Essays in Idleness

One of my heroes, Sōetsu Yanagi (1889–1961), was the author of the conception embodied in the book, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty. It was adapted into English by my hero, the potter Bernard Leach, in 1972 — a year when I actually visited Japan and at last became fully aware of the little town of Mashiko. This in turn was the location of the kama, or family kiln, of Shoji Hamada, yet another of my Japanese heroes. Yanagi’s son, Sori Yanagi, became an industrial designer, just like, and for the same reason as my father, James Warren in Canada, whose love of Japanese objects and fine craftmanship was communicated to me in early childhood. Indeed, let me close this circle before it becomes any wider.

Yanagi was the spiritual founder of the (Buddhist) Mingei movement in the 1920s, a term he invented for the art of everyday people. My papa acquired similar ideals from a Minnesota book, by Harriet and Vetta Goldstein, published in the ‘twenties, which I mentioned two years ago in this space. And through reading many other authors we may trace their mission of simplicity and craft back through the Middle Ages, both in the East and the West.

This movement is not the sort of thing to be managed by a bureaucracy, like those of government and big business, both of which instinctively ignore it, or worse. Too, it is not a philosophy, unless on Yanagi’s terms, for his philosophy did not entail formulaic, literate ideas. The craftsman in both hemispheres cannot organize themselves, because they are instinctively anonymous. Their standard of beauty is unregulated, because drawn exclusively from nature and made from nature’s materials. It does however tend to demand strict craftsmanship, not “flashy” except for the absence of commercial flash.

It speaks to us through patterns, which we can see and know, for the things that are made are not intended to make the craftsman famous, or even rich. They are designed only to be useful, and to last.

The Beauty of Everyday Things was the title given to the latest translation of this work, mass-produced for Penguins last year.

“Hands to work and mind to God,” was how it was expressed by my papa’s beloved Shakers. Their works were also unsigned.

On Valentine’s Day we, or perhaps only some of us, like to glance again over our old Ovid, which we had in school and was “previously loved” when we were teen-aged. Alas, these days it only reminds me how far my Latin has decayed — which is a much different feeling from that inspired by the crisp ingenious verse I first encountered as a schoolboy.

For in the time since, not only has Ovid faded from my lips, but from the laziness of an inconstant devotion I have come to accept his diminished reputation. We are taught, if taught at all in school any more, to assume that he must be writing a form of pornography, perhaps allied with sophisticated learning, but using that only as an excuse. I remembered that a scandal of two millennia ago had him banished from Rome, to some wretched cottage by the Black Sea; but any great poet is a candidate for political exile. Fortunately, I had a very fine Latin mistress, at the time, the kindly Mrs Hansen, who would not let me fall into crude misunderstandings, and who supported my proper enthusiasm for art, including the Artis Amatoriae.

Ovid was fastidious. He had nothing to do with harlots. His standards were cultivated, and quite specifically he was looking for a docta puella, for a girl with a mind and with whom an intelligent conversation could be had. He expected her not only to speak, but to speak mellifluously, and be familiar with Callimachus, Anacreon, Sappho. Beyond this, she should know how to walk, how to laugh; and how to be elegant in dress and person. He is not simply trying to avoid disease, but actively to resist everything that is low and ugly.

The poets of the T’ang Dynasty, or of Heian Japan, were as one in this with the poets of civilized Rome. Poetry raises everyone’s consciousness. On Valentine’s, I remember how a young Chinese lady, crossing a busy intersection in the gruelling heat of Hong Kong, seemed to levitate slightly above the filthy street. She would have received elaborate training in comportment, from childhood; and lo, I was being exposed to the grace of a superior culture.

The chief advantage of socialism, and of every other “popular” and “progressive” ideal (these are terms of art), is that they destroy wealth, both individually, among all working and investing individuals, and at large. This must be qualified, however, for the much-diminished aggregate of all remaining wealth is consolidated in an “elite” ruling class. Alas, in places like Venezuela and Cuba, these people may then also lose their wealth, come the genuine revolution, or an invasion.

It is good that the people do not become too rich. This spoils them. We should all know what happens when people become spoilt. Excess money, especially in a post-Christian culture where there are few examples or mechanisms for giving it away to the poor, or building beautiful temples and monuments, leads to liberalism and immorality. Reckless spending is the only option the rich person has left. We see this immediately in our media and Internet: thousands of brutally obscene suggestions for how to waste a bit more money, or to go on an explosive binge. Buy a yacht?

With impoverishment, on the other hand, the people must work harder and ever more pointlessly, without hope of getting a reward. They do not have the time to indulge in colosally stupid, unphilosophical thoughts, such as “equality.” Everyone has anyway become more equal; equally hungry, and equally slipping into despair. We should all be pleased to see the Canadian economy, for instance, slumping under the misrulership of the Liberal Party. It gives us so many reasons to indulge our hatred for Donald Trump. For we can now see that everything he does makes the American citizen richer; and that inevitably means, richer than us. He is disequalizing.

And he is just so crass.

But don’t panic. All is secretly well. Trump has been governing by Presidential Decree, without reliable support from Congress. His Republican Party is cowardly, about doing those controversial things that would secure change. So everything Trumpian will evaporate when he is gone, and everything else be back to “business as usual.”

We should be more selective when criticizing what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” As America’s young and impressive Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, tried to explain to “media” recently, most of the waste can be plainly attributed to political interference in the weapons-buying process; to “chopping and changing” on orders for tanks, jets, missiles, &c, thus adding substantially to delays and then to cost overruns. But as usual, under progressive socialism, the people and companies that make these useful things are blamed for inefficiencies in their production.

For, once politicians are involved, “democratically” representing the financial interests of the people who paid to get them elected, and making their own embarrassing, amateur guesses about what the technology might be good for, corruption and ignorance become the general rule.

Alas, without capital punishment, the courts cannot hope to control this aspect of criminal behaviour. Let the people who know what they are doing make all the craft decisions, unhindered by the corrupt. (And may the supply of politicians be whittled down.)

Good administrators will be poor but honest. The soldiering class should seek honour, not wealth; and conquest in preference to kickbacks. We need to maintain a force that is terrifying, but cannot be terrified too easily.

War, of course, can be a lot of fun, once one is committed to it (read some military memoirs!); but like any participant blood sport, its purpose should be victory. To which end, military expenditure must be as grand and wasteful as necessary. (“No price too high!” was the phrase that got Canada through the last World War.)

Should God be with us, as He must be if we have not parted from His company ourselves, we will be in that happy state promised to the prophet, Isaiah: “When thou shalt pass through the waters, I will be with thee, … and when thou shalt walk in the fire, thou shalt not be burnt.” God is speaking of His Church, even in Old Testament times, in the Christian interpretation (for Christians have always been very Jewish in this); but also we understand the promise literally, and mystically, and having political implications. And it is repeated, by Christ, when He comes down from Heaven:

“My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

The simplicity of this has been confusing to many. We think that God must be doing something, with His creatures; that a performance is necessary when they are helped. And when He doesn’t do anything, or anything visible and audible to us, the atheists come forward, telling us to disbelieve. (Now, disbelief is doing something, by replacing faith.) This is the curious truth: that faith requires no action. It is only bad faith that leads to complications.

All of our foolish reforms require action, and continue to summon our squalid efforts, until we abandon them and they disappear. This is why monarchy is so much closer to godliness than democracy. A good king does not do anything at all — beyond following the law he has inherited, and the ceremonies that go with them — unless he is compelled to act by “events.” (For instance, defend his nation from invasion, or civil war.) There are bad kings, of course, but not anything like as many as there are bad “popular” governments, rife with corrupt and self-serving busybodies. These are ever trying on something new and revolutionary, rather than much-needed restorations.

The law in a good kingdom is the ancient law, founded in divine justice, then tried and tested through many generations. Only the world’s vicious idiots are campaigning to write new law.

Wiarton Willie, up in Bruce County, was unable to see his shadow this morning, thus portending an early spring for Ontario. He is consulted every year at Candlemas — or, Groundhog Day, as it is known to my (very secular) fellow provincials. Punxsutawney Phil has more famously performed the same function in the American state of Pennsylvania. That Wiarton Willie has been consistently more reliable than the scientific meteorologists, is reported in all our local media, which, in turn, are notoriously unreliable.

Shubenacadie Sam in Hants County, Nova Scotia, and Fred la Marmotte in the Gaspésie of Quebec, have agreed with Willie’s projection, as have other animals including Lucy the Lobster in Canada’s Far East. Thus, I begin to suspect that all are in the pay of our perpetual Liberal government. Woodchucks out west, such as Okanagan Okie, have meanwhile suspiciously confirmed this, by expressing their dissent. Prime Minister Carney will thus assign them six more weeks of winter.

This is significant, for it has been quite brutally cold, lately — indeed, below zero on the white man’s thermometer.

As I try to explain to my critics, at least one of whom insists on reminding me that I am a member of the political “far right,” I am actually right about everything, and opposed to everything wrong. He is the opposite, as I think he should agree: Left, and wrong, in all of his judgements. He is, however, opposed to all “labels” when they are applied to himself, except for those he happens to find flattering, and thinks those he refuses to use correctly cannot possibly apply to him. But to far right people, instead, his allegations will somehow always stick, and he wanders gratuitously from one insulting term to another, and tells me to “shut up” in response to each of my refutations. Except for nominal, accidentally truthful remarks, his every statement of fact is a bare-faced lie.

This is inevitable, I would conclude, when one is in the service of Satan, the Father of Lies — as everyone on the Left has been (or Whig, as they were called in Doctor Johnson’s day). But it is boring to repeat this observation constantly. I do not like to be dull, which is why I only say it sometimes; and try not to resort to the legion of synonyms.

It is said that one should look for stupidity, rather than for evil, in an opponent, even when writing new Dunciads. Plato is sometimes mentioned as author of this “fine point,” although in my experience neither Socrates, nor Plato, nor even Xenophon, was so naïve. They realized that absolute stupidity — corresponding to “absolute zero” on our temperature scale — is also the benchmark for evil. You can’t get the one without getting the other.

Thanks to high technology, we are finally able to achieve absolute zero.

We — that is, my evil twin and I — have been immensely enjoying the Amelia phenomenon, that now is visiting “social media,” in English, French, German, Swedish, Italian and many other languages. “Amelia” is depicted as a young, pretty, mildly Goth maiden, in the Anglo-Saxon version, with fashionably purple-dyed hair; or red hair and freckles in the Gallic version, where she is incidentally provided with a dashing young white husband and two enchanting infants. But the family resemblance among international “Amelias” (or, “Maria” as she is called in the Teutonic version) is unmistakable, and each of these attractive young women is conducting a campaign on the theme, “Everyone deserves a homeland.”

The phenomenon was accidentally launched by the unspeakable Starmer government in the U.K., who thought they were creating left-liberal anti-racist propaganda cartoons, for the instruction of British youff. Somehow, they lost control of the narrative, as governments sometimes will. It is exhilarating to see these people get punished, especially to the degree that Amelia has been punishing them recently. Under unsupervised creators, using artificial intelligence, she has in fact gone viral across Western Europe, and even in Japan (another “white country”). She has become a representative of “white nationalism,” and the call for “remigration” — wherever third-world and especially Muslim immigration and “welfare tourism” have gone into overdrive. “Deportation” has also been Trumpishly popular in the USA, and is surely overdue in Canada.

These are rightwing political movements, and as usual for counter-revolutionary campaigns, they accentuate the positive. In this case we are invited to imagine that everyone who has been re-exported will be happier and more comfortable when they have been returned to their (hygienically informal) native surroundings, and are de-exiled, as it were. Perhaps they won’t actually benefit, but rightwing sensibilities will tolerate complacency.

Nevertheless, Amelia (Amélie) is a break from violent leftwing oratory, and having things rammed down our throats by commie ideologues.

My mama was from Cape Breton, which, perhaps up to the time of her childhood, conferred upon her inhabitants a familiarity with the world, and an ability to cure any of its problems. Too, she came from a rich Tory family — not wealthy, except in comparison to some of their coal-mining neighbours, but rich in human experience and knowledge. My maternal grandpa could drive a railway train back-and-forth between Louisburg and Sydney, among other stations. It could carry both coal and passengers. He also piloted the first automobile on the island, and knew how to crank it up while family Holmes waited aboard. Those were the days, when mischievous but witty and industrious youths took the whole thing apart, secretly, and reassembled it on the Holmes’s barn roof. (You see, they were enterprising.) Alas, no one knows how to be my grandpa Oliver any more, whistling by the old S&L stop at Homeville, or Holmesville as we spelt it in a previous century.

Just now, as I was being apprised that human beings require more than 5,000 international units of Vitamin D every day, and will never get it from the tiny vitamin pills that are sold by Big Pharma (which supply, perhaps, 800 units, at incredible price for something unpatented), I recollected my mama’s counselling on this. She was a registered nurse, as surely all Cape Breton women were qualified to be, and used to give both my wee sister and myself a teaspoonful of cod liver oil every day. We can still remember the taste of it, for which we were not enthusiastic. But because of this magical oil, we grew to maturity. Or solid Icelandic cod liver, compressed into a small flat tin, as my mama reminds me, from heaven. Which, opened, can be made edible (arguably) by adding lemon juice and spreading it on a Graham cracker. It still was not delicious, however.

These days all our hopes for a future in this world are vested in “AI” high technology, which for your information drains electrical power, is frightfully costly, and will never work. But mama had clearly anticipated this, and knew better. Especially when the snows blanket us, and we are all sealed indoors apart from the healthy sun, it is cod liver oil that will preserve us.

“Contrary to what moralists would have us believe, men are nowhere the same.” … I quote from Count Gobineau’s Nouvelles Asiatiques (1876), and I would continue to quote to the end of the book, did not a modern and very Western shame about plagiarism stop me. Then, since my thème-du-jour is Persia, I would begin to transcribe Morier’s Hajji Babba (1824).

But continuing with Gobineau, “Doubtless anyone can see that a Chinaman has two arms, two legs, and one nose, just like a Hottentot or a Parisian; but one hasn’t got to talk an hour with either to perceive that there is nothing in common between them, unless it is the conviction one must eat and sleep. In every other regard, in their mode of acquiring ideas, in the nature of those ideas, in their combination, their budding, their flowering, their hues — all are different.”

Actually, I must stop quoting there because if I continued with some of Gobineau’s examples (i.e. a negro dwelling south of Lake Chad, or an Egyptian Arab), I could be arrested. In becoming Woke, our society has sunk into depths of depravity never previously known, although for that reason, also unique. We are forbidden to tell the truth about anyone, with sufficient candour to make it recognizable; let alone the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as men of the ancient West recommended.

Just compare, the shopkeepers now rioting against the Ayatollah in Tehran with those who rioted against the Shah.

Having spent much of my youth in Asia (including two visits to the Shah’s Iran) I knew exactly what would happen when the Radical Muselmans took over in 1979, and approximately how it would end (although I expected a bit sooner). But it was pointless to “report” this. Similarly, at the time of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was pointless to explain how the American effort at “democratic nation-building” would result in a lot of unnecessary death and destruction, including the extermination of native Christians, Jews, Yazidis, &c. One would have had to consult the most learned and rightwing American “neo-conservatives” (who could speak Persian, Turkish, and Arabic) to have a clew.

It is because the worldlings are unalike that it is unwise to make war on any of them, unless it is strictly necessary, and one is willing to be exceptionally brutal, and get out very shortly after one has gone in. For without the self-confidence of the former British or Roman Imperialist, and most important, indifference to death, things will not turn out well.

Trump has the right idea. Americans should go in by surprise, blow everything up, and then disappear, having gained everyone’s respect and admiration.

“Public housing,” whether privately or publicly owned, is at the heart of urban life today, and increasingly of rural life, and human life in general. It is the destruction of the former art of living, and its replacement by mass economic principles. Perhaps I should mention that I am thinking of buildings and tenements that house hundreds of apartments, like the one in which the High Doganate is located, but any rental facility that combines accommodation for more than one family, and makes them behave under another person’s management and rules, is essentially unjust. It forms, if you will, a pocket of socialism, and tyranny, in which self-government is at least partially eliminated, and in which nature’s agricultural economies are collapsed.

This is why the word “community” has been taken over by the Left, and is a means by which the Left takes over the Right. If, or when, community advances, freedom retreats. Beauty, too, retreats from social arrangements, and becomes progressively illegal, for beauty is the product of nature and nature’s God; not of human planning. The idea of rental housing is, in the worst sense, feudal. It is aesthetically feudal, permitting only such charm as reinforces feudalism. The citizen must be shown his place — “a place for everyone and everyone in his place” in a different sense than the mediaeval — rather than being allowed to participate creatively, to learn and to suffer. He must have guidelines, and these must be assigned by agents who do not have his interests to protect, but instead a “profit motive” in money or some more evil currency.

The myth of modern planning, which is planning “for the masses,” is the myth of communism. It holds that two can do anything better than one, and then concludes, that a million people can do it better than two. Industrialization, in this case even of living arrangements, follows from this myth. As the communist Le Corbusier put it, a house should be “a machine for living”; the inhabitants are made to serve the machine.

Socrates in the Dialogues that depict him, and Plato in his Letters, give voice to the possible worthlessness of writing, two thousand years before Gutenberg, in effect, clinched the point. Yes, it is worthless, and note, always was. With the technocratic advance of printing with infinitely replaceable type, the printed word, which began as a way to preserve scripture, began deteriorating to the condition of journalism. That is to say, it became meaninglessly glib, and now it interferes with any sort of understanding, rather than accommodating it. Socrates, the worthy father of our Western dialectic, was a man who never wrote anything down. He raised philosophical conversation above the competitive prattle of the Brahmins of India, to resemble the sermons of the Gautama Buddha. Which is to say, above the cacophony of debate, to the settled tranquility of high seriousness.

But Plato was, even when he tried not to be, a poet and dramatist. He was different in kind from Socrates, who was a philosopher “by nature.” Plato wants his compositions to present themselves as sound and true; to lead securely to a place of wisdom. Whereas, Socrates is seeking truth, without the gorgeous decorations. Socrates will of course be punished for seeking truth, as is inevitable in a democracy, for the background condition of “the people” is to be fools, and the more foolish the greater the stakes. This is why I, for instance, dread the spread of democracy; for truth, to the democrat, means becoming more and more degraded.

Philosophers, in both East and West, have usually tried to escape this degradation, but fall into a trap when they write things down. The extraordinary genius of Plato was to understand why he must put things into writing, and quite ironically, if philosophy is to find a home in the world. But when once committed to writing, dialectic is displaced, and prevented, by sophistry; reasoning is quickly replaced by false rhetoric. The devil, as it were, is given words to play with.

Plato was well-placed to see why writing might be both necessary, and worthless. To comprehend the cosmos, or begin to understand what is given to man to be understood, we must devise a method for listening to God. This is much different from listening to prattle and reading journalism. Yet Christ was perfectly placed not to be a writer, for He was God.

Re-enrolled in Canadian schooling, circa 1967, I first became aware of our national anti-poetry project. This was when the childers were introduced to Shakespeare, tragically late in the day. For English class, teachers were assigned to show how boring he could be. By paraphrasing coruscating verse, the writers of high school textbooks could also show a more or less complete incomprehension, and criminal indifference to poetical effects. They did this on purpose, in the cause of crippling poetry, music, and art. Now, of course, they do it with “artificial intelligence.”

Fortunately for me, I had already encountered How To Read, by Ezra Pound, while living abroad. Also Homer, &c. This made Canadian schooling entirely unnecessary, except perhaps for the sadistic topics; chemistry, for instance. (To which class we brought a little song: “Nrmr, nrmr, nrmr, I’m a Bunsen Burner.”)

I was going to quote, for my colour, a flagrantly otiose paraphrase of “Blow, blow, thou winter wind,” Lord Amiens’ song from As You Like It. The meaning of this lyric is so clear, that any Shakespeare scholar should be able to understand it, even several days after being shot in the head. With the help of Google, gentle reader may compare AI paraphrases. But read such things much longer than it takes to get angry, and one will begin to see why violence is a necessary component of educational reform.

Let me confess that on more than one occasion I stooped to English perfessing, for money. This seemed to me not necessarily evil, if I could teach the subject well enough. This required that I frequently shock my students, and traumatize the slower ones. Attempts at singing and declamation were part of the instruction. I tried to speak like a visiting Elizabethan. Also, through his Histories, to communicate the fact that Shakespeare was a quite livid and admirable “fascist.” My teaching experience went fairly well; and I was never arrested.

While the cold wind blows, I am enjoying an act of gratuitous destruction. I am removing from the High Doganate all those beuks in which I find stupid paraphrases and “feelings.” C. S. Lewis once began a very useful beuk, The Abolition of Man, with a vigorous attack upon a typical textbook author.

We should be doing more to prevent the employment of useless teachers in our schools. It was a sound mediaeval principle that the incapable tradesman should starve.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — Rather than leave the impression that my Ontario high school was a dead loss, I should like to remember Mrs Glynn and Mrs Blaney, who heroically maintained the Latin department even after the Ministry of Education had stripped away almost all of their pupils — by making all difficult subjects into “electives” so that the provincial system could specialize in the educationally sub-normal. But it was paradise when the idiots disappeared from our Latin (and some other) classes.