Essays in Idleness

All my life I’ve been forgetting things, so that today I cannot even be sure that I am going senile. In my childhood the expression was “out to lunch” — a feeding break for a mind that might, conceivably, resume its normal functions later in the day; but with the possibility of failure not excluded. For after the lunch, comes the siesta. “Thinking is hard,” Housman used to say, “and four minutes is a long time.” He doubted his own students had the stamina, at Cambridge more than a century ago. And while the four-minute mile has since been beaten, I should think attention spans have shrunk, more.

Up here in the Canadas — America’s mad attic, where the bats roost — I sometimes wonder what it would take to drive the bats away. But then I recall that I’m a bat myself, and it is my own home.

Unpleasant people, from the political periphery (“out in left field”) will assume I refer to the immigrants, but no, most of our bats are native. It would anyway be hard to find people from elsewhere as crazy as those we breed here. My constant fear is that the children of our sane, polite, hard-working immigrants, will be assimilated. The fear is reasonable. The other day, for instance, I was stopped in the street by an aggressive young Chinese panhandler. After not giving him the dollar he demanded, I reflected that before we had plenty of Chinese — especially in Chinatown, there — but not one of them a panhandler. Until this guy.

On this morning’s walk I was arrested, though not by Justin Trudeau’s new Pronoun Police. Rather it was by a beautiful sight. It was a Muslim woman, from her complexion and headdress, walking her daughter to school. (I say “was” out of an abundance of caution: I’m sure she was a Muslim woman at 8 o’clock this morning; but do not presume to know what she is now.)

In addition to the daughter, she was carrying a baby. Ah, what a picture. The failed painter within me immediately saw an ideal model for Madonna and Child — coached, curiously enough, by some words of Girolamo Savonarola that happened to fly through my head.

This Dominican friar, and Florentine preacher was, I think, quietly despised by the painters of that city. He lectured them on how to paint. He told them they were doing Our Lady all wrong. She wasn’t a rich woman, he explained, not a fashion plate. In fact she was poor, and from everything we know, modest.

“She would have covered up. Her face, alone, would have been showing. Only whores go about with their heads uncovered like that.”

Another Dominican, Fra Bartolomeo, would obediently affix the mantilla; but not before he had lovingly inscribed every lock of the Virgin’s hair. (I have a book of his drawings up here in the High Doganate; I’m fairly sure that’s what he did.)

One grows older, and possibly simpler. One may forget the more complicated things. How I wish that I could paint the image I have seen. Words will never do it justice: this image of the humble Muslim lady, waiting for the streetlight with that Child in her arms.

My Chief Hoosier Correspondent (not to be confused with the Vice-Potus) advises me to advise gentle reader of another living sage. All of his recommendations are good; some, like this, remind me that I have done a wretched job of “sharing” the wealth of which I know. For the strange thing is, that God has not abandoned us. (I’m often at a loss to understand why not.) Knock and it shall be answered, according to Our Lord. Look, and you will find. I have found this to be so, with shocking regularity. But one must knock, one must look. No one answers when you don’t knock; not even God. Although, He may be sneaking up behind you.

There are actually people like Gabriele Kuby, alive and at large — even in Germany. They write books, such as hers — on, The Global Sexual Revolution: The Destruction of Freedom in the Name of Freedom; on, Christian Principles of Political Struggle; on, The Nationalization of Education; on, Self-Knowledge: The Way to the Heart of Jesus — which are not only on the right topics, but handled with extraordinary poise. What has impressed me, at every literary encounter with this lady, is her refusal to be destructive. Even while condemning the worst excesses of our post-modern Culture of Death, there is sweet breath in her. She gathers our attention then lifts it from the mire; in a way that is neither naïve, nor clever.

We claim to want a better world; to be struggling for “change” in one direction or another; to be oppressed by tyrants of the Left or Right; to be small and powerless and helpless. If only we were in a position to do something! If only we had the ability to advance, then we could make a difference. Everything would be better then.

But: Quia parvus error in principio magnus est in fine, as St Thomas saith. (“For a small error at the beginning is a great error at the end.”) We go wrong, from the start, in failing to grasp that “change” requires repentance. The essential problem is in each of us, and not in any social abstraction. Without that purposeful act of reconciliation with the Author of all Grace, we cannot rise. And yet we can, rise, from the moment that we discard the burden of sin we have been stupidly carrying.

This is not impossible. The confessionals are open.

The problem begins with me. This is the profound Christian insight that can change everything in the world around us. Of a sudden we are not slaves any more. We can begin to see and to embrace truths from which we had spent all our days hiding.

Gabriele Kuby (website, here) is a credentialled master of certain grim social sciences. She is from a distinguished family of German writers and thinkers, who went her own way into Catholicism. She has been reviled for her stalwart orthodoxy by many “progressives” in Europe, to a degree that suggests how well she understands them.

In a time when “gendered” madness is afoot, she has patiently expounded the nature of the sexes at the root of civilized life. She has a further understanding of what is called Love, that does not interact with our current, degraded conceptions. Instead, it is a cure.

In Heaven, I don’t know what the practical arrangements are, or even if they have any. They may not need them (it frightens me to think of all the things they might not need), and the idea of “sustainability” would draw an immortal laugh. Or perhaps, rather, an immortally gentle and indulgent smile.

Among us worldlings, however, here in Theatrum Mundi, eating is among the big issues. Lent would be, if nothing else, a reminder of how material we are. You don’t work, you don’t eat; you don’t eat, you get quite hungry; and so on to a bad end. Apart from His pointed advice, that man cannot live by bread alone, Christ had nothing much to say on agronomy. Neither did Socrates, for that matter, though I think he spread a rumour to the effect that men were happier in our hunting and gathering days, before we settled on farms. (I would correct his anthropology, for the evidence now suggests that we were innate farmers from the start, just as we were innate talkers.)

The question is thus not whether we should grow food, but how. I will be quickly condemned if I modestly propose that the way we are doing it now — in huge monocultural sections adapted to automotive seeding and harvesting — is not ideal. Only a city boy would question arrangements which are truly feeding more than seven billion living souls, with more calories each, on the average, than ever before. I am a city boy, however, so let me try it on.

The great majority of what I call “environmentalcases” are city boys and girls. It helps to know nothing about farming and the wilds, to have strong opinions on them. It seems whenever I ride the Greater Parkdale Subway, I see perverse public-service adverts for veganism, with pretty portraits of cows. Our farmers are frankly accused of murder, but also theft of the mother’s milk.

Yes, the idea is insane; but more so than may first appear. All these pretty cows exist because we have a use for them. When the use has passed, the cows go, too. Turn them loose, and they won’t get far. Unless, of course, we want to extend Twisted Nanny State to all the formerly enslaved farm and zoo animals. … (The road to Cloud Cuckooland winds ever on.)

But this is the scandal of contemporary agriculture, merely adjusted. It is all, essentially, insane. It requires massive “inputs” to keep it going — of fertilizers, pesticides, machinery that now includes computers, and a global infrastructure of transport and storage. A bit of war, and the whole thing collapses.

I will not lecture gentle reader on the principles of “permaculture,” which may be easily found by the search term. Suffice to say, it is opposed to “organic,” which only proposes less efficient inputs, and thus continues industrial farming, though with one hand now tied behind our back. It is the invention of people who can only think “outside the box,” according to me. We need people who can think inside the orchard.

With a little genius, here and there, and plenty of applied science, it would be possible to farm more intensively than we presently do on our arable lands, and extend them into now abandoned places. Indeed, some of that science consists of archaeological inquiry, into the works of many distant ancestors, who by trial and error (or angelic intervention) raised mixed, collusive crops — to grow themselves annually and perpetually, with the minimum of artificial intervention, and without sacrifice of the soil’s fertility. Yet with jobs, jobs, jobs: joyfully planting and harvesting by hand, in places beautiful instead of boring and ugly.

We trap ourselves in these megaproject boxes, that we have externally assembled. The best we can imagine is a smaller box; usually we’re thinking of a larger. We analyse negatively: how to correct this nuisance or that. The trick is to think positively instead, the way God does, in terms not of restriction but abundance.

In my piece at the Thing, this morning (this one here), I refer parenthetically to the three (3) Reformations. As ever, my most whimsical asides are meant with deadly seriousness. Had I the learning, wisdom, and energy, I would write a book on it. Fortunately, perhaps, for the world’s paper supply, I have never got in the habit of writing books. Call it a conceit. Everyone I know, it seems, has written at least one book, and got it published, too. Some have written twenty. I should like to be remembered as the man who never wrote a book. It makes me feel like Socrates.

People (not my friends, of course) write “piffle,” that can go on for hundreds of pages. The word is my father’s, who would use it when he thought I was talking nonsense. If so, better to stop after a few hundred words.

Or my hero (when young), T. E. Hulme (1883–1917, another non-author), who read or scanned a lot of big fat books by then-contemporary philosophers, and replied to them in much the same way. He said don’t waste your time. Read the last page first. See where the author is going. If he is going to end on some commonplace fatuity, you may spare yourself the trouble of mastering his jargon. (He got this tip from Bergson.)

Hulme also said that the content of most philosophical tomes could be scrawled on a half-sheet of foolscap paper (one side). He did not mean it could be abstracted or précised at this length. Rather, that the whole argument could be made, without significant omissions.

So in that spirit, this morning I will present my latest “book,” on the half-sheet. Notice that most of it is filled with my introduction.

My thesis: everything in history happens in threes.

I know this sounds Hegelian — thesis, antithesis, synthesis and all that — but I mean, literally, something closer to Marx: 1. Tragedy, 2. Comedy, 3. Farce. Surely, were it not for the high body counts, everyone would see this.

There were, for instance, not one but three American Civil Wars. They started in 1776, 1812, and 1861, respectively. The first was a tragedy, in which the principles of legitimacy and continuity, and those of popular will and freedom, met head on. The second was just unfinished business. The third was a horrible misunderstanding, within the “will and freedom” camp. In each case honest, hard-working, God-fearing American people were diverted by the prospect of killing each other.

Today’s initial Tragedy is what everyone who has read a little history (and that’s not a lot of peoplekind, any more), knows as the “Reformation.” A rebellion was mounted against the claims of the Catholic Church, by men who nevertheless considered themselves Christian. The whole of Western Christendom was rent in two, thereby; with predictable further schisms within the schismatic camp.

That was in the sixteenth century, though much of the bloodshed extended into the seventeenth, increasing until all parties were inclined to make peace.

We had round two, the Comedy, when we got our energy back. We call that the “Enlightenment,” but it was a continuation of the same trend. The rebellion was now against Christianity, tout court. By this time, the Catholic Church was trying to stay out of it, but of course without luck. The bloodshed from this Second Reformation began seriously pouring in the French Revolution, then resumed in nationalist and ideological revolutions sporadically thereafter.

In the twentieth century, for instance, the body count easily surpassed one hundred million, from the triumphs of the “cutting edge,” atheist regimes.

Now we are in the twenty-first, and enjoying yet a Third Reformation, and in my terminology, the Farce. In this one, the rebellion has “moved on,” from Faith to Reason. It challenges the authority of sanity, itself. It is founded on propositions that are, even compared to those previous, utterly insane. The body count for this one hasn’t properly begun. Be patient, gentle reader.

We’ve had that Cardinal Sarah in town, speaking after Vespers in the Cathedral, and at St Augustine’s Seminary. It was hard to get in, even to the Cathedral — long waiting lists for the tickets — but I was able to pose as another man’s wife. (She had to drop out at the last minute.) Saint Michael’s, here in Greater Parkdale, isn’t very large. When a certain Cardinal Ratzinger came, some thirty-two years ago, the churchwardens had the good sense to rent a hockey arena. We underestimate the star power of these quiet, undemonstrative clerics.

Indeed, considered as a business — and why not? — the Church Catholic has been making bad management decisions for decades now. They have, one might say, two products: “Traditional,” and “Lite.” The former is selling briskly, the latter is on the blocks. So where do they place their bets? (Guess.)

Or to put this a little less vulgarly, but only a little, most people who want Catholicism at all, want it straight up. They actually long for reverence and holiness. They want the music and chant that even pagans will buy on commercial recordings, but which they won’t hear in church. They are not afraid of Latin, and may have noticed that in this age of “multiculturalism,” it is our one common language. Without it, we divide into small ethnic cells, which die in isolation.

In my own humble but persistent opinion, we have endured more than half a century, of noisy things done to attract “the people,” which instead drove them away. When we do the opposite — make Catholicism more Catholic — the naves mysteriously fill again. I don’t understand the sales strategy.

Humiliated in Rome, as certain other “traditionalist” prelates, yet popular elsewhere, men like Cardinal Sarah remain to inspire us. He spoke here in a soft monotone — English is about his fifth or sixth language — and received rapt attention. One might almost say he went out of his way to be boring. He repeated the thesis of his recent book, The Power of Silence, in sentences consistently meditative rather than rhetorical; with no aphoristic flourishes, or anything resembling an applause line. He said nothing that should not be obvious to a formed Catholic mind, yet with a cumulative, developing power. He compels an audience to listen prayerfully.

Silence is a language that came before Latin, and remains at the heart of our Liturgy, whatever the language in which it is said or sung. We live today in the highly technical language of meaningless buzz, and from custom have become terrified of silence. It is a priest’s job to tell us: be brave.

Are we to be defined by our technological gadgetry, or defined in silence? Are we to be empty or full? Most came expecting to hear that, and were not disappointed. Silence can’t be spoken with a loud voice. It is the still and small one, of which Sarah speaks. I doubt anyone, knowing of the speaker, came expecting a pep talk.

I (and perhaps several others) could not help noticing what a good pope he would make: one who doesn’t speak unless he has something necessary to say; who is not trying to surprise us. One whose comfort is in the Sacraments and Doctrine, and not in novelties; a spokesman for Jesus Christ, and for no other cause. A man whose voice echoes twenty centuries. Even through the noise of the contemporary world, serious people are drawn to that.

Don’t let it in; fight it; don’t let it get started. Those are the words to the wise from the High Doganate this morning. They apply in many circumstances, today. Gentle reader must be warned that they are not the current position, almost anywhere else. The current wisdom is to make some little concessions, for the sake of a little peace. We should be “reasonable.” The word is misused, for it assumes a relationship of trust, between two or more parties, each informed by reason.

In the world of today, that cannot be assumed. One is dealing with demands that are angry, instead. The Progressive Party (I name it in contrast with my Regressive Party) constantly makes these demands, churning and rechurning an anger that is, at its core, displeasure with God. But they will not, indeed cannot, put their cards on the table. They want something now; they’ll want something else later — more “progress,” as it were. Whereas, we want something today and tomorrow. Already we are speaking to cross purposes.

Under the old political dispensation, that I could still glimpse in my youth, there was lip service to a received order. There was broad agreement on fundamental things. We knew which were our good and bad angels. There was such a thing as “normative” — as there must be in any sane, non-dysfunctional society. There was thus agreement on what is “abnormal,” or perverse.

Liberals wanted more “liberty,” but were sticklers for “process.” Conservatives were instinctively opposed. But the two could still drink together, without risk of poisonings. Both thought “liberty” a Good Thing, and both knew that without some reasonable, and thus “transparent” restraints, it would be lost.

We don’t have liberals any more. The last one died two years ago. Nor, for that matter, do we still have conservatives, because without liberals, they are obviated. We have something instead, to which we must assign the awkward term, “progressivism,” to which the opposite must be “reaction.” Hence the need for our Regressive Party, which wants not only to stop progress, but “set the clock back.” … (Fight “daylight savings time”!)

The progressive lives in the nowhere land of the future. He is, as he says, “planning for the future.” His head isn’t even in the clouds. The clouds would be somewhere; he does not recognize place.

The reactionary lives in the past (which includes the present). He can at least reconstruct, from what we know of history, some things that really were, and must therefore be possible. The Christian, or philosophical reactionary, may even have a clear idea what is better and what is worse, from reflection on cause and effect. The progressive can’t do that.

More fundamentally, the progressive can’t trust. For when there is no “normative” — no normal — there is no ground on which anyone can be trusted. It is worse than that: the very idea of trust becomes an evil for him. How can any individual be trusted to discern right from wrong, good from bad, truth from the lie, when all such categories are either candidly abrogated, or inverted by sophistry?

It is no accident that all progressive proposals require the creation or expansion of a faceless bureaucracy, with jackboot powers.

Reciprocally, we can’t trust them, to help us rekindle or restore any social order. For any such thing must, necessarily, be founded on trust, faith, good faith, reason. But these are the very things the progressives are at war with.

I was once called a “connoisseur of irrelevance,” and I treasure that title, as I treasure “man of the thirteenth century,” “reactionary nutjob” (actually it was “nutcase” but I prefer the British style), and “drooling neanderthal.” Hardly knowing which to put at the top of my name card, I settled for, “Smoker.”

My odd wee memoir of yesterday will serve as introduction for today’s. I confessed to being hungry for news, but unable to find any. That is a slight exaggeration: it is no longer available through the “Main Stream Media,” but may still be scrabbled from here and there. One must dig, but it is hard to get a good shovelful, for the Internet is so diffuse. I miss competent reporting.

Let me give an example. I am curious about what Mohammed bin Salman (the Vunderkind of Saudi Arabia) has been up to this past week — not so much in England (where the media pounced) but before that, in Egypt. In England the “story” was made about an aid agreement which the Guardian called “a national disgrace,” without pretending to explain its why or wherefore; instead, the usual mudball at an easy target, with virtue signalling ladled on thick. It wasn’t even an important matter, at worst another hundred million from the British taxpayer, down the drain.

The media pretend to hate war (the unavoidable one in Yemen will do for an example), but actually they love it. If the war is big enough, and can be contrived to involve “us,” it will sell eyeballs to their advertisers. It is one of many broad areas where one might accuse them of hypocrisy, but I wouldn’t. For to my mind, hypocrisy is like blasphemy. No one can do it any more. One needs some faith, to commit blasphemy; without faith it is mere rudeness. Similarly, one needs some self-knowledge to commit hypocrisy. The contemporary journalist has none.

The journalist who actually longs for peace, will not strike vain poses. He will look instead on the causes and likely consequences of events. He will be careful to report things that really happened, in preference to things collectively imagined by his entertainment industry. He will be on his guard against misrepresenting even people he despises. He will not be following a company line, whether that of CNN, or Fox. In other words, he will be unemployable.

The Saudi crown prince went to Cairo to publicly and unambiguously align his government with that of Egypt’s president, Sisi; and specifically with its serious opposition to Islamism. That in itself is real news, for the two are now working cooperatively on many fronts, one of which is rapprochement with Israel. President Trump’s principal agent in the field — his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — has been working efficaciously in the back parlours, not only on this project, but on what extends from it: rebuilding American alliances with Arab states throughout the Middle East. He is using the wolf-state of Iran, in his diplomatic shepherding. This appears to be working. If Mohammed bin Salman can stay alive and in power, many things become possible, that were not possible before.

In Egypt, the Saudi prince said many surprising things, widely reported in Arabic media but ignored here. He visited not only Al Azhar (the citadel of learned, moderate Sunni Islam), but also the Coptic pope (Tawadros II) at St Mark’s; and invited Copts to visit his country. He allowed a photo-op under a pictorial representation of Jesus Christ. This was previously unthinkable. It bodes well for Christian minorities in Saudi Arabia itself, and across the region. (God bless that Jewish boy, Kushner, for his part in this.)

Something large and potentially very positive is happening, and yet it is ignored by our media, obsessed instead with tabloid things that are small, dirty, and inconsequential.

During a recent, technologically-imposed Internet famine, I had the healthy experience of not knowing what was in the news for days. Now that it is over, I am again cussing myself for my habits. You see, gentle reader, my history as a news junkie runs deep. Habit keeps me reaching for “the papers,” even when there aren’t any left. I go into withdrawal.

A shameful life, addicted to the news.

By the age of six or seven I was hooked by the broadsheet typography. (Its editor had asked my father to propose a redesign of the Pakistan Times, which he then rejected; but meanwhile what could I do but watch?) I’m not precisely sure of the chronology, but by the time Pope John XXIII died (in 1963) I was saturated with the content, too. I had also started a little weekly myself, called the Comet Express, reproduced in about thirty copies from a gelatin tray, and sold door to door in the Park district of Georgetown, Ontario, for two cents a copy.

It is hard to recover from a tailspin like this. By fourteen I was reading European papers in German, French, and sometimes Italian, with enthusiasm if without competence. I was collecting odd numbers of periodicals from around the world, in any language, to study how they were done. I landed a job as a copy boy on the Globe & Mail (or, Mop & Pail to the insiders). By seventeen I’d reached the summit of my journalistic career, as Women’s and Social Editor of the Bangkok World. It has been downhill from there.

I mention all this by way of Lenten extenuation. Really this addiction to printed matter (or digital, now that I’m reduced to that) began by the age of three, with a fascination for the letter “g.” (A pair of spectacles turned sideways?) I taught myself to read on that account, but should have stuck to books. Journalism has proved a monstrous waste of time, and in the course of the last six decades or so, it has become, physically, very ugly.

My favourite newspaper was the “Fernausgabe” (i.e. foreign edition) of the Swiss daily, Neue Zürcher Zeitung — dull, grey, and ridiculously well-informed. (Then not now.) When men landed on the moon, they kept it off the front page — except an “Inhalt” reference to a longish piece about engineering for lunar gravity, on their “Forschung und Technik” page. There would be more current reports in subsequent days: the newspaper would wait until they were available, rather than print extravagant, sentimental fluff.

They employed more foreign correspondents than the New York Times; and far more specialized “stringers.” All seemed to be learned, and were often allowed thousands of words on obscure topics. The editorial staff was compensatingly small and overworked (I saw the inside of their office once). They did not “shape the news” like American editors; the writers shaped it for them.

An example from memory was a marvellous piece on cinema advertising in Cairo, revealing a guild of talented billboard painters. It offered a glimpse of artistic ideals and temperaments within this exotic bubble of commercial illustration. But if one read attentively, it also foreshadowed transformations in Egyptian society.

Pieces like that might appear somewhere in the Internet today, but we will have to look for them specifically, with some genius for search terms, and no confidence in their authority. Such articles seldom made the papers even then, yet as I say, there was a newspaper that ran them, the plurality of whose readers were German-speaking businessmen. And five paid subscriptions went into the White House, as one of their correspondents once boasted to me; and as many into the Kremlin, where the inmates also “needed to know.”

When the philosopher and scholar, Hans-Georg Gadamer, died in 2002 (at age 102), the good old NZZ devoted eight full (ad-free) pages to his life and thought. I remember this as a last hurrah. It was soon after that the paper was “updated,” to incorporate colour splashes, and progressively strip away whatever remained of unique value. It is obviously desperate to hold a few “modern readers,” who want their news “lite” and frothy.

It will become a sleazy tabloid, living off faded pretensions, like the Times of London; or it will become extinct. For in the absence of intelligent readers, there can be no intelligent journalism — in print, or anywhere.

My title this morning comes from Sir Alexander Fleming, and is one of several of that gentleman’s sayings which appeal to me. It might be taken as the Scots equivalent to, “Eureka!” It was what he uttered the morning he noticed that some fungus had killed off one of the staphylococci colonies he had left on a bench in his notoriously messy lab, when he went on holiday. (The others were unharmed.) Within the month he had isolated the “mould juice” that is known to us today as Penicillin.

As he recalled much later, “I wasn’t planning to revolutionize medicine that morning.” But so it goes.

That discovery was made in September, 1928. It would have been useful in the Great War, when Fleming served as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and battled the idiots (field surgeons) over their counter-productive treatments for sepsis, but ah well.

As luck wouldn’t have it, Fleming had unknowingly repeated the work of a certain Ernest Duchesne, whose brilliant thesis long before the War had been ignored by the Pasteur Institute in Paris, because he was young and a nobody. Some millions of deaths might have been averted, but there ye go.

We live in a culture of “research” and “planning.” I’m not against honest research (which is rare), but mortally opposed to “planning.” The best it can ever achieve is defeat, when its ham-fist efforts fail to prevent some beauty, truth, or good from emerging. Countless billions, yanked from the taxpayers’ pockets, and collected through highly professional, tear-jerking campaigns, are spent “trying to find a cure” for this or that. When and if it comes, it is invariably the product of some nerd somewhere, with a messy lab.

Should it be noticed at all, more billions will be spent appropriating the credit to obtain rentier status, or more likely, suppressing it for giving “false hope.” The regulators will be called in, as the police are to a crime scene.

For from the “planning” point of view, the little nerd has endangered billions of dollars in funding, and thus the livelihoods of innumerable bureaucratic drudges. That is, after all, why they retain the China Wall of lawyers: to prevent unplanned events from happening. But glory glory, sometimes they happen anyway.

We could go through my mental file of similar stories from the scientific trenches, then wander more generally afield through the corridors of modern “education.” But not inside my daily word allotment.

I think of Benson Snyder, the psychiatrist once in charge of hand-holding (“human relations”) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. About the time I was coming of age he wrote a saucy tome, entitled, The Hidden Curriculum (1970). It told what it takes to get ahead in places like MIT: the kind of institutional gamesmanship which, far from encouraging learning, drives the genuinely talented away, and makes the world safe for the credentialled.

I think of beloved old J. M. Cameron, who took me up as friend, mentoree, and “unregistered student” at Saint Michael’s College, back in those days. I once asked him directly, after he had been driven out by mandatory retirement, if there was anything all his best students had in common. He answered directly, “They were all self-taught.” In subsequent conversation I received a few mould-juicy anecdotes about how unwelcome they were in the universities, and how quickly most dropped out.

I think the reason our universities were so easily captured by the Leftist filth, was that they had already become institutes of planning; as opposed to education, which is risky and hard and in the fullest Platonic sense, personal.

Among the signs of our time is a poster mounted by a local “educational” institution. (One must use this term very loosely, these days.) The headline reads: “Check Your Privilege,” and in case you don’t know what the long word means, a definition is offered:

“Privilege: Unearned access to social power based on membership in a dominant social group.”

Naturally, one then wonders what the author means by “unearned,” “access,” “social,” “power,” “membership,” “dominant,” and “group.” But that’s only a beginning.

The graphic design is professional, slick, expensive. Underneath this frankly Orwellian statement, we have a “black list” (quite literally, white type reversed from a black rectangle) resembling a Canadian election ballot. There are nine entries, which the viewer is invited to mentally check off:

[  ]  Able-bodied physically and mentally
[  ]  Access to education
[  ]  Christian
[  ]  Cisgender
[  ]  Heterosexual
[  ]  Male
[  ]  Native English speaker
[  ]  Canadian citizen (at birth)
[  ]  White

The list pleased me greatly. I scored nine out of nine!

And here I’d thought I was just some impoverished old git, or rubby-dubby, drummed out of his hack-writing livelihood for sporting “politically incorrect” views, then pestered by leftwing cyberskunks trying to shut me out of the Internet, too.

I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to learn that I am superior to these people in every possible way.

It is instructive, sometimes, rather than tell people what they mean by a word, to ask them. A good example was from my younger son, whom I took on walks, when he was little. (Now he is turning thirty!) His term was waminals. A good father would correct this to “animals,” but I was a bad father. I decided that I preferred waminals, and to this day I retain the prejudice. Animals to you, gentle reader, are waminals to me. The point isn’t really arguable. Animals are; and waminals are just like them except, different.

I assumed, at first, that my boy meant wanimals as opposed to vejtabuls — the animal kingdom of beasts large and small, as opposed to the vegetable kingdom of fwowers, pertatoes, twees, and the like. But then I asked. He meant everything that has legs and walks. Thus to my lad (who is Down syndrome, incidentally), a bider (“spider”) was a waminal, but a fish was not — nor a worm, nor a snake, nor a bird except when landed.

An amphibian, such as a frog (we shared a phoneme for this) was a waminal when out of water but a fish when in. The same for crocodiles. A bird was a waminal, but not in flight. Then it became a burd. Bipedes, such as humans or cats (when batting at things dangled from strings), were as acceptable as quadrupedes. (I’m told the plural is “quadrupedi,” but I don’t care.) Ditto, hexapedes, at least in principle. Of octopedes, he began to express doubts, but only once I told him that, unlike biders, the average octopus likes to stay under water. (We’d seen biders that knew how to walk on it.) Of centipedes, he did not want to know.

He had no concept of evolution by the age of six, and I was careful not to give him one. Instead, he freely accepted metamorphosis. This was especially obvious in the case of ducks, which may mutate from animal, to bird, to fish, at will, and within a few seconds.

I asked him about angels. This he considered to be a new category. “Angles are angles, dad,” he explained, with a theological confidence that left me in awe. And this, just as a fwower is a fwower is a fwower. Some things don’t change, the way my boy could, into a fish. (He won many swimming medals.)

More generally, in the child’s ontological reasoning, a thing is what it is, so that even a duck remains a duck through innumerable transformations. Thus, categories aren’t so important. What kind of duck might be, however, because that is about the duck.

The concept of what is and isn’t an insect had no importance to him at all. And this because he had no concept of “bugs” as a nominal category, only of bugs as an action, a verb. Indeed, as a bloody nuisance. But one should be wary of Wolf Biders, in themselves. It is true, they can both amble and jump (and so might be classed with kangaroos), but the significant point was, they might bite you. Moreover, if they were very large, they might chase you down, then finish eating you entirely. (Here I must admit that I had given him some wrong information about the maximum size of wolf spiders, in the course of a tallish tale.)

Of course animals are scary, or potentially scary, but that is part of the attraction: they are real. The idea of being captured by a Giant Grackle made smaller grackles the more fascinating. Whose babies would they fly away with? He had thought this through, but in a way not quite intelligible to me, because his category for “babies” did not, for instance, include eggs. When I told him there is a baby inside each egg, he took it for a revelation.

“How does the baby get inside?”

It was a good question. I couldn’t answer it. I might have said something stupidly reductive and false, such as, “the mommy makes it.” But my son would have seen right through that. It was eggs, not eggshells, he was asking about.

The outer shell is just so much calcium carbonate, formed to an incredibly high standard of engineering, with countless thousands of precisely gauged pores; the exterior, when decorated, with sublime art. But that’s the easy part. The hard question begins at the cuticle underneath, and grows until it becomes unimaginable. It is about the baby inside. How did it get there?

(By a miracle, of course!)

And there are so many questions, that a child has asked. As we grow older, we forget what they were.

There is no hydrophonic array, up here in the High Doganate, nor have I access to any elsewhere. The kitchen sink sometimes gurgles in an interesting way, but I find no fish in it, nor other signs of life above the microscopic scale. At least, no living fish, for I have overlooked several that were defunct. I think particularly of a tilapia which I dismembered recently. (Perhaps “filleted” is the nicer term.) It sang no songs, made no comments. It started from frozen; it never had a chance. But ah, to be an oceanographer!

I have never had a whale to tea, nor a porpoise, nor any other of that clade. Exigencies of space and altitude are such, that I have neither had the pleasure of those very low-frequency sounds when an ice berg scrapes along an ocean floor; nor the distant “bloops” of underwater ice-quakes; nor the mysterious “upsweeps” of presumed seismicity. I have heard not even one submarine vulcanogenic whistle, up here. Just the gurgle as the dishwater drains.

Hippiesque friends would sometimes import the whale sounds on audio tracks, into their home entertainment centres. Or sometimes, other undersea noises. These were typically “save the whales” types, which is to say, environmental tourists. Even killer whales tend to be shy, when they are not being psychopathically aggressive: either way one should leave them alone. When a marina customer gets attacked by one, I think we should rescue him. We must show some loyalty to our own species. Still, I can see both sides.

I loved travelling, and travellers, in my prime; yet always hated tourists. The person who will immerse himself in the foreign culture, sketch, and try to speak a little of its language, always seemed admirable to me. The true Western visitor is an amateur of anthropology — an “Orientalist” in the smear of the last generation of leftist smuglies. But tourists are mere pleasure seekers. They act only as ambassadors of our post-Christian consumerism. Let me extend this analogy to the voyagers on seas.

Very well, I am being unreasonable. I often am.

The first thing one should seek is discomfort. It is the reliable path to a little understanding. Love is, I hold, the great teacher; but pain is the great teaching assistant.

Among the more intriguing icons of pop science audio is a whale that no one has ever seen. It is known as the “52-hertz,” for it sings above the pitch of any other whale. No one knows what species, either: for it has, as it were, the coloratura of a blue, but the timing of a fin whale. It has been tracked for decades across the North Pacific, and moves just as a whale, and entirely unlike an extraterrestrial object. It may travel a few hundred miles in one season, several thousand in another to Alaska then south, but can’t do bilocation. No one can know how (being a whale) it can hit those exhilarating notes, in the lower range of a tuba.

Were it seeking a mate, it has yet to find one. Perhaps it is deaf, as some deaf mutes suggest. It has been called the “loneliest whale in the world,” but I see no reason to credit this. I am not saying that a whale can’t be subjective, or might even be able to feel sorry for himself — which would not be a sin, in a whale. But loneliness is such a human presumption.

With equal authority let me aver that God endowed this “freak” whale with this wonderful voice, so that God could hear it from on high. And from the deep, it replies in joy.

“If all our medicines were thrown into the sea, it would be better for us, and worse for all the fishes.”

The motto, I believe, is from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Senior, not to be confused with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior. That is to say, the doctor and author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, and not the jurisprude. My mama, who was the daughter of Oliver Wilbur Holmes (and the illustrious Annie Graham!) liked to quote it. Now, she was a nurse, indeed a ward matron, and knew whereof she spoke. Avoid medication, she advised, and moreover:

“Never put anything in your ear smaller than your elbow.”

She had other bonmots, but they were more eccentric. The general purport was, leave well enough alone, and be patient in waiting for the heat death of the universe.

Another word for this is, “conservative.” As I have pointed out myself, the more one knows about a subject, the more conservative one becomes towards it. Conversely, the less one knows, the more liberal he becomes, and inclined to embrace “progress” and “reforms.” Even a Communist may prove a very conservative stamp collector, once he learns something about philately. It’s only economics he knows nothing about.

This is a universal principle. Everyone knows something about something, and is very backward on that which he knows. The one exception may be journalists, who know nothing about anything, and are therefore liberal all round.

Now, what has this to do with Welshmen? Very little, I suspect. But it is Saint David’s Day (a.k.a. St Taffy’s) though the fact isn’t mentioned in my Saint Andrew’s Missal. And here I am in your presence again, after an unwanted holiday, during which I passed through the various rings of cybernetic hell. I promised to be back by the first of March, and here I am with dragons: Bwahaha!

I will take the Dydd Gŵyl Dewi for a name day, though truth to tell, I was not named for a Cymri, but for King David of Alba, in the 800th year of his decease. (I would mention the Psalmist, but have no dates.) Everyone should have a name day, which is why it is so important to name your children after Christian saints, not stars of stage and screen. Too, one should try to spell them properly, in at least one language.

And everyone should be allowed some self-indulgence on his name day.

Truth to tell: I’m a little dazed after my recent experience of this world in which, “everything is changing.” Hence the incoherence of my philosophy today (with apologies to Al-Ghazali). But my main point stands, and pray for all the fishes.