Essays in Idleness

Yesterday’s little Idlepost grew more than three times in length overnight, while I was sleeping. Or rather, I was not sleeping, thanks to the wandering of a spinal disc that “slipt,” twenty years ago. This introduced me to “a world of pain” (line from the comic movie, The Big Lebowski, 1998), in which I live with many other people: too many, alas, to earn any of us a return on moaning. Still, one moans when one can, even prayerfully to God.

The world is full of advice, and I have hesitated to write this not from fear of being marked as a whiner, but rather fear of the emails I might be inviting, suggesting various cures. Trust me: over twenty years, one becomes well-briefed. And: thanks for your prayers, and your encouragement, and forgiveness when I fall behind the mail.

Pain management has been a way of life in every generation; and there were many more before the discovery of modern painkillers, than there have been since. It is part of the human condition, and as I was remarking recently, it is something that distinguishes us from the other animals. They all seem to be healthy and whole: for the simple reason that, in nature, the animal not in perfect condition is picked off. A slipt disc, for instance, would be curtains for a creature whose defence against predators is to outrun them.

I saw a rabbit once, in imperfect condition, being run down by a hunter’s dog on an open grassy field. After a pro forma dash of perhaps thirty yards, and only one deak to send the dog skidding, he just sat there. Perhaps it was the combination of the distance and my imagination: it seemed the rabbit was at peace, when the dog took him. That, or he was frozen in fear. We, or more precisely, I, cannot read minds. Not even hare brains.

Humans, too, might behave nobly from ignoble motives; I’ve done that myself a time or two, so that the praise I received sounded in my ears like a terrible condemnation, and I owned to the truth to make it stop. But to assume an ignoble motive, is ignoble.

Like the rabbit, I gather, did many Christians in the Forum behave, as the starved lions came for them; and likewise, countless other Christians, who have gone to their executioners through the centuries, grasping the futility of flight: “Here, this is my body.” And too, some noble pagans, as the virgin Polyxena, in a line from Euripides’ Hecuba that has haunted me since I was a schoolboy: “Here, young man, if you want to stab my heart; or here is my neck, if you’d rather cut my windpipe.”

Others, I am sure, are so overtaken by anxiety, that they scream and yell. I was told once by an old soldier that persons condemned to the firing squad have their hands tied behind for their own dignity. There is an animal impulse to guard against blows with flailing arms, which in the circumstance is quite pointless. The modern convention is to administer tranquillizers, as a way to avoid embarrassing scenes. This must undermine the work of grace, however, and confuse judgement in the prisoner’s last moments. Therefore it strikes me as unChristian.

It is in that context we must consider “mere pain,” not as an end but a beginning. Often, I think, worse than the pain, is the anxiety that goes with it. One’s attention is focused on the disease, uselessly, if the pain is to go on and on. It makes sense to focus on impending death, with all of our spiritual resources; but it is morbid to focus on disease in this way.

This, incidentally, is my one hundredth consecutive daily essay. After reflecting on my situation at the end of November — the combination of acute physical pain, and financial desperation; the incurable nature of the pain, and the unlikelihood of finding adequately paid writing or speaking engagements, given my orthodox Catholic views — I tried prayer. I do not expect simple answers, for God does not write an agony column, nor reply to voicemails in sequence. But when I phrased the question simply (“Give me a clew!”) my mind formed the answer. It was to make the pain my goad, to write these essays: not when in the mood, but daily. Since, I notice, God has provided, and my prediction that I would starve by Christmas did not come true.

So what shall I do now? Continue.

Slightly to the east of Parkdale, and visible from the roof of the High Doganate, is a place known as “Downtown Toronto.” It consists of large hexahedra, with glassy surfaces and internal lighting that glows very bright at night. Some other, mostly convex, tri-dimensional polytopes have been added for variety; and there is one spike that rises above all these, with an annular tube tossed on it, as if by some playful, gargantuan child. On closer inspection through opera glasses one finds these polyhedra rest on a common horizontal ground array, divided into rectangles by wide ribbons of a greyish substance. Magnification may also reveal tiny, living beings crawling through this grid: in appearance some curious, bipedal species of ant. Small metal traps pass back and forth along the ribbons, randomly capturing and releasing these creatures. During daylight hours, they may also be seen going into and coming out of the fixed shiny structures, which might be their nests. Thousands and thousands of them may suddenly pour out, perhaps in response to a predatory threat; or it might be their meal time.

So, anyway, I have observed, from my elevated position. But upon walking through the array, I have discovered it is actually roads, cars, skyscrapers, and people. Things are not always as they first appear.

*

My little essay above was inspired by a visit to the ultra-cool website of Unknown Fields Division, a “nomadic design research studio,” in some kind of cosmic relation with the (ultra-cool) Architectural Association, of London. My attention was drawn thither by an article the scientifictionist Tim Maughan wrote in BBC Future. It is an account of a voyage with this group, by container ship between mega-ports in Korea and China. (I’ve sworn off links for Lent.)

The piece is terrifying. It is a dazzling, or more precisely, dazzled account of the giant cranes, container mounds, truck queues aground, ship queues afloat, and apartment skyscrapers surrounding, cargo ports the size of cities — within which everything is computerized for maximum efficiency. Visible from space, but invisible to us, these monstrous facilities move the consumer products between one national economy and another. The group were guests of the Maersk company, a global shipping line which is also one-fifth of the Danish economy. At sea, they were never out of sight of other container ships, travelling in lanes guided by GPS, and also marked with deep-sea buoys. Life on board is described, under direction from computers: mind-numbing routines, utterly unlike those of seafarers through history.

One may describe these things objectively and dispassionately; one might then bemoan the loss of jobs, as advances in robotics gradually eliminate the need for human skills, thus saving huge amounts of money — for humans are extremely costly to maintain. But once this is achieved, how will the former labour force earn money to buy all the “product”? It is a conundrum of which the intelligent are already aware.

A certain Liam Young, resident guru in Unknown Fields, instead dreams of “co-opting” the whole system to serve some master plan for income equality. This is the essential idea of the Left — not equality in itself, but instead the idea of co-opting — i.e. theft, rapine. Thieves, pirates, tend not to concern themselves with how the production is brought about, only with how it is to be appropriated, and re-distributed. I have tired of explaining that the wealth on which they focus their ministerial intentions was built on cost/benefit analysis; that it works on profit and loss; that Stalinesque schemes reduce efficiency. Too, I have tired of breathless technological visions of the future.

Paradoxically, the more efficient a system becomes, the more fragile. Conversely, the more robust, the more it provides for back-up and down-time and redundancy. It is ridiculously easy to imagine little irruptions of nature that would bring down our house of cards, whether the management were greedy capitalist pigs, or Gulag supervisors. (In China, they have both; but then, increasingly, so do we.)

Spiritual considerations entered into the economic arrangements of all societies, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, until quite recently in historical time. All were thus rendered inefficient by the standards of today; none could accommodate our modern “economies of scale.” The systematic elimination of “irrational” thinking, and its replacement by purely economic calculation (whether capitalist or socialist or “mixed”), is vindicated in retrospect. By ignoring the resistance of those who would rather starve than go to Hell, it has not only filled the world with shiny, vicious junk, but fed it.

Yet as the futurist sages have also shown, the spiritual considerations will be always with us. Their own moralizing confirms this. The old are replaced with new taboos — suggested, as Marx could never see, by the very means of production. Men will be equal; men and women will be equal; finally, men and women and animals will be equal. Any distinction between one and another will set off an alarm in the machine.

The struggle at the heart of the Gospels, to put it scripturally, — or in Christ’s mission to Earth, to put it more traditionally, — is against the Devil. I can’t imagine how this point, driven home with a mallet in the Old Mass today, can have been overlooked in so much of the modern Church. Christ casts out devils; and through this Lenten season we recall the dramatic desert encounter between the Son of Truth and the Father of Lies. That Christ will win the victory, or rather, has already won, is the resolution of this conflict. But contrary to the code of apathy which governs proceedings in the Church of Nice, we are not innocent bystanders.

For us, thank God, the war isn’t over. (We’re not dead yet.) Look around, and this will be seen. The front line runs through every human heart, and so long as there is breath in us we can know that there is no such thing as neutrality at the front line. Christ is Our Lord and captain, but if we do not also recognize that Satan is the Enemy, we are not actually in the battle.

Oculi mei semper ad Dominum, … “My eyes are ever towards the Lord: for He shall pluck my feet out of the snare. Look Thou upon me, and have mercy on me; for I am alone and poor.”

These words, plucked from Psalm XXIV, launch the Introit at this Third Sunday in Lent, and express our condition, exactly, even when we are turned the right way. And when we are not, we are devil’s prey. We look to Christ, because we look for orders.

And if we do, we find He leads, by example as every great field commander. We find Him in the Gospel today, doing what? Casting out a devil. It is a passage from Luke, in the course of which we are told, that “every kingdom divided against itself shall be brought to desolation.” … And, “he that is not with Me is against Me.” … That, “you gather with Me or, you scatter.”

For this is war.

Is the Church then a field hospital? Yes, it is a function of the Church to bind her wounded, and to heal them. Note this latter point: to heal, not to provide those displaying ghastly wounds with certificates of health. That is not mercy, in a field hospital.

“Let no man deceive you with vain words.” In today’s Epistle, Saint Paul lays down the law, telling the Ephesians without hesitation or doubt what these wounds are. He mentions fornication, uncleanness, covetousness, obscenity, foolish talk and scurrility, and finally, unbelief — all the causes dear to the Left. These are wounds that need treatment, in the field hospital on our side, and our doctors must know what they are, and judge them accurately.

But the war is not won with field hospitals. The aspect of Christian life we overlook, or flinch from, is the field artillery. This is what Our Lord brings forward. We intend to take territory from the Enemy; to make him abandon the territory he has. We are not negotiating a hudna with the devils. Our purpose is to drive them from the field, with extreme prejudice — to create some space where we can stop taking casualties. In other words: to cast out devils.

Their opponents complain that, “Daesh terrorist gangs continue to defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity.” I am quoting Iraq’s minister of tourism, who uses the Arabic acronym for the group that has apparently bulldozed the archaeological remains of Nimrud, on top of its other accomplishments. I’m sure the presidents of the United States and France, the prime ministers of England, Italy, and Japan, the chancellor of Germany and many other world leaders would agree with this sentiment. And let me add that these gangs have hurt my feelings, too.

*

When I was rather younger, I awoke one morning to hear birdsong: city sparrows, singing in the ivy outside my window. This window faced east, and the dawn was coming in, “with little feet, like a gilded Pavlova.” If memory serves, I was also curled up with a beautiful Jewish ballerina, penniless but quick in the belief that we would live happily ever after — thus completing the translation of a poem by Ezra Pound, life imitating art:

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
That the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.
Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.

Life is short, or long, depending on one’s choice of timer. We were all young once, and some of us more foolish than others. I think back on my Ophelia, from forty years ago, fallen into the waters of time; loved, and quite lost. …

My thought on that morning had been: time itself must be immortal. Though not, then, in any way a Christian, let alone the fierce crazy Roman I’ve become, I was nevertheless in the habit of entertaining theological speculations. I became convinced the very moment I experienced was perfectly immortal; that it would be preserved whole in the memory of God through all ages; or perhaps even in my memory, after my own death.

*

The history of Nimrud on the Tigris, as we knew it from dry bones — the biblical Kalakh; the Levekh of the cuneiform inscriptions; the city of the Great Ziggurat, once capital to the prodigious Assyrian empire; the site near the little Christian village of Noomanea, where Sir Austen Henry Layard once turned his spade — can make a very grand topic. What it looks like now, we can only check from satellite photographs.

Happily the late Polish archaeologist, Janusz Meuszynski, systematically recorded on slides every fragment from the site that remained at location, back in the 1970s. From that, what the Jihadis have destroyed can still be “virtually” recreated. The inscriptions that provide such extraordinary historical detail, from the reigns of kings dead through thirty centuries, were also, long before, carefully transcribed by the learned Christian Orientalists. All this, too, will be lost in due course, from one cause or another; but meanwhile let us take such cold comfort, as may still be in the taps.

The Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III — thank God, removed to the British Museum more than a century ago — was found at Nimrud. It depicts, among foreign tributaries, Jehu, the ancient King of Israel, and is thus a direct transcription onto dated Assyrian limestone of what is also reported in our Bible. That was 841 BC: one of innumerable physical proofs of the historical veracity of what our children are taught to sneer at as “fairy tales,” in today’s jackboot-secular schools.

For more than a generation, now, the barbaric savages who teach in our post-Christian universities have been filling their heads with e.g. the malicious lies of the late Edward Said. They are drilled by these Pavlovs to drool, promptly, upon hearing the word “Orientalism,” and then woof, yap, and bay at “Western Imperialism,” like little attack poodles. This also hurts my feelings.

The bas-reliefs, the ivories, the sculptures — the colossal, winged, man-headed lions that once guarded palace entrances and were found in such a wonderful state of preservation — are, so far as they remained on site, or were retained in the Mosul Museum, now being smashed to bits on camera; or ground to gravel by heavy machinery beyond the local competence to manufacture or design. The “irony” here is that much of this sophisticated equipment, and probably even the mallets, were paid for by the profits from other archaeological objects which these Muslim fanatics, and their “moderate” enablers, have been selling in the international black market for art and antiquities.

Indeed: these videos of gratuitous destruction, which our media so generously promote, are probably designed to drive the prices up on the gems they have for sale; as, too, the beheading videos are intended to increase prices, and guarantee payment, on the heads of such other hostages as they may capture, from time to time. (I have noticed that many of the objects we see being smashed are actually plaster copies, of originals exported in the good old days. One must be familiar with practices in the bazaars of the Middle East to follow the many angles, in a culture that exalts low cunning.)

Mostly the Jihadis purchase weapons with this money, which they use to kill Christians and other “infidels.” This provides a nice moral illustration of a circumstance in which it would be wrong to pay for the goods offered, and right to take them by violent force.

*

But set all this “punditry” aside. What strikes me now is the thought of ancient Nimrud, in the days when living men and women filled its streets, rulers ruled, but also children played, and lovers retired to their bowers. And there were birds, then, and vines I should think, and even east-facing windows.

Chatting with some seminarians this week, about art and artists, and one remarkable artist in particular, I raised a point about “quitting while you’re ahead.” We could equally, I suppose, have been discussing Las Vegas, where persons disposed to gambling sometimes congregate, and where some have been known to continue betting even after — notwithstanding the odds — they have made handsome profits. Winning streaks do not last forever; nor losing streaks, although these latter can end in death.

As an avid, if incompetent watercolourist, I am perhaps over-familiar with this issue. It is a very rare thing when suddenly I discover that I have painted something that is “not half bad.” Pausing to thank the Holy Spirit for His assistance, I then reload the brush to make further improvements. They fail, badly. Soon I am trying to undo what I have done — a “reform of the reform” as it were — further advancing the metamorphosis of my once beautiful painting into a dog’s breakfast. What had seemed for a moment to be an unusually poetic depiction of winter light piercing an ice-fog in the Humber ravine, now more resembles a deluge, with shipwrecks, or perhaps they are discarded transit buses.

A talented poet of my once-acquaintance, once asked for my advice as an objective editor on a sequence he had written. My advice was, “remove all the last lines.” As the discussion extended to the rest of his works, my advice was enlarged to, “Remove the last line from every poem you have ever written; or the last stanza if the poem is long.” I should have quit while I was ahead.

In all the extravagance of his wordplay, I have noticed that Shakespeare knows when to stop. Marlowe often took things just that little bit farther, but not our Will. The most extraordinary scene has been developed and realized but then, “The rest is silence.”

Aggiornamento was the pretty Italian word used by Pope St John XXIII, to describe the purpose of the Ecumenical Council he projected in 1959. Englishmen, of course, do not understand Italian, but the word flowers in their ears all the same. It sounds like some happy journey into spring. But while it was in vogue through the 1960s, people everywhere came to understand it meant, “bringing up to date.”

At first, the sainted pope used the word quite specifically, with reference to canon law, which had been assembled and harmonized in a uniform, official, single-volume Code of Canon Law for the first time, in 1917. A revised, second edition of that seemed to be called for.

Cardinal Burke would know more about this, but from my limited understanding, the canon law that went into effect at Pentecost, 1918, had been a major undertaking. It had involved many scholars and broad-ranging research, under the direction of the formidable Pietro Gasparri, a Vatican secretary of state with a reputation for getting things done, regardless of whether they were possible.

Yet, this was not so impressive as a previous assembly of a Corpus Juris Canonici, at Bologna in the mid-twelfth century. This had been done by a single man, the brilliant Camaldolese monk, Johannes Gratian, about whom I’ve always wanted to know more. His Decretum (as it came also to be called) is a stupendous thing — not merely explaining what Church law must be, in the canones, but expounding its principles in scinitillating maxims and dicta. Gratian had pulled together into this self-consistent corpus every significant ruling from Moses forward to the recently concluded Second Lateran Council, in light of Roman law through Justinian, and with sidelong glances at Celtic, Saxon, and Visigothic legal orders. I am told that lawyers have gone to their graves in a state of bliss, just contemplating it.

Which is not to demean the great Burchard of Worms, who had attempted something similar a century before; nor the many other fine legal minds who had flourished in the first millennium of the Church; nor the many more who flourished after. Nor is it to suggest that the Decretum Gratiani was the only, or even the final word on anything. It is merely to insinuate that Gratian “wrote the book” on Catholic law, in a way similar to that in which Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa on Catholic theology.

Many other documents had since been added to the mix — thousands — but Gratian’s Decretum (with later notes) had continued to provide a sheet anchor. And the further beauty was, that it had no formal authority in the Church, whatever. It was, in effect, unwritten law in a written form. The mark of a great and noble institution — and what is Holy Church if not that? — may be seen in such arrangements. She does not rest her Positive Law upon neat programmatic formulae — like a revolutionary constitution, arbitrarily imposed — but on a distillation of human and divine wisdom, acquired over thousands of years. She is spacious: her distinctions are subtle but exact; her truths ordered to accommodate each other, assembling themselves hierarchically in the interstices of reason and revelation, as light dappled through the leaves. They are not “invented” but “discovered” (in the modern senses of both terms). When she needs something, she invariably finds it is already there. She requires only servants with the depth of mind to retrieve it, excavating where necessary down to the Natural Law at the centre of the Earth.

The intention behind that Codex Iuris Canonici (the Code of 1917) was good, unquestionably, the project having been launched by Pope St Pius X, and brought to fruition by Benedict XV. It cut a highway through the overgrown thicket, abrogating all trees in the way, thus making the law more accessible to persons of mediocre intelligence: in effect, the modern, buzzsaw approach to gardening, followed up in the liturgy half a century later. I myself would have been totally opposed to the whole project, but people consulted me even less before I was born. The revision foreseen by Pope St John XXIII was not completed until 1983, when Pope St John-Paul II signed off on it, bringing the “reform of the reform” of canon law into force for Advent in that year. In the meantime, Vatican II itself had created much additional turbulence for the smoothing, slowing the process down.

But I return to this little-known, or little-remembered fact: that the aggiornamento began with the fairly modest ambition of revising the text of the Code of Canon Law. Within a couple of years Pope St John himself, a man of energy and enthusiasm and what I might almost call overbearing goodwill, was speaking of a much grander enterprise, and using the same word to refer poetically to an aggiornamento of the entire Church — as if to clean out the cobwebs of two thousand years from every pipe of every organ. Nothing specific was foreseen, however; it was only a poetical flourish.

The one actual change upon which Pope St John insisted, he had already proclaimed: removing the word perfidius (“faithless”) from the Good Friday liturgy, where it had been used to qualify the word “Jews.” This genuine saint, who had done so much to rescue, hide, and save so many Jewish men, women, and children from the Holocaust during the War, rightly saw that any hint of anti-Semitism must be washed out of the Church’s thoughts — acting dramatically from the Sanctuary in 1959 to have the prayer for the conversion of the Jews repeated without the offending word. (Deo gratias!)

Compare: the omission of one word, with schemes to revise and rewrite everything in sight. And note: the popular idea that Vatican II was required to achieve that tiny but crucial alteration. Like most subsequent ideas about Vatican II, it is false, ignorant, and on closer inspection, mendacious.

Now, there’s a point to all this, and perhaps I will get to it tomorrow.

Speaking truth to power becomes quite impossible if the speaker has failed first to speak truth unto himself. The attempt might help to teach him that speaking truth is painful, in this vale of tears, and the more excruciating after one’s cheering section has dropped away. You will know that you have successfully spoken truth to power only later in the evening, when the Gestapo arrives; good luck speaking truth to them.

It is supposed to be an old Quaker saying, which would give it some original dignity, for the Religious Society of Friends did knowingly court persecution, while eschewing defences, in the seventeenth century. They were certainly high on Parrhesia, the biblical term that is constantly on a certain pontiff’s lips. (See Father Hunwicke, the classical scholar.) I, who totally reject the Quakers’ Arian, pacifist, teetotal, and radically egalitarian tenets (for starters), nevertheless still take their founder George Fox (1624–91) for one of my heroes. I was deeply impressed by his Journal, once upon a time, sensing in it the burning sincerity of a good if somewhat humourless man. (Look: the Everyman edition is still on my shelves, after forty years!) His instinct to simplicity in private life and works is commendable, and though sometimes heretical, his readings of Scripture contain flashes of prophetic insight.

As ever, the sect which followed him dispersed in many schismatic channels, so that we now have multiple branches of Friends who aren’t much friends of each other, as all drift farther from their Christian roots. I have met a couple of impressively conscientious Quakers, though, from congregations that must have been doing something right.

Fox was not author to the phrase, “speaking truth to power,” nor any of his high-sounding contemporaries, so far as I know. Instead, it seems to have come out of the civil rights movement in the USA, exploding after the American Friends Service Committee used it for the title of one of their pinkish tracts against the Cold War, in 1955. Smugness is implicit in the phrase, and by no accident it has since been popularized chiefly by persons with more actual power — in terms of available, aggressive supporters — than the adversaries they taunt with it. Fox would never have done this: he was in my view too decent a man. Yet it is one of the oversights in Fox, that in volubly proposing a public holiness, he was increasing the scope for public hypocrisy; the humourless being slow to catch a paradox in motion.

Stand your ground on moral issues, bravely; and speak the truth to anyone who will listen; but not too boldly. Christ was not a moral exhibitionist, and neither have the true Saints called moralizing attention to themselves. They fear God but are also vividly aware of the Devil and his snares. They realize that in the very moment they appear to triumph, Hell may be gaping before them. God may temper the wind to the shorn lamb, but conversely, He may let it howl on the woolly. Grandstanding would not be advised.

The Prophets, Old Testament and New, did not speak truth to power. They spoke truth rather to all Israel, and upon a divine command. Their boldness was not their own. The truth spoken by the prophet was moreover transparently not his own. Often it was mysterious in worldly terms: it contained things that could not be understood within the conventions of the day, or for long after. It had the ring of transcendent truth, as opposed to the whine of situational plausibility. The prophet spoke for God to the people, not for the people to their king. This could not court popularity; and as Christ reminds, the prophets were despised.

It is from such reflections I have come to believe that those who say they speak truth to power, or even think it, are lying to themselves. The demagogic pose negates the message.

But how can we escape posture, and begin at least to speak truth to ourselves?

As Lent progresses, one is reminded, by the progress of one’s own little failures, one’s own nasty little private infamies, that the process begins and ends in speaking truth to God’s little priest in the Confessional.

According to the latest research, he writes facetiously, coffee may be good for your heart. It just might prevent cholesterol build-up in the arteries and … blah blah blah. I refer to some Korean study in the news this morning, but the findings (not of causation but of statistical correlation) are hardly new. There was for instance a big Dutch study five years ago, which redeemed tea as well as coffee, and I vaguely remember others. “More research is needed,” say all the people who make money from such pointless research. We are trained to nod sleepily in agreement. These hugely expensive, perpetually inconclusive, and very soft epidemiological studies are what most people have in mind when the magic word, “science,” is invoked: for we are living in an age of magic.

Actual science would show the mechanism by which a specific constituent in coffee, such as caffeine, operates within the human metabolism to produce specific reactions in a long, very specific chain, leading to a specific result. (I have over-simplified, because at each of these stages there are innumerable complicating factors.) The rest is, to be perfectly colloquial, bullshit, as a “spokesperson” for the British Heart Foundation made abundantly clear, when commenting on the Dutch study. She said having one cigarette with your coffee would cancel all the benefits. There was nothing about this in the study, it was a candid expression of her superstitious beliefs.

For decades, as most readers should now know, public health authorities condemned delicious, fatty foods on that plausible argument (all magic must be made “plausible” to convince) about clogging the arteries. Now they have quietly taken it back, without owning to the misery spread by their lies through several generations. They mounted collateral attacks on beer, wine, and liquors, which likewise proved false; and their continuing campaigns against tobacco depend on the same methodology.

What they have done is far more evil than this, however: for they have been exploiting the human propensity to guilt, which serves an irreplaceable purpose in the moral order. Compunction about sin and wrongdoing is distracted to meaningless dietary issues. The success of the nannying public health authorities has helped the principalities and powers to accomplish a complete moral inversion — in which abstinence and fasting to a spiritual end is now dismissed as silly, yet dieting for health is done with insufferably morbid gravity. We have, as a consequence, a society of obsessive dieters, deluded fitness fanatics, and low-calorie muffin eaters, who are utterly shameless in committing crimes contra naturam: that Culture of Death which Saint John-Paul identified with such harrowing accuracy.

It should also be noted, for the benefit of credulous materialists, that the time and money invested in gathering and analyzing inconsequential health statistics subtracts from serious medical research into suspected causes of disease — including the hard and focused epidemiology that can usefully assist. Resources for such work are always finite, yet almost everything I see flagged in the media is an example of resources bled away.

A deeper note needs to be sounded, however, against the consistent tendency of all this “pop,” or more precisely, “crap science.” The target will ever be some innocent human pleasure; genuinely sinful ones with direct and potentially grave health consequences (sexual promiscuity, for instance, or sodomy), are shied away from, for fear of the politically correct. Class is evident in each choice of target: typically some consolation, some little delight that makes life more endurable for the poor. (Smoking is a primary example.)

Soft science is then combined with moral posturing to provide cover for the politicians, and senior bureaucrats. They publicize supposed health risks to justify raising taxes on what are now identified in the public imagination as “corrupting luxuries” — using the argument of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, perhaps the most corrupt individual in the history of philosophy, before Heidegger. An impression is given of taxing the rich, while in fact sucking the poor dry: a basic principle of progressive democracy.

The moral reality is exposed in state lotteries, which do real, direct, and vicious harm to the poor, but on which the state increasingly depends for revenue.

I have no idea whether coffee is good for you, by the way, or in what amounts. I do know for a certainty, however, that going to Hell would be bad for you, which is why we must urgently cut down on our consumption of pseudo-scientific, liberal and progressive blather.

Sometimes I have opinions on things. An example would be the “Isleworth Mona Lisa,” in the news lately. It is not, definitely not — even by a wild stretch of the imagination, while rubbing at bedbugs in both eyes — not, by Leonardo. How do I know this? By looking at a picture of it on the Internet.

This was before learning a few other things, about this painting that washed up from some old manor house in Somerset, England, just before the First World War. The crackerjack who spotted it saw that it resembled the Mona Lisa. Once cleaned, it still bore a family resemblance to Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, the Florentine merchant who commissioned Leonardo’s extremely famous portrait now in the Louvre. She looks perhaps a decade younger, according to some viewers, but is posed in the same way, and is wearing some attempt at the same winning smile.

Everyone agrees the background of this Isleworth painting was dabbed in by some clumsy oaf. Only the face and hands are optimistically attributed to Leonardo, with the plausible suggestion that it was his first draught. The plausibility comes from the master’s work habits, or rather, a satirical misunderstanding of them. He painted few formal works, and when he did was slow to start, and even slower to finish. (He held exalted views on the possibilities of his art.) When he repainted a picture, as for instance the Paris and London versions of the Madonna of the Rocks, both are breathtaking; but in different ways, and there are many significant variations. He was not some duffer just trying to get it right.

It was anyway not the background, which I hardly noticed, but the foreground that convinced me, very quickly, that the “Isleworth” could not be from Leonardo’s brush. This is because it is glib. While it will pass as a likeness of the same sitter — not so much younger, I think, as bereft of intensity — it lacks entirely the spirit with which Leonardo infused not only the Mona Lisa, but all of his paintings. It was not in him to paint so glibly. He was not a clown. But if he had actually painted this damp squib, it would not have survived him. Elementary self-interest, if not aesthetic revulsion, would have caused him to toss it in the fireplace right away.

Now, the clincher for those who are motivated by “reason,” very narrowly defined, is the canvas it was painted on. Leonardo painted on wood. The real Mona Lisa is on poplar (which has slightly warped); others of his paintings are on walnut; infamously, The Last Supper went on rotting plaster. Leonardo had used linen: but only as a sketching medium with tempera, and then only when he was art-student young. He would not have begun a formally commissioned painting on such a support, which came into common use for serious painting only a century later, and on sail canvas, at Venice.

That would be the final killer for any attempt to attribute the painting to Leonardo “scientifically,” but the mysterious Swiss foundation that claims to have proved “scientifically” that the Isleworth portrait was by him, shuffles around this insuperable fact. They claim to have employed “research physicists” who established “with 99 percent certainty” that “the two versions” were by the same hand. I am therefore 99 percent certain these employees knew nothing about art. I leave their knowledge of chemistry to the chemists.

No serious Leonardo connoisseur or scholarly expert has ever bought into the authenticity of the Isleworth painting, and none ever will. There are many other bad copies of the Mona Lisa on which they have also never wasted their time. Among those living, Martin Kemp, Luke Syson, and Frank Zöllner are now on record contradicting the Swiss foundation, and sneering at the thing. The scienticists in Geneva, who did not consult them, now dismiss them for not having examined the painting themselves. Why would they?

I mention this matter only because it illustrates one of my bugbears: the use of “science” to perpetrate frauds on the ignorant public. I have no idea what the relationship is between the Swiss foundation, and the current owners of the painting, now kept in a Swiss bank vault. But I note this is a secret, of the sort that should inspire the Ciceronian question, Cui bono?

Natural science is of some use in certain specialized circumstances, and I have no desire whatever to suppress it. It can sometimes answer questions that are extremely specific, and shallow. It absolutely cannot answer intelligent questions. Those who claim it can should be ignored; or punished, should that prove impossible.

For the twelfth consecutive year, I have failed to find Saint David of Wales in my Roman Catholic breviary. In my previous, Anglican experiences of March 1st, it was no trouble at all. The erstwhile Bishop of Menevia (died no later than 601 AD) was ever at the top of the Kalendar for March, and thus the Welsh saint’s Legend ever before me when, on this date, I wanted a name-day to elude the rigours of Lent. Happily it is Sunday today, anyway.

As I have already confided to gentle reader, in some previous Idlepost, I was not named after David of Wales (or, Dafydd, if one wants to get Welsh about it). Born rather on the day Catherine of Siena died (though 673 years later), I was not named for her, either; nor for the Psalmist as might be supposed; but instead for King David of Scotland, then dead for a nice round eight hundred years. Not a Saint, but hey, my family weren’t Catholic.

The Patron of Wales was (Catholic), however, and as we learn from the chronicler Giraldus, one of the best, performing for that principality — once rather larger than it is now — much the same services as did Saint Patrick for Ireland. In 1398, Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury ordered the Feast of David kept throughout his province of the Church, which I suppose will have to do; daresay I’d have heard “Dewi Sant” acknowledged, had I awakened this morning in Cardiff.

Or, “Dewi Ddyrwr,” as he is also known, from the tradition that he was “a drinker of water,” which I have always found an insipid beverage. By this account he was also a vegetarian. That he completed this trifecta by being rather short, is indicated by one of his miracles. Addressing a synod at what came to be known as Llanddewibrefi (never try to pronounce Welsh names, you might hurt yourself), he found himself neither seen nor heard. A dove then alighted on his shoulder, and the ground heaved, lifting him into view.

The banner of Saint David is a yellow cross, on a field of black; or, vice versa. This has the advantage over the more common Red Dragon of Cadwaladr (passant, on a field of green and white) that it is not a Tudor standard. When Wales becomes independent again, as it surely will the way things are going, I do hope the Cross will be retrieved.

Parkdale, which is to say, the inner core of the Greater Parkdale Area, in which the High Doganate is located, is a melting pot of innumerable overlapping ethnications. Among our most exotic immigrants are those from the far east: Nova Scotia, for instance, and Newfoundland. Shopping, at least for food in Parkdale, is a treat. We have every sort of specialist grocery, and in effect, groceries within groceries. One gets one’s Tibetan yak sausage, for instance, from a Serbian butcher whose store is cowboy-themed; ingredients for one’s Somali maraq from the Sinhalese grocery (via their Maldivian connexion); but the exhilarating, cardamom-infused gashaato instead via the Sikh Punjabis, as supplement to their Bengali sweets. Note, this culinary cross-dressing is the opposite of multiculturalism. Rather I would call it, “downmarket fusion.”

This being Lent, I try to avoid fish on Fridays. There’s enough of that for the other days, beans on rice will do, or perhaps sinfully on the last two Fridays, I indulged a craving for sweet potato in a Siamese red sauce. I woke this morning with a craving for salt, as well as protein, and as God is merciful, recalled to mind a little platter of Digby chicks in my fridge — obtained some days before from the Maritime ethnic section of a cheap local supermarket.

Digby Chicken has long been Nova Scotia’s answer to Bombay Duck. The latter, also salty, and so powerful in flavour and scent that it requires careful packaging, is actually a fish, the bummalo. Gentle reader may already be trying to construct an etymology from that, but there is no hope for him. The fish is actually harvested from the waters off Bombay. It was transported from there by rail, in the good old days of British Imperialism, aboard the Bombay Dhak (i.e. the Bombay Mail), which gave rise to such expressions as, e.g. “You smell like the Bombay Dhak.” Surely, that will be enough to go on.

Whereas, to my understanding (and my mommy was from Nova Scotia, remember), no one in its presence could be in the slightest doubt that Digby chicken are in fact intensely smoked and salted herring fillets. The name is an old Minas Basin in-joke, from the arrival of Loyalist settlers with Admiral Digby, after the final evacuation of New York City (in 1783). The first couple of winters were rather a pain, for these effete urban types, but the settlers did have a plentiful supply of fish. They called the herring they had salted away, “Digby chicken.” You see, they were being ironical.

It is a gorgeous thing, not only to eat but to look at, in its glistening darkness. I have knocked off two of the fillets this morning, cold (as they are best), each wrapped longitudinally in a slice of Bavarian rye, to assure catholicity. Nothing is required by way of condiment, except, arguably, a long slice of full-sour kosher dill, so that we may commemorate the Old Testament, also.

It is all very well for these saints to be martyred, “at the top of their game,” as it were. One suspects it may even be a worldly privilege in some cases, like the silk rope I mentioned two Idleposts ago. However, recent events have reminded us that most die slowly, whether or not they happen to be saints, and with or without good palliative care. To the contemporary secular mind, this is appalling. The “quality of life” having been defined without reference to any spiritual values (love is incidentally a spiritual value) — but instead by analogy to the life of a dog — it is easy to understand the desire for euthanasia.

Today’s Saint in my Saint Andrew’s Missal is the young Passionist, Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows (1838–1862). Should he not already know, I daresay gentle reader could find all about him, given the search terms just provided. (Some Catholics have even been infiltrating the Wicked Paedia, leaving all kinds of learning there: I am shocked, shocked, to find how much good stuff is now posted there, with information gradually transferred from standard printed sources. Good on them!)

What might occasion most surprise — after we have answered to our own satisfaction the question, “How did this young lady’s man and dandy become a saint at all?” — is Saint Gabriel’s peculiar prayer. It was for a slow death; and incidentally it was granted, through tuberculosis at the age of not quite twenty-four.

From a large family, Francis Possenti (as he was baptized) had in his short life already watched several of his brothers and sisters, and his mother, die of horrible diseases. One of his brothers had also committed suicide. Francis had himself suffered from the quinsy as a teenager: a throat abscess that starts with strep, from the days before tonsillectomies. It should have killed him, but miraculously did not. From such facts we may reasonably deduce that the young man could not possibly have entertained the romantic notions about “easeful death,” still quoted from the “Ode to a Nightingale.”

In the face of hard reality, yet, that was his prayer: for a death so slow it would give him a chance to prepare himself for the hereafter.

To those of you who are not yet saints (and I have a spiritual director who will confirm that I’m with you), a slow death is of inestimable advantage. There is a great deal of sinful attachment to this world that needs burning off, and best to get about it this side of Purgatory. Pain, properly managed (which is to say, peacefully accepted if it is one’s unavoidable lot), can be helpful, too. But even if the pain can be palliated — which it can be, usually, when known treatments are properly applied — time is of the essence. The more of it one has, the better, once one has fixed upon the ambition for a good death.

Time can also be wasted. This is the most heartbreaking thing I see in the nursing homes and elsewhere, where patients receive no spiritual counsel, and their visitors, if they still have any, flash the smileyface when they come, usually as cover for a quick getaway. These patients are told lies, including silly lies about how they are getting better. People who tell you lies are not your friends.

People who want to kill you are also not your friends, though I think this point has been sufficiently made in other Idleposts, recently.

Of course, if there is no God — no Heaven, “no Hell below us, above us only sky” — then I grant, you are a dog, indeed: a happy panting dog at best, but a dog nevertheless, and of course you should be put down if you are feeling seriously uncomfortable. But this is the fool’s hypothetical, which can be quickly dismissed. For if, as you aver, human life can be reduced to accident, it is entirely meaningless. So why don’t we put you down now?

There is no arguing with the Culture of Death, beyond showing it is a form of psychopathology. There can be no debate, and really it’s just a question of who has the power to get his way. Wolves eat sheep when there are no shepherds, and as Thomas More observed, sheep eat men when the atheists are in power.

Saint Gabriel Possenti, pray for us. … Lord, give us time to prepare ourselves for Thee.

The background music since last week, up here in the High Doganate, has been Mozart, mostly, oddly enough. He is not usually associated with Lent. But five CDs of his solo piano music fell into my hands the day after Ash Wednesday, and you know how superstitious I am. The organ is shut down till Easter in my church; and I haven’t been tempted to Mozart’s grander “operatic” and “symphonic” works — with one exception “proving the rule.” That is a small chamber transcription of his insuperable D-minor Requiem, by Peter Lichtenthal (1780–1853), performed by the Quartetto Aglàia on four very old string instruments. By subtracting the choral grandiloquence, and pulling away Mozart’s scintillating orchestral special effects, it makes the Requiem meditative and more shockingly Christian. And yet it does not reduce the terror in the Dies Irae, and rather enhances the dialectic of the whole piece, in which the proud soul is humbled to divine submission.

Lichtenthal was an accomplished musician and composer in his own right, of Hungarian origin, Viennese taste, and Milanese settlement. He was also a medical doctor, and a hack journalist — softly proselytizing against the melodramatic trend in nineteenth-century Italian music. His many transcriptions from Mozart and others appealed to keyboard and chamber players performing in their own homes, “under the radar,” as we say. His most ambitious literary work combined all his interests. It was a treatise on how music effects the human body, and can actually cure certain diseases.

From the album notes, I paraphrase this interesting observation on the nature of genius as gift. Lichtenthal is explaining Mozart’s accomplishment in a memorial pamphlet:

“Genius is present at birth. It does not provide the structure, however; only the base. Sometimes the genius strays from the path of hard study. He finishes by making disastrous mistakes. But if he is going to accomplish something truly great, he will need even more than diligent study of the classics. He will need, in addition to this and going beyond it, a remarkable focus: the ambition or will to accomplish something that is very great, that is universal.”

And this of course Mozart had. There are no “untutored geniuses,” there never has been, even one. This is something I have tried to communicate to the class I teach on Shakespeare, to arm my students against the extraordinary volume of plain rubbish that has been written about The Bard, all premissed on the Victorian heresy that, “Shakespeare is a god.” The same is usually applied to Mozart, and as falsely. Consult the ancient Greeks, who perfectly understood that human genius explains nothing. It is what the human has done with that gift that counts. Hence, Christ’s Parable of the Talents.

As in nature, so in art. Notice that there is nothing murky about any of God’s creatures in nature; that, as we have been recently reminded in biological discovery, there is no such thing as “junk DNA.” Every living thing is designed to close tolerances that beggar the human imagination. The flaccidity of “Darwinism” is a total lie, an idiot lie.

Likewise, the greatest works of human craft are not vague, slurred, messy, or “visionary” in the cheap popular sense. They are extremely sharp: not only in physical execution but in what it is that they embody. A “soul” underlies the work, so particular that even in translation — and in transcription — the work carries into new realms, reassembling or resurrecting itself in new ways. It may be interpreted, too, in many different ways, but only because it has the power to be interpreted. It has dimension, such that it may be seen only from one angle at a time. It has movement, or in other words, it is alive.

Mozart’s solo works for piano — about one hundred of the six hundred or so entries in the Köchel catalogue — are strange entities, in effect transcriptions of themselves. There is — I am struggling to describe this — an untouchable interior precision; a self-enfolding emanation of wit. I would almost say, an impenetrable transparency, for (it seems to me) he is enunciating many things very clearly, but not to an audience. Often he seems to be sharing brilliant private jokes, but not with us. I will dare to call them prayerful. The shape is classical, but the spirit is high baroque. The fantasies are inward, the sonatas outward-facing and declamatory, but in both modes an audible conversation, behind our backs. And we eavesdrop on only the half of it.

*

The early pianos on which Mozart played were much crisper instruments than modern grands, which drown us in tone colour, and turn us all into lounge lizards. They were, in a sense, half-way back to harpsichords. He writes to his father about the joy he has found in Stein’s instruments:

“When I strike hard, I can keep my finger on the note or raise it, but the sound ceases the moment I have finished producing it. In whatever way I touch the keys, the tone is always even. It never jars, it is never stronger or weaker or entirely absent. …”

Stein’s pianos, he explains, have an escapement mechanism that other piano makers can’t be bothered with: he can completely avoid “jangling and vibration.” This is so, likewise, with the draughtsman’s exact implements, or for the colourist with his sable-hair brushes (the importation of which into the States, incidentally, is currently stopped by environmentalist whackos). Mozart is drawing lines, in music, that are not “approximate.” There is dimension in the lines themselves. We are dealing here with a form of chastity that only an artist can fully understand. A sparkling, and not a grim chastity.

That they can be played on any sort of piano, I will take on the authority of any sort of piano player, and Lili Kraus plays them on what sounds like a very modern piano, but the spirit of them is of the age and instruments on which Mozart composed, or if you will, inhabited. He was the last of the non-Romantics. Everything I hear in him that “prefigures” Schubert, Beethoven, and so forth, is dry. Not once does he grab us by the lapels. I like how he gives us space; and how Lili Kraus lets him.

This pianist (1903–86), who lived an heroic life, is not only an exceptionally clear player, but one of incredible “dash” and “poise.” (I’ve lifted these words from Bernard Jacobson.) It is not her virtuosity alone but something more: that very quality Lichtenthal identified in Mozart himself. She was a woman who did not rest on mere study. The discs I have are aciculate remasters of her Haydn Society recordings from sixty-plus years ago, and possibly rare. I’ve heard some of her later recordings of the same repertoire, but I think there is an aloofness in these — a Mozartean aloofness — that could not be recaptured. These were not for the big concert hall, but from a moment when we were briefly free of all that. They are performances of an astounding cleanliness. I was lucky to find them (especially where I did).

It seems to me (and remember, I know nothing about music) that Lili Kraus found access, not “generally” to Mozart, but to what is most Catholic in him, through these solo compositions. They are a purposeful constriction, a self-limitation, on a character who is normally outgoing and social, a mixer and charmer of the dramatic muse, a master of the comedy of manners. But there is nothing fastidious or self-conscious in them. The music is something in its nature Lenten, yet joyfully and playfully so; carried off with dash, and poise. It is as if, operating almost entirely in major mode, without shadowing or concealment, Mozart had at intervals composed a hundred meditations on the theme, “According to Thy will.”