Essays in Idleness

I have not been following the “Just Stop Oil” protests in Britain very closely, but close enough to realize that they have succeeded in irritating all of the ideological shadings, while inspiring counter-action when they stand in people’s way. Commuters have quite independently mounted responses to oil oppositionists blocking the streets at rush hour. I noticed at least two of the female protesters being dragged off the road by the hair (by a female counter-protester), and several other examples of intemperateness in the clips I have reviewed.

Colleague environmentalists take their protests to art galleries and cultural events, where they glue themselves to artworks and the like (but usually to paintings under glass, so to limit permanent damage). There have been more ambitious and elaborate displays.

While I hesitate to condemn the use of carbon fuels, which contribute so richly to organic growth and reforestation, and I would dismiss the panic over “climate change” as an unscrupulous fraud, I am nevertheless much opposed to cars. They are indisputably an environmental blight. They are noisy, noisome, dangerous, and use up the space and resources that could be needed for several billion new babies.

Moreover, I have noticed that the Just-Stop-Oilies do not interfere with the work of drillers and refiners, but focus their efforts on cars, buses, and trucks. Hence my support.

I would particularly applaud any protesters who could find ways to permanently disable ice cream vendors, and silence their jingles once and for all. These vehicles disturb public order throughout the summer months. Let the people eat their ice cream in peace, free from the pressure of aggressive urban salesmen who may (for all we know) be delivering crystal methamphetamine under this guileful cover.

Suppose gentle reader has found a five-franc piece, while rooting through his garbage. This would occasion some surprise, though short of a miracle. A five-franc piece! “L’Hercule,” as it is called by numismatists, was minted from the time the French currency was first decimated, during the Revolution, until it was totally debased in the 1960s.

But once it was a large silver coin, about the size of our silver dollar (also utterly debased). If you found one, perhaps tarnished, among your vegetable scraps, it would, almost certainly, brighten your day. You would clean it up, and try to polish it, and find a place to keep it where it would be safe.

Compare, if you will, what you do with God. If you find him, you spit. This is because he has made the universe so intensely beautiful, that He has left nothing else for you to spit upon. Though like a five-franc coin, the effect of spitting can only be to polish, as perhaps the pope was hinting, by honouring Andres Serrano, the artist of the “Piss Christ.”

Léon Bloy is my source for these observations, except this last (for I fail to understand Pope Francis). An anonymous reader in Scotland has sent me a selection of Bloy’s works, entitled The Pilgrim of the Absolute (ed. Raissa Maritain). It was a wonderful thing to find in my “snailmail”; Bloy (1846-1917) is a hero to me. He was a Catholic apologist entirely free of feelgood sentimentality. He had been a pain to live with: look him up.

Now suppose gentle reader, immediately upon reading this, were to root in his compost bin, and find a five-franc piece. Now, that would be a miracle.

In fact one needs the love of God, and fortunately one has the love of God, through all of the attempts we make to lose it. I do not know about Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell, except what the Church has told me, and in some locations is telling me still. Not being resident in any of these places, in my biological form, I cannot provide the kind of “on the ground” report that I can from this place, which I will continue today.

Human neediness is traditionally the province of girls. Boys are as likely to share it, but it was traditionally the male “rôle” to conceal neediness, in conceits of masculinity. The girl who doesn’t need, at least the protection of boys, has abandoned the conceit of femininity; whereas, the boy who is needy is a real wuss. This is however a general observation, which subtleties might amend.

Need for what? — the general reader might ask. In our girlishly sensitive modern language, we tend to assume some psychic, emotional need, as opposed to the practical need for food, clothing, shelter. We begin, for instance, with companionship, which we call “love” and reconstitute as a right (to be easily withdrawn). People have a right to entrap each other in a quasi-marriage, for instance; and the right to casually negate this artificial bond; it is what happens when marriage is based on “neediness” instead of the needs of children. (They have real needs, the adults have needs that are mostly fake.)

What children and adults have in common is the need to be lied to. Young children of both sexes, more than any other generational cohort, have the ability to see through lies, and to distinguish fantasies and fallacies from reality. As we grow older, we lose more and more of this natural gift.

This is especially a problem in politics. By voting age, the majority of people have developed an acute need to be lied to. This is why governments, media, businesses, &c, have developed the habit of lying. Their best argument is the classic one for laissez-faire: they are just giving the public exactly what it is asking for.

Not the Theophilus of the Gospel of Luke, not Theophilus the ancient Greek geographer, not the VIIIth-century astrologer Theophilus of Edessa, not the IXth-century Byzantine emperor, not Theophilus Erotikos the Xth-century geometer — but the Diverse Theophilus is my hero of the moment. He was, I think, a Benedictine monk somewhere in Germany, late XIth or XIIth century, author of De diversis artibus, which I have been reading through the unfortunate distractions of the past week.

I found Theophilus by chance in a second-hand bookstore, where I have found other authors discreetly hiding — in Nelson’s admirable 1961 edition in Latin and English. It is in three sections called “books,” the first about the art of painting in many media, the second for the production of all kinds of glass, and the third with various metals and metal-depending implements, such as church bells and organs. It is an extraordinary conspectus of the arts, written in a century before what we call the Renaissance, in the spirit that would animate the Gothic movement.

Many surviving mediaeval manuals contain hints to artists, but the De diversis is uniquely a full-bore treatise. Yet its author does not mention his name, or anything about himself. From topical references we may deduce his time, place, and religious occupation.

I was myself puzzled by his range, for in everything he precisely indicates workshop arrangements and craft techniques that he must have witnessed to describe, and nowhere does he depart from his practical tone, even when prescribing decorations.

He is a very humble monk, without posture or airs, and in the habit of our long Middle Ages — which was interested in the productions of men, not in the style of their egos. It was the civilization that produced Chartres, not Pringles or the Barbie doll.

But more than this the spirit is compatible with the “diverse arts” of pre-modern India and China. There is no hint of the modern concept of “fine art.” Leonardo might be disappointed to find that painting does not take pride of place above the other arts, nor does Michelangelic sculpture. Each art is rather a component of the whole.

One might also be surprised to find that the methods of oil painting were known long before the Quattrocento, and Cennino Cennini. It is heartbreaking that, through ruthless time, no examples have survived of this or many of the other genres to which Theophilus alludes.

Reginald Pecock, who is practically my favourite Welsh metaphysician, flourished early in the 15th century. Educated at Oxford, and preaching in London (in a fine parish church later burnt and bombed like so many in London by the Proddies, the Great Fire, the Luftwaffe), he was (to my mind) a superb explainer of Catholic doctrine, and a defender of the Church against the attacks of the Lollards and Lollardy — who alas himself slipt foul of senior clergy. You see, he did not think the Catholic teaching always “infallible,” or the creed perhaps ideally expressed, and made his own proposed revisions on several subtle points.

It is interesting, to me, that he was taking the same sort of exercise I was taking in my Idleness this week: asking himself questions like what is a soul, who has one, and how many? And making distinctions between “the beasties” and “the peeple” — yet writing in an agrarian age when both man and animal were shown more respect. Pecock was consistently well-disposed towards both, though he had enemies in politics who were out to get him, and as capable as Democrats of misrepresenting his (basically orthodox) views. Aheu!

His heresy, according to the contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury (Thomas Bourchier), was to misunderstand the principle of obedience to superiors, and to put too much stock in reason. Pecock accordingly renounced these errors, in trial, and lost a couple of handy sinecures (including a bishopric) into the bad bargain. But burning at the stake was not in the cards; for these were the Middle Ages after all, not the incendiary Early Modern.

I quite enjoyed Pecock’s stand against the “over-much weeting” of the Lollards, anticipating Luther and worse in their whining about the (supposed) sins of the clergy. In both this and his works on the faith, Pecock is pioneering arguments in the English language (previously restricted to Latin and maybe French), in a lively style that is almost informal. I love the vivid, sparkling honesty with which he tingles.

Incidentally, I will be happy to take back Thursday’s speculation about the “two souls,” should any learn’d archbishop cogently refute me.

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POSTSCRIPTUM. — While denying that he is a learn’d archbishop, my priest writes: “The thing is, as I’m sure you know, that it isn’t necessary to call them two souls. Sometimes isn’t the same territory covered by distinguishing ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’?”

Haha! … I was beginning to wonder if anyone was actually reading my compositions, or whether I now had the stage to myself, like some Welsh metaphysician. …

Verily, spirit is another word.

The soul is the form of the body. This is an idea so simple that most modern people get seriously confused. As materialists, perhaps, they continue to imagine a “form” that could be seen. Hint: a soul can be construed, but not seen. A living person moves. This is true also of other living creatures. He has a human form, which does not mean that every human being has a form that is quite identical. But it will be “radically” similar.

For different souls inhabit different bodies, and are united with them, for a time. The body dies, eventually. (It is a miracle, incidentally, that people may deteriorate gradually, but they die all at once.) The soul, which Aristotle perceived, leaves the body, and fades, or dies all at once. We haven’t found a way to detect what it is up to; but that it has left the body — that is for sure.

Most moderns don’t “believe” the human has a soul, except in rhetoric. Even communists and atheists use this rhetoric, sometimes, from a purpose that is purely rhetorical. They might acknowledge some kind of life force that “seems” to occupy the body, because even medical science distinguishes bodies that are living from bodies that are dead (although it no longer rules on male or female). As dead bodies have trouble organizing, they must accept what the living bodies decide. They are enslaved by the living.

We might call this soul “the ghost in the machine” of the living animal. It is entirely in the machine, as it were, and its self-consciousness is thus severely restricted. It exhibits habitual behaviour, sometimes clever; but the original creative act is not part of its repertoire. It can apparently adapt, quite impressively. It is sophisticated, though rather like a very advanced machine would be sophisticated: for it regulates many, many billions of nested parts, making mistakes only rarely.

I, on the other hand, do not believe a person has “a soul.” I believe he must have two. One is quite mortal, and dies when the person dies, for it was united with his body, and the body has ceased to be, or at least, ceased to be animated, and one way or another it will soon disappear.

This is the soul in the more modest Aristotelian sense — immortal, only as the species is immortal, or rather, souls just like it will be around for a while. For they are individuated, and often plentiful. One might, if one were ever in a position to think such things through, speculate on how these human souls, or monkey souls, or pussy cat souls, partake in the process of creation (or, “evolution,” as the modern man insists), but so it goes. We don’t have to know, and cannot successfully plumb either space or time.

But there is, I reason on Biblical authority, another soul, which is immortal. Humans have this, but monkeys have it not. It could only be installed, like spiritual things, by God or his agents, at the conception of the human; which is to say, effectively, outside time. When the human dies, this soul is uninstalled, but that does not mean it is extinguished.

Indeed, the evidence of divine creation (as opposed to some secondary creation) may be found in our immortality.

It is the one hundred and fifty-sixth anniversary of the foundation of the “Dominion of Canada,” a phrase that may still be legally used, with the understanding that it means nothing; nor has meant anything since Pierre Trudeau sabotaged the Canadian constitution (“freed the slaves”) in 1982. His son, Justin, who matches or exceeds his arrogance (although he is much less intelligent), continues the faux-dynasty that has dominated Canadian politics for most of my long adult life, and provides an unanswerable argument against bourgeois democracy.

We received yet another when Olivia Chow-Chow, the socialist bargirl who is the widow of the communist, Jack Layton Chow-Chow, won Toronto’s mayoral by-election this week — by her superior name recognition among the one hundred and three “independent” candidates. She conquered with a commanding one-third of the tiny turnout (a new municipal record low). It is discouraging to be reminded of the general, catastrophic stupidity of Torontonian and Canadian voters. (By riding on vehicles of the Toronto Transit Commission, one may quickly confirm my estimate.)

To be fair to the majority of (now) forty million Canadian residents (thanks to the world’s most aggressive immigration recruitment policies), very few of them have the slightest interest in politics, or willingness to participate in public life. They simply pay their taxes, or cash their government cheques, and do what they are told, wearing masks and taking vaccinations when indicated. They are told to vote Liberal, by the bought-and-paid-for shills in the Canadian media, and they usually do. A growing proportion in Toronto are mentally ill (as one may also determine while a passenger on its trolleys).

Is mental illness the consequence of a meaningless life? (No politics, but also no religion, and no detectable literary or other cultural interests. Perhaps some physical exercise and dieting.)

On the hidden assumption that it is, the official solution to this “crisis” is MAiD service — “Medical Assistance in Dying” — increasingly (and remuneratively) promoted by Canadian doctors. Our abortion regime has thus been extended to persons of all ages and medical conditions. It is the government’s solution to the problem of people who can’t pay taxes, and should soon become our leading cause of death, ahead of suicide and drug overdoses.

To which I might add, “Happy Canada Day!”

“In the twentieth century war will be dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be dead, frontier boundaries will be dead, dogmas will be dead; man will live.”

The quote, which I found in the Wicked Pedo, is of Victor Hugo, one of the most valiant, and brilliantly obtuse, believers in the progress of man with machines, and author of the book entitled Les Misérables, which has a happy ending. He was a man who made the transition from conservative monarchist to republican revolutionary in just one lifetime; truly, a hero of our times.

It is the twenty-first century now, and I notice that war, the scaffold, hatred, frontier boundaries, and dogmas have come back into style; and man is still with us, too (for all his sex changes). I myself have proposed to send at least one libertine to the scaffold, this morning. In Paris, they cull them every twenty years.

Hugo was motivated by “a vision,” of infinite progress through nature, though it be red in tooth and claw. The very murderous and flesh-eating tendencies could be put under supervision, by man. All he would need is unrestricted tyrannical power, and the usual helpmates — arrogance, and stupidity.

Compare, exempli gratia, “the vision” of Dante, John of Patmos, or that Jew, Moses, who wrote down the Book of Genesis. Each attributed superb results to God, and not to man; while supplying an end and a beginning to his story. Whereas, Hugo starts precariously, in the middle.

A world which, by two midcenturies ago, was enchanted by machinery and progress, and impatient to wave sad history goodbye. It was optimistic to a fault: it was ready for Marx, Darwin, Hugo. Perhaps it was even ready for Freud. Truly, we could go anywhere, by railway and steamship; we would no longer have to walk, like apes.

Congratulations, to us, that we have made it to midsummer alive, all of ye who may read this. It is appropriate that we celebrate Midsummer on its first day, when the sun lingers longest over the northern hemisphere. Should you have subscribed to global warming, you must consider that it may be too hot to celebrate, later; and after a few months of this, the seas may evaporate; and it appears that our forests have already caught fire.

Alternatively, you are sane, and cannot be frightened by the weather, much though it may irritate, from time to time. I exclude such as a friend of mine, who set out to traverse the Sahara on foot, back in 1977. He, I assume, evaporated (the human body being mostly water, like most of the foodstuffs it ingests, and may shrink into shoe-leather when left in the sun); but then, I doubted his sanity.

Dear Richard, for I will give him his name, wanted to contribute an adventure book to the English language, in the tradition of William Thesiger. I would rather have imitated Eric Shipton, or H. W. Tilman, for it is cool in the mountains, although I might be discouraged from climbing them by a fear of heights.

But whichever route he has chosen, one walks away from what is called “civilization.” This is a misleading term, applied by the simple-minded to cultures with indoor plumbing, and even to some with the plumbing outside. I apply it rather to religion and the arts, in both of which I seem to have minority tastes.

But whatever, “sumer is icumin in.” — Lhu-de sing cuc-cu!

Marsilius of Padua, the great neo-pagan revolutionary of the early 14th century, presented himself, as Hobbes did later, as the defender of peace. He was the precursor of Luther and Calvin (inventors of “peace through total war”) as a theorist of populist democracy, when the popes were living in Babylonian captivity at Avignon, and the University of Paris had become the centre of intellectual fashions; Marsilius was actually its rector for a while.

He taught (says I) a post-Christian theology, which diminished the worldly power of the Church essentially to nothing, and enhanced the secular power, which he imagined rising from “the people,” in the instrumental power of the Holy Roman Emperor, which, as my reader was probably taught in school, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.  In practice, a form of caesaropapistical terror was enjoined, once its defining features were all given pretty names. Political modernism was being launched.

Up here in the High Doganate, we tend to condemn the memory of Marsilius of Padua (a medical man by initial profession). We do so even although this has little effect in the world below us, which still asks how this institution is to be spelt.

Indeed, the late John Muggeridge, who taught me to stop calling hot weather “muggy,” but call it “lutherish” instead, did not blame Martin Luther for the Reformation, in which he (Luther) was only among the more recent participants. We gave that honour personally to the Devil, as Doctor Johnson had also declared the Devil to be “the first Whig.”

This was when I was living with Mr Muggeridge, in what we called “Manning House,” immediately before I took up my station in the High Doganate, and set up as the author of this blog.

I have just written to a confused reader, who asked whether it should be spelt “Dogan,” or “Dogon,” or like the Philistine god, “Dagon.” I take it the altitude “high” will need no gloss, for we are eleven floors in elevation.

My own preferred spelling is the High Doganate, for it contains myself, a Dogan, named after the primitive tribes of Mariolaters in West Africa who were discovered — to their shock and discomfiture — by Cape Breton Presbyterian missionaries when meandering upon the central plateau of Mali in the last but one century. They wrote home about their adventures.

These Dogans themselves, who claim to have descended from the stars as extra-terrestrials, seem to prefer the spelling, “Dogons,” but I subscribe to my mother’s transcription of their demonym. Catholics in insular Nova Scotia and western Newfoundland came to be called (informally) “Dogans” and, as it were, negrified.

Indeed, when I converted to Catholicism (and Mariolatry) myself, my Cape Breton mother shrieked that her son had “turned into a Dogan,” and added (perhaps facetiously) that they eat Protestant babies at Easter.

“Only when they can find one, mama,” I replied.

The Catholic Church is an absolute tyranny. This is my political thought for this morning.

She, the Church, is animated by only one person — Jesus Christ. She has other officers, of course; some of them saintly, though most of them not. But she is not a democracy, nor an aristocracy, nor a kakistocracy like our modern states, but a permanent monarchy. The pope merely stands in for the monarch, rather as the governor-general represents the king in the Canadian constitution. He has an essentially ceremonial function, except when he is carrying orders from on high.

Most particularly, the Church is not a corporate body, by any political, or business definition. That is why she is still alive, after two thousand years, or a few more thousand dating from the beginning of Judaism.

Whereas, corporate bodies have no life, no living soul, as William Hazlitt points out (in his Table Talk):

“Corporate bodies are more corrupt and profligate than individual, because they have more power to do mischief, and are less amenable to disgrace and punishment. They feel neither shame, remorse, gratitude, nor goodwill” — all of which Our Lord is reported to have felt, in the course of the Old Testament.

We should make no distinction between public and private corporations. In none can natural conscience exist. I might refer the reader to Hazlitt, and some others, for a synopsis of what corporations have instead.

“What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, a molecular Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.”

This was the judgement of Erwin Chargaff, in his scintillating book, Heraclitean Fire, published in 1978. It is a memoir of his early life (in Austro-Hungary) leading to his condemnation of Big Science, in which he became a formidable biochemical researcher — who assembled the paired ingredients for the double helix of DNA, but was omitted from the Nobel Prize. Indeed his ridicule of gawky young Watson and Crick, who had been his students, is deliciously apt. He is ungraciously stylish and wittily sharp, as he waltzes through the fields of literature, music, and high culture in a way that offends most American reviewers. For the gentleman could read at least fifteen languages.

I am not a biochemist (you may be surprised to learn), but this is theoretically a free country, and my admiration for the late sapient Chargaff (1905-2002), as also for his Pre-Socratic mentor (Heracleitus, not a professional biochemist either), is unrestricted.

“Science is not a mechanism for exploring the unexplorable.”

Chargaff was among the last scientists to grasp this, before “progress” began to explore such creations as Dolly the Sheep. He was among the first to grasp that the dependence of scientific research upon extravagant bureaucratic funding would make it more tedious than accounting, and more monstrous than crowds. The law of unintended consequences would apply to every arrogant step into “the unknown.”

The first discoveries are done by brilliant and imaginative men. But as Chargaff noted in his last year, they are trailed by the mephitic smell of a mob; by the touts and sly grins of the wizards of technology.

The latest Gallup poll shows that a clear majority of Americans rate “the state of moral values” to be poor, in America (they were not asked about elsewhere). And by an overwhelming majority (83 percent), they think that these moral values are getting worse. Among Republicans, this worsening is declared to be more or less total (97 percent), compared to Democrats (74 percent). If the Republicans were indisputably in power, nationally, I imagine these numbers might be reversed.

But note, the proportion of the despairing is the highest, in all categories, since Messrs Gallup first thought of measuring public attitudes in this (asinine) way.

In fact, public morals have always been low, as we might learn from reading some detailed history. My insertion of the word “despairing” in the last paragraph was illegitimate; the proportion of those who actually despair must be much smaller. The properly despairing kill themselves, and not all of these in response to the perceived decline in moral values.

One does not have to be a jolly soul, to think that the world is, over all, at its worst, — not bad. Indeed, being a jolly soul is an end in itself, quite regardless of social conditions. One of my (frequent) disputes with modernity is the notion that jolliness needs a cause, and that it can be identified by such as pollsters and scienticists. On the other hand, I think that it may positively exist, and that it works against suicide.

But jolliness, like a high state of moral values, is something only possible to the individual person. To assess it socially is to fall for a political presumption that has pestered us, and certain prominent philosophers, for the last few centuries. It is one of those dubious terms gliding from late Latin into mediaeval French, then twisted through “The Enlightenment” with mechanistic torque. It declares that there is such a thing as “humanity,” and that it can behave like a creature.

In reality, all creatures, including humans, are distinct.