Essays in Idleness

There can be only two points-of-view on guarantees and promises: his who gives one, and his who takes one; though the views may be similar. For instance, both may be, and generally are, naïve. Acceptance may be personal, or may be “impersonal” or collective, but in either case, one is usually foolish to believe. And those believing only in themselves are the most foolish. In God we may trust, but in priestly or institutional accounts of the will of God we should “trust, but verify.” After a lifetime of broken promises, some of which were underwritten by legal or quasi-legal guarantees (marriage, for instance), perhaps I should know. Persons, even bankers and insurance agents, cannot be trusted, and the more respectable of them will have something to lose.

As for commitments from the Vatican, … don’t get me started.

What will it actually cost us if we break our promises? By which I mean, will it ruin us? Can we, as it were, afford to lose a bet? And the other party, who takes the bet, does he take responsibility for it? He may deserve to lose. Did he calculate what he could afford, and was he prepared, like Kipling, to “never breathe a word about his loss.”

We have courts, and once had relatively fair ones. So long as this remained the case, it was possible to hope for a little justice, but even way back then, to hope for more than a little was an act of foolishness. The same was true in capital cases, and is true today. In Nigeria and dozens of other countries, the reader may slaughter whomever he pleases, without consequence, so long as he is practising a murderous religion.

A serious purpose of the law is to allow us to forgive murderers, and other felonious types. The notion that a serious crime is never committed, except incidentally against an individual victim, but always against civilization, represented by the state, has been with us whenever we were civilized. When we weren’t, we would have no alternative to — purely private — acts of revenge. Liberalism, as John Henry Newman and others have suggested, is destructive of civilization.

Among the pleasures of old age — a physical condition I had the honour of entering into, during February of 2021 — is that one is given the opportunity to give up several of one’s pleasures. This isn’t offered as a choice, however. One simply cannot do what one was, perhaps habitually, doing before; although in some cases an old pleasure is replaced by a new one. I used to love long walks, for instance. Now I do short walks, followed by a fall, and then, all the excitement of getting up again. Since my son got me a “walker” — or “stroller” as I call it — this pleasure, too, has almost departed. But one gets used to not falling over, as I have now discovered.

A truly cosmic pleasure, in my former life, was reading; and somewhat ancillary to that, shopping in “beukstores.” Indeed, when compelled to live in some over-populous city, I would quickly establish where the beukstores were located, and visit them often during my daily, long-distance walks. Two features of my life assisted this compulsion. The other was my freedom from even short-term employment. For some reason, and it began long ago, I had never thought of applying for a job. Leisure was preferable. Jobs were simply supplied to me, miraculously, whenever it seemed I might need one. Indeed, sometimes they were forced upon me, by the terminally well-intended, with moral arguments as discouraging as decisive.. For I was born into that class of men who simply won’t “sign on” to the dole. (This bespeaks white privilege.)

For nearly five years I have not been in a beukstore, except when some saintly person gives me a lift; for I live in Parkdale — Vallis Hortensis as I call it — a part of this vastly populous city in which there are no beukstores; and in which none is conceivable, because no one reads anything intentionally, except filthy trash. (There used to be some who could read a newspaper.)

Being without new beuks is certainly an advantage, which the Catholic Church once recognized, for she created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, to help her members stay away from works deemed heretical or immoral. A quick glance at universal modern conditions will tell you it is gone, and the Wicked Pedia will tell you it was “cancelled” in 1966. By coincidence, even though not yet a Catholic, I decided not to obtain beuks published after the moon landing in 1969; for it seemed that the readable and interesting ones had already appeared.

I had already noticed that the selection of beuks, generally, had much contracted in the beukstores, to make room for gifts and beverages, so I suppose that my not being able to visit them is no great loss. For now that one is old, one realizes, … what?

As I proceed farther into the posthumous phase of my career as a hack journalist, I am unsurprised to find that my readership is falling away. A leading indication of this has been donations. My donations have almost dried up, though perhaps my failure to explicitly ask for contributions partly explains the dessication. Too, I write on buzzing current issues and events, less and less, and I am more and more insulting to my readers. To be in Canada and to be supporting “La  Trompe” may be fun, but cannot be profitable — for I contemn the local opinion — and there is more to literature than inviting retaliation.

Nevertheless, my old promise to continue writing, regardless, for as long as I can form words, or while I may enjoy the toleration of the Canadian legal and tax lordships, still stands. I am aware that I am close to the last person writing from this icy latitude who is aware of the (mostly British) principles on which Canada was founded, and similarly, on which the Western world was operating, at least some of the time. We were free countries, which required, from Canada for instance, a willingness to fight: “No price too high.” I am proud of my actual ancestors, who immediately risked their lives when they were called for. And I am very deeply ashamed of my contemporaries.

My pleasure in the regime next door, can be quite misleading. It is nice that they have revived some common sense. But in a blink the dark, corrupt, profoundly stinking Democrat Party could come back to power. (They are as vile as our own Liberal Party.)

However, my hope for this world does not depend upon “Conservatives” or “Republicans”; but upon a revival of Christianity and of the Catholic Church; and, for instance, the forced retreat of the tribal “religions” that have been replacing her, due to decay of our intellectual and moral faculties. It is not good to know that we are going to Hell. Instead, let us affirm the truth: that salvation is through Christ.

Meanwhile, we come again to the Vigil of All Saints; a day of fasting and preparation.

When foresters, farmers, and fishermen, are put in ownership of the land and the seas, and left in freedom to do what seems best (which includes all-round profitability), the world mysteriously gets better and beauty proliferates. When, instead, bureaucrats are put in charge (“public” or “private,” it hardly matters), the world grows vile, ugly, and tyrannical. The definition of productivity is systematically narrowed by worthless people of the bureaucratic mind-set; and poverty is expanded to include everything else. Statistics multiply. I do not care whether the factota are “socialists” or “capitalists.” In either case they are joyless, tedious, and a danger to every human being who is not a revenant of complacency. Everything he does can be conveyed digitally, or on paper.

Well, I am inculpated with being a tad severe. This, by a person who also accuses me of unseriousness. Relevancy and efficiency are both found missing from my analysis of the world. I am, of course, guilty as charged. Relevance is invariably irrelevant, efficiency is inefficient, and I have no use for statistics. Rather I prefer things to be joyful, and interesting, so that my critic may add the word “dangerous” to my descriptors.

My technique, for forming opinions on anything at all, is by word association. When I was fifteen I fell in love with an enchanting German maiden, named Sylvia. I last saw her a little more than half-a-century ago; but she still playfully commands my imagination. By word association, my country notions have been formed around “Silviculture.” I’ve come to detest identical organisms growing in rows. This is what the factota of commodities are doing; but whenever possible, I like to patronize the farmers.

I could complain that the factota are irrelevant and inefficient, but this would play with words. In reality our modern “factory farms” would produce much more, and much more delicious, if our food were raised more labour-intensively, and in all four dimensions of space and time, rather than just the one. There would also be more employment, and happiness, with fewer additives and poisons, and no need for fertilizers except for what the farmer could supply himself.

The increase of atmospheric carbon is certainly helping this along. With Sylvan delight, I look upon our agrarian future.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — I think Ronald Reagan was right, in that mischievous advertisement that the Ontario premier posted in the World Series game; & that Trump is wrong, absolutely, in principle. Tariffs are destructive, like taxes. However, I’m enjoying Trump’s ruination of the Canadian economy. Perhaps that will put us ahead of the U.S.A. in backwardness. … I have also learnt that the one minute excerpt was trick edited, out of a Reagan speech in which tariffs were being recommended for purposes just like Trump’s.

Henry III is perhaps my favourite monarch from Canadian pre-history, speaking only of the Normans, and skipping over the Anglo-Saxons of the pre-Conquest in England. (Like them, I find Vikings distasteful.) These Normans did not tend to be saints, but until Henry Tudor they were not stinking absolutists either. Henry III is a model. Acceding to the throne at the age of nine (in 1216), a Plantagenet, and living to 1272, he had ample leisure to make his heroic mark within the XIIIth century — my preferred place to live, or at least hang out.

At his birth, the first Barons’ War was fuming, and a form of Crusade was launched against them. The French were also, as usual, revolting, and in order to raise the money to put them down, King Henry’s protectors, and later the monarch himself, agreed to be circumscribed by the terms of successive recensions of the Magna Carta. This was in the long view of things, perhaps acceptable — power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton later pointed out. But what to do with all that money, once the French were put in their place?

This is where I think of Henry III Plantagenet as a model for “Engelond” and the world. He did not waste his fortune on public welfare and relief, or on the numerous gentle men and women who were breeding under conditions of peace. He invested, instead, in building of great cathedrals and abbeys, and in the glorious creations of Gothic art — in the illuminations, wall and panel paintings, sculpture and woodcarvings, metalwork, ivories, tiles, embroidery, stained glass. By this means, ignoring dull materialism in its ruder forms, he contributed to making England worth having.

It is the same when we review the other productions of history. “The peeple” might be starving, or knocked about in wars; there might be terrible and obscene injustices emerging in every place. But note, they are all dead now, and we have these wonderful works of art (if the Calvinoids or Muzzies haven’t yet destroyed them). These works testify to the noble values that command us still. Who cares if they put the Marxists, and other humourless scolds, in a bad mood?

For then came Henry’s son, the great King Edward (“Longshanks,” and “Hammer of the Scots”) to finish them off.

I continue to be loyal to the Plantagenets.

That conversations are taking place, throughout nature, and not only between the water buffalo (see penultimate post), is among the self-evident matters I am still young enough to understand — although not always to translate, from one species to another. For conversations involve nuance. This not only gives native speakers an unfair advantage, but one has to be present to get the joke, as it were. And one has to be listening, carefully, as well as being the creature for whom the language was designed, to grasp the poetics.

Amusingly, the “artificial intelligence” machinists have made some conspicuous discoveries while decoding the symphony of acoustic details with which the air is filled, when avians are communicating. Crows, ravens, jays, magpies, are among the most plentifully intelligent — far more than the bipedal “liberals” — and can best be studied with their cooperation, rather than by insulting or boring them, for instance by compiling statistics, &c. For, unlike liberals, they have dignity, and should be respected.

I learned, many years ago, that crows observe periods of mourning for fallen friends and family, and assemble for the inquests. I was once embarrassingly “mobbed” by crows, in Victoria, B.C., when I was understandably mistaken as the killer of a fledgling, which had suddenly and mysteriously perished, near my feet. It was thanks to the crows’ ability to describe me, that my alleged guilt was broadcast to the other crows, all over the town, together with details of my dress, comportment, smoking habits, facial expressions, &c. Though probably unable to kill me in revenge, I could at least be driven off Vancouver Island. The confinement of my understanding was entirely limited to me, who had never flocked with a “murder” or “parliament” of crows. For we lack the subtleties, in our senses five, to follow the proceedings in any crow investigation. We cannot even remain still for long enough, or endure a crow’s cross-examination.

On some other channel, you may find a little more information about this. But what I have to say is that, no matter how well-intentioned, you, as a human with your clownish ears, will never be able to follow the incredible procession of caws and clicks that are employed in crow conversation.

They are impressive even when restaurant reviewing, as I discovered when putting out food for them when I lived in Kingston, Ontario. Their leading gourmandess came to visit, promptly, but alone, whenever I put something out. I would listen to her detailed judgements, from the other side of a window, from which she knew I never threatened to pounce. Sometimes the proffered food was rejected, with a definitive, contemptuous phrase: “Unnecessarily exotic,” she might say. “Only a human would eat this.”

Now, the education system for their young (they had a school that met on the grass in Artillery Park, just across the street) put all our progressive scholarship to shame. For we classify everything fashionably into degrees of “Left” and “Right” — whereas the crows, like other intelligent birds, know that the categories are rather “Right” and “Wrong.”

“God, I hate white people,” I declared upon arriving at a weekly conference with my respected priest, in recent antiquity. Father smiled indulgently. “I know what you mean,” he contributed.

He went to his death, during the Batflu, sharing most of my more settled prejudices. Both of us were convinced that Canadians have gone quite degenerate, and that reactionary immigrants offered the only relief. Certainly, that’s the only place we can look for Catholics. I proposed that we should recognize this fact, while restoring Christianity to the wind-whistled wastes. We could establish a “Right of Involuntary Return,” for Canadians suspected of voting Liberal, or N.D.Pee. This would create enough confusion to make our deportations run smoothly. The deportees would enjoy the same rights as uncollected bottles to the Liquor Control Board. Where we would send the empties, no one need ask.

Or perhaps we could call it the “Recycling Act.”

I was thinking this again over last weekend when millions of aging, baby-boom, white people were demonstrating at the “No Kings” event, across the U.S.A. Some of them were dancing, even at the risk of a fall. Some media estimated that 90 percent of the participants were white, which means it was probably closer to 100 percent.

While my prejudice is chiefly racial, my bias includes a generational aspect. I began to distrust the “baby-boomers” when I was (innocently, I insist) an under-aged baby-boomer myself, and have retained my baby-boom-o-phobia ever since. But as for “the kids today,” I might easily forgive them. For, to be generous, they still have a chance to grow up. And many of them were raised by typical baby-boom, irresponsible parents. Whereas, the contemporary baby-boomers have, by now, discarded their chances. They have all “matured,” and cannot possibly expect forgiveness. Surely, it is time they were returned.

My proposal to the superintendent of my building, to keep a goat on the balcony of the High Doganate, has met with the usual bureaucratic resistance, and so I am compelled to buy milk at the corner store, where only over-packaged and over-priced commercial milk is available. This is subject to a different regulating authority, but frankly, I do not think a dairy cow would be any more welcome, or comfortable, suspended 99 feet in the air. Dairy cows are, in my limited bovine experience, not to be criticized for this, however. They are a tranquil, and kindly, though not a sentimental, beast; if unpredictable during a panic.

In a more perfect world, however, I could have a water buffalo, or perhaps a pair so they could entertain each other, by telling stories about us behind our backs and (since I am earnestly pro-life) starting a family. I speak of the beloved Bubalus bubalis, or domestic water buffalo, not the wild Bubalus armee, nor any of the ferals, for whose behaviour I cannot knowledgeably speak.

As a child near Lahore, one of these creatures, under the influence of religion I suspect, almost ran me over. I sympathized, for she had been turning a Persian wheel (a wellhead task normally reserved to a draft horse or donkey), and must have been lethally bored. A Thai water (or “swamp”) buffalo, on the other hand, has a more exciting intellectual life; she can understand language and reason — one may tell her “thaad” and “thoon“; or yodel to the dispersed brother-and-sisterhood, as they do in Indonesia.

Still, my purpose in keeping a water buffalo “carabao” would be to milk her, which can be done non-controversially except immediately after she has calved. The milk is much richer in fat and protein than that out of a mere dairy cow. Moreover, the beast(ess) is not subject to dairy board regulations in Canada, so one may legally hide her away from over-curious bureaucrats. This is important to know, for in our movement back to the land we must start somewhere. Only later in the operation will we be neutralizing the government agents.

To return to my celebration of Donald Trump — and why not, it gets a rise out of people — I actually disagree with the man on approximately nine out of ten questions of public policy. However, I disagree with his adversaries even more, and to clinch the matter, I love his brave, waggish humour, and his thrilling, “braggadocio” charm. He rules, largely, by giving affront, and it is those to whom he offers this service who are most indebted to him, for by rendering them powerless, he is saving them from the eternal fire they deserve to be pitched into.

Which is to say, perhaps his largest single achievement, is his overthrow of the scientific ochlocracy. (Peace is nice, but seldom lasts.) Faced with the mob that was costing the society of the West countless billions then trillions, in climate mitigation (“ninety-seven percent of scientists agree”), he did not waste our time further, but rather sounded an angelic trumpet — a deafening tootle over the whole affair. The enemy disintegrates, not only in the United States, but in Canada and Europe, too, as the bewildered masses ensorcell what I first smoaked about thirty years ago, i.e. that we were dealing with a scam, which, like every other audacious swindle in history, was designed to fill depraved pockets with tax money, or equivalent. What perhaps made it special was the extraordinary scale on which this diddle was performed.

Still, “climate change” makes relatively modest claims on our lives, minds, and pocketbooks (compared, for instance, to Islam). And as I say, it is already passing, as things do pass, when they are met by men who defend the truth boldly, and will suffer a few martyrs. Our ochlocratic rulers — the smug mandarin elites above the mob — have not killed nearly as many as their predecessors through the centuries, and those only indirectly. This is perhaps because, before their time, civilization had “progressed” so far, as a Liberal might argue. Whereas, I think that climate scaremongers are, as we used to say in the colloquial, “pussies.” Now, happily enough, their threat is evaporating.

But our foe will be back for more.

Never declare Peace when you are up against the Devil.

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 into the Internet. Also, to be entirely candid with the reader, I am not a Buddhist monk. 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 interrupted constantly 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 Pope, Donald Trump 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.

More particularly, we require 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 achieve anything by death is to pursue hard relevance, to the end.

It is to be vulgarly topical, frankly.

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.