the hills and into the oceans.

I shall leave the curious reader to follow the proper nouns to the proper sources, should he wish to learn more about the Higher Asians — with their incredible range of ethnicities and languages; their resistance alike to literacy and to positive law; their millenarian and prophetic tendencies; their chameleon skills; their mobility — and with that, their ingeniously successful techniques of swidden agriculture (usually more varied and complicated than “slash and burn”).

At the opposite end of the spectrum of human barbarity, we have the urbane. Total mutual incomprehension can be assumed between these extremes. Glancing through rebuttals to the Zomian theses, from the Po-faced academic elite, I am again and again arrested by their unreachable stupidity. The agents of Po cannot understand (except in little twinkles) that these people do not subscribe to the premisses of political and economic “science,” any more than to the other premisses of the Lowland mindset; don’t get, that the hillsman does not consider himself inferior to the “insects of the plains,” and does not long for “inclusion” in their termite colonies.

*

It seems all my life I have been reading the English travellers, and those of other countries who penetrated the wilderness, and came to understand the motives of “primitive” peoples — invariably from some calling in themselves, to which settled suburban life did not answer.

For instance, Charles Waterton’s Wanderings in South America, which came back to me from a flea-market stall, after years of wandering on its own. (The same copy with my name in the front.) It is a memoir of deep incursions into the woods of Guiana in the early nineteenth century, to stuff birds, and collect snakes, and gather other items for his extensive cabinets of “natural curiosities.” Waterton was a brilliant naturalist, whose descriptions of new species, and explanations of their physiology and behaviour, have stood up through all the subsequent Official Science.

Too, he was a fine Recusant Lord, from the vicinity of Wakefield, where the Catholics never quite gave up — just as their ancestors had never quite agreed to the Norman Conquest. He counts among the great English eccentrics; if also, alas, as a pioneer of the “ecology” business, for he surrounded his large estate with a tall wall, to protect the private wilderness around his moated castle, back home in Yorkshire. Conversant with both worlds, he adopts the prejudices of the British aristocracy, when mocking the tribesmen of Guiana; and of the tribesmen when mocking the British aristocracy — remaining Trump-like in his own indifference to criticism.

The History of Progress is highly biased, as I may have mentioned before in these electronic pages. It omits much more than half of human nature, and overlooks every fact that doesn’t fit. We need another account that will take in the whole, re-orient our attention to the immortal, and rescue us from the corvée frame of mind. A Highland version of history, if you will; a free man’s guide to how things really are, with some hints for escape from the labyrinth of totalitarian “good intentions.”

Indeed, Waterton found this just where I did, in the Gospels.

I try not to have “interesting” opinions on Scripture, and when I have them anyway, to mull them through myself, rather than sharing them with any who will listen. For it is not my place to usurp the role of the orthodox priest as interpreter, or to propose novelties. And even if, as sometimes happens these days, the priest is preaching heresy, it is not my place to add more. Rather, to recover, starting in myself, a few plain meanings.

For Christ’s teaching was meant for all men (including, all women). That’s the first clue that the more arcane interpretation of Scripture is unlikelier to be the correct one. Native reason, too, instructs us to start with the obvious, and pause — ideally, forever — before skipping to the Gnostic explanation, which only a few favoured “insiders” could possibly appreciate. Verily, we should examine our motives, before passing over what is plain to the brain.

For even the mystical turns out, on mystical examination, to be surprisingly plain, as a far countrie is revealed to plain sight when we travel to it. It remains “mysterious” in the human sense, of a puzzle, only because we haven’t got there yet. And there is always more beyond our getting: infinitely more, in Jesus Christ.

And so it behooves us to be plain, not arcane, when faced with plain matters, and to remain in the condition of faith, knowing Christ will not tax us beyond our means. There will be no mystery in the questions that appear, immediately before us. Only denial (that famous river in Egypt) prevents us from seeing what is directly before our eyes.

But here I am sounding like the Pharisee again, thanking God that I’m not like that Publican over there. (You see him? … Well, if you went to church you would.)

My mistake, openly advertised I hope, began with the words, “I try.” The implication is that others don’t; that I’m up against a wall of trees filled with obfuscating howler monkeys. Whereas, usually I’m up against the tendency to obfuscation in my own noisy soul. When what “I try” is to justify myself, I am playing the Pharisee for sure.

For it is very easy to manoeuvre into the position of smug, from any starting place that is not genuinely humble. The notion that, even if I’m bad, I’m not that bad, leaves open the low window for the devil we just saw officiously out the front door.

We live in glass houses it has been said; which, as any competent devil will observe, contain a lot of windows. Why throw stones and risk cutting hisself, when so many are habitually left open? And besides, stones wake up all the neighbours. Instead he carries a can of WD-40 in his toolkit, for the squeaky hinges. And a ball of wax for my creaky drawers. Never forget that he’s a smoothie; hardly trying to make a spectacle of hisself.

Saint Irenaeus (according to my 1962 Saint Andrew Daily Missal, which I can recommend to anyone) tied the two lessons in today’s (Old) Mass together — Paul’s to the Corinthians, and Luke’s to the planet — by a single scintillating observation. He defined man as, “the receptacle of God’s gifts.”

Saint Paul tells us to stop questioning each other’s gifts; Saint Luke, in effect, to stop questioning each other’s lack of them. (Jesus speaks through both Apostles.) The gifts we have are sufficient for our needs; more than sufficient, quite frankly — for beyond this, they are also sufficient for our contribution to the common weal.

Humility is enjoined in either case. It is incidentally the mark of the Saint: “a spirit of complete and constant dependence on God.” Which is among the reasons the Saints are so various, for contrary to current assumption, God is not narrow, boring, and repetitive.

He only repeats what we haven’t yet learnt, as we are obliged to discover. From the human side, this is called “punishment,” and it is invariably thoroughly deserved. That is what the Publican grasps, and the Pharisee apparently doesn’t. And it is because he gets it that the Publican, instead of trying to justify himself, beats his breast for his own sins, and begs only for mercy.

And note, with Christ, that it is the prayer of the Publican that is answered. And note further, that this really isn’t very surprising.

Instead, it is quite plain.

Lucky for me I’m not a dentist, and therefore can’t afford to shoot a lion in Zimbabwe. That means I don’t have to hide from the angry, democratic mob. (Millions of them on the Internet, demanding capital punishment for this solecism alone.) And what is worse, their post-modern reasoning.

Instead, I can sit here quietly with my tea, and indulge my own post-modern thoughts. And read old poems about Africa:

Young muscular Edwardian
Swings through trees,
Stops carnage at Karnak,
Whole trains at Windhoek,
Dances waltzes simianese.
Lord Greystoke jad guru! …

Truth to tell, even if I were rich beyond the dreams of avarice, like a dentist, I would probably want to shoot something else. For after all, lions are cats, and cats have souls. Everybody knows that; or at least, everyone on Facebook and Twitter. (Do dogs have souls? Depends on the breed.)

Maybe I wouldn’t shoot anything at all. The automobiles seem to be taking care of the raccoons. (We have glorious big ones in Parkdale, here; big like bears! Take out the front of your Honda.)

And anyway, I’m more into books.

A dumb yellow drum
Hangs down from the night.
For the rite of the Dum Dum
Come the cousin apes.
He who would wear Bond Street
And opera capes
Prefers loin cloths of
Impeccable cut.
Lady Jane Greystoke jad guru! …

Will the media be there, I wonder, when the beta male in that lion pride steps up to fill Cecil’s empty … paws? For he will then, I would think, in the lion way, snuff all of Cecil’s kittens. That’s what the new alpha lion does, according to the best BBC documentaries. He starts by wiping out the old lion’s progeny.

Sort of the way Mugabe did, when he came to power.

Perhaps someone else has made this point: I haven’t surveyed the controversy as thoroughly as I might have. Only enough to see that Cecil spent most of his time smiling for the cameras.

Nigel (or whatever the beta-male lion was called) must have spent his time sulking, and dreaming of the day. You know, that very moment — the moment Cecil got blammed.

For alpha males (whether lions, or dentists) don’t waste much time thinking about the optics. But beta males are Darwinian; they think about what it’s going to look like, every day. (A little sidelight there, on evolutionary biology.)

“There is no gay in a lion pride.” You can quote me on that. … Er, on second thought, don’t quote me.

Instead, quote James Reaney. He’s a white male who is safely dead:

Mazumba waves his spear!
Oh the white beach and the green palms!
Stygian night between the ears!
Oh Prince of slaughter do not bungle
My jugular vein within the jungle.
And springboks flee across the plains
From apes with silver headed canes.
Edward VII jad guru!

No, no, I have changed my mind. I think maybe I’d like to shoot a Barbary Lion. Nobody’s done one of those, lately.

They are something to look at: narrower faces, meaner expressions than your standard East African. A bit taller, too, and heavier: hard to miss. … (Easier to weigh them, once they are stuffed.) … Lots of testosterone (before that)!

The last one was observed to be extinct, by the Frenchman who shot it, in Morocco back in 1922. Or so it says here. (It says something different in the Wicked Paedia.) But someone said he saw a live one in the Atlas Mountains, a few decades after that.

Let’s go for it, I say.

Barbaries are (unless they were) big-hair lions: rich, dark, resplendent manes, of hippie length. (Such a wonderful target!) Indeed, better than hippies, because sans the ponytail, and the thinning on top. More closely related to the lions of India, I have heard. Ate lots of natives in their heyday, I’ll bet.

And Christians, I suppose, in the Forum. The Romans must have got their lions from around there.

(As a child in what was once British India, I used to wonder on this account. What was the score this month? How many lions had killed villagers? How many villagers had killed lions? And which side were we rooting for?)

Yes, yes, suddenly I see it: the head of a Barbary Lion would look rather fetching over the hearth. Glaring across the library towards a crouched Bengal Tiger, atop the glass cases on the opposite wall.

So I’ll also need to bag a Bengal Tiger.

And get me a place with a grand hearth. And maybe a higher ceiling.

(But darn, I forgot. I’m not a dentist. I can’t afford swag like this.)

Íñigo López de Loyola, better known to us as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, whose Feast we observe today (in both the traditional and the novel Calendars), was a valiant and gallant soldier. He had more than proved himself in the field, from teenage years through his twenties. Indeed, he owned a reputation for swashbuckle and vainglory; had repeatedly won lethal duels. These Iberians can be mighty proud; Íñigo was the picture of machismo, in his cape and tights, his jewelled boots — the dagger and the sword hanging loosely. It was suicide to provoke him.

But even super-soldiers take unexpected hits, and when the Navarrese stormed the fortress of Pamplona, in May of 1521, Íñigo took a cannonball in the legs.

We are assured that surgical operations in those days, some centuries before modern anaesthesia, were often worse than the original injury, and our heroic Basque gentilhombre, now thirty and no longer in the flush of youth, found himself laid up for a while. And, as luck would have it, starved of his usual reading materials. He preferred the sort of chivalrous tales that Cervantes did such a fine job of mocking. He was stuck, instead, with De Vita Christi, an encyclopaedic devotional work by the (then dated) Ludolph of Saxony. The rest, as we say, is history.

Lounging about like an idler — not his accustomed mode — the future saint conceived an Idea. It was that the Church needs an army, too. Through a rigorous system of prayer and contemplation (seven-plus hours a day), founded on the hints in Ludolph’s book (which could be read as a fourteenth-century Carthusian self-help manual), this Idea was subtly developed. The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises offer a boot-camp approach to Catholic mysticism. The religious order that grew out of them, with the energy, too, of remarkable companions, was “militarist” by nature. But it is a remarkable kind of “hybrid warfare” that Saint Ignatius and his friends “invented” — one in which conventional weapons played, and can play no part.

Enemies of the Jesuits — and from the beginning, they had plenty — might characterize the whole order as a “mind game.” They could never be counted on to do what was expected; they had the tactical genius for surprise. (We all remember the Monty Python skit: “Fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.”) Yet rooted often, as in the case of Saint Ignatius, in a holiness itself inscrutable. God, unquestionably, helped them on their way, into spiritual battle, with an intellectual machinery always state-of-the-art, and a discipline that seemed to pass beyond the human.

That was then, this is now.

There are, in practice, so far as I can see, two Jesuit orders today. I have met “men astutely trained” in both. One is traditional, the other is novel. The traditional “faction” remains loyal to the teaching of the Magisterium under the most intense fire; I could name a few people. The other — but I will not name — thinks it knows better, and is looking cleverly ahead. As one “progressive” Jesuit once told me, “I am loyal to the Church as she will be, and to the Popes of the future.”

Jesuits have provided, for several generations now, perhaps the principal opponents of Church teaching from within, a kind of self-assembled Fifth Column. Where would e.g. “liberation theology” be without Jesuits, who wink at arms running and violent acts? Who purposefully confuse “the poor in spirit” with “the poor in goods”? Who think with their superior expertise they can analyze the most abstruse social and economic questions; and like some of the more advanced Muslims, serve the will of Allah here on Earth, as a revolutionary vanguard.

Perhaps a third group could be identified, a “middle way,” balanced on the knife edge between the two, and sometimes adeptly skating. It has been said that our current Pope — the first Jesuit in that office — is on this edge. From each side he appears to be on the other; but from back or front, entirely on his own. He is certainly not a Marxist, for instance. But he is certainly not an anti-Marxist, either. Nor is he ambiguous. Only a Jesuit could be like that: a whirling dervish of charisma. I had this sense reading Laudato Si’ — in many free-spinning passages I thought, “the exact opposite of what our Church so desperately needs, in a time of terrible doctrinal confusion.” …

But who am I to judge?

Having read something of the Jesuit missions in China, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I became aware of a “grand strategy.” It was not in any sense a compromise; not an attempt to offer a syncretic version of Christianity to a Chinese court and intellectual milieu of great sophistication. It was rather (to my mind) an exercise in the Socratic. Concede everything that could be conceded to the Chinese mind and high culture; then win the argument on Chinese terms. It was an incredibly brash “strategic vision.” It was conducted, brilliantly. It failed, utterly.

Perhaps Pope Francis has the same brash vision: to concede to the post-modern mind and culture, such as it is, everything it takes for granted; then win the argument on post-modern terms. I hope this is not the plan, however, for still more is now at stake: and there are days when it seems we are down to playing for our last marbles.

The Jesuits were invaluable in the Counter-Reformation. It was often their discipline that held the line, in very unpromising circumstances, at what had suddenly become the Church’s northern frontier. They were Jesuits who conceived ingenious schemes to retrieve the morale of increasingly isolated Catholic communities. Their approach was not, actually, “take no prisoners”; rather it was, “never give an inch”; nor miss an opportunity to move the front line forward; and, count on reinforcements from the rear. For they had an astounding faith, beneath their astounding self-confidence.

Be, and stay, at the forefront of science and of art, of literature and society. Appropriate everything of value and of use, for the Church’s operations. In our contemporary sporting idiom: the best defence is a terrifying offence.

The humble and contrite owed them.

And to my mind (with its monopoly on the thinking at this website), that is rather what we need today, when again our front line is faltering. Not a diplomatic accommodation to defeat, but sudden, shocking, forward thrusts, against an Enemy who has become complacent.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, pray for us; remind us how it is done.

The genetic modification of science by hoodoo is a theme of interest up here (in the High Doganate). I read journalists such as Henry I. Miller, in Forbes, much to the displeasure of at least one correspondent, who does not like his “tone.” I, for my part, very much enjoy it.

Miller is an abrasive critic of everything in food that is labelled “organic.” The title of his piece yesterday nicely sums his view: “The colossal hoax of organic agriculture.” His last two items before that had me giggling, too: “The most imbecilic and pretentious commentary ever written about genetic engineering” (reviewing an article in the New York Times); and, “Whole Foods caught with their thumb on the scale and their hand in your pocket” (on their demonstrably false package weight and nutritional claims). No mealy-mouth he. Nor deficient in job-appropriate scientific training.

I like to start myself with the tomato: a small, very hard, suspiciously shiny, yellow berry of the Deadly Nightshade family, found in the Mesoamerican bush. Highly toxic, especially in the leaves. But it had already endured at least two millennia of genetic modification by the Mesoamericans, before the Spanish conquistadors arrived, to ship it around the planet. As Miller notes, we should bear this in mind when offered an “heirloom tomato” for sale; and then reflect that, with the exception of some genuinely wild berries, game, and fish, everything in the grocery has been modified beyond recognition, and usually over more generations than we can count. This, let me add, is one of the distinctions between ourselves and the apes, to say nothing of the dolphins.

Oddly, though Luddite by aesthetic disposition, I have no objection to technical improvements, per se. I delight in simplicity, and paradoxically, that is what “technology” sometimes delivers. Moreover, we were instructed by our Maker to go forth and multiply, and could not have got so far as we have without increasing the crop yields.

Mrs Edith Carson, the elderly widow next door when I was a child in Georgetown (and no relation to Rachel), was a fanatical opponent to the fluoridation of the municipal water supply, which she attributed to a communist plot. She may have been right about that, but another of her views struck me as eccentric.

When she returned from shopping, she would toss her apples and pears and oranges and bananas, her walnuts and all the other fruits, beans, pods, and nuts she had purchased — from her back porch, onto the grass. Soon after, she would collect them (less the loot of bird or squirrel), and take them into her pantry. This was from the belief that none were healthy until they had touched the ground. It was a fact she had discovered from the careful perusal of certain (Protestant) religious tracts.

I try to imagine what her views would be today (had she lived she would now be 120), on GMOs. My guess would be, Against. Ditto, for the methods of DNA scrambling by radiation and chemicals that preceded the molecular techniques; and the pioneering methods of wide-cross hybridization. For Mrs Carson was already opposed to the irradiation of potatoes, and even to the atomic bomb, except for the specialized purpose of annihilating the communists.

A dear woman, beloved in memory, in whose debt I remain for innumerable cookies and chocolates. (I gave her name so you could say an Ave.) Yet even with the people we adore, we may sometimes disagree on details.

The marvellous thing about current genetic modification on the molecular scale, it seems to me, is its simplicity and relative safety. And what I mean here is, relative to traditional methods of cross-breeding. Instead of transferring a whole mess of genes, haphazardly from one organism to another, we can now do it in a finical way, one little gene at a time. This gives us more chance to observe the consequences.

But of course, public safety is not the only desideratum, and avoiding risk is not always a virtue. I wouldn’t want to discourage every “jurassic,” cowboy operation, lest we become too fastidious in our ways.

On the third hand, thanks to my own perusal of some (Catholic) tracts — including the Bible, and various Fathers and Doctors of the Church — I am convinced that the genetic modification of human beings is a big mistake, except through voluntary, licit, opposite-sex marriage. Indeed, all attempts at it so far have ended badly.

For humans are enveloped in a moral field that excludes the plants and animals; each one of us a special creation. (See: Catechism.) A fundamental humility and caution when tampering with nature is not a bad thing; we should cherish her. But, cherish by integral moral commandment; not because other creatures have any “rights.” (We have only what rights we can defend; they have only what we bestow.)

Here I refer to the order of Love — quite distinct from the order of sentimentality, vividly presented just now in public wailing over the harvest of Cecil the Lion, by people prepared to overlook the destruction of millions of human babies, and the harvest of their body parts by e.g. the Doktor Mengeles of Planned Parenthood.

Love, in this sense, which accords mere affection to Cecil the Lion, is not reducible to rules in a book; nor can it be encompassed by loveless and morally spastic government regulation. It is expressed, too, in an attitude through nature to nature’s God, inculcated from childhood; and through knowledge founded in that Love, whose outward attribute is wonder.

This should animate even the clinics and labs, and be detectable not only through electron microscopes, but in a work atmosphere of joy. There is no necessary conflict between high scientific endeavour, and amazement with the very tools we find at our disposal. Yet even in the choice of techniques, we should be attentive to transcendentalia: to beauty, truth, and goodness in our intentions, and in our actions. This is not law, but religion.

It is not the gradual transformation of a poisonous New World berry into a delicious and nutritious pasta sauce that is the problem, here. Rather, it is the transformation of the human, into something mean, miserable, small, and finally, murderous. That is the key environmental issue: not what we do with nature but what we do with us.

Among my chief regrets in life, is my lack of education. For instance, I cannot read classical Chinese. I cannot read modern Chinese either, but that does not bother me. The failing is on my part alone. As a child, in the Bangkok Patana school, in a special class that met by klong-side, an attempt was made to teach me at least the elementary Chinese characters, and how to draw them correctly with a brush. But my family left Bangkok soon after I began, and all I carried away was an instruction book that was soon lost. I lack application.

Translations are treacherous things, and neither are the works of critics to be trusted. If one is to enter into the mind and sensibility of another, in an olden time, one must go by a route that will not be easy. It is almost a religious quest: to shed the layers of personal hubris in the course of acquiring a knowledge that lies entirely beyond one’s self. Or more simply, to be drawn out of oneself by dedicated study. To some degree one may do this by leaps of the imagination. One reads different translations, and different accounts of the same ancient work; but really one is circling around it. To enter in, one must read the original Chinese, against a background of much other historical and cultural learning.

For today, the book in question is the T’ang dynasty classic of tea, the Cha Ching (or, “Chájīng,” to you pinyin commies), by Lu Yu. It was first published, or copied, about the year 762 of our era, in an edition long lost. Subsequent editions were also lost, but the fragmentary tradition was sufficient for Ming scholars to reconstruct the original. It was in three scrolls, comprising ten chapters; about seven thousand characters in all. This is not long, but the work is densely packed. It is full of interest, not only because it conveys a profoundly civilized attitude towards tea-drinking. It also provides basic information on tea botany, cultivation, and production in its ancient brick or cake form: how it is picked, steamed, pressed, dried, stored. All the many tools are described, and their uses concisely explained. It is a technical manual, preceded by learned speculations on the mythological and historical origins of tea; then followed by general directions for the tea connoisseur.

Every sentence raises questions that cry out to be answered. For instance, the seventh chapter appears more a collection of lists than a narrative; it is like an index to preceding Chinese history and biography, viewed from the very acute angle of common interest in tea. The sixth and eighth chapters leave one pondering over the many tea-garden districts scattered across T’ang China, and the range of cultivars in those times. Often one is at a loss even to follow the geography, and is left longing to depart from the present and go searching on the ground. For the poetry of tea arises from the earth; it is founded upon concrete associations.

Now, tea in its modern form — loose tea brewed in a tea pot with a handle and spout — is a development of the Sung Dynasty, centuries later. We tend to assume all progress is improvement, but Chinese scholars did not think that way. As we see in Lu Yu, the old methods were extremely complicated, and required great skills — down to the way the tea was powderized from the cakes, in specially-designed stone mortars, prior to brewing like Japanese matcha. The Japanese tea ceremony is itself derived from older Chinese rituals, which Lu Yu describes, but incompletely. One does not grab at tea, as one grabs at coffee in the morning. Rather it must be given one’s full attention.

We do not today understand what a T’ang writer means by a health benefit, for instance. Or, so I conclude from trying to understand the Cha Ching, as other classical Chinese works. A robust body is less important than a clear mind. The condition of good health involves a serenity that is more a spiritual than a material condition; a notion of harmony with heaven that will pass over the modern reader, for whom “heaven” is without content, without reality. The remedies for bad health are not “cures for what ails you,” in our technocratic, medical sense; not one of them seems to be task-specific. Rather, they relate to what we would call “syndromes” from our ancient Greek heritage: things that go together, and so must be addressed together. There are herbal remedies, and one of those was, classically, tea. But how to take them is as important as what they are; not only how to infuse and swallow, but how to taste and muse upon them. Hence the ceremonial attached, not only to tea.

Our modern “naturopath,” who goes into a store full of white plastic bottles containing herbal remedies in tablet and gelatin capsule form, is in his conceit much farther from understanding these things than, say, a motorcyclist stopping for a double baconator at Wendy’s. For the latter at least merges himself in the ambiance or culture of his hunger remedy, and is all of a piece with it as he consumes his hamburger, with coke and fries. He isn’t a fake, like the herbal pill-popper.

Yet I find the ambiance of the tea pavilion, whether in town garden or in the mountains, superior in kind to what we now have at Wendy’s. Call me a nostalgic, living in the past, but I would really rather be there than here.

This is why I wish that I could read, and through that ability enter into the spirit of classical Chinese. More is there than any straightforward translation can convey, and copious notes would surely be necessary, even to begin explaining what has not been said, but would nevertheless have been understood, implicitly through allusions. Who is alive, today, who can write them? The sad truth is, no one I can find.

The expression in my title was used by a certain Scotchman, of Catholic affiliation if not Catholic sensibility, to describe certain beloved Fathers in a certain beloved Parish. He said they care for nothing except the liturgy, and implied that they spend all their days dressing up. Note the further insinuation that they are deficient in manliness. Moreover, he was spreading this calumny about, among the young and impressionable.

I should mention that he was far off the mark. The priests in question are known well to me, and you will wander some distance in Christendom to find their match for charity and good works, involving personal sacrifice. They are also more manly than their accuser, if we take quiet courage for a manly virtue (whether it is found in women or men), in contrast to habitual posturing and bluster. I could give anecdotes. This is not the place.

Now, in Christendom we condemn not the sinner but the sin. Far be it from me, therefore, to condemn this vicious little Scotchman. His pig ignorance was, perhaps, honestly acquired. And his charge would not resonate were there no “liturgy fairies” in this world. (I have met, I hope, more than my share.)

That this is a short, barrel-framed fellow, with a wide flaring neck, and little beads for eyes, I would be reticent to mention, were it not somehow relevant to his case. For he has also the temper of the beast he most resembles (Sus scrofa). A descendant no doubt of the Pictish folk of the Caledonian interior — once described by my genetically Hebridean grandmother as “vindictive dwarves.” (This was not the correct plural, but I knew what she meant.)

I did not query the Pict on his phrase, for it was self-explanatory. It came back to mind, reading Father Hunwicke, yesterday. With the latter I share an Anglican past, and I should think the same experience of a High Church “smells-and-bells” faction that cared much for liturgy; some of whom had the aspect of fairies. And now, even in the Roman Kirk, Hunwicke is able to observe, “the distinction between those whose preoccupation is with Liturgy and, for preference, very fine Liturgy; and those for whom liturgical questions are part of a larger whole.”

More tellingly, he notes that few of the former group came over to the Ordinariate. This was a surprise neither to him, nor to me.

Here in the Greater Parkdale Area, when I defected, I noticed that others doing this were among the more serious “believers”; some of them memorably Low Church, or “evangelical.” The question for them was not whether the Catholic Mass were prettier; around here it is seldom that. It was whether the claims of the Catholic Church were true. (Some went over to the Greek or Russian Orthodox, as their Anglican roofs caved in.)

J.H. Newman, greatest of modern converts from the Anglican “middle way,” was not a “liturgy fairy,” though once very “high.” He did not go “up” from the high tables of Oxford, but down to the stalls of Littlemore, in the course of his own crossing. I think he is the model for any Anglican convert, who follows a road “down.” One must exclude very few who convert for personal convenience of any kind; they have been rare in the English-speaking realms, where “poping” has not offered worldly or material advantages, but usually, social and economic costs.

One goes downmarket, “Irish,” outside the pale; one leaves all the splendid silver behind, and takes up with immigrants and working-class types. This is not the sort of fate which appeals to your “liturgy fairy,” whose eyes remain fixed on the silver.

But Christ is in the wafer, instead.

Traditional liturgy was something to be taken for granted, not obsessed over. It was the way it was and had always been. It had “grown” through the centuries, when at all, only in relation to that wafer; and in the spirit of reverence, not “reform.” The Mass did not cease to be valid, after the ceremonial was trashed “in the spirit of Vatican II”; it was only made ugly and distracting. Christ is still received, though now in a manner often outwardly insulting to Him.

The very clash between “traditional” and “modern” is hateful to a Church whose beliefs and practices refer beyond time. To defend something as “modern” is to admit that it is false. But so is it, to defend something because it belongs to another distinct era. Truth is indivisible, and cannot be partitioned in space or in time.

And likewise the Liturgy, properly celebrated, is inseparable from what it exemplifies and expounds. And we ourselves not liturgy fairies, unless we deliquesce.

Has it occurred to anyone in the Obama administration that the Persians, perhaps, cannot be trusted? Probably not; but it need not occur to them. They are told it every day.

And the Turks, not quite doing as they say? (Ditto; but with fewer reminders.)

I refer only to the governments of the respective nations, of course; we all know that Persians and Turks are, as a general rule, Sufi saints, incapable of deceit; that they have been so since time out of mind. Granted, the classical Greeks tended to be Persophobe; and the Byzantines, Turkophobe; but that was long ago. If you can’t trust Persians and Turks, today, whom can you trust? (Arabs?) Though of course, they do not trust one another.

They are the Turks who command my attention this morning. Their valiant, “moderate Islamist,” freely elected and re-elected leader, Erdogan, promised to help us bomb the Da’ish. (Turkey is, technically, still in NATO.) But oh look, he’s bombing the Kurds by mistake. (Our most reliable allies in the theatre; to whose territories all the refugee Christians run.)

I don’t expect gentle reader to follow; I can hardly follow myself, despite years of trying; I am simply noting the outcry from various Kurdish sources in Syria, reported by the BBC and others. They had enough on their hands with the Da’ish coming at them, before the Turks started hitting them, too.

The Kurds in Iraq will be unsurprised. They have lost ten-thousands of lives to Turkish forces, crossing into Iraq in (officially) “hot pursuit” of Kurdish “separatists” fleeing Turkey itself. They hardly expect the Turks to be serious about attacking their enemies — the Da’ish, who are also the enemies of the Persian ayatollahs. (“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”: sort it out.) The Sa’udi air force is in a similar position in Yemen: ostensibly bombing terrorists of all kinds, like nice Yankee allies, but actually taking sides with the Sunni terrorists against the Shia terrorists. This is called realpolitik, I believe.

And meanwhile those United States, led by some guy doing a victory lap in Kenya, have manoeuvred themselves into a curious position. The Americans are now providing diplomatic cover for both Turkey and Iran, while from their opposing sides they, respectively, both attack America’s remaining allies.

Or rather, to keep up-to-date, they attack the few countries left in the region which are actually “on our side,” in the sense that they are unambiguously opposed to our common enemy, “Islamism.” That would be Egypt, Israel, Jordan — each getting pompous lectures from the State Department, whenever they try to defend themselves. I might have mentioned George Bush’s old Iraq, except, Iraqi Kurdistan is the only part of that country still unambiguously “on our side.” (As for the the Sa’udis, it depends which faction; they are feline and feminine and try to have everything both ways.)

But that is the bad news.

The good news is that the United States is no longer a significant player in the Middle East. The net effect of American ministrations, since Obama came to power, and initiated a consistent policy of insulting America’s friends, and encouraging her enemies — in an extended display of moral preening — has been to relieve this former “hyperpower” of any important rôle.

This is an aspect of the “Iran deal” that has been overlooked in the media; even by the “neocons” who are usually sharp to such things. On Obama’s instruction, Kerry freed America of her last consequential forward position: which was enforcing the embargoes that constricted the ayatollahs’ aggressive options. In effect, America has now abandoned Iran as she has abandoned Iraq and Afghanistan; abandoning Israel into the bargain; along with Egypt and everyone. There are substantial Fleet forces still in theatre, to maintain some “optics,” but they no longer have any serious business there.

While it is true that Kerry and company have now removed the remaining impediments to Iran’s development as a nuclear power; in a longer view, he has only hastened the inevitable. If the states that Iran targets (not only Israel) want to do something about it, they will have to act themselves. Paradoxically, this means Israel is no longer alone. She has friends now in Cairo, Amman, and even Riyadh, that she could not have hoped to keep had Iran been successfully isolated. So thank you for this mitzvah, John Kerry.

Also, thank everyone for the cheap oil. The Arabs are drilling it faster and faster, despite falling prices, because they desperately need the cash. And now with Iran back in the market, the Age of OPEC is completely behind us. For meanwhile, fracking has been developed, and even should the Persian Gulf become a radioactive wasteland, it will just be a hiccough in the oil supply.

Thank not only Obama and Kerry every time you fill your tank; but the big oil companies, too, for increasing their margins as the bulk prices fall, thus grandfathering their profits. They will need cash in hand for any future investments. To say nothing of the pension plans that are sustained in the equity markets for big oil, big banks, big everything. We can reasonably foresee a new era of abundant, cheap fossil fuels, ours for the burning. And if it weren’t for the impending demographic crash, and the proliferation of wealth-sucking bureaucracy, we’d have another Golden Age of Capitalism, with growth as through the baby-booming ’fifties and ’sixties.

As it happens, the world is going to Hell in a bullet train, but ho! The beauty is that it will not crash where we were expecting. But then, it never does.

I am very bad at remembering birthdays, dinner dates, anniversaries. Perhaps that’s why I now live alone. This week I set some kind of record, not only by forgetting the birthday of a good friend, which I suppose could be overlooked in some years. But this was a round-numbered birthday. Saint Philip Neri turned five hundred last Tuesday. By the time I realized, it was too late to attend the Mass. I have prayed to him, however, and promised to make it up.

Meanwhile I want to mention, again, the book on Saint Philip, by Jonathan Robinson of the Oratory, which is at last published. (I mentioned it previously, here.) Angelico Press has done a fine job, not only on the typography and design, but also in getting it out promptly, after another publisher (who will be nameless) made a hash. I am quite impressed with Angelico, a recent enterprise whose whole current list is superb. Good publishers are extremely rare. I’m not aware of even one in Canada, and Angelico may now be the best we have for the Catholic milieu in the English language.

A good publisher works exclusively with manuscripts he thinks deserve the light of day; he never publishes shoddy work to make a quick buck, hook a subsidy, swing a deal, or other low motive. This is because he is not sleazy.

On the other hand, because he believes in both the work and the author, he is tireless in promoting them. If there is any way to make the book sell (that is ethical), he will discover it. He must take risks, which he must judge shrewdly. He will be, invariably, both a man of letters and a business man, and he will thrive in the creative tension between these sometimes incompatible callings.

There is nothing whatever wrong with “selling” a worthy product whose benefits are real. On the contrary, it is quite wrong to miss opportunities, or be otherwise lazy, or unnecessarily shy, when one is a salesman.

And a good publisher is a Godsend to a good author: not only for dealing with the “stuff” for which few authors are equipped, by talent or disposition. They become friends, of great use to each other on multiple levels. And as always with true friends, however the relation started — usually, with a meeting of eyes — the entanglements develop into a loyalty beyond all material attachments. This is ultimately what Holy Church is about — a society of friends that extends through and beyond space and time, in Christ.

Saint Philip Neri is worth knowing, as friend. He is incidentally very charming and lovable. Father Robinson’s book is, I think, the ideal introduction to him, for an intelligent reader of our day. He has presented, with approachable learning and also with wit, exactly what it is about this man that has not aged in five hundred years.

The “embodied mysticism” mentioned in the subtitle guides to the Guide, as it were: someone to take us past the obstacles in our present environment, where what is meant by the word “mysticism” is not understood; where it is instead confused with a lot of jolly nonsense. For “mysticism” is not some experience to wait for. It is the way of life, itself, beginning now; the only way through the shutters of illusion. And it begins in a humble, earthy way.

The surtitle, applied at the last — In No Strange Land — is from the poem by Francis Thompson. It speaks of a realm that is invisible, intangible, unknowable. Yet which in grace we may view, touch, and know. Saint Philip is the remarkable guide to that “embodiment,” and Father Robinson will take you to him directly, here.