Essays in Idleness

It seems that I am pulled down, or sucked up, by “events,” in these essays. I try hard to keep away from them, and to the Buddhist customs of Yoshida no Kaneyoshi, whom the reader may know by his nom-de-pimceau, as Kenko. My mistake may have been not to move into an isolated cabin in the mountains, in which to write my short, insignificant pieces (and paste them harmlessly on the walls); and instead to have cut-and-pasted them onto the Internet (which is like writing on water). But as I have endeavoured to show, “relevance is irrelevant,” and one should have little to say until that moment when one becomes permanently silent.

The Internet is such a loud and offensive source of mindless relevance; and it is constantly interrupted by advertisements to keep everyone teased, distracted, and worried.

I was reminded, this morning, while consulting Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. This work exhibits a serene proclivity to coherence; to be brilliantly reasoned, and irrefutable, &c. But no one can take it seriously, as a guide to life and letters, or even as a reminder to brew a pot of tea. This is because it has grown unfashionable, like most other things made too widely available.

Like Donald Trump, Pope is an Anglo-humanist and gentle Jacobite — as we see after adjusting our eyes. Nothing he presents or recommends is a novelty, not even the peace treaties, or the return to sanity and good manners, including non-violence. Had he not been previously enmired in commerce and politics, he, too, might have chosen a life of retirement; it is a tragedy to be known. Let us at least avoid fame and ostentation.

Most particularly, we should make an heroic effort not to be captured by “events.” No good can possibly come of it. Of course, one may choose to be martyred, in good time, when the chance arises; but to leap at the opportunity to accomplish anything by death is to pursue hard relevance, to the end. It is to be vulgarly topical.

Well, it could have been worse for Trump. He might easily have won a Nobel Prize. That would have been so utterly distasteful.

Two years have now passed since the gratuitous slaughter of huge numbers of Jews, and many others, by psychotic Mussulmans from Gaza — who had to physically invade southern Israel because the Jews living in Gaza had already been evicted. It is argued, by our “liberal” Left, that many of these hateful people might not have been supporters of the slaughter, but in the pictures taken by Hamas photographers of the terrorists’ homecoming after they had committed these monstrous deeds, it is obvious that the whole population of Gaza was enthusiastically participating. (“Not every German was a Nazi,” the leftoids argue, but categorically, the Gazans had earned what was coming to them.) Now, thanks to imaginative interventions by Netanyahu and Trump, there is some prospect that the Palestinians can be neutralized, and that Hamas and Hezbollah will both be made extinct. Arabs at large, throughout the Middle East, have realized that Israel should be left alone. For the “Zionists” are able to defend themselves. Egypt, for instance, knows how foolish it would be to admit even a single “Palestinian refugee,” though it is hard to imagine where else he might go. (Perhaps “repatriate” him, to revolutionary Iran?)

I wish that Canada, too, and all Western countries, would show such prudence as Egypt has displayed.

It is difficult to insist that something is unknowable, especially when there is constant theorizing about it, and speculation is never relaxed. There must be an answer, some believe, with an earnest, misplaced faith, and unsearchable assumptions, within a fenced enclosure of time. If they “follow the science” (ho-ho!), they will of course get nowhere, because in our understanding science and mathematics were constructed by men; whereas, in the objective spirit of Aristotle, even when knowledge comes from deep within ourselves (as the laws do), they must be discovered. That anything can be known, at all, is the consequence of God’s willing; and in this we find our security.

The reader may think I am a believing Catholic, and I am, but should confess that in at least this one respect I am inclined to be a Coptic Christian, whimsically sprung out of Hellenistic reasoning. With Clement of Alexandria, I understand that the world was not created in time; that time came to be with all that it contains; and that it is perhaps spread, like space, over greater (or lesser) distances than the number of light years our cosmo-physicists have counted. So it may be in a sense finite, and yet infinite, having no definite edge, but is everywhere, wherever it extends. Therefore, in time, we cannot find its beginnings. It does not have a before nor an after, nor befores nor afters except within itself. It cannot have an age for, as it says in the second beuk of Peter, a day is as a thousand years with the Lord, and a thousand years as a day. Note, in the beuk of Genesis, that the word “day” is used in quite a few different senses.

I was first introduced to Clement while visiting Alexandria-by-Egypt, a quarter-century ago, having known of him only by reputation as a theologian and philosopher occasionally in bad odour with Rome, rather like his younger contemporary Origen — an even more breathtaking Alexandrian spectacle.

Another Clement, of Alexandria — a young Scotsman working for the archaeologist Jean-Yves Empereur in Alexandria at the turn of the present century — performed the intoduction. Too, I found a crumbling copy of the Butterworth (Loeb) edition of the former Clement among the rubbish in an antique emporium of that city. Ah, those were the days.

That triad of triads — the Nine Worthies of medieval antiquity, from Hector and Alexander to Godfrey of Bouillon (three pagans, three Jews, and three Christians, to whom Falstaff was added by Doll Tearsheet in Shakespeare) — are not celebrated today. We must relearn that, without historical characters much larger than life, our own little lives will shrink smaller.

Charlemagne, one of those Nine Worthies, presided over the Carolingian Renaissance in the VIIIth and IXth centuries, and was among the transformative hinges by which the ancient, or classical, was turned into the mediaeval and modern order of Europe. He is thus a knife edge between ancient and modern: the great conqueror of his age, but too, among the signal guides in the formation of Christendom. The monasteries were already being founded and equipped, the prayers being said, but as Charles told Abbot Baugulfus, they would have to become secular training centres, too. For while his bureaucrats might have the odd clever idea, their Latin was appalling and they could not think lucidly on parchment. They were inelegant. Nor could they read Scripture adequately, in this ignorance, until elegant literacy filled their veins.

The revival of art, and especially of literary art, underpinned the Emperor’s new order. For another dimension of this rekindled beauty was escape, from the fanaticism of the East — from the war between iconoclasts and iconodules that had waylaid Byzantium, retreating before the violent new Antichristical religion of Islam. Charles realized that both extremes were wrong: that what icons were and what icons were not could be found in the Christian dispensation.

It was from this wisdom that the achievements of Romanesque and Gothic followed in the West; and that orthodoxy, in the sense of right belief, could return to the East.

One might look upon our Catholic heritage as uncommonly lucky. Instead, Our Lord intervened, through the King of the Franks. One must however see, how terribly unlucky we will become, if we let barbarism return (rape, pillage, decollation) through Mussulman immigration.

Bitumen would be among my favourite hydrocarbons, for it is a leading constituent of oil sands, and petroleum seeps, which I am determined to cheer on. It is the seeps, especially, that remind us that God created our beautiful world — for as Isaiah said, “Look, He made it to be inhabited!” — and stocked it with everything we could ever need, including many gifts we haven’t opened yet, that will prove necessary in the future. Verily, He, in friendship, left it to us to develop the principles of refining, and purification, and the various receipts and techniques by which things glorious in themselves may be made even better. (Praise the Lord!)

Bitumen gets called asphalt over here in America, including Canuckistan. It is the cousin of crude oil. But whereas the oil flows freely, bitumen is sticky and slow like molasses. It is used mostly as a binder, combined with crushed stone, gravel, sand, and probably microplastics, in different combinations, and spread over roads, race courses, tennis courts, parking lots, aeroplane runways, flattish roofs, &c. I have tried to find the proportion of the world that is wrapped in asphalt, but there does not seem to be a reliable figure. It must be less than 29 percent, as the oceans haven’t been paved over yet; but 20 percent? 25?

Plants do not grow under asphalt covering, but through it, as I have observed. Happily, an increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is now encouraging them.

But I think my proposed universal land speed limit (see previous Idlepost), which would leave our bureaucrats ticketing horses and cheetahs (a purpose for them, at last!) also makes most of these smooth driving surfaces unnecessary. Agreed, for environmental reasons, we should burn off more of our oil supply. But perhaps, with advances in rocket science, we could do most of it far away from our planet.

The widow, Erika Kirk, made a fine demonstration of her Christianity, when forgiving the (alleged) murderer of her husband, during his memorial in Glendale, Arizona, last Sunday.

Typically, you cannot find this simple information in Google or in any other mass electronic site, without exposing yourself to a stinking shitload of vicious, left-wing propaganda, that already clogs the seemingly infinite toilet of the Internet. Not only our children, but everyone, is brainwashed in this way. Fortunately, a few are not easily brainwashed, and maintain the Socratic habit of thinking for themselves.

It is like trying the prompt, “Israel,” in search of impartial news, and finding that both Google and the AI suppliers of virtually all current information, are programmed to rely upon the pro-terrorist news platform, Al Jazeera. It is because “artificial intelligence” is circulating everywhere that you get obvious lies, and “hallucinations,” presented as the truth, from formerly trusted sources. There are alternatives, if one searches more patiently, but one will have to know a great deal about the subject to guess where to look for them. The principle “garbage in, garbage out” applies, strictly, here as well as elsewhere.

Moreover, Jew-hating is “settled science” throughout the soi-disant “educated” classes, and will be for the foreseeable future, wherever it goes unopposed.

But how to oppose anything, and boldly defend decency, without killing the purveyors of “fake news”? For Christ did not propose to slay anyone. Nor, without proper judicial procedures, may we execute or even imprison malefactors. Christians, including Catholics, may own guns, but are instructed only to use them selectively and, as it were, dispassionately.

There is, however, no restriction on telling the truth. All it requires is bravery. This is why it has been protected in all Western legal codes, that were formed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Criminals, of course, may not obey these codes, but that is what makes them “criminals,” in addition to liberal and progressive. Indeed, in this culture, as well as any other whether Christian or not, a person like Charlie Kirk may be shot, for persistently telling the truth.

His widow may forgive the killer, as her husband certainly would have done, and others in the activist heritage of Christ; and yet the court cases would still proceed, towards securing legitimate convictions, and the wicked man be hanged or whatever, despite this Christian advice. This is because our laws follow another Western eccentricity. We reach a capital judgment on the basis of what we discern to have actually happened, as opposed to anyone’s feelings about what happened, no matter how sincere.

(This, in opposition to the modern pagan procedure of reaching a quick nominal conclusion according to whether the supposed crime is considered “icky” enough.)

We are not, after all, desert savages, and our commitment to biological life is, also resembling Christ’s, not without thoughtful exceptions.

For the human soul is immortal, regardless whether it becomes biologically defunct. It must live forever; which is why it is prudent to avoid the eternal fire.

Since the Left insists that their violent Antifa organizations do not exist, but are the product of an overactive right-wing imagination, Antifa members will not object when we propose to exterminate them. Indeed, as we are Christian, we might take the trouble of formally hanging them for actual crimes, one by one, or use other considerate techniques to compound their non-existence, just as we might do with Communists, perverts, or the Italian Fascisti, after we have grown tired of imagining them.

Verily, who has been doing all the loud shouting on their behalf, or designing their placards and propaganda? “They” (these annoying non-existents) claim to have existed at least since the 1930s, fighting the Nazis who were then flourishing in Germany, so that my Spitfire-flying papa and his gung-ho military friends were all fighting alongside them. However, my papa did not recall ever seeing them, before himself peacefully retiring from this existence (in 2008).

I dreamily wonder, who has been writing their psychotic demands, and who composed their uncirculated manual, Mein Anti-kampf, later in the publishing season of 1925? Perhaps we might ask the Antifa funders and enablers to tell us where they have been hiding, since then. I, for one, would like to hunt them down with numerous, fanciful, armed policemen.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — In truth, Antifa was not founded in another century; this was merely its conceit. It was actually a product of the Obama presidency, like Black Lives Matter and various other radically demented, viciously evil, entities.

It is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year of 5786, or MMMMM.DCC.LXXXVI in Roman numerals, since I don’t know how to get a vinculum (overline) in this typesetting programme, and Donald Knuth doesn’t take emails. It is the first of the High Holidays, a day for sounding the ram’s horn, or shofar — to “Blow Up the Trumpet in Zion,” as we used to sing in Anglican. Henry Purcell’s glorious anthem was, however, written less than thirty-five decades ago. Some things are recent, some things are not.

For us — the people of God, and the Christians also in succession to the Jews — the Hebrew Yom Teruah is a prophecy of judgement, a call to repentance and thus of preparation for the life to come. In our seasonal calendar it falls near Michaelmas — the feast of Saint Michael and All Angels — the day on which fall terms used to begin. It is indeed a day of divine glory, but of ends as well as beginnings. That is the curious thing about the biblical revelation. The Bible — three-quarters of which is Old Testament — tells a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It does not, like other official texts, drone on forever, but has been thorough all the same, omitting trivialities. It makes us familiar with the boundaries of Heaven and Hell in this fallen world, and with the presence of angels and demons. The trumpet blast is, too, the sound of our warning.

The many — apparently millions — who are coming to religious practices for the first time, in America and around the world, in light of the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk, have intuited that something is expected of them. Religion is not just another consumer purchase. The call to church and synagogue can and should be, rather, a new beginning.

As a politician much better than America deserves might add, “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Suppose, for the sake of having an argument, that the reader wishes to do something that will change the world — for the better. He shouldn’t be too candid about his ambition, as I first realized when a teenager. Most who accomplish things have a secret. They avoid taking credit for it. I appeared quite a fool, when claiming credit for anything. It got me mocked. Fortunately, my mockers were, at the time, also teenagers, so it didn’t matter much. But I would have preferred praise.

Ambition is something to keep to oneself, but concealing it may require more honest pride than disclosing it. Those who become politicians learn the art of deceiving people, by presenting their ambitions as timely and altruistic. A lot of money can be made by progressive politicians in this way, when they discover that, in every democracy, the people are slow-witted and easy to fool. On the other hand, they are often quite innocent, and their various bigotries are actually rather sweet. A pity for sure, but only that they were given the vote.

The better educated among voters may be tainted with real poison, and smaller minority are “communists and perverts” — the old-fashioned description that placed them in their twin classes with impressive economy.

Ambition, however — and especially good ambitions — are needed, the more when the majority of the ambitious are certainly evil. We have whole parties — Canadian Liberals, American Democrats, and British Labour, for instance — that are entirely given over to the service of demons.

But they have unintentionally created a marvellous opportunity. This is because Christians need only tell the truth, modestly, for the contrast with these demoniacs to become apparent. For their violence and corruption is on full public display. And while it has become physically dangerous to be a “conservative,” or to oppose the Left, we may hope for improvements in policing and investigation.

Moreover, we need never become spiritually corrupt ourselves, by opposing fire with fire. Christian martyrs have always outscored the murderers who slaughtered them, not only in the afterlife, but in this one..

Now, boasting that one will be a martyr is arrogant and in bad taste. You should keep your ambitions to yourself. But becoming a martyr in pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful Christ, is hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. As Charlie Kirk advised, we should try to make heaven crowded.

For some reason, I have been idly surveying hundreds of videos, by or about the late Charlie Kirk, over the last few days. My interest has not been always political. In fact, Mr Kirk was a broadly (self-) educated man, and usefully observed the highest journalistic standards. He not only told the “gospel” truth, but would correct himself whenever he discovered that he was in error; he was assiduously fair, even when this was painful. In other words, he was the opposite of what we are used to in the “legacy media.”

I found myself frequently reminded of “things I used to know,” and informed about things that I did not know yet — in agriculture, for instance.

Did you know that carrots are much less nutritious than they were more than a century ago, as well perhaps as most other crops? Or that this was the consequence of modern industrial production, including especially the Green Revolution, that radically increased our food supplies? For, like everything else, it was a trade-off, and people getting fat and diabetic on surplus carbohydrates was probably an improvement on people starving to death.

Or that there are more than ten thousand micro-organisms to be found in a single tablespoon of arable soil? and up to 50 billion according to another estimate, in up to 50,000 distinct species? No one can count that high, or even imagine such complexity.

Because I was once scandalously involved in “developmental economics,” and because even before that, in childhood, I discovered minute pond creatures with a cheap microscope, this topic brought back many happy memories. Indeed, one of the wonderful things about Mr Kirk, is that his youthful interests coincided with mine, and included Austrian economic sages like von Hayek and von Mises. I rather wish I could have met him, when he was still alive.

But anyway, his pro-life views extended to the billions upon billions of life forms that are tiny and benign. Through them we investigate the nature that God has created, and continues to create. In the words of Isaiah, who was apparently looking at our planet from outer space, “Look! … there is life in it.”

And, to the square of living forms, possibilities.

(Revised.)

It is not fashionable to express this thought, which I have been avoiding, or trying to avoid, since I came to older years. (By ten, approximately, this is what I was thinking; certainly by eleven, I was convinced.) One comes to the thought by simple observation, of those with a propensity to violence. North Americans recently had another opportunity to notice this during events in which rioting, vandalism, and looting were performed, after one of several (probably necessary) police killings. But compare the most recent political assassination of a beloved, consistently lawful, prominent right-winger. There was, as usual, no violence whatever in response. Only grieving.

Many, many left-wingers celebrated the crime.

While this does not “tend left,” but is left, even in principio, it is not true that, by contrast, right-wing people never sin. As an exemplary right-wing person myself, I have noticed that I am capable of sinning. Alas, too, capable of violence, when confronted by active evil-doers, or frustrated by defective machinery. I am restrained, however, by my curious belief in God. The poor, godless left-winger has nothing to restrain him, except physical punishment.

The “verbal violence” of lying, and its most lively relatives — i.e. smearing, slander, calumniation, traduction, &c — can preview the real thing, and I have been aware occasionally of shameless right-wing characters, committing these “crimes short of violence.” But constant, systematic, murderous lying, as if by communists and perverts, has become a settled habit now, across the Left. It is not moderated by “telling the truth sometimes,” but by virtue signalling: a lie within the many stinking lies. Indeed, in the moment one finds oneself surrounded by many reprehensible signals, one realizes he has entered into a left-wing environment, and must brace for a pantload of global warnings.

But suppose one is, oneself, a man of the left, or perhaps, arguably, a woman. Suppose, in response to some emotional event, he/she/ze resolves to stop playing with weapons-grade bullshit, and not to participate in violence any more. What happens then?

Then, one is called a “fascist,” or a “nazi,” and may receive plausible death threats.

Oddly, however, both the Fascist and Nazi Parties were violent, revolutionary socialist organizations, until they were formally relabelled “right-wing” through left-wing propaganda.

Charles James Kirk had a growing following, not only in the United States, but in Britain, Germany, New Zealand, and so forth — throughout Protestant Christendom. Unusually, among Protestants, he had also a mystical devotion to Our Lady. To my mind, even though I mildly disagreed with him on the need for democracy, he was an impressive character morally and politically (in the broadest sense).

At great personal risk, he took his arguments into the darkest regions of the American campus (I almost wrote, “darkest Africa” by mistake). And he acted, consistently, with honesty, good humour and cheer. Also with patience, and prudence, given his immersion in university environments. Because he had detached himself, personally, from the filth of campus life, he was able to obtain a magnificent education, and was more learned in political philosophy than any living soul, except perhaps Thomas Sowell (age ninety-five).

Yet he was still young (barely thirty), and had an extraordinary career ahead of him — for he was profoundly lovable, even though he was smeared and libelled by “the Left.” He did not return their viciousness, for he was genuinely Christian.

“But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you.”

He was also wise in personal matters, free of cheap lusts and cheaper ambitions, and never a candidate for public office. He knew, in his bones, that the truth lies with Jesus; and so he did not stray into the shallowness that cloys and gags, in anxious pursuit of charisma, dollars, and votes.

We will see his like again (though never his clone); for there is a Christ, whose strange love for us exceeds all human possibility.

____________

POSTSCRIPTUM. —  One of the more backward customs of the late Mr Kirk, was the reading of “beuks” (as I like to spell them), on a variety of topics, and by classic authors. About 150 of them were gobbled each year, for he was a man of leisure, and had been since childhood. (Until a few days ago, he kept a couple of hours free, every day.) His generation, and his juniors, do not read beuks, except in the few very conservative institutions (i.e. Hillsdale College); university students find beuk-reading nearly impossible because they were all born after the Internet and buzzing “social media.” This tends to reduce their intellectual abilities to zero, and their belief structures to the aggressive idiocy of their leftwing perfessers.

The assassination yesterday of Charlie Kirk marks a kind of “turning point” in the battle between the psychotic Left, and our glib, languid, somnolent society. Today it is the twenty-fourth anniversary of Nine-Eleven, which happened when Charlie was eight years old. It was another such turning point; a remarkable advance for psychotic Islam in its war against the West, and in cementing its natural alliance with our woke politicians. I expect the assassination of Kirk will develop in this way: towards commonplace violence and more assassinations with various goals, such as eliminating Trump.

The stabbing of Iryna Zarutska was instructive. With one honourable exception, all the passengers who were near her as she was murdered in the light rail car, moved away discreetly, letting the murderer escape at his leisure. When Charlie Kirk was shot, yesterday, the response of the youthful crowd was to start running, randomly, in panic.

After the hijacked jets slammed in, a quarter century ago, the American public blustered patriotically, then sent their jets into Afghanistan and Iraq. But after they had settled down, they resumed the habit of betrayal. They became desperately concerned about “Islamophobia,” and now they obsess about “Palestine.”

But the West isn’t “done” just yet. We still have a few years of decline left to enjoy. We might, miraculously, as in the past, suddenly rise to the occasion, rather than agree to our extinction, perform a Reconquista of Europe, resume the Crusades, et cetera. We might cease to be shy about defending ourselves. But that would take courage, intelligence, and other qualities now in short supply.