Essays in Idleness

For some reason I do not understand, my invitation to speak at a fundraiser for some remote riding association of the Conservative Party of Canada has been withdrawn. I learnt this only last night, although the message was relayed many days ago. Somehow I had missed it. It would seem my email receiver marked it as spam, deflecting it into my electronic trash bin. It does that with a lot of incoming mail, perhaps because I instructed it to do so. I only wish I knew how to program my telephone in a similar way.

As I say, I can’t imagine why I would not be the ideal speaker at any gathering of the Conservative Party. My political views are well formed, and I think I would be able to express them succinctly. I am well disposed to conservative people — the more extreme the better. Surely they would find me charming.

Indeed, I had a rabble-rousing speech all but prepared: one which, I sincerely believe, would have gained the little riding association some national attention. It is a great pity the invitation was withdrawn; the more because I could have used the fee, to say nothing of the publicity. Gosh, it might have launched my political career.

The gentleman who’d proposed me in the first place — an Idleblog reader — asked me for the gist of my speech. Proudly, I provided him with this conspectus, in which I outline a new Manifesto for the Conservative Party, one that will break decisively with its dreary past:

“If elected, we promise to do nothing. There will be no new initiative in any area of government. Should some foreign power threaten us, we shall smoosh them promptly. Should some other unforeseen event positively demand our attention, we shall respond in like spirit to make it go away. Such contingencies aside, we shall avoid enterprise of any sort. Instead, we shall devote our entire attention, not to doing, but to undoing things. And not just little things but big things; and not just a few notoriously rotten apples in the eyes of vested interests known to be unloved, but the whole apple pie, the whole bakery. We shall make the Tea Party in the United States look like a bunch of socialist whiners. We shall make the UKIP in Britain look like Europhiles. Our ambition, as we cling to power, shall be to undo every gratuitous Act of Parliament, or other superannuated government measure, going back to Confederation, if not to Champlain. We shall repeal legislation, erase regulations, close government departments, demolish the buildings, salt the earth on which they stood, fire and retire civil servants by the refugee shipload. We shall sack them on the beaches, we shall sack them on the landing grounds, we shall sack them in the fields and in the streets, we shall start with the CBC. Our motto shall be that of the Machine Gun Corps of the British Army in the Great War. (‘Saul hath slain his thousands, but David his tens of thousands.’) We shall do this deliberately and persistently and remorselessly with no more attention to public opinion than will be necessary to lure our opponents into traps.”

Surely this would be better — more refreshing, more inspiring, more galvanizing — than what might be offered by any other old hack or party bagman of a speaker. And yet it was dismissed out of hand. I feel hurt by this rejection; I am sulking as I write.

Perhaps I’m not quick enough, but I would like to be the first to not welcome the landslide election victory of India’s new “Hinduist” prime minister-elect, Narendra Modi. Democracy has done it again, and I gather they are dancing in the streets at Delhi, as “the people” are wont to do, whenever they have decisively achieved some profoundly stupid result, that is going to cost them big. (I had the same feeling, albeit slightly milder, when Americans were congratulating themselves for electing as their president a certain Barack Hussein Obama Soebarkah, back in November 2008.)

The immense victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party is, as the saying goes, “Bad news for Jews.” Actually, this is not said, for there are so few Jews in India, and the clever hack pundits of the world instead opine that it “may” be very bad news for Muslims. We will see how bad, soon, as the new government handles the police. For the police are never popular when defending minorities from majority mobs; and governments never popular when they are telling their cops to do the right thing.

There is, or at least was, however, a flourishing Jewish community in Bombay (“Mumbai,” according to the Hindu nationalists); even more flourishing and numerous Zoroastrians; and the Armenians there, but even more in Calcutta (“Kolkata”), are also close to my heart. I pray they are small enough to become invisible, when they keep their heads down, the way Christians try to do in Pakistan (and Bangladesh). The Christians in India, as too the Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, are sufficiently numerous to make hiding difficult. Whatever they do, the Christians in particular will be accused of illegal proselytizing among the Hindus, whenupon there is invariably hell to pay.

Defenceless minorities are always “arrogant,” in the view of insuperable majorities. As several of the less elegant BJP politicians have suggested, they “need to be put in their place.”

Still, to my mind, just as I have argued that “Islamism” is bad news for non-Muslims but even worse news for Muslims, the Hindu nationalism that has now fully reared its multiple heads is worse news for Hindus. Those faithful will find that their religion has been hijacked by political fanatics and moral frauds; that it is now being dictated to them by men who are not God, and not very nice, either. (One might say, of India this morning, that the Vox Populi has once again elected the Vox Dei.)

One could, if one were so tedious as I used to be as a newspaper columnist, go into the history and reasons for Modi’s rise to unchallengeable power. He certainly got a lot of assistance from Mr Obama’s administration, which contrived, through sheer breathtaking incompetence, the diplomatic incident in New York that had all India’s media tongues wagging with chauvinist fervour. (They arrested a beautiful young Indian diplomat at the United Nations for something to do with the pay rate and visa status of her Indian maid; and then, ignoring her claim to diplomatic immunity, tossed this elegantly-clad lady into the lowest class of New York gaol cell, like any common vandal from the slums, yet with the express permission of the State Department in Washington. It was what the world has come to know as a “Kerry Special” — and then, while all India seethed with anti-American outrage and nationalist jingoism, the Kerry Specialists rubbed it in, adding that distinctly provocative New England tone of nasal self-righteousness, before finally realizing how big a mess they had made for themselves.)

This would be pointless, however. The rise of Hinduist nationalism has many causes, and the fatuity in New York was just a passing inspiration. In my judgement this chauvinism is, in the main, an historical response to Islamism, which touches India where she lives in a way that Islamism has yet to touch Europe and America.

As ever in these matters, Christ’s mysterious instruction, “Resist ye not evil,” comes back to haunt. The more one studies the enemy, the more one comes to emulate the enemy: to appreciate his tactics, and adopt his techniques. For really, one envies the enemy’s success. “Hindustanism” (may I coin this word?) will be much like Islamism, but with the wrath of Kali added in.

There are commentators in India this morning who think Modi won’t be like that. God bless and keep them, on Modi’s good side. For in my view, a politician who has gained power so largely through personal “charisma,” will indeed be like that. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton famously decreed. It was a formula that he himself qualified in interesting ways, but I should like to add this morning that the very prospect of political power deeply corrupts, and the votaries of Power come to power already fully corrupted.

If we must have great crashing sounds, I’d prefer they be thunder, accompanied by lightning. We enjoyed a few flashes with late supper on our balconata yesterday, up here in the High Doganate. We’d been promised the same, for tea, the day before, but the weather prognosticators with their sophisticated computer models cannot predict a city shower one hour in advance. One giggles at their claim to predict climate trends over the next century, with the same junk equipment.

Yet, no sooner had they declared the all-clear, twenty-seven hours later, than we finally received our deluge. I had myself given up by then; had been watching from my balconata majestic effects of light and colour in the approach of the sunset, while black wool coalesced in the sky above, directly over the High Doganate; and in the antediluvian stillness beneath, the waters of Humber Bay turned deep indigo. Then gloriously, the world was awash, with lightning streaks to emblazon, and crash crash like dear old Ludwig, shaking his fist and hurling the crockery.

Notwithstanding album notes I have deposited, recently in this space, I am not always against a loud orchestra.  Sumer is icumen in, as we say, and that brings extravagant public make-work projects, to burn off the taxpayers’ excess cash. This is democracy at work. Past, non-democratic regimes have erected huge public monuments to the glory of God or the glory of their kings; we get Pyramids assembled by gentle, reasonably quiet slave labourers, which remain tourist attractions for millennia to come. Democracy, too, does megaprojects but, to no point at all. Within a generation nothing is left except the debt.

There are several half-way houses in my neighbourhood for the criminally insane. These appear to be the primary local beneficiaries of megaproject spending, with huge efforts devoted to making them ever more plush. The inmates cannot be expected to work, so teams of architects and planners, builders and specialized tradesmen, site consultants and landscape designers, gardeners and decorators — along with their respective administrators and inspectors and union representatives — are constantly assigned, to demolish the last remodelling and replace it with something grander.

And there is now a provincial election in progress, in which a government that bought the last two elections, and lied their way to power the election before, seeks to retain its perqs. They have taken the people of this province for idiots, and have been richly rewarded.

Perhaps I should be more discreet. Our current premier is suing the leader of the opposition for asking pertinent questions in the Legislature about her own involvement in the colossal corruption of her regime, and until at least June 12th, should be treated with some caution.

Now, I have touched before on the natural alliance between “liberals” — or, Liberals, as in this case — and the criminally insane. The former are perhaps the latter’s most pampered constituency, but the two are not interchangeable. While the criminal tendency pertains to both, the element of calculation differs between “politician” and “client.” Yet, as in any feudal system, lord and peasant, provider and supplicant, share material interests, and an essential point of view. Each is capable of identifying with the other, so that whether the issue is disarming the law-abiding public to improve the criminals’ chances, or launching whimsical programmes to spread the working stiff’s lifeblood around, or inventing new “human rights” with which the criminal may turn the tables on the just man, or select fresh victims for his sport — services are indeed provided in return for a reliable vote.

From their side, the criminally insane are not without calculation. In Parkdale, for instance, where election placards are often treated with disrespect, the giant signs for the Liberal Party that go up promptly on the lawns of the half-way houses the morning an election is called, are the only ones which are never defaced. (Rather slow this year; I don’t think they were expecting the election would need to be called so quickly.)

Gentle reader may heckle that the criminally insane are only a small minority, hardly worth such efforts to corner their votes; but such a reader cannot live in Parkdale. For here is where one may gather some sense of the continuum, between the criminally insane tout court — the “avant-garde” of progressivism, as it were — and that plurality whose moral and intellectual disorders are relatively mild — which is to say, just enough to vote Liberal. (Readers in the USA may substitute, “Democrat.”)

For centuries, the secret of success for the parties of the Left has been to encourage their avant-garde. When every public policy you offer so obviously advances the interests of the Devil, it is important to avoid reason, and cultivate fashion instead. The Left has been consistently fashionable since the 18th century, at latest. There has been no pendulum of political fashion. Or if there was one, it broke long ago. And since, there has been at the heart of every fashion statement, an irruption of madness.

Which returns us to the question of orchestral volume, and the sound of so much industrial machinery, as the make-work projects irrupt around me. (The jackhammers have just cut in — a whole section of them, equivalent in a symphony to the strings.)

To be fair, the politicians must be made to share the blame, and thus punished proportionally, with the exponents of our “northern” culture. Canadians, like Germans, and Swedes, are an industrious people. And we are never working harder than when towards some profoundly counter-productive purpose.

The gratuitous nature of some of these projects astounds me. Take for example the workmen I discovered repaving a back lane, then installing speed bumps over the smooth concrete. Any rational creature, such as an Italian, could see the same end could be admirably served by leaving each of the potholes in place. The peace of the neighbourhood is being disturbed for a prolonged period — for the sake of the peace of the neighbourhood. (And they call me crazy.)

One must find some way to cancel this, and large orchestras are the ticket. Around seven this morning, by when the noise of construction busy-work had become insupportable, I put on Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 10 (in E flat major). It is for two pianos, which ups the ante slightly — harder for an orchestra to drown out two pianos than one. But on this disc, the orchestra of John Eliot Gardiner (full of magnificent old “authentic” period instruments) was already able to drown out even the three pianos in the preceding Concerto, No. 7 (in F major).

Mr Gardiner (or Sir John, as he has since become), is a sensitive man, and I don’t think he meant to submerge such fine keyboard soloists as Malcolm Bilson, Robert Levin, and Melvyn Tan. It’s just that he couldn’t help it, given the size of his orchestra. Therefore, I reasoned, why not put it to work against a worse enemy, i.e. the politicians and supporters of the Liberal Party of Ontario, and the rest of the post-modern world?

It is the same on the streets, really. They don’t consciously intend to drown out the birdsong, nor the sounds of the children playing; they simply can’t help it, given the equipment at their disposal, which they have been paid to turn on, when a wiser authority would have instructed them to disable it.

Perhaps I begin to understand the motivation behind heavily amplified rock, punk, rap and other “anti-music.” People have been deranged by modern urban life, and with their own mad levels constantly rising, seek some kind of retaliation against it.

It has come to my attention that a considerable proportion of the people around me are Heretics. This includes members of my Commentariat; much of the congregation at my church, and up in the choir; people at large in the Greater Parkdale Area; and who knows how many beyond? I believe I may be a Heretic myself, on one doctrinal matter or another, although I am trying to avoid that sort of thing. It then comes to you, gentle reader. Quite frankly, I suspect that you, too, harbour heretical tendencies, much as you might try to conceal them from yourself and from the world. Which leaves God, from Whom nothing can be hidden.

Will we be thrust into Hell for our heretical beliefs, and speculations? (For instance, the belief that Hell is a “myth.”) Call me a heretic, but I doubt it will come to that. There will be, come the end of Time, so many other reasons to thrust us thence, one wonders if our miserable little private opinions will even come into it.

Here is my heterodox thought for this morning. Or perhaps it is orthodox, I stand to be corrected. It is that private heretical notions are inconsequential. Until, of course, they are acted upon. It begins to matter only when one uses one’s private insolence to give one’s public actions some spiritual torque. Acting would of course include, teaching Heresy, when one knows what it is. (Yet another reason why the body of Catholics should be better catechized, especially the priests: to put them on the spot.)

But then, the question of what heresy is, in the moral dimension, comes immediately to mind. I think I know what it is in the intellectual dimension: getting the basic doctrines of the Church wrong. This can be achieved from the purest pig ignorance, but there is such a thing as an heretical frame of mind and intention, in which one wilfully places oneself in opposition to the known teachings, because one considers oneself to be the greater authority. This became the issue front-and-centre in the Reformation, when Christians were instructed (by Heretics) to make themselves the judges of Scripture, Tradition, and more generally of the Faith; then told that their salvation depended in some strange way on their sincerity. We have since had a lot of people going — quite sincerely — very, very wrong.

In other words, the heretical became a public “choice.” To my twisted (or possibly, untwisted) mind, bad things such as abortion-on-demand ultimately depend on that principle of “reform,” in which conscience became dislocated from what I am about to call, Truth. For if you sincerely believe something is permissible, on this view, it must surely be permitted. To do other than permit the demand would abridge the subject’s “freedom,” and our entire definition of “freedom” has itself been publicly adjusted, over the last few centuries, so that it is now indistinguishable from what was formerly known as “licence.”

Verily: “freedom,” and “democracy,” have been the bird calls for a couple of centuries, at least. “Conscience” has been fully atomized. The confusion of bird calls with genuine authority (i.e. what is demonstrably, self-consistently true) explains pretty much everything we see around us.

Heresy matters, because the rationally self-consistent teaching of Holy Church — perceived not merely in the wording of the current official Catechism, but in the weight and consistency of her preaching over two thousand years — is required to order the conscience properly. I am personally against heresy; but it should not matter whether or not I am personally opposed. (It may, however, rather matter whether the pope fully gets it, from time to time.)

My hero (the secret patron of this blog) Nicolás Gómez Dávila observed somewhere that it would be better to have a smaller Church, full of Catholics, than a larger Church, full of let us say, Rotarians. (This was a point the retired Benedict XVI was admirably clear on.) Here I think Dávila was touching, among other things, on the heresy issue. It is, I would add, the same thing with armies. A small army, that knows what it is doing, can easily defeat a large army, that does not know what it is doing. Indeed, this has happened rather often in history. And I am certainly in favour of having the people who are armed with the Sacraments fully conversant with what they are doing.

What is your point this morning, Mr Warren? It is that we should look upon heterodoxy not as a question of salvation in itself. God will know when it crosses a line of no return in the mind and soul of the individual sinner; and we are taught to leave such judgements to Him. Rather, the matter should be considered the other way around. It should be realized that orthodoxy is the positive and empowering good. It is what makes us effective as soldiers, proclaiming the Faith in our actions. Soldiers I say; I said it on purpose. Soldiers as opposed to, say, clowns.

Mothers have great power, in earth as in heaven. Those who are just, have the greatest power. Or, such was my thought, some many years ago, in observing a mother of the Italian ethnicity, something under five feet high, but all gristle. She had a delinquent adolescent son, over six (feet). He played extremely obnoxious rock-and-roll “music” on the roof deck next to mine. My reasonably civil request that he turn this down, was ignored. I asked again. The third time I asked, he turned it up, finally to the volume limit on his little machine. And then, while leaving that playing, he ran inside, promising to find a more powerful ghetto blaster. In his absence I tipped the first one off the roof deck. On the delinquent’s return, he grasped what I had done. This added to his excitement. Rather than take him up on his fresh offer — to toss me off the roof deck — I went inside, down the stairs to the street, then to this neighbour’s front door, beating upon it. I was hoping for an interview with one of his parents.

The juvenile delinquent was instead there first, shouting obscenities. His mother, however, arrived just behind him. She seemed very small, beside her delinquent son. But with a remarkable twist of her hand — a move more impressive than anything I had ever seen demonstrated in judo — she flicked him by his right ear into the hallway behind her. He became silent as a lamb. The lady thanked me, peacefully, in a mixture of Italian and English, for having destroyed the offending machine, and assured me that it would not be replaced. She then bid me withdraw from her family affairs.

This is my first “Mother’s Day” without a living mother of my own. Mine, as readers of this anti-blog may recall, was of the Gaelic not Italic heritage. She was also just, however, and had similar presence of mind. Nor did she have to plead to be obeyed.

She had a number of eccentricities, and one of them was distaste for the expression, “passed away.” She preferred the term, “dead.” It became a convention in our family to refer to the deceased as persons who had “doyed,” in tribute to the Cape Breton pronunciation. As a registered nurse, and old ward matron, she was well acquainted with death; did not look forward to her own, but still, accepted it as the sort of thing you get on this planet. I pray she has found a better place. (My mother would endorse this understatement.)

Much could be said about mothers, as a class. More could be said about them, individually. But the details are in a sense unnecessary, for it is given to sons and daughters, with very few exceptions, to know what I mean.

The word “happiness” has turned up, in my correspondence and several other places, as if it were the mot du jour. Everyone wants to be happy. I would guess from this that everyone is un-happy. As Nikolay Chernyshevsky used to ask, “What is to be done?” (Lenin also asked, and indeed it is the basic question of all politicians, activists, social democrats, and other demon worshippers.)

Formations from the stem hap are rich and complicated, so that the etymological considerations begin to pass over my head. The meaning begins with luck or fortuity, and seems to return there from time to time. To have “hap” is to have luck running with you, fate on your side; but there is some shading. What had ge-haep in our Old English was fitting, well arranged, in good order. Something of this carried down the centuries, but if I am not mistaken, it went missing during the 19th century, of unhappy memory.

There is a neighbouring country with a constitution which promises to its supplicants “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Up here in the Canadas, we often giggle at the contrast with our own, which aimed only at “peace, order, and good government.” Had I been a refugee, forced to choose between the two countries on the basis only of those phrases, I would have picked the Dominion of Canada in a blink.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against life or liberty, per se. Why just yesterday, the question of capital punishment arose with one of my American friends (we’re both in favour, but I could not match his enthusiasm). And I was reflecting: “We all deserve to hang, of course, but it can be a serious administrative embarrassment when someone is hanged for the wrong reason.”

To the modern reader generally, I suppose, “life” and “liberty” pass glibly by. It is the “happiness” that arrests our attention, that seems to go over the top. As we would put it in Newfoundland, a seal might be happy, but from another point of view, “he is death on the fish.” One man’s happiness is the trap opening beneath the feet of his neighbour, and others get their kicks in similar ways. I can think, myself, at this moment, of several egregious sins that would offer the prospect of some transient pleasure.

But no, those Founding Fathers (of the nation state next door) were not quite so flippant. Happiness for them was what the word meant at the time they were using it. It did not then reduce to pleasure. They would have been appalled if told that it did. For all their little theological foibles, they did not take so dim a view of man, as to think he lived for thrills. I believe they meant something more along the line of, “live and let live.” Let every man (or woman, should it come to that) pursue, unhindered at least by the guvmint, his own calling and the manner of life he finds right and fitting — so far as it does not bring him into conflict with unalterable Law. Let him, as it were, seek the satisfaction of a life lived by his own best lights and better angels.

One of my old heroes, a certain Thomas Ernest Hulme (pronounced as “Hume”), not to be confused with the fanatically sceptical Scottish historian and philosopher, once wrote a brief and reasonably vulgar “Critique of Satisfaction.” It addressed the pursuit of happiness by asking, “What is truly satisfying?” He noted that all known paths lead elsewhere, in this vale of tears. Let me cut to his chase:

“Imagine a man situated at a point in a plane, from which roads radiate in various directions. Let this be the plane of actual existence. We place Perfection where it should not be — on this human plane. As we are painfully aware that nothing actual can be perfect, we imagine the perfection to be not where we are, but some distance along one of the roads. This is the essence of all Romanticism. Most frequently, in literature, at any rate, we imagine an impossible perfection along the road of sex; but anyone can name the other roads for himself. The abolition of some discipline or restriction would enable us, we imagine, to progress along one of these roads. The fundamental error is that of placing Perfection in humanity, thus giving rise to that bastard thing Personality, and all the bunkum that follows from it.”

So where is our perfect happiness to be found, if not on that plane? Let us cut the chase shorter:

“No ‘meaning’ can be given to the existing world, such as philosophers are accustomed to give in their last chapters. To each conclusion one asks, ‘In what way is that satisfying?’ The mind is forced back along every line in the plane, back on the centre. What is the result? To continue the rather comic metaphor, we may say the result is that which follows the snake eating it’s own tail, an infinite straight line perpendicular to the plane. …

“In other words, you get the religious attitude; where things are separated which ought to be separated, and Perfection is not illegitimately introduced on the plane of human things.”

*

Much has happened in the century since that was written, or rather, little has happened if anything at all. A century ago, the world in which it was written, already deeply contaminated by the “romanticism” to which Hulme refers, plunged itself into Total War. (He was himself among the casualties.) We have since had alternations between Total War and Total Peace (i.e. government on a war footing for supposedly peaceful ends, including wars on poverty, inequality, drugs, terrorism and whatnot) ever since. I like to say that we are trapped inside the Nietzschean nightmare of the 19th century, and will continue to endure it until we wake once again, into the arms of Jesus.

In the meanwhile, “happiness” is a sick joke. By the contemporary definition, we should try to avoid it as much as possible, as all false counsel. It is a trap beneath our own feet. What is to be done?

Call pleasure by its proper name, and keep it constantly under suspicion. Try to retrieve happiness according to that older convention, in which it was something satisfying, something worth having and keeping, in our heart of hearts; something the world cannot take away. Pursue instead the good, the beautiful, the true. We should try to stop living for lies. We are drowning in them.

There is some controversy, apparently, about whether the final movement in Boccherini’s Guitar Quintet No. IV should include castanets. Some learned gentleman (forgotten his name already) used the loaded term “notorious” to describe that movement, attributing this to the irresponsible intrusion of castanets into so many performances of it. This was not “correct” the man argued. I suppose he was English. Or, “Protestant,” which comes to the same thing. The man could get away with his sneer, because the manuscript of the piece is long lost. The quintet was never published, with an Opus number, and no one could possibly know the original instrumental details. The guitar quintets were really just re-arrangements from other chamber music more formally published in Paris — back in the days before recording, when people had to make their own music, and so the big thing, when a new hit came out, was to be the first kid on your block with the sheet music. Boccherini had this aristocratic patron who played a guitar. He wrote six guitar quintets to keep his patron happy. But it is the concluding fandango on this one that can, notoriously, never be forgotten.

Of course there should be castanets! There have been castanets with that piece since time out of mind. A musical director would have to be very obtuse, to leave out the castanets.

I am Catholic myself — “the worst kind, a convert,” as McLuhan used to say — so fee, fi, fo, fum, I have no patience for an Englishmun who would leave out the castanets. (That’s why the Spanish sent the Armada.) I think the whole matter illustrates by analogy the importance of Tradition, where Scripture is silent or obscure. Trust the Tradition. Do not simply assume that you know better than the people who were there. By reversing the analogy, we see that the whole world makes a lot more sense on the “conservative” principle, or better, the reactionary principle, that our ancestors knew what they were doing. It is when the (self-selecting) smart people — the “enlightened” types — the “Brights” as the New Atheists like to call themselves — start to tinker with Tradition that the gates of Hell begin to yawn. And in the end, there will be no castanets.

But there are castanets in Heaven. I am sure of that.

The item of music we are considering is incidentally profane, not sacred. To the Protestant mind, which lies immediately beneath all modern Western protest movements, and makes its perpetual demands for “reform,” there was a sharp divide between these tendencies. On Sundays, in old rural Ontario, we were to sit still and do nothing, because that was the sacred day. The other days were profane, and we worked like dogs and horses. Superficially, things have changed. The Orange Parade, for instance, has been replaced by the Gay Pride Parade, and there are many other superficial inversions. God has been inverted into Human Rights. But the spirit of schism and division lives on, as revolution sacralizes itself and progressively eats its opponents. One sees this in the progress of music.

In the older view, however, a Christian must be Christian on seven days. That is to say, we have Christian music that is sacred; and we have also Christian music that is profane (just as we had a Christian Church that was sacred, and a Christian State that was profane). Sundays may be days of obligation, but the Mass is celebrated every day. It is a way of life, encompassing even the established human propensity to sin. To the Protestant mind, castanets are sinful. To the Catholic, they are at worst the occasion of sin, being perfectly innocent in themselves. The same could be said for whisky; or handguns. And a Spanish woman in long dress and flowing hair, playing the castanets, is surely an improvement on the belly dancing which was driven back across the Strait of Gibraltar by the Reconquista.

For gentle reader must realize that one of the things Tradition makes possible, is “subtlety.” A definition I have considered for this word, one of those mediaeval terms derived from old Latin, which originally meant, “with acumen, with fine discrimination,” … is the introduction of chastity into forms not intrinsically chaste. In their Golden Age, the Spanish were great masters of this. Or we might wish to recall the courting practices of the chivalrous. Or the traditions by which casualties were minimized, by the stylization of war. Things that were possible before the lurid triumph of Statism, in the seizure of the monasteries and appropriation of all the Church’s other worldly goods (the burning of the libraries, the trashing and smashing of the paintings and sculpture, the stripping of the altars, the butchering of living saints, &c).

Luigi Boccherini, an Italian from Lucca, found himself permanently in Spain as a consequence of chasing after what we can believe was an extremely beautiful soprano. Alas, she died — though not before presenting him with six children. His luck generally ran out, when she departed. For the supply of patronage was also running down, as his extravagant sponsors ran out of money, and Bonapartes trampled all over places where they did not belong. Our hero was reduced to the “publish or perish” stratagems of modern life, against the background of accumulating personal tragedies. But the light in him was truly light. (Mozart remembers that fandango in the finale of The Marriage of Figaro: O such a candle, as the peasants dance, while Susanna slips a note to the Count.)

As the Psalmist declared, the Lord delights in dancing.

He is also, according to my best information, well disposed to musical improvisation.

The version of the piece I most recommend, at the moment, is alas hard to find in this post-Protestant country, though probably available from the cybernetic cloud. It is by the Cambra Almodis, of Barcelona (Columna Musica, 2004). The grave assai properly merges, or rather collides with the fandango; Boccherini’s beloved cello lifts the melody in the guitar; the violins fully capture the sublime (and deliciously funny) drooping sounds that grace his composition. The whole movement is gratuitously doubled in length, and the castanets are shameless.

Is it just me, or has all public discussion of everything been reduced to facetiousness and sarcasm? Perhaps this is a facetious exaggeration. I noticed it fully in public debates — meant, I suppose, to be entertaining — on the question of the existence of God. I have caught a few of these debates at the usual Internet sites, and noticed the difficulties encountered in explaining the subject to various exponents of the New Atheism. Their attacks, specifically on Christian beliefs, are crass, rude. Typically, isolated passages from the Bible are ridiculed. It isn’t even a question of getting them out of context; the point is missed more completely than that. Working from the premiss that miracles cannot occur, everything in Scripture of a miraculous flavour is scorned. It is asserted that there is no God, and from this premiss, it is proved that God does not exist.

How do you turn a rib into a woman, one correspondent recently asked me, echoing no doubt something he’d picked up from the New Atheists — with all the gravity of a three-year-old who isn’t actually listening for the answer. I foolishly took the bait. It seemed to me he had got the rib from the wrong end. He wanted an explanation in terms of Darwinian evolution; to which the reply could only be, “Oh, please.” (Yes, I could pull innumerable imaginary intervening stages out of the seam between my back pockets, as it were, for I was a crack in biology class, but I get bored with “settled science.”)

Adam was created from dust, but Eve from the body of Adam, “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” The event, though only in the second chapter of Genesis, was already anticipated in the first: “God created man in His image; in the divine image He created him; male and female created He them.” Imagery of life, taken from Christ’s side, and for the redemption of this world, will come into this at a much later point.

The mystical significance of this rib, is large. In the words of a wedding folksong from my youth (by Paul Stookey), “Woman draws her life from man, and gives it back again.” It seems today almost odd that the idea behind that sentence could still be understood in the pop culture, as recently as forty-five years ago. Something profound had been said, about the nature of man and woman, about their mutual dependency, at the very outset of our monotheist tribe. This profundity encompassed the deep sleep of Adam, which sets the scene.

That the book of Genesis is not a biological treatise should be apparent to anyone with sufficient intelligence to master the Roman alphabet, and yet the mocking, facetious question reduced it to that. Much of the conceit of scientism — in its most ignorant form — is to dismiss everything that cannot be repeated in a laboratory test to “myth.” I put the quotes because there is no understanding of myth, either; that it may be true deeply below the factitious level; or that by this tactic everything we know, without exception, including the efficacy of laboratory tests, becomes “mythical.”

As there will be no understanding of the meaning of the word “factitious,” I should explain that, too. It does not mean “based on facts.” It instead means, “made up for the occasion.” Indeed, the word “fact” itself was lost on approximately 100 percent of my old journalistic colleagues: that a fact is itself something made — that it is a deed, not something that “just happened.” And I am turning back here on the essence of Darwinism, and other forms of scientism disseminated today in our air and water: for all reporting depends on the (idiot) notion that things may happen hocus-pocus “just like that,” there being no First Cause, only secondary ones.

Gentle reader is advised to pause here and think on that for a moment. It will take him back to the heart of Aristotle, and to the heart of Western Civ: that a secondary explanation is insufficient. That for our ends we must return to our origins.

In my brief and pointless debate with the rib mocker, I touched on three miracles of natural science. 1. The universe began. 2. Life appeared on Earth. 3. Man emerged. These are miracles in the sense that they are singularities which no amount of natural science can possibly explain. In each case the explanation, if any can be had, must precede natural science; will be, and can only be, Revelation. This does not mean, and cannot mean, that our very being is less important than what empirical inquiry can discover. Quite the contrary: the known facts exhibit the extreme limitation of empirical inquiry.

They raise questions that cannot be avoided: no man nor woman capable of intelligent thought can dismiss such ultimate questions about the nature of the universe into which he has been born, or the existence of himself as a living, thinking creature. He, life on earth, and the vault of stars, are Fact. That is to say, they have been made. There is no escape from this, except by avoidance of reality itself. Things do not make themselves, and to hypothesize that they do, is to lead oneself by stages into a real and plausible insanity.

Hence, I think, the facetiousness and sarcasm that now animates all public discussion of important matters, gone far beyond what is nominally categorized as “religion.” This is in itself a mark of triumph, for atheism. (Not merely disbelief in God, but the elimination of God from all consideration, as a condition for participation in public life.) Consistent avoidance of elementary reality leads by extension to avoidance of fact or deed, in detail. From the avoidance of first fact, every subsequent fact can be, progressively, trivialized. And what can be trivialized, will be trivialized, by Satan’s little minions.

“The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.” This is precisely correct. All human fallacy, all human foolishness, begins in that act of denial. This includes the foolishness of believers, who choose for a moment to act as if they did not know any better.

Returning briefly to the question that got me started. The account in Genesis of the origin of man and woman is itself “fact,” in the sense that it is given to us, as revelation on matters we could not possibly discern by empirical means. That God created Eve from the rib of Adam, is not given as the explanation of a technique. We are not being told how He did it, but of the meaning, for us, in what He did. It is a revelation of the cause behind the causation of Eve and Adam; and therefore not of what they were but what they are. It is at the foundation of our knowledge, that we were created purposefully, in two kinds mutually depending. That, “man and woman, created He them,” in no accidental way. The technique, by which God made the mute stones speak, does not matter to us. It is therefore permanently beyond us — as moot as every other “discovery” in natural science that is not merely descriptive. By focusing exclusively on an undiscoverable technique, we indulge a foolishness that is contemptible. We ignore, while presuming upon, first cause. We ask a question so facetious, that it can only deserve a facetious reply.

There is, or there was, a small school desk by the window at the very top of the philosophy and theology stacks in the London Library. The structure itself — that part of the warren that is perhaps the world’s finest private subscription library — may be gone. I can’t quite tell from the Google satellite picture. It was an oblong cuboid in raw concrete, of no architectural distinction whatever, entirely concealed by older buildings around it. To reach its top floor, from the library entrance in St James’s Square, one passed through a foyer of catalogue tables, up a panelled staircase, through a three-dimensional labyrinth of iron grates and shelves, up one helical staircase, then through another maze and up another flight of stairs and, … I close my eyes and repeat the whole journey.

The school desk in question, and the window looking over the delightful backsides of Victorian buildings, was my “office” or study cell for several years. It granted an almost perfect privacy, for no one else seemed ever to go there. In all that time, I recall only one other visitor, and he an aged Anglican clergyman who was quite lost. I could leave my notebooks in the drawers of that desk, return after weeks of walking on the Continent, and be confident to find them undisturbed.

A spirit filled the room, of the “timeless contemporary.” Many of the books stacked there were retrieved from the preceding library extension, which had collapsed after some attention from the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. There were, for instance, 17th-century folio volumes pinned shut by shards of German shrapnel, and other mementi of Total War, adding to the bunker effect, and thus enhancing the stillness, the silence, of “all passion spent.”

This room was an antechamber of Paradise. I felt very honoured that the angelic presences had granted me this space, to read Aristotle, then gradually to discover, at first through the commentaries of Thomas Aquinas, a deep catholic Christian heritage. For nearly four years it was my private university chamber, and London at large, with its other libraries, and bookstores, its museums and galleries, its churches and its concert halls, was my Athens. Those were happy days, and my memory is gladdened by the knowledge that I appreciated them, while they lasted. I was living hermit-like and chastely after the convulsions of earlier youth; I would return to the world of work and play; but for a time circumstances had coelesced to allow me the freedom to study and to think. I needed little money to get by, and that little was easily found in odd jobs, themselves entertaining.

Last night, on my birthday, I thought back on this, in a long pause while glancing in mind over sixty-one years of sin and error. I have a small desk today, by the window in my bedroom, and had with me two candles and a bottle of good wine. I thought back, too, to the workman’s cottage in which I then lived — without electricity, in Vauxhall, right in the middle of London. It was a house address where no bills or solicitations ever arrived.

(I was squatting, with the informal permission of the socialist Borough of Lambeth, which had expropriated several contiguous historical neighbourhoods to demolish and replace with hideous tower blocks. Happily, they’d run out of money, and right in the middle of a “housing crisis,” so that they dared not leave a square mile empty for Mrs Thatcher to talk about. Many of my neighbours had been genuine working-class home owners, their properties inherited since time out of mind. They’d been paid mean, arbitrary sums for their property, that was then clawed back in taxes — truly dispossessed, banished as in the old Highland Clearances but, thanks to a little miscalculation in Big Brother’s Five Year Plan, they were themselves now squatting in what had been formerly their own homes. … And the poor devils had always voted Labour; had voted, and would continue to vote, wilfully for their own destruction.)

The automotive and infrastructural hum of London, as any modern city, is constant even in the middle of the night, and yet in the interior of blocks it may sometimes still be defeated by birdsong. And then, if one is lucky enough to live in a slum or ghetto, one may be on a street where no one owns a car.

Perfect silence is not of this world, nor even of outer space, so long as the equipage to sustain human life must be carried through it; and there is background noise in the metabolism itself. True simplicity is also not possible here, though again, an approach to it is possible. When I think back over past centuries, before the “industrial revolution,” and use for my analogy my experience of walking through unelectrified rural India, I am astounded by the silences. That is what the “modern man” would find most provoking. He cannot easily cope with it, for when left in peace he is soon overwhelmed by instilled cravings for noise, clutter, and motion.

In religion (not only Christian), the greatest challenge for the modern man is to endure silence and simplicity of intention; to pray, to contemplate without distraction. He enters church, temple, synagogue, mosque, from a world blaring and glaring. He cannot help taking the reverberations inside, within his own body, and will have little time to compose himself.

Again, from my own experience, I have found it takes about two weeks to “dry out” from modern urban life; to reach the point where one is no longer inwardly flinching at mechanical noise, or unconsciously preparing for the next encounter with salesmanship and “professionalism” — with all the outward credentializing requirements and traffic arrangements of the Prince of This World. The modern man is free only to indulge his lusts and perversions; to display “choice” in his consumer selection of “products” almost invariably fake. He has no patience for the good, the true, the beautiful — and is therefore a cringing slave in his nature, compelled to participate as an easily replaceable cog in the infernal machinery.

“The modern world is too complex to be governed by the simplicities of the past.” Some variation on this has been told me often, in a condescending way. Yet there is one thing I know that the modern world does not: that simplicity leaves room for God. Complexity can spare neither time nor space.

This, anyway, is my birthday wish: to continue my quiet resistance. Gentle reader may call this an ideology should he wish — moreover, a reactionary ideology — for it is not in itself of God, rather a precondition for apprehending Him, in the human condition. My watchwords here are quietude, aloofness, idleness — to keep by them so far as it is in my power, as the citizen of a Nanny State and therefore a haplessly indentured servant of Democracy. To make a small example of my freedom; to seek the company of other free men; to cultivate simplicity, and thereby leave room for the very God from Whom the votaries of Hell would distract us.

How often — and especially when I was editor of a soi-disant “literary” magazine — have I read a nearly passable poem that was ruined by its last line. This exposed the rest of the composition. With practice, one could see it coming: the cumbersome set-up for the long-anticipated punch line, often itself flubbed. Vers libre slips naturally into this joke format. It appeals to the poet because, it doesn’t have to be funny. Standard prose rhythms are also acceptable, with the addition of a few unnatural pauses, leading to a commonplace that was often thought, and e’er so ill-expressed.  With one poet, I used to argue that his stature as a great Canadian worthy of the governess-general’s ordure and every other public prize of our exalted democracy would be enhanced if he would only re-issue his collected poetical works with all the last lines excised.

He was on to me, however. He had received all those prizes already. He pointed out that the prizes are for the sentiments expressed in the last lines. And having friends on the prize committee who would agree with them.

There are innumerable contemporary accredited academic philosophers who would appear much deeper, to me, if they would cancel their last chapters. These would be the chapters in which the purpose of all the preceding incomprehensible jargon is plainly revealed, by the insertion of a few tawdry clichés. At least take out the last paragraph, which can only enable the reader to omit reading the preceding book. For that is the paragraph that gives the whole story away: of how the man got tenure. Spare us that.

But the man who had followed this advice would hardly have gotten past the tenure committee.

One could be ambitious, and consult dictionaries of quotations for the famous last words of famous people: little tags placed on the ends of lives that leave us wondering if they were truly worth living. All those decades of hard-earned human experience ending in … a lame tweet? … Of course you need more light, Wolfgang. You probably need more oxygen, too.

Perhaps I should do it myself in these essays. Go back through them and delete the endings. When I wrote for newspapers I would often find a sub-editor had performed this service for me. He’d remove the last sentence to make the column fit the space. Sometimes not the whole sentence, just what came after the comma. This must have happened to me a dozen times before I learnt always to write a little short of the word-count, leaving the frustrated sub-editor with a line to fill, in which he could write, “Mr Warren’s column appears Wednesdays and Saturdays.” Or if that wasn’t enough, he could add, “And Sundays.”

Reading Charles Krauthammer’s column this morning, I was inspired to write the above. He does what the Canadian poets do, but with flair. A fellow obnoxious rightwing lunatic like me will be nodding all the way through, agreeing with everything he says — yes, I thought today, the leftists are becoming more and more totalitarian. Yes, this example; and yes, that example; and yes, the other example, too. Well said, Charlie, I totally agree. He adds, this morning, “Long a staple of academia, the totalitarian impulse is spreading. What to do? Defend the dissenters, even if — perhaps, especially if — you disagree with their policy.”

Good man, and a commendable liberal impulse, in the fine old sense of that word. Voltaire would smile, and look at his pocket watch. Talleyrand would wonder at the indiscretion. But then Krauthammer adds:

“It is — it was? — the American way.”

Oh please. You’ve spoilt it. All these small and simple truths, ending in a flourish of … bosh. It was never the American way. That’s not how a democracy ever worked. It works by consensus. The people may or may not have a few opinions, but they wait for the consensus to form in their immediate environment, and then everyone against it shuts up. That is, and has been, the American way, from the income tax to gay marriage. Also the Canadian way (but more so), the British (but with sly humour), the French (while eating), the German (to a fault), the Swedish (beyond it), but — God bless them, it is not the Italian way. No, the Italians don’t care what they say. They don’t even know what a consensus is in that country.

Let me conclude by mentioning that I really like Italians.

Several readers have noticed how little I’ve had to say about our current Pope, whether here or elsewhere. But you know me, always trying to avoid controversy. “If you can’t say something nice, say nothing.” Today, thanks to a correspondent in Virginia, getting at the latest Sandro Magister post before I could, I have something nice to say. It follows from the meeting last week in Rome of Pope Francis with the President of one of those unfortunate American republics, which lie to the south of us. (There is one I can get glimpses of, just across the Lake, from up here in the High Doganate.) You know the gentleman, surely. He has been on TV. He was the one with the big grin: that wide, painted, danse-macabre grin he was wearing while he stood beside our Pope for the photo-op in Rome. The Pope, for his part, was glowering.

The two faces, in juxtaposition, seemed plainly to suggest their respective positions on contraception, abortion, and the vicious attacks on religious freedom over here in the New World — most recently through the provisions of something called “Obamacare,” designed to put every faithful Christian on the spot, with fines and other punishments unless he agrees to make a public sacrifice of his own conscience, and worship at the shrine of Belial.

This is not how the matter was presented in the pages of the New York Times, however. On the other hand, elsewhere in that paper I noticed that even they begin to characterize their President and his administration as enemies of liberty — at least, liberty of the press. They are on the cusp of noticing that their President is, to put this as nicely as I can, often less than candid about his actual agenda.

Just between us, I expect politicians to lie. That is their trade, after all, and many have devoted decades to the mastery of this art of “circumlocution,” which contains many little techniques of deceit, and is in turn part of the larger art of mass suckering, or “democracy.” The master of this art can tell a very big lie, that is aggregated from small, factually checkable statements, or uncheckable statements that will pass glibly. The art is in the selection of his “talking points,” and in omitting the connectives, the reasoning, that takes him from point to point. As a student of rhetoric, I can admire a talented sophist, simply as a craftsman. He is, like an old-fashioned circus magician, able to distract his audience in key moments, to perform his tricks. He can turn even the sceptics into a cheering section. They all go off and vote for him, now he has shown that he can deliver an endless supply of rabbits, or anything else they may require.

However, the President in question lies without the slightest air of plausibility. I consider that poor workmanship. He does it again and again, with or without the help of his teleprompter; and except for the humourless types at Fox News, nobody calls him on it. He secured victory in the last election by having the tax department methodically neutralize organizations that had delivered crushing electoral rebukes to his party in the previous mid-terms. Very well, corruption goes with the territory. Any political party in a “democracy” may try that sort of thing, by way of clinging to power. The experts love a winner, and will smile on their success.

My outrage is instead directed to his public statements afterwards; about that and other matters including Benghazi, where knowing lies were told, in something of a panic, to keep the matter off the political agenda until the election was over. Once again, that is what politicians do, when they have the means to do it. And lies like that are limited, not systemic; they are only meant to serve in the absence of any more subtle deceit. Later, they can be retracted. But when later, the acts are fully exposed — and no acknowledgement is made of the fact of exposure — my rant begins.

As I say, corruption I expect. And I expect them to try to get away with it. But when they are caught, mere decency requires a little show of contrition. This did not occur.

The same comment, really, for contraception, abortion, infanticide, and innumerable other crimes — fornication, adultery, sodomy, bestiality — and whatever else Phil Robertson mentioned in the alligator swamp. I know these things happen. I am sometimes prepared to look the other way. I will allow that, in some cases, the consequences of having a law are worse than the consequences of not having a law; that we should “live and let live,” tolerate the tolerable, so long as it does not spread. But the argument that these are not wrongs, not “sins” both by revelation and reason — which, in principle, ought to be discouraged — goes beyond me.

Sin in secrecy is perfectly comprehensible. But when it ceases to be secret, and is flaunted without shame, well: “Houston, we have a problem.”

To Sandro Magister I send the curious reader for the best account yet of how the current Pope may, indeed, be Catholic. [Link.] At the most basic, viscerally intentional level, he, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Pope Francis, seems to know exactly what he is dealing with, when he is meeting with men of worldly power; who have sold their souls to the devil to obtain it; whose dishonesty extends even to denying that crimes are crimes. I am relieved to learn that Francis is a “disciple” of such a thinker as Alberto Methol Ferré, whose description of contemporary “libertine atheism” is so astute. For the prospect of the Church herself making concessions to Belial is of concern to me.

Doing wrong is common enough. We’ve been doing that since Adam. But denying that wrong is wrong — that is where we pass from the human into the metaphysical realm of evil.

Up here in the High Doganate, where we have been rather ill this week, to the point of seeking medical attention, Lent proceeds apace. With illness comes a form of writer’s block: not a failure to write, but instead, a failure to write anything remotely publishable. If one has been a hack journalist through too much of one’s life, there can be no such thing as “writer’s block” in the strict sense. The internal switch may be toggled to “blather” at any time, so long as the fingers can type. Attention is dangerous: they are the pieces I write at full attention that get me in trouble. Too much passion in them, and the views are all wrong. I’d still be employable today, if I had not strayed from half-attention. I have no discipline. At any moment I may suddenly focus, in a most gratuitous way. As periodical editors often warned, this is unbecoming in a journalist. Better stick to email, when the fit is on, with old and forgiving friends, who have seen these fevers before and know that they will pass.

Alas, this happened once even when I was cast as a food columnist, surrounded by the grocery adverts in a Wednesday consumer section, and accompanied by other food columnists with beats such as “Healthy Eating,” “Vegetarian Delights,” “The Organic Chef,” “Wine for Wellness,” “The Whole Earth Gourmet,” and so forth. The editor thought I could do no mischief there. I don’t know what got in me to write an essay entitled, “Why Vegetarianism is Morally Wrong,” and conclude with a Serbian sheep’s head recipe. But there you go. There was a violent attack on tofu; a mean-spirited lunge against muffin eaters; an idyllic aside on the importance of smoking in the kitchen (all the great chefs were smokers, and I touched on the symbolism of the ash that drops here and there into the finest dishes).

I persisted in this vein, and in a little time all the other columnists were threatening to quit, and the supermarket chains to withdraw their advertising. My last piece was on the advantages of wine drunk in immoderation, on the old Greek scheme, in celebration of Bacchus. It included my memoir of a long and happy weekend from my youth. Alas, it never appeared.

Meanwhile, one of the office feministas and commies — a self-appointed legislator of newspaper mores — had made a big storm over an innocent piece I had written, in appreciation of “White Trash Cookery.” She had read only the first “graf,” and thought I would be taking a kick at the welfare customers. Had she got to the second paragraph, she might have noticed my invocation of Ernest Matthew Mickler. For it was the cuisine of those pigmentally unenhanced, and materially impoverished, along Hurricane Alley, up the U.S. south-east coast, by which I was enthused. They use “oleo” (margarine) for their cooking oil, as the French use butter. Too, they interpret the contents of tins as raw ingredients, on the analogy of vegetables. The black people, in those parts, had had the wit to move a little inland, isolating the whites along the low-lying shores in a form of (breezy) island culture. But the latter had acquired from the blacks, in transit, a genius for adaptation, and a taste for hot spicing. It was a fascinating story; nothing to do with our wretched urban underclasses. “You must learn to read, Janice,” was my only defence.

You put your faith in Thomas Jefferson, or you put your faith in God. (See Leo XIII on this point.) Curiously enough, it was the subject of one of my food columns. Technically, it was justified, for there was a book of recipes from Monticello, generated, I think, by some of those Daughters of the American Revolution. A copy had fallen into my lap, and I was pretending to review it. I ran out of space before getting to that, however, owing to a lengthy digression. I have always preferred the Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire — “For Queen and Country,” with a prayer, and a badge. Unfortunately, they have been in recession. But they were noble, well-dressed, proper ladies, and the Children of the Empire Junior Branch always neatly turned out and well-behaved. For dignity, and serene authority, I would pit a chapter matron of the IODE against a Dowager Empress of China. But I did allow that Jefferson had been an ardent opponent of the demonic metric system, which continues to spread havoc and confusion through kitchens across America to this day. For the envoi, I gave hints on the lush rotis to be had from the island of Nevis, birthplace of Jefferson’s rival, my esteemed Alexander Hamilton.

*

I, for my part, as a United Empire Loyalist, put my faith in God, with a tender regard for the British monarchy, and a passing lament for the late Secretary of the Treasury, the revolutionist who, uniquely among those “Founding Fathers,” seemed almost fully to grasp the actual limitations of political action. (Would he had understood pistols as well.) Unfortunately it would take a book or more to explain that Hamilton is to be remembered not as the advocate of central banks, nor federal bureaucracies to any other purpose, but as the sworn enemy of worldly idealism, to say nothing of the cheap political posturing that invariably accompanies it, with sufficient wisdom to see where “enlightenment” can only lead. He was, to his credit, instinctively a monarchist, too. He was an “if/then” man, not a political dreamer. All he wanted was some sound money. And grilled beef; he was a tyrant for grilled beef. That was what to put in his roti.

Too, as I was reminded this week by a piece in Forbes magazine (the column of a certain Thomas Del Beccaro), he opposed any Bill of Rights, whether federal or state. That makes anyone a hero in my cookery book. All such Bills are sophistical, and invite legalistic twisting. Hamilton understood: he was British like that. A written Bill of Rights turns the corner, from everything is legal unless the law says no, to nothing is legal unless the law says yes. A government without the power to abrogate freedoms has no business guaranteeing them. So render it powerless; only a fool trusts a keeper with his freedom. From the moment such a guarantee is declared, verily, our liberties are now under siege. The USA Constitution descended upon a people who had enjoyed unparalleled individual freedom for a century and a half, under the British Crown. In response to the puling, demagogic oratory of colonial politicians, they exchanged this for a system that could ultimately deliver Obamacare. (So did we, incidentally: pshaw on “democracy.”)

What we need is to abrogate all the Bills and Charters, and restore the (mediaeval) Common Law — to uphold the rights of the defenceless Little Man against the Monster State, and all other organized powers contriving to oppress him. But that is not all we need, for outside of Lent, we might also hanker for a grilled beef roti. And with plenty of scotch bonnet in the sauce.

*

This week’s principal culinary accomplishment, up here in the High Doganate, was a catfish curry. Unfortunately it was made at half attention, I doubt that I could reconstruct the receipt. But, you know: coriander, fennel, cumin, chillies. Lots of garlic and ginger. Fresh, if you can find them, lemon grass and curry leaves, and those wonderful “rampe” or pandan or screw-pine leaves that I found even in Parkdale, ground up in oil in a bottle from Sri Lanka. Goes with yellowed rice: ghee and ground onions, more leaves, turmeric root, cinnamon, cloves, cardamoms, and whatever else I put in.

Oh, and coconut milk. How could I forget about the coconut milk.

Not everyone likes catfish, I am told; they go into fits about “bottom feeders,” and of course, some of them die. But what can you do? Cars kill more, and even though nobody eats them. So, if you are the neurotic type, say an Ave before you dig in. To me, catfish are wholly admirable creatures, like goats. They feed on the underwater grasses, but also on anything else they can find. They can be insolent, like goats, or like some of my favourite women. We call them pla mong in Siamese. (The catfish.) Slithery and scale-less; also easy to gut. Catch them with nets: they’re too smart to take hooks. I love their droll expressions, as if they’ve been listening to heretic eels all day and they’ve had enough. They should put one on tabloid TV, to chew the riparian cud with one of those angry white males. Let the fish tell us what he thinks really happened to Flight 370.

They were so plentiful in the rivers and klongs, the poor people ate them for a staple. (The catfish. In Siam.)

“There is fish in the stream, and rice in the fields,” as we say (in Siam). Except, during the monsoon, when there is rice in the stream and fish in the fields.

I cannot say enough for catfish (also, pan-fried, or roasted on the fire).

Do you know that they go quite crazy for Wonder Bread?  There is a colony of them, that swim under Little Irene’s Swamp House, up there by Penetanguishene, where I have house-sat from time to time. You get your Wonder Bread from the grocery shelves at the local gas station. Since it is not suitable for human consumption, you break it up and toss bits on the water. Great convulsions of catfish thrash joyously as it lands. Some will leap, and even squiggle a few inches onto a mudbank to fetch a piece. I have spent hours, fattening them in this way, and feeling happy, and at peace, like a catfish on one of his more philosophical days.

We (and I still sometimes use this plural to indicate, “all of my personae, considered as a choir”) were asked only yesterday, by a gentleman who had previously been asking about Stefan Zweig, to describe the degree of our aloofness from current events. He (the emailer, not Herr Zweig, who has been dead these last seventy years) is, I suspect, vexed by this question himself. I know him as a man who has been somehow mixed up in high counsel to the American Republican party. And like me, he seems to realize that the Americans have a two-party system: the Democratic Statists versus the Republican Statists. (Up here in the far north we have five or more Statist parties.) That, to my mind, is what “democracy” has always been about: competitive statism.

But, ho, I am ignoring his question:

“Do you consider yourself to be in exile, imposed or self-imposed? I mean in temporal affairs, not the exile from the divine that is this life.”

The glib answer, supported by a Russian proverb (“A man can do most good where he was born”), is no, I cannot be an exile because I live in the same city wherein I was born. (It is also where one can do the most damage.) True, I was whisked away by my gypsy parents at a tender age, and several times having returned later I went off again, vowing never to come back, but here I am once again in the Greater Parkdale Area, enduring the general decline.

Yet even temporally, the question is a good one. By chance, several other correspondents (for I have a Commentariat ye know not of) have asked me recently some similar question. It must be in the air. To what extent do we even care what is going on around us? Granted, we could anyway do little about it, for if we devoted our entire lives to meddling in some way, what could we expect to achieve? I have friends of long standing who have tried this, and are only now beginning to give up; who have tilted against the proposition, “What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world, but forfeit his own soul?” And unlike Saint Thomas More’s interlocutor, they didn’t even get Wales.

One of my correspondents, a lady from the Canadian far east, posed or rather insinuated the question in terms of “reality” or “realism.” That is to say, look at the world as it is, and discard every illusion that might be employed in romanticizing what you see there. That still leaves plenty of room for meddling. We could, as Voltaire said, when he was playing Cicero in opposition to Leibniz, “cultivate our garden.” Some exiles are able to do that. But can one be a proper exile with such property as a garden? Or if, as Cicero, we get carried away, and add a house to shelter our library, too?

There is a paradox, which I propose to stare down. As I’ve written before, I hope without originality, almost everyone is an exile today. T.S. Eliot (in his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948) observed the tendency of modern education (which includes media) to adulterate and degrade everything it touches, concluding, in a bad mood, that we were “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.” And we are there now: for even those who occupy houses must be, should they wish to continue earning a living, ready to move at short notice.

The “exile” in such circumstances is more likely to be the person who refuses to move. By this refusal he makes greater and greater distance from his neighbours. But then, the modern state can expropriate anybody: we no longer enjoy the reliable protection of e.g. the Common Law; and our human rights have been, such as they were, collectivized. (This, too, is among the inevitable, barbarizing products of “democracy,” as all other kinds of totalitarianism.)

We have been re-interpreted as “human resources,” when once upon a time we were human beings. Another correspondent, in Ottawa, who actually works with computers, notes that really she works for them; and that in every working environment of which she is aware, the people are subsidiary to the machinery. We are exiled, thus, from our own nature.

And we are exiles whether we want to be or not, so the question may now be moot. Any attempt to answer it is playing with illusion. True, in a certain sense, we were always so, for at any moment any of us might involuntarily “push off” and die. But again, we were not considering the question from the transcendental angle, only in worldly terms, and those terms have been changing, “progressively” as it were. My parents, and even more my grandparents, did not consider themselves to be exiles, even when forced by external circumstances to change houses. They still felt a certain continuity within the society around them, and a quite personal belonging to it. Do I?

As we used to say in hippie days, “Reality is for people who can’t handle drugs.” … Well, as may be discerned from my last Idlepost, some of us weren’t hippies then, have become more like hippies now. (Was gentle reader ever a hippie?) … I continue to resist medication, however.

From the towering height of sixty years, I see that “realities” have come and gone. The fair certainties of merely half a century ago have evaporated during my lifetime — reasonable certainties, for instance, about what was right and what was wrong — and there is no foreseeable prospect of restoration. Which is not to say the world was not in a fine mess a half-century ago; but the sands of atomization have become much finer and more readily shifted by every passing breeze. Who is not an exile in a “culture” which does not recognize, for instance, the sanctity of human life? Or the indissoluble nature of families? I have lived to see the terms “father,” “mother,” “brother,” “sister,” “uncle,” “aunt,” and so forth, methodically and retroactively stripped from all provincial legislation; and in parallel, the creation by the same “reforming” legislators of new human sexes. Who will bother warning of the cliff? We are already in the free fall of a demonstrable insanity.

*

Which puts me in mind of the quatrains of my youth. Friedrich Hölderlin, for instance, wrote in his madness (if gentle reader will accept translation, and tolerate my old-fashioned habit of quoting from memory):

The lines of life are various, they diverge and cease,
Like footpaths to the mountain’s utmost ends:
What here we are, elsewhere a God amends.
With harmony, eternal recompense and peace.

Good, but perhaps too fatalistic, especially in a poet who once glorified Greece. On the other hand, I have been assured that every Zen Buddhist Japanese, when travelling, carries in his heart:

Really there is no East, no West.
Where then is the North, and the South?
Illusion makes the world close in;
Enlightenment opens it on every side.

At least, I assume it is the other hand, and that the author of the Japanese quatrain was sane. I prefer the Buddhist “Enlightenment” to the French; I believe it leaves fewer corpses. It also provides the exile with a remedy against the homesickness that may sometimes afflict him. But when it comes to this, there remains a quatrain by Li Po, known, apparently, to every waiter in a Chinese restaurant:

Above my bed there is pale moonlight,
So that it seems like frost on the ground.
Lifting my head, I see the bright moon;
Lowering my head, I dream that I’m home.

He was a real exile, and my far eastern correspondent immediately replied with his verses on “Madly Singing in the Mountains,” written after his banishment to Hsun-yang. (It was worse for Po Chü-i: he was removed from Hsun-yang and sent to Chung-chou.) Li Po observes that his mad singing attracts the curiosity of monkeys and birds, and that by removal to a remote location he is freed of the embarrassment of becoming a laughing-stock to his fellow humans. This returns us by way of Szechuan to the West, by the open road, and to a poet I have mentioned before, Michael Roberts. It is yet another quatrain long carried in my own heart:

Coming out of the mountains of a summer evening,
Travelling alone;
Coming out of the mountains
Singing.

Roberts was an earnest man who, as I explained in that old Idlepost, devoted earnest attention to the fate of worldlings in books with such titles as, The Estate of Man. He died young, alas, but as the economic, political, social, and environmental “problems” he identified from the world of the ‘thirties were exactly the same as they are today, minus the debilitating complexities we have added, I don’t see that his living longer would have been much use.

Exiles from Heaven we most certainly are, but from this terminal ward of a planet we can escape in only one way. To reply to the question as directly as I can, I would therefore quote my own motto, taken from the preamble to the Salon de 1846, by Charles Baudelaire, addressed affectionately “aux bourgeois“:

Vous pouvez vivre trois jours sans pain; — sans poésie, jamais!