Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Passive-Aggressive Revenge?

Other than as a practice-piece, it is difficult for he to understand much about this short story. A woman obsessed since puberty by a neighbour she has hardly spoken to spends her entire life in a world of fantastic projection. Despite her rescue from poverty, loving family, and opportunities to get on in life, she prefers to senselessly pine over a man to whom she refuses even to give her name. A casual affair, from his side, results in a pregnancy about which she refuses to inform him. Their offspring dies as a young man from unknown causes. She apparently also dies from grief.

She has written a letter to him to be delivered post-mortem. The constant refrain of her letter is “Beloved, I am not blaming you. I do not wish to intrude my sorrows into your joyful life.” Yet this is what she has done - maliciously, unrecoverably, and clearly intentionally. Why? Did Zweig believe that a woman, any woman, all women could be psychotic enough to carry out such a programme? Could it be that the story itself is a sort of passive-aggressive revenge by Zweig? If not, his point escapes me.

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Fear by Stefan Zweig
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Coming Out of the Proto-Feminist Closet

Zweig was a close friend and confidant of Sigmund Freud. And this little novella is clearly influenced by psycho-analytic theory. However it suggests to me at least a nod to the concepts of Carl Jung in its development and resolution.

Who is this Frau Irene Wagner really? Merely a bourgeois socialite, a Mme Bovary, who decides to engage in a little adultery out of boredom with her established matronly routine? A hedonist pushing for that extra frisson of pleasure? A neurotic housewife trying to escape the horrible fate of relationships without apparent meaning? Or perhaps just a selfish bitch? What fundamental motivation lies behind her behaviour?

If nothing else, Frau Wagner is certainly what Carl Jung termed an Objective Introvert. She lives mainly in her own head as indicated by the scarcity of dialogue throughout. But almost nothing exists in that head of her own making. She is defined by the views of the people she is with, her ‘set’, those others who have apparent regard for her, and particularly by her husband. She moulds herself to this society, as she does to her family’s expectations of her. Even her children can command that she not deviate from their expectations for their care-taking.

Woe to the Objective Introvert who intuitively can see the limits of their own psychology. The only thing they can do to, as it were, broaden their perspective on life is to expose themselves to contradictory external demands. If they are within a sedate, stable society, they purposely but unconsciously seek out passion and danger as a corrective environment. Their life then, of course, becomes miserable, not because of the passion and danger but because of the radical conflict in the demands upon their personality.

Frau Wagner, therefore, becomes dissociated into two separate selves, so that “All that had passed and been forgotten was no longer her crime at all, but that of another woman whom she could not herself understand and whose mind she could no longer even enter into.” In fact each aspect of her personality feels guilt about the other. Whether she turns to her husband or her lover for solace she will be judged inadequate.

Like all of us, according to Jung, Frau Wagner wants to have her psychological cake and eat it. She wants what the Jungians call ‘integration’, that is, the acceptance of both parts of herself into a coherent whole. She in fact wants to be ‘found out’ and thus healed: “Deep inside her she longed for what she had hitherto been afraid of: the lightning flash of redemption that would come when she was caught.”

The only resolution to this fracture in the self appears to be annihilation of both aspects of her personality, “She considered all routes to death that she was familiar with, weighing up legion possibilities of self destruction, before she suddenly recollected with a kind of joyous terror that the doctor, on account of her insomnia during a painful illness, had prescribed morphine.” The internal contradiction is simply overwhelming.

But the solution isn’t actually in her hands. It is the environment that has to change to accommodate her. This is precisely what happens. While I find his resolution a bit too much deus ex machina and abrupt, I am not entirely dissatisfied with Zweig’s resolution of Frau Wagner’s dilemma. She has at least learned that it is not she who is always required to adapt to the demands of the world.

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War by Sebastian Junger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just Say No

Young men have fantasies about being soldiers. But whatever it is they imagine combat to be, it isn’t this - the unremitting discomfort of heat, fleas, and filth; the obvious futility of all their efforts to do a job which is impossible; the unrecognized stress of being a continual target of bullets from the enemy, hate and suspicion from the local populace, and disdain by their superiors; the inevitable incompetence of those in command of a situation which they never comprehend; and the knowledge that the experience of numbness one is undergoing is fundamentally incommunicable to anyone who isn’t sharing it.

But young men seem never to get the eternally recurring message: This experience is likely to damage you beyond repair; it will haunt you and be the source of life-long regret. If you survive it with your body intact, your mind will have absorbed not just your own pain and degradation, but that of your friends and perhaps even your enemies. This pain and degradation will not make you a better man; it will make you an invalid. As Junger reports: “By the time the tour was over, half of Battle Company was supposedly on psychiatric meds.”

The further one is from those who are shot at and shoot back to kill, the more fantasy takes hold. Of course, the majority of a military force never actually know what’s going on: “Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company.” One need not go far up the chain of command to get the point: “It’s only on rear bases that you hear any belligerent talk about patriotism or religion.” Senior officers, faced with the unfamiliar, are at best incompetent and at worst seriously deluded: “...the war also diverged from the textbooks because it was fought in such axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain that few military plans survive intact for even an hour.”

The laws of unintended consequences constitute the unchanging physics of war. War is the only demonstrable perpetual motion machine as it creates the conditions necessary for its continuance:

“...war came to the Korengal when timber traders from a northern faction of the Safi tribe allied themselves with the first U.S. Special Forces that came through the area in early 2002. When the Americans tried to enter the Korengal they met resistance from local timber cutters who realized that the northern Safis were poised to take over their operation... For both sides, the battle for the Korengal developed a logic of its own that sucked in more and more resources and lives until neither side could afford to walk away.”

Frankly I am exhausted hearing the old shibboleths about war evoking the best human traits of compassion, self-sacrifice, courage, and solidarity. Junger has a familiar anecdote:

“Moreno put his hands on him and started to pull him out of the gunfire. A Third Squad team leader named Hijar ran forward to help, and he and Moreno managed to drag Guttie behind cover before anyone got hit. By that time the medic, Doc Old, had gotten to them and was kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out how badly Guttie was hurt. Later I asked Hijar whether he had felt any hesitation before running out there. ‘No,’ Hijar said, ‘he’d do that for me. Knowing that is the only thing that makes any of this possible.’”

Exactly. It is the intense caring for each other by soldiers in combat that makes the whole enterprise of war possible. The entire complex machine of the military has been geared to generate and to exploit this fundamental force of fellow-feeling among men who come largely from the margins of society and who have no clue about the process to which they’re being subjected. Indoctrination is the official term; brainwashing is the more accurate. To me this is at least as obscene as the violence that it permits. This is the open secret of all armies everywhere. It is also a source of immense guilt, regret, and psychosis among those who are its product. By distorting and intensifying the natural sympathy among men, the military creates zombies who are emotionally neither dead nor alive.

Is it too much to hope that, despite their hormonal disturbances, someday young men who are encouraged to wage war will tell the old men who insist on war to fuck off?

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Nothing by Henry Green
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Less Than Earnest

‘It’s a damnable thing when a chap can only see his mistress on Sunday afternoons, don’t you think my dear? Pressures of work don’t you know? And even then she might decide to visit her mother. Then the chap would have to visit Jane instead. Damned inconvenient isn’t it my dear? Oh look, there’s Jane now. Is that Richard she’s with? I didn’t know Richard’s wife was out of town. She looks well doesn’t she? I do love you so terribly dearest. It’s not too late for you to find someone and have children you know. Oh, waiter! Shall we pay the bill and go to bed my dear?’

A paraphrase but you get the idea: upper middle class English sexual mores are somewhat disconcerting in Nothing. And this is years before the Beatles first LP. Brighton is merely lewd with adultery rather than gay. Servants with pre-war discretion are disappearing but obsequious restaurant staff are still available even if champagne is in short supply.

The children of the professional and ministerial classes are rebelling against their parents, of course. But it is the parental lack of morality and hypocrisy that they find objectionable. Perhaps the children will start a conservative backlash that in turn might provoke free love hippiedom in the subsequent generation. In Nothing nothing seems impossible. The social structure and its customs are Edwardian, or possibly even Regency, but things are fluid in post-war down-at-heel England. All the more reason to whistle in the dark.

Green always has a unique literary ‘thing’ in each novel. In Nothing it seems to be the clipped, disjointed cadence of well-to-do conversation. Talking with each other, however intimately, allows - no, demands - continuous observation of the immediate social environment and the interjection of interesting titbits of gossip, history, or valuations as a sort of seasoning to personal confidences and confessions. Green can bring a whole dining room into a little chat between a man and his mistress without ever describing the place or its inhabitants. The effect is vibratory rather than visual as various frequencies blend to make the harmony of the scene.

The young people talk like their parents but in order to disapprove of them: “‘That’s where the whole difference lies,’ he said ‘between our generations. Their whole lot is absolutely unbridled.’” It’s like the British 90’s comedy Absolutely Fabulous - the children actually parent the adults, who are more or less feckless. “... That generation’s absolutely crazy,” says the son of one philandering woman, in a tone that is used by the school girl, Saffron, in Ab Fab to identical effect. The parents pay absolutely no attention to the conversation of their children except to worry about its incomprehensibility.

Both parents and children seem to be acting according to a script by Freud. Sexual objectives permeate their relationships. Oedipal mothers, Electra-like daughters, married siblings, and several Olympian love triangles form Green’s plot. A particularly English brand of sexual currency is in circulation. There is desire - the men’s adolescently orgasmic, the women’s blatantly economic - but no passion. Calculation not hormones drives the action. The men have more of the latter; the women excel at the former. The children are counters, understandably confused and forced into a sort of prudishness by the adult machinations, “... because they’re like rabbits about sex.”

The naive children put their parents sexual neuroses down to economic rather than psychic trauma: “... one has to be sorry for parents. They had such a lot of money once and we’ve never seen what that was.” Poor things. Green also makes economics the conscious cause of the children’s concerns as well. The only jobs are those with the socialist State. It’s not like the good old days, whenever they were, when private enterprise provided variety and opportunity for the young and aspiring. Tory politics is never far from Green’s narratives.

There is a set-pieceness to Nothing with its coincidences and stage-asides that has charm but for me little substance other than as documentation of a culture in transition. All in all, it’s easier to visualize Green’s characters in Victorian rather than Second Elizabethan dress, high starched collars and crinolines. The situation and structure is that of an Oscar Wilde play, updated to 1948 levels of liberality: The Importance of Being Less Than Earnest, perhaps.

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A Mathematician's Apology 
by 

G.H. Hardy

 

A Serious Business of Taste

The dominant theme of A Mathematician’s Apology, established from the first page, is one of aesthetics. Aesthetics, the study of what is inherently important and valuable, is for Hardy the fundamental power of mathematics, not an incidental result of correct thought. Aesthetics, while not unique to mathematics, is arguably more single-mindedly applied in mathematics than in any other human activity, including art of all kinds.

Hardy, like many poets and artists as well as other mathematicians, is hesitant about his exposition of the aesthetics of mathematics. It seems to him vaguely disloyal and a possible waste of time. Mathematicians, after all, do mathematics, they don’t write about doing mathematics. And he has a point: either one gets the aesthetics of mathematics or one doesn’t. Mathematicians could care less about their reputations outside of mathematics. Hardy is therefore wary of going over the line from an ‘apologia’, that is, an explanation, to a defense, lest his should offend his colleagues. Most creative artists, I imagine, feel similarly.

Hardy is acutely aware that an aesthetic, that is, a specific criterion or set of criteria, is that which is valuable for itself, and for no other reason. The aesthetic aims at nothing practical, nothing beyond itself. It is an argument from first principles that cannot be gainsaid by any other argument. It proves itself by its own assertion and by its own internal logic. Paradoxically, this is what makes an aesthetic so powerful: it doesn’t care what is thought of it outside the rules of its own creation. It is the scale of its own value. Its attraction is precisely its special kind of absoluteness.

Aesthetics therefore is a dangerous business. It holds itself apart from criticism of any kind from those outside the circle which embraces it. It is an elitist activity. Its justification is merely the complete indifference about whether others subscribe to its views or not. There is no compulsion for others to ‘belong’ nor even to recognise its existence. It does not even claim any right to exist, for that would imply a purpose beyond itself.

When a mathematician asserts that 1+1=2, there is no meaning beyond that assertion other than the expression of the aesthetic of mathematics. The assertion may have implications. Indeed this assertion has vast implications for the practice of mathematics. But that is the extent of its mathematical significance. It is a start in expressing the relevant aesthetic, but it is not intended to make the world better, or more intelligent, or more interested in mathematics.

Does that make all aesthetics equal? Hardy says that the highest ambition “is to leave behind something of permanent value.” Value cannot be permanent unless it is intrinsic, of value in and of itself. But such intrinsic value is not arbitrary. The aesthetics adhered to by the professions - law, medicine, science - for example are distinctly different and incommensurate; but they are not arbitrary. Rather they are arrived at through social processes and accepted for what they are - the way we do things.

Nonetheless a distinction can be made between fundamental criteria of action (I hesitate to call them aesthetics at this point) which are hidden, implicit, and unexpressed, from those that are made explicit, revealed, and given for consideration to others without the threat of compulsion. It is only the latter that are aesthetics. The former we can categorise as mere prejudice or, at best, unconsidered preferences. 

An aesthetic then must be articulated and expressed to be considered as such. When it is, it develops an uncanny power. The greater the precision of the articulation, the greater its attractiveness. I can’t account for this except as an empirical observation of the way in which people respond to aesthetic propositions. ‘Justice’, for example, as an abstract criterion is far less captivating than ‘the just treatment of relationships among those with same sex preferences as a matter of law’. This latter aesthetic has become accepted throughout Western Europe and North America as it has become expressed. 

An aesthetic is likely to attract those with a talent to employ it creatively. If for no otter reason than the social comfort of being among ‘like-minded’ people, that is others who appreciate not just the same things but the ability itself to appreciate those things. Hardy identifies curiosity, professional pride and ambition for reputation within the profession as general aesthetic aspects, applicable to many others than mathematicians. 

The principle aesthetic criteria of mathematics that Hardy identifies, however, is that of ‘pattern’, more specifically patterns of ideas. It has always struck me that it is precisely this aesthetic that is presented in Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game, published almost contemporaneously with A Mathematician’s Apology. 

The game in question is never described except to the extent that it involves the identification of patterns across otherwise discrete fields of human knowledge - mathematics, history, politics, painting, poetry, physics, etc. A mathematical aesthetic expanded universally in other words. My discussion with other readers suggests that indeed you either get this aesthetic, and find the book a treasure, or you don’t.

Pattern-seeing rather than pattern-making is the essential mathematical skill. The difference is crucial, and what makes mathematics an empirical science. Numbers are there to be explored and interrogated. Mathematicians don’t invent, they discover, patterns that numbers have always had. These patterns are as real, perhaps even more real, than the patterns proposed by, say, physicists. The latter involve themselves with ‘strings’, and ‘quarks’, and ‘dark energy’, for example. But these are mere hypotheses in comparison with the factual solidity of the number 2, or the logical necessity of more than one cardinal order of infinity.

There are ugly and beautiful patterns in mathematics. One might suppose that this distinction is also arbitrary. But as Hardy explains, it is not arbitrary at all, nor is it vague even if its details are obvious only within the profession. Hardy refers to this as the ‘seriousness’ of a theorem or a proof. A serious proof, like Euclid’s proof of the infinity of prime numbers is short, un-showy, and (surprisingly) surprising. It has a seductive elegance that does not so much force as it does invite acceptance.

A component of seriousness is ‘significance’. This Hardy further divides into ‘generality’ and ‘depth’. Without these characteristics, theorems, however ingenious, remain curiosities of interest only to puzzlers and hobbyists. On the other hand, too much generality and a theorem becomes abstractly insipid. Depth is even more subtle and has to do with the virtuosity involved in solving a problem that has just the right degree of generality and difficulty - again using innovative or unexpected ...“line of attack” to get to a solution. Such a proof “should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way.”

Ultimately metaphors like this are inevitable, not because the criteria are vague but because they have been so internalized by practitioners that they are almost pre- (or perhaps post-) linguistic. They ‘know it when they see it’ not because they are inexperienced and unsophisticated dilettantes, but they are able to ‘walk the talk’ so well that it is unnoticed by consciousness. The aesthetic becomes truly a ‘law written on the heart’ for better or worse.

Hardy makes several mentions of how the aesthetic becomes obsolete and how it might be modified. Cambridge, for example, “crippled its mathematics for a century” by insisting on examinations that were exclusively about technique at the expense of creativity. Only by having the personal courage to move against this established norm did the situation improve. The toleration of such ‘rebellion’ is clearly, therefore, a necessary characteristic of the aesthetic-society, as it were.

A Mathematician’s Apology is a highly personal statement, as its title implies. But the fact that its contents are only usually revealed over late night brandies during international academic conferences, doesn’t make it idiosyncratic or merely anecdotal. Without the mathematical talent sufficient to participate in the community that shares the aesthetic, it is perhaps impossible to appreciate the power of the aesthetic Hardy outlines. 

My summary of Hardy’s outline is undoubtedly inadequate. But it is, I think, sufficient to establish the almost miraculous way in which a professional discipline can create and sustain criteria of value that are not only independent of economic or commercial imperatives, but markedly antithetical to them. One might say that mathematics is serious business indeed.

Appendix: Aesthetics and Fake News

An aesthetic has no intentional meaning beyond itself but it does have an incidental effect in the sense that it eliminates any consideration of truth. Since an aesthetic is its own truth, it cannot be compared or verified by reference to any other truth. This might appear as an aesthetic defect until it is realized that an aesthetic has a great epistemological consequence. It eliminates what has come to be known as fake news.

Fake news isn’t fake because it is intentionally wrong or not (although it may be). It is fake because it is irrelevant in a given aesthetic. Fake ‘fake news’ are purported facts which are presented for some reason other than their mere presentation. It exists when there is an ulterior motive that remains unexpressed, a purpose - political, economic, or otherwise pragmatic - which is beyond the simple factual assertion.

It takes some practice to know whether one is dealing with an aesthetic or some other instrumental or intermediate criterion of value. The phrase ‘this is important because...’ is a giveaway that whatever is being discussed is not an aesthetic. Even what follows the ‘because’ - it is right; it is expedient; it is effective; it is sensible - may not be an aesthetic. Often we hide our aesthetic under layers of rationalization so that we may not be aware ourselves what our aesthetic is.

When a politician claims that a news story is fake, it is because he has some underlying interest he wants to promote, some hidden aesthetic, possibly Power, possibly wealth, possibly reputation. But never ‘truth’, this being the underlying aesthetic whose revelation might be damaging to itself.

When a physicist or a social scientist makes a claim about reality, he or she is also making claim that is fake. They may use the term ‘truth’ to defend such a claim, saying that it ‘fits the facts’ better than alternatives, or that ‘it will cost us less to do X than to do Y’ but these are statements that confirm the existence of some other criterion that constitutes the reason that their assertion should be accepted. Only when we reach the terminal response-point ‘just because’ have we encountered what can be called the fundamental aesthetic that can’t be defended, only accepted or rejected, have these scientists approached the directness of the aesthetic of mathematics.

The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics by Marcus du Sautoy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Natural Religion

If there is advanced technological life elsewhere in the universe, it would unlikely be Christian, or Muslim, or Jewish, or Buddhist. It would however certainly know the same mathematics that we do. And it would understand the phenomenon of the prime numbers and their significance as much as, perhaps more than, we do. Mathematics is the natural religion of the cosmos; and prime numbers are its central mystery.

Prime numbers are those integers which can only be divided without remainder by themselves (or of course by 1). Put another way, as du Sautoy does, prime numbers are the atoms from which all other numbers are composed. 1, 2, 3, and 5 are prime. 4 is merely 2 x 2; and 6 is 2 x 3. 10 is 2 x 5. Prime numbers constitute the periodic table of mathematical elements which can be mixed and matched to form molecules and compounds of enormous size and complexity.

Prime numbers become less frequent as numbers get larger. There are fewer in any interval greater than let’s say 1000, than the same interval less than 1000. This is intuitively obvious since the greater the number the more lesser numbers there that might be divided into it evenly. Interestingly, there is always at least one prime between any number and its double.

The fun arises because although mathematicians know primes occur less and less frequently as we progress up the scale of numbers, no one knows how to predict when the next one will be encountered. They can be, and have been, calculated to very large numbers indeed, but they can’t be anticipated, only recognised once they appear.* Or should the term be ‘revealed’?

Is it any wonder that prime numbers can take on an almost cultic significance? The 18th century philosopher, Denis Diderot, hated both religion and mathematics for the same reason. Both, he felt, provided a veil that obscured reality. Much of today’s popular aversion to mathematics may well be down to this same associative prejudice: if something isn’t immediately obvious or somewhat abstract, it is merely an unverifiable belief or theory and not worthy of respectable thought.

There is a good reason for the religious, even spiritual, interpretation of mathematics - particularly number theory, and especially prime numbers. In the first instance, unlike any other area of human inquiry - even theology - the results obtained in mathematics never change. Euclid’s proofs may be superseded by more general analysis but they are nevertheless entirely correct and need no modification in a world of radically different cosmology and technology.

Mathematics also shares another characteristic with religion: a concern with aesthetics. Religion orders the world. It provides comprehensibility in a world that might appear otherwise chaotic. And order is an essential component of beauty. Mathematicians not only investigate order as beauty, they collectively insist upon it in their evaluation of their work. A proof or a theorem just isn’t acceptable if it is ugly. The liturgy and art of the Roman Church has no advantage over the aesthetic wonder of the Euler Identity, which connects worlds even further apart than Heaven and Earth.

And, it must be said in an era of fake news and rootless factoids, there is nothing quite so practical as a good theory. And mathematics has the best theories - in astronomy, encryption, communications, and logistics to name some of the most obvious areas that are dependent upon them. In fact understanding almost anything at all reported in the press or online demands familiarity with at least the most glaring abuses of mathematical logic.

Not all of us, naturally, have the talent or discipline to become mathematicians. But most of us can appreciate the importance of history without being historians, or of engineering without building bridges. The real value of The Music of the Primes is that it inspires an appreciation of, and therefore interest in, the thought and thinkers that are perhaps the purest examples we have of shared human thought; who knows, perhaps cosmic thought. Mathematics - and its heroes like Euler, Gauss and Reimann, and Cauchy, and Godel - belong to all of humanity not just some sect. I find this inspiring. It is more than music; but music will do.

*The search for ever larger prime numbers continues. Here is the latest discovery: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/sci...

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A Model Childhood by Christa Wolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Total War: Total Amnesia

Proust had his madeleine. Wolf’s Nelly has an infinity of objects ‘beyond the Oder’, in her pre-war Prussian homeland, to evoke memories of her childhood. But Proust had clarity, while Nelly’s memories are fragmentary and unreliable, reflecting a very un-Proustian ambiguity: “One could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century.”

Nelly’s family is ‘unpolitical,’ that is to say, unconcerned about government and its activities beyond the usual mendacity and corruption of the local council. Like most families, its main issues were Auntie Emmy’s embarrassing act as a gypsy witch and disputes over the invisible children’s territorial boundaries. Life wasn’t luxurious; but it wasn’t oppressive or unstable. People got along.

But so little engagement in governmental politics didn’t mean a lack of politics tout court. The politics of daily existence were learned at the dinner table and in the school yard: “That obeying and being loved amount to one and the same thing... A misdeed without consequences is no longer a misdeed... To rejoice in undue praise... The difficult job of sparing the parents... The link between good deeds and well-being.” And perhaps the most important political precept of all: “Not to be normal is the worst thing by far.”

These are the politics exploited by governments everywhere to achieve their ends. Without these unseen, unremarked, ingrained, politics of the heart, government becomes impossible. So when government becomes insane, it is only by the cessation of routine daily politics that its insanity can be controlled. This is perhaps a lesson of acute relevance to the present-day citizens of the United States who seem to have fallen into one of the periodic faux pas of democratic societies, one not dissimilar to that of Germany in 1933.

Wolf suggests the signal for reconsidering the continuation of daily politics in the face of governmental insanity: “The feeling that overcomes any living being when the earth moves underfoot is fear.” This fear may be the sign to stop being normal, particularly within the family and its political mores. “A family is an agglomeration of people of different ages and sexes united to strictly conceal mutually shared embarrassing secrets.” To coin a phrase, good government begins at home and before the age of seven.

Knowing when it is necessary to suspend normal politics, to take to the streets in order to protect others at the expense of one’s own interests, should not be one of the secrets. If it is, then as Wolf says, “Total war: total amnesia.”

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Giordano Bruno by Walter Pater
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Hell Froze Over

Walter Pater’s little booklet on the 16th century Dominican friar is a literary gem; not just for Pater’s distinctively graceful style, but also because of its profoundly perceptive content.

I have worked among Dominicans now for over a decade. And I am still surprised almost daily by the nature of the Order and its sociological effects. One of these effects is the intellectual freedom which is not just allowed but promoted, even at the risk of treading on the conventions of orthodoxy.

Giordano Bruno was a Dominican and arguably the first modern Pentacostalist. He believed in the Spirit, not merely as an abstract participant in divine society but as the active engine of the universe.

The Spirit for Giordano was everywhere and in everything. A century before Spinoza, Giordano reached the same conclusions that would get Spinoza ejected from his Amsterdam synagogue. Giordano survived as a member of the Catholic Church longer than Spinoza did in the synagogue, but his end was a bit more abrupt. He was burned at the stake in 1600.

Pater, I think rightly, ignores Giordano’s physical fate as a distraction from his intellectual achievement. This achievement goes beyond mere ideas. Giordano’s contribution to the world wasn’t in fact any specific idea, it was his establishment of the unrestrained goodness of ideas in general. Nothing was off limits, nothing was fixed and eternal except the demand on thinking beings to think: "Of all the trees of the garden thou mayst freely eat! If you take up any deadly thing, it shall not hurt you! And I think that I, too, have the spirit of God."

As Pater summarises his subject: “To the eye of God, to the philosophic vision through which God sees in man, nothing is really alien from Him.” Nothing alien, not even that central eccleiastical convention of Hell. Giordano announced that there was no Hell. And if there was no Hell, there could be no real authority to compel belief or even to adjudicate the morality of behaviour.

Pater is right. The only sin recognised by Giordano is the sin of obstinance against reality: “To shut the eyes, whether of the body or the mind, would be a kind of dark ingratitude; the one sin, to believe directly or indirectly in any absolutely dead matter anywhere, because involving denial of the indwelling spirit.”

This is a theological conclusion; but it is also a scientific charter. “The reign of the Spirit, its excellent freedom” marks the separation of thought from not just ecclesial authority but from any fixed authority whatsoever: “Winged, fortified, by this central philosophic faith, the student proceeds to the reading of nature, led on from point to point by manifold lights, which will surely strike on him, by the way, from the intelligence in it, speaking directly, sympathetically, to the intelligence in him.”

By destroying Hell, all restrictions on thought were removed, even those of so-called scientific method. As Pater says, “Bruno had measured the space which Bacon would fill, with room perhaps for Darwin also.” Science does not have, is not, a single ‘method’, not the novum organum of Bacon, nor the field research of Darwin. Science invents methods as freely as it invents ideas. What really matters is that there is no Hell, only obscurity when you fail.

Seems obvious now, mainly because a man died expressing it. Ironically, it is other modern Pentecostals who take issue with Bruno’s achievement. For example, the well-known American evangelist, Carlton Pearson, was declared a heretic by his fellow Pentecostal bishops in 2004 for promoting the doctrine of ‘universal reconciliation’, in simple terms, the elimination of Hell.

No ecclesiastical hierarchy wants to lose its leverage over its congregations. Fortunately their power to inflict the ultimate earthly punishment has been somewhat curtailed, else Pearson certainly would have risked Bruno’s fate.

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The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

War-time Japes

The Enormous Room, the fictionalised account of Cummings's arrest and incarceration by the French on charges of sedition during WWI, reads like a Billy Bunter story. The protagonist is obnoxious and endearing in about equal measure.

The various French authorities (and for that matter American, Cummings accommodates everyone), from the snobbish regional police chief to his medievally minded jailers are more or less treated with the disdain a clever 12 year old feels, but rarely shows, for his boarding school headmaster.

But Cummings does show what he feels on every possible occasion. One finds it necessary to be more English than the English if sufficiently provoked, '"Very well, gentlemen," I said. "You will allow me to tell you something." (I was beet-colored.) "In America that sort of thing isn't done."' His Back Bay breeding can't be faulted for lack of pluck.

Cummings was nothing if not an all-appreciating aesthete: "The door was massively made, all of iron or steel I should think. It delighted me. The can excited my curiosity. I looked over the edge of it. At the bottom reposefully lay a new human turd." Quickly, however, Cummings engages more fully with his Kafka-esque situation. He doesn't know why he has been arrested or where he is to be detained. But even then the mystery is another opportunity for appreciative admiration, "everything seemed ridiculously suppressed, beautifully abnormal, deliciously insane."

The adventures in a French underworld of deserters, spies, war prisoners, and various unfortunates continue like a sequel to the Count of Monte Cristo. Cummings never loses his Bostonian noblesse oblige and sang froid : "I contemplate the bowl which contemplates me. A glaze of greenish grease seals the mystery of its content, I induce two fingers to penetrate the seal. They bring me up a flat sliver of cabbage and a large, hard, thoughtful, solemn, uncooked bean. To pour the water off (it is warmish and sticky) without committing a nuisance is to lift the cover off Ça Pue. I did."

And of course one's true calling can never be denied even in extreme duress: Lacking a pencil or other suitable drawing instrument, he must make do: "So I took matches, burnt, and with just 60 of them wrote the first stanza of a ballade. To-morrow I will write the second. Day after to-morrow the third.Next day the refrain. After—oh, well." The finest etiquette must always be observed, even, no perhaps especially, when it serves no social purpose: "I did not sing out loud, simply because the moon was like a mademoiselle, and I did not want to offend the moon."

The Enormous Room is, I believe, Cummings first literary effort. It is a practice piece in sustained irony that suggests much about where he is going and some of where he did not. An interesting, periodically entertaining, piece of dark humour. And probably excellent therapy for his PTSD.

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The Reality of the Resurrection: The New Testament Witness by Stefan Alkier
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Does Belief Inhibit Judgment?

I put comments about theological books on GR only when they seem to me to be of general cultural significance, and when they are likely to be comprehensible by any educated person. This is one of those, recommended to me by a close friend in an attempt to gather me up into the Christian fold. It’s effect has not been as my friend expected.

To be a Christian believer is to be a follower, not of Christ, but of Paul of Tarsus, a self-proclaimed Apostle of Jesus who had never met him and who, by his own admission, learned nothing about Jesus from those who did know him. It is from Paul that most of the doctrinal content of Christianity originates. Therefore the credibility of Christianity depends largely on whether one perceives Paul as divinely inspired or merely religiously imaginative.

Paul’s surviving writings, his letters to congregations he founded, are the oldest Christian scriptures, probably by several decades. It is they that announce the ‘good news’ of what would become known as Christianity, - particularly the resurrection from the dead of the man Jesus, and the imminent end of the world during which those who accept this as true will be united with him forever.

Alkier, a believer in the announcement of Paul, traces the development and expansion of Paul’s message through the rest of Christian Scriptures. His intention is to re-invigorate the meaning of Paul by stripping away the metaphysical and cosmological presumptions of the Pauline world. Alkier wants to understand Paul’s relevance to the modern mind. He presents a serious but very ‘accessible’ analysis of the New Testament with academic rigor but also with readable aplomb.

The problem from the point of view of belief, however, is that Alkier’s textual analysis demonstrates not just the arbitrariness of Paul’s doctrinal pronouncements but also the complete absence of reasons to accept this arbitrariness. What Alkier presents therefore is an excellent summary for the rejection of Christian belief by those who take it most seriously.

If neither Jesus nor his close associates taught Paul his message, who did? One presumes that Paul’s experience was informed by his cultural inheritance, which was Greek as well as Hebrew. But as Alkier concludes decisively, Paul’s

“... word of the cross satisfies the Jewish demands for proof of its validity as little as it satisfies the criteria Greek philosophy would employ to validate truth claims. Thus it fulfills neither the Jewish conditions for a sign of the powerful activity of God, nor those of Greek epistemology.”

Paul never mentions an empty tomb, nor does he cite anyone else who does. He was never a witness nor does he find it necessary to suggest there are witnesses who might corroborate his account of the fate of Jesus. His statements exist without context or any connection to the cultural reality of the times. His account of Jesus is entirely self-contained. This is a reasonable definition of a myth, that is, a narrative that is internally consistent but which describes emotions, hopes, and desires rather than facts.

To the extent these emotions, hopes, and desires corresponded to something in his audiences in the Roman Empire, they will have had an effect. But judging by the experience of modern-day Christian sects - Mormons, Baptists, Adventists - the appeal of Paul’s message was not so much the doctrinal content as the social organisation of the proto-Christian congregations. Christianity spread because it provided a particular kind of community, not because it preached a truth that anyone could understand. It is unlikely that anyone understood what Paul was saying. Things haven’t changed much since.

Of course Paul is not the only ‘witness’ in the New Testament, but he is pivotal for all the rest. And Paul didn’t actually witness anything except his own inflamed imagination. In our age of increasing evangelical involvement in politics, Alkier provides an insider’s perspective that has importance for those of us who are outsiders. Belief is being used around the world to justify prejudice of all sorts as religious faith. It is arguable that Paul is the inventor of modern religion generally with its conceptions of doctrinal conformance and univocal interpretation of spiritual insight.

If so, Alkier shows Paul and those who take him as a substitute for moral thought have much to answer for. The reality of the resurrection hardly seems more than the resourceful creation of a religious entrepreneur.

For more on Paul, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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The Flight of Peter Fromm by Martin Gardner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Origins of Deplorability

Martin Gardner was a mathematician and writer about mathematics who wrote only one novel*, this one; and an exceptionally good novel it is. It is the hidden mathematical connection that makes it good - as both a novel and a moral tale for our time.

The narrative line of The Flight of Peter Fromm is that of the evolution of American fundamentalist belief and its adaptation to the world beyond the tribal society in which it has been formed. Why should a well-known mathematician engage himself in such a project?

The answer, I am convinced, is: because American religious fundamentalism emerged in a period, around the turn of the 20th century, when a parallel debate about the fundamentals of mathematics was also taking place. While Christian religious belief had been under intense fire by historical criticism and biblical exegesis during the latter half of the 19th century, mathematics was simultaneously being challenged to demonstrate its own rationality.

From the 1870’s onwards, biblical scholars and historians like Julius Wellhausen and Albert Schweitzer had succeeded in revealing some very uncomfortable facts that undermined much of conventional scriptural interpretation. Issues of authorship, chronology and intentions in the Old and New Testaments rolled out like ingots from (mostly German) academic word-mills. Many Christian theologians put up a fierce but ultimately futile battle against both the scientific rigor as well as the sheer common sense of these new ‘revelations.’

This powerful criticism brought into question not just particular doctrines but the entire Protestant Reformation with its dictum of ‘Everyman his own interpreter of Scripture’. In America, this threat was arguably more acute than elsewhere since the social cohesion of the Westward expanding country had been provided not so much by civil government as by Methodist peripatetic preachers and the self-forming Baptist congregations that moved forward with the frontier. If biblical truth was not self-evident, what chance the derivative truths of American democracy?

The situation provoked a response among American Christians that became known as Fundamentalism, that is, the adherence to a specific and fixed set of doctrinal ‘fundamentals’ regardless of scientific, historical internal biblical evidence which might seem to contradict them. This movement grew in membership and political power throughout the 20th century and remains the voice of today’s evangelical Christians, particularly among so-called Red State Republicans. Gardner’s fiction is a description of the state of that movement and its development from WWII to the early 1970’s.

In remarkably close parallel with the emergence of biblical criticism, mathematics underwent similar developments. 19th century mathematical researchers like Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind (more Germans!), started working on problems in set theory and infinity. One of these problems, the so-called Continuum Hypothesis** was particularly thorny since it seemed to undermine confidence in the reliability of even basic arithmetic.

The initial response of the mathematical community was not unlike that of the American Protestants. Bertrand Russell with his colleague Alfred North Whitehead threw themselves into providing the axiomatic fundamentals needed to formally demonstrate the integrity of the system of numbers. The result was the Principia Mathematica, originally published in 1910, precisely the same year as American Baptists and Presbyterians published their first version of The Fundamentals (The Catholic version, the papal bull Pascendi, appeared in 1907; popes can act more quickly than councils).

Russell’s Principia had a run of growing popularity for about 20 years until a mathematical smart aleck named Kurt Godel demonstrated not only that Russell and Whitehead were wrong, but that the very objective of their project, the establishment of the inherent rationality of numbers, was futile. Godel showed that no axiomatic system could ever account for its own rationality. No arithmetic rationality equals no secure foundation for the so-called science of mathematics. Godel‘ s Incompleteness Theorem has caused about as much consternation in mathematics ever since as The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has done in physics.

Similarly, religious fundamentalism in America seemed to have reached a peak of influence (right along with the Ku Klux Klan) by the beginning of WWII. Education was eroding the credibility of primitive religious beliefs generally; the expansion of the federal government was providing a cohesive American self-image which was independent of the local, historically religiously-based identity; scientific and philosophical research in language began to show the inherent conventionality of words and their problematic relation to things. So religious fundamentalism was feeling exactly the same pinch as its mathematical sibling: if even language was unreliable, what hope could doctrinal pronouncements, necessarily made in language, have for expressing the purported truth of religion.***

Gardner picks up his story at just about this historical point. His first person narrator is a Unitarian minister, Dr. Homer Wilson, who teaches at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Wilson makes a number of jokes at his own expense, generally about the somewhat slim claim that Unitarians have to be Christians, or even theists for that matter. Unitarians, very much like mathematicians, are aware of the fundamental irrationality of their adherence to their calling. They nevertheless maintain a view that there may be something, call it divine, hiding behind the boundary of the irrational.

Peter Fromm, a hick from the Oklahoma Bible Belt, and offspring of true blue fundamentalist parents becomes Wilson’s student in Chicago. Peter is on a mission: to bring the notoriously humanist and liberal Chicago divinity faculty to its spiritual senses and back to the Ol’ Time Religion. He is energetic, passionate, and skilled (he had preached routinely as a teen-ager). But of course he fails; he fails not only in converting his colleagues but in maintaining his own evangelistic certainties.

It is this failure that is the real subject of Gardner’s novel, how it affects Peter but also Gardner’s prognosis about its impact further along in history. It is here that the book makes an important contrast between the religious and mathematical responses to failure. And it is here that one can see the reason for the persistence and sheer bloody-mindedness of American Fundamentalism. The issue he seems to be putting forth is: Can we make a rational response to a situation which is literally fundamentally irrational?

Mathematics is often put forth as the Queen of the Sciences, the ultimate carrier of truth. But it has also always carried a religious tinge from the days of the ancient Greeks (the Dionysus of Pythagoras) to the 21st century (the Supreme Fascist of Paul Erdos). Indeed numbers have been historically described as not just the words of God but the essence of the divine. It would seem that human consciousness, unable to entirely understand itself, is vulnerable to almost anything it can find to fill the chasm of irrationality that it perceives in itself. Some solutions are innocuous; others have horrendous consequences for one’s fellow humans as well as the rest of the planet. Gardner’s novel implicitly shows the alternatives and their consequences.

Not all mathematicians are acutely concerned with its irrational boundary or with lies ‘beyond’ it. Like Homer Wilson, they accept this fundamental uncertainty and get on, more or less pragmatically, with a life filled with numbers. Some, however, find this intellectual dead end troublesome and try to address it, even if only to move it only slightly into the beyond. Only rarely do they become obsessed with the beyond itself; and even more rarely do they make claims about the mathematical beyond that they then attempt to impose on other mathematicians as truth.

Similarly not all human beings, mathematicians or not, find the mysteries of human existence - ultimate causation, ultimate purpose, consciousness, free will, etc. - problematic. But some do and they often turn to religion or philosophy to provide some reasonable explanation for these apparently unreasonable questions. Having formulated some answers (or more likely heard some answers fifth-hand by someone who says ‘Trust me, I’ve seen the beyond), the Peter Fromm character in them either stops looking for other answers... or he goes mad. Actually even the first alternative is a kind of madness since it destroys communication with those who might share his concerns but insist on continuing their search.

In short, Fundamentalism, the establishment of fixed religious or philosophical doctrines, isn’t bad because it promotes wrong doctrines. Rather, it is disastrously destructive because it is an inhibition of the very human impulse to understand, a closure of the process of education, a betrayal of the capacity that human beings have to think and act together. It is wrong because it tries to stop not just thought but the society which makes thought possible. Mathematics is the hidden metaphor in Gardner’s novel for an alternative to fundamentalist tribalism, an alternative that expands the community of ‘believers’ indefinitely.

Forget the rash of recent books about the forgotten Americans who have found Trump. For those people Trump is quite literally an Incarnation of their Prosperity Gospel, the latest version of American fundamentalist psychosis. The Flight of Peter Fromm, although written almost an half century ago, is for my money a far better analysis of the existing cultural situation. Hillary Clinton’s electioneering remark about the Trump’s Deplorables is accurate but not accurately explained. I contend that they are largely the seekers who have stopped seeking, nihilists who move from absolute to absolute because they can’t tolerate the fundamental uncertainty of being human. They have demonstrated their fundamentalism with no regard for evidence, or logic, or their fellow human beings for the past year. It will be interesting to see where they alight next after their current fundamentals fail.

Postscript: it strikes me that the themes of Gardner are remarkably reinforced and demonstrated as significant in Pankaj Mishra’s recent The Age of Anger: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

* This is not strictly true if his 1998 book Visitors from Oz: The Wild Adventures of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman is considered as a novel.

**The problem can be stated simply: Does the set of all sets contain itself? The answer seems to be both Yes and No which is the kind of self-contradiction that gives mathematicians dyspepsia and nightmares.

*** By the time of WWII, Reinhold Niebuhr, the premier American Protestant theologian, could write a 600 page book, Human Nature and Human Destiny, with not a single mention of the central Christian belief of the Resurrection.

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Fiasco by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Respecting the Eternally Dead

This is science fiction at its best. It is scientific because it employs technology that is not yet available but is nevertheless plausible in theory. It is fictional not because it proposes some strange physics in an alien galaxy-far-away but because it presents an alternative cosmology to the one that exists, unchallenged, in our own heads. This is a counter-fiction that is shocking and intriguing in equal measure; and it makes Fiasco a masterpiece.

Lem reveals and overturns an unrecognized presumption, a prejudice really, we make about the universe: the anthropomorphic conceit that life emerges from mere matter, when it does, as a sort of developmental triumph. Life represents progress; the more complex the life which evolves, the more advanced the world in which it occurs. Living things, we think, are special: they have purpose; they adapt to the world in order to achieve their purposes; in the case of humankind, they are even capable of choosing among purposes. In short, life is teleological. Even if we reject religious belief, we tend to accept that this apparent trajectory reflects the purposefulness of the cosmos which produced it.

But just suppose that we’ve got this narrative of cosmic progress wrong. Suppose that purposeless matter - not just lifeless matter but matter that has no potential at all to produce life, as on a moon of Saturn - is not only the dominant mass in the universe, but it is also a superior substance. It is superior because it is not subject to the laws of genetic evolution. It exists without having to conform to environmental vagaries. In fact, extreme environmental conditions allow this matter to express incredibly original, even creative, forms. Dead matter need not struggle for a place in the universe, nor need it prevail over other dead matter. To describe the situation succinctly: dead matter is free, liberated eternally from the “guillotine of evolution.”

The possibility of travel to other places in and beyond the solar system has perennially provoked speculation about the existence of dead matter. But we duck the issue of infinite cosmic ‘waste’. And we temporise about it until the scientific analysis is ‘complete’. We try desperately to give dead matter purpose. We search for life on Mars and Venus, even if it might now be extinct, because the thought of the dominance of dead matter is disturbing. We fantasize about mineral deposits on the Moon or travel to other planets, or even galaxies, to find places of refuge or needed resources for a depleted Earth. We look for intelligent signals from deep space in the hope of forging some kind of cosmic companionship. We may no longer consider ourselves the centre of the universe; nevertheless it is all for us - to use, to explore, to communicate with. If there is intelligent life elsewhere, it too is instrumental for our well-being. Either they can teach us or we them. The camaraderie of the living!

We thus give purpose to these places - but only in our imagination. They have no inherent purpose or at least none we could accept as such - for us, for any other form of life, but most importantly for themselves. If they consist of dead matter, they will never develop. They will never be used to become more than they are. They may be reduced to their constituent components of particles and energies in a super nova or black hole or in the nuclear engines of space craft, but by escaping genetic evolution they will forever evade the constraints of teleology. They exist immutably and only for themselves. In Christianity this is a definition of God.

If another intelligent civilization does exist, it too has been subject to the inscrutable, and debilitating, process of evolution. And evolution implies competition, conflict, and very un-Godlike action to overwhelm one’s living opponents. Recent anthropological findings confirm that the rise of primitive Homo Sapiens was at the expense of not only others in the genus Homo but most of the existing fauna in the areas Sapiens invaded. From Australia, to the islands of the Pacific, and into North and South America, humankind was a persistent serial killer of mammals, and marsupials, as well as the insects and flora which relied upon them. Why should any other intelligent species be ignorant of the reality of evolution. [See the recent Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind For a fascinating account of the natural destructiveness of our species: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...]

Such a conception is obviously problematic for Christian, as well as other monotheistic, beliefs for a variety of reasons. But Lem hones in on the central doctrine of Christian thought: resurrection from the dead. Resurrection is thrown into reverse; it is not a sign of divine mercy but an obscene curse. The resuscitation of a corpse, that is the reconstituting of life from dead matter, isn’t a divinely inspired miracle but a cosmically sinful tragedy. The corpse is forced from its liberated state of union with the divine back into the slavery of the genetically dependent world and straight back into the miserable competition among living things. The medical technology that Lem invents to allow such resuscitation is therefore clearly infernal, profoundly evil in its intent.

Lem’s cosmology isn’t Gnostic or nihilist. His heaven or nirvana or place of ultimate refuge is not somewhere else outside the universe that we see and experience; it is located within this very universe in its most perfect state, one of absolute internal stasis and contentment. What we call dead is really divine. What is not dead produces chaos. ‘Disordered’ is the theological term which the Dominican theologian aboard the space craft Eurydice might use. ‘Fiasco’ is the theatrical equivalent.

Lem uses his technology to get us as far away from ourselves as possible in order for his fiction to take effect. At such a distance, the fiction may not be fictional at all. "The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars... "

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Invitation to a Beheading 
by 

Vladimir Nabokov, 

 

Dmitri Nabokov (Translator )

 

Nabokov’s Cave

In his allegory of the Cave, Plato suggests a limit on human knowledge: that we see only shadows of reality. Immanuel Kant went Plato one better two millennia later and claimed that we can’t even apprehend the shadows properly, that even these in their ‘true selves’ are beyond comprehension. 

Invitation to a Beheading offers an alternative to these classical philosophical, and inherently dismal and nihilistic, views. For Nabokov the world is not hidden beyond an epistemological veil. On the contrary, reality is so much in one’s face, “a tumult of truth,” so rampantly and fecundly ‘there,’ that it is effectively infinite. It is not erroneous perception that we experience but an abundance of perception that is too great to adequately describe.

Nabokov’s equivalent of Plato’s Cave is a prison cell in a fortress, at some indeterminate time in the future. But this is no ordinary prison; nor does it contain an ordinary prisoner. The prison provides three squares a day and a good roof over the head of Cincinnatus, the condemned protagonist. This is only as to be expected. But Cincinnatus’s cell is described as ‘deluxe’; his food is the same quality as the director’s. And the prison houses an outstanding library of which he makes intensive use. The staff are kindly folk who look after his every physical need from entertainment to regular bathing. 

One could get attached to such a prison. Nabokov hints at the opinion that most do when he writes about “his [Cincinnatus’s] jailers, who in fact were everyone.”


But Cincinnatus is nevertheless stressed. Not because of his death sentence, but because he can’t get a confirmation for the date on which it is to be executed. This he finds intolerable: 

“... the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned. However, I am being left in that ignorance which is tolerable only to those living at liberty.”

In short: Cincinnatus’s predicament is universal.

Nevertheless his imprisonment and pending execution provide a sort of focused freedom for Cincinnatus. Among other things, it gives him time to dream, to recollect, and to write about his life. He can “see things clearly through the prison walls” that were previously invisible. And he feels driven to express them, “I have the feeling of boiling and rising, a tickling, which may drive you mad if you do not express it somehow.”

But there is too much to express. Not just of his life, but of the life he has suppressed and the dreams, which is also part of his experiential reality, much of which he has forced himself to forget. Facing death, he feels nonetheless, “I am the one among you who is alive”. But his life is overwhelming in its detail and complexity. It is infinite. Even the biography of an oak tree obtained from the library consists of more than 3000 pages; and it is still incomplete. Therefore, “I have lived an agonizing life, and I would like to describe that agony to you – but I am obsessed by the fear that there will not be time enough,” he informs the reader. 

Cincinnatus’s justifiable conviction is for the crime of “gnostical turpitude.” The offense is not one of moral depravity nor a lack of discernment of good and evil. It is his persistent inability to appreciate conventional reality. Driven by either an inherent artistic muse or perhaps guilt on account of his previous attempts to conform, he must write, and write, and write, before it is too late - even though his writing must remain incomplete, composed of merely fragmentary descriptions from his imagination.

The problem that Cincinnatus discovers as he pursues the expression of his perceptual overload is that the world is entirely mad. And not just mad, but evangelistically so. Everyone in it tries to convince him to be reasonable and submit to reality. In conversation, his warden is enticing. He might be reprieved. 

But Cincinnatus 

“does not understand that if he were now honestly to admit the error of his ways... honestly admit that he is fond of the same things as you and I,... if he were honestly to admit and repent –yes, repent –that is my point –then he could have some remote – I do not want to say hope, but nevertheless...” 

When he refuses he is rebuked with an apt biblical reference, “You offer him kingdoms, and he sulks.”

Cincinnatus has no Freudian Death Wish. Quite the opposite. His fear of death overwhelms even his drive to write. Ultimately it is the conquering of this fear that gives him some sort of freedom. This is unlikely to be a pleasing ending for “the disciples of the Viennese witch-doctor [and] their grotesque world of communal guilt and progressive education.” Nor is it likely to be satisfying for those philosophers who contend that the world is alien to perceptive human beings.

The Bell by Iris Murdoch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Interrupting Routine

I work as tutor and librarian at Blackfriars Hall Oxford, the smallest and most medieval of the University of Oxford colleges and also a Dominican priory. A few years ago Blackfriars acquired a bell to call the friars to prayer. The sound of the bell does indeed create a definite atmosphere in the place; as also does its timing since it rings, like its larger fellow at Christ Church College, according to solar time - about six minutes behind GMT. The midday call to the Angelus therefore is somewhat disconcerting for passers by who nervously check their watches. I have come to believe that this slight disruption, this interruption, is precisely the bell’s function, intended or not. Paradoxically: a routine that interrupts routine. One way to interpret Murdoch’s novel is as just such an interruption in the lives of its characters.

A.S. Byatt in her introduction calls The Bell Murdoch’s first ‘English’ novel. And it certainly creates a distinctive atmosphere, one so dense, thick, and humid in the Summer heat that it feels like green cotton wool - simultaneously inhibiting and cushioning movement. The characters, mostly middle class professionals, each might have ‘issues’; but all are nevertheless cradled in the social solidity of a 1950’s bourgeois English culture that hopes against hope that it will remain 1939 forever. They live in an existential routine that seems fixed; they are stuck... largely with themselves.

People ‘get on’ as if on a trajectory with the defined and relatively narrow limits of Oxbridge graduates in a post-war world they find alien and confusing. Their individual worries, however, don’t inhibit their confidence, material or spiritual, in being English. They are, of course, completely unaware of this. How could it be otherwise? But their Englishness is the necessarily unstated subject of the book. The narrator would only spoil the narrative if she gave the game away; introspection is not to be encouraged, “A belief in Original Sin should not lead us to probe the filth of our minds.” Irony is after all English group therapy.

Opening with a very civilised adultery, leading to an even more civilised reconciliation for which the outgoing lover provides transportation to the railway station, there is no conflict which can’t be solved if one just has the patience to wait it out. And for heavens sake keep one’s mouth shut. Intimate communication is far too perilous a venture. Much preferable to rely on one’s friends to buoy one up without making a fuss, usually with a little G&T, or possibly even a bit of evening Compline before bed.

The High Church tradition, the antithesis of her Irish Presbyterian background, is something Murdoch became intimately familiar with in Oxford. Her College, Somerville, is just past the end of St. Giles’, a street along which John Henry Newman started his career as an Anglican vicar at one end and wound up a Catholic Cardinal at the other. Halfway along, and touching Blackfriars, is Pusey House, named for Newman’s colleague in the liturgical revival of Anglicanism (the Oxford Movement in fact). Pusey House is often more Catholic than the local Catholic churches since it can both anticipate the introduction of new ritual or revert to ancient practices without consulting the Vatican (Pusey House also has the best collection of Vatican documents in Oxford).

Some consider High Anglicanism to be a mimicry of Catholicism. It’s not. It is true English Catholicism, or better said, Catholicism in the English mode. Many Oxford colleges conduct Evensong and Compline services daily during term, using English Plainsong or Gregorian chant according to preference. These are sensually pleasing, one might call them erotic, events. They employ all the smells and bells of Catholic ritual but also emit a vaguely camp rebelliousness - directed at both Low Church Anglicans as well as the straight-laced (historically Irish) Catholic masses.

This Anglo-Catholicism provides a great deal of the dark green, cotton wool, comfort of The Bell. The enclosed convent of Anglican nuns in Imber is not an antithesis to the repressed erotic desires of the characters who fetch up together across the lake in a half-derelict country pile of Imber Court; it is a spiritual celebration of the erotic (One is reminded of Teresa of Avila and her swooning for Christ, her Spouse). I know of at least three similar communities within 15 minutes drive of Oxford. And I lived in one of these while I wrote my doctoral dissertation.*

This kind of community is not a place to escape desire but a place in which desire can be explored in a way that is uniquely English: through patient ritual, agricultural and industrial as well as religious. As the medieval philosophers taught: through practice one can act one’s way into a moral life. “The great thing about a dog” says one of the residents “is that it can be trained to love you.” And not just dogs. Humans too can be taught to love trough practice; but not through conversation, idle or therapeutic. So, “Meals were taken in silence at Imber.”

In a sense, therefore, sex is as much a religious practice in Anglo-Catholicism as it is in the Buddhism of the Kama Sutra. It needn’t be advertised as such, that would require talk which would compromise the effort fatally. But Murdoch makes the equivalence explicit in her description of the psychic state of her main character, a homosexual: “...in some curious way the emotion which fed both [his religious feeling and homosexual orientation] arose deeply from the same source.”

English resourcefulness is to be found in this dance of sex and religion, which is carried out as much to the rhythm of an English country house as of a Benedictine convent. The mustiness of each is additive: “There was a stale smell, like the smell of old bread, the smell of an institution.” A concise summary really of the English Baroque. Everything is surface, but brightly lighted surface so that nothing is actually hidden, “All the electric lights were so bright at Imber.”

The inhabitants are essentially misfits, and are recruited as such, “people... who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely...” Each of these defective characters has a place, a duty really, in the overall choreography of an operatic ballet in Imber Court, a definite role that fits snugly into an overall ensemble.

Dora is the dim beauty, the soprano of the piece. She has no comprehension of religion and only the most instrumentally sterile view of sex; but she is not malicious, “That she had no memory made her generous.” She is a central figure, a sort of goddess of creation (and of course therefore sex), who tends to get lost in Murdoch’s narrative turbulence. Paul, Dora’s husband, is the operatic baritone, for whom neither sex nor religion is about passion but domesticity. He desires Dora as housekeeper and mother for his children; and religion is part of an ordered family bliss. His lust, such as it is, is paterfamilial and conventional not perverse.

The director/producer is Mrs. Mark (married to Mr. Mrs. Mark), a somewhat beefy person in long skirts, with “well-developed calves.” She is a type of English proto-hippie perhaps, an evangelical Mrs Danvers, living a life of gentile, procedural poverty on someone else’s dime, never without a ‘cause’. Without her, neither sex nor religion could flourish at Imber. She is the liturgical and social hub, the enforcer of strict adherence to the rubrics, “It’s not like a hotel and we do expect our guests to fit in – and I think that’s what they like best too,” she politely commands. She also ensures that conversation never becomes intrusive, “That’s another little religious rule that we try to follow. No gossip.” What takes place outside Imber, remains outside Imber.

Mrs. Mark is the agent of Michael Meade, the somewhat reluctant leader, whose family estate Imber Court is. In subsequent decades Michael would have been identified as the ‘cult leader’ of the residents, not as sinister as Jim Jones or as commercial as Werner Erhard perhaps but still of some unaccountably charismatic incompetence. Michael has been inspired by the Abbess of the Benedictine convent to ‘minister’ to folk who are neither clerical nor secular but what now might be called ‘seekers’. He is a homosexual.

Catherine is the mezzo-soprano and, innovatively, the prima ballerina of the piece who is immediately identified by Dora as a rival. Catherine is imminently to become a postulant in the convent; or, as her twin brother perceives the situation, to be swallowed alive by the institutional monster of religious passion. Toby, Catherine’s male sexual counterpart, is the the pious, virginal counter-tenor. He is the unsure novice, spiritually as well as sexually unformed.

The eponymous bell constitutes what Alfred Hitchcock called the McGuffin - a motivating force whose function is to set the narrative in motion but that remains invisible. Essential therefore, although apparently trivial. It is Dora and Toby, at ends of the sexual/spiritual spectrum, who release the bell from the primal waters in which it has been hidden. Driven by the ‘event’ of the bell, the characters carom around the confines of Imber Court, impelling each other to acts of spiritual lust and material folly in a marvellously English way. And of course interrupting their lives profoundly, not just for them but for all of Murdoch’s generation.


* In fact this form of Anglo-Catholic lay community was inspired by the so-called Distributist Movement of the 1920’s and 30’s. This was a Catholic attempt, promoted by the likes of GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, to find a ‘middle way’ between Capitalism and Communism. It’s ideal was a sort of medieval economy dominated by small agricultural producers who owned and worked their own land. A few of Distributism’s ideological remnants still exist in Britain, Canada and Australia.

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The Master and Margarita 
by 

Mikhail Bulgakov

 

Soviet Ghost Stories

Stories, stories, all is stories: political stories, religious stories, scientific stories, even stories about stories. We live inside these stories. Like this one in The Master and Margarita. The story that we can more or less agree upon we call reality. But is it real?

Story-making and telling is what we do as human beings. Through stories we create meaning out of thin air, in the same way that plants create their food from light, and usually with about the same level of casual unconsciousness. We then learn to share meaning and thereby create language and societies. We call this culture and have little idea what it means or how it works.

What happens when stories, particularly stories about stories, are inhibited or forbidden? The most important result: society goes mad. And that part of society which becomes most mad is that of the professional story-tellers who, because they are the carriers of the essential human and cultural talent, become less than human. They are unable to tell the stories needed by the rest of us and enter a dream-like state of inexplicability and meaninglessness. 

The Master and Margarita is obviously a satire, a purposeful distortion of language to demonstrate its corrupt use. It is also obviously meant to recall the necessity for religious stories in a society that has degraded and mocked them. But for me the book is less about the corruption of Soviet society and its attitude toward the Christian religion and more about the even more fundamental beliefs that are the unspoken tenets of story-telling, that is to say, the philosophy of literature. 

In an important sense, literature is indistinguishable from religion. Religion cannot exist without it; but it is likely that literature could exist without religion. Literature precedes religion. Bulgakov notices this in his story of Christ before Pilate. 

“These good people,” the prisoner began, hastily added “Hegemon” and continued: “learnt nothing and muddled up all I said. In general, I’m beginning to worry that this muddle will continue for a very long time. And all because he records what I say incorrectly.”

This is a direct attack on the ‘veracity’ of the gospel of Matthew. Bulgakov here implicitly contrasts religion against literature in his expanded and reinterpreted version of the biblical story of Jesus's condemnation and death; and he comes down decisively for literature as the more fundamental mode of thinking. The only thing beyond a text is... another text.

This is not to say that literature should cause trouble for religion. The use of language is itself a religious experience even when it is used to parody religion as in Bulgakov's Communion of Sinners Ball and demonic Eucharist. Literature, consequently, exists as a spiritual (and social) rather than a material (and merely sensory) process. Materialism, of a Marxist, Capitalist, Scientific or any other sort, tells a story that cannot account for where its story comes from. Its causes cannot be enumerated and accounted for. Such a story is deficient and incomplete.

Stories do not appear to be 'in nature' but they do comment upon nature. It is not inaccurate to say that they come from 'elsewhere.' And it is this elsewhere that is both the source and guarantor of the integrity of the stories that get told. Without the existence of this infinitely fecund elsewhere, the realm of the spirit, there is no way to verify the stories we tell ourselves. As Bulgakov has a psychiatrist point out to one writer, "People can go around telling all sorts of stories! But you don’t have to believe everything!”

It is this spiritual elsewhere that Bulgakov has intruding on and disrupting Russian civil society. In time-honoured fashion, the intruders are portrayed as devils who are able to exploit the presumptuous conceits of this society, especially those of the literary elite of the MASSOLIT, the state-run literary guild. It is the writers who sense this intrusion first and it is they who are quite properly driven mad - or to their death - by it. 

Bulgakov's demonic characters are up-front in their challenge to cultural reality. They make a reductio ad absurdum by denying the reality of language and the society and the culture associated with it. "The seductive mystics lie, there are no Caribbean Seas on earth, and desperate filibusters do not sail them, and a corvette does not give chase, and cannon smoke does not spread above the waves. There is nothing, and never was there anything either!" This challenge of course passes over the heads of the Soviet Citizenry.

From the writers, the plague induced by constrained and distorted story-telling spreads to minor government officials. The local housing officer is the first casualty and he instinctively recognises the problem, "Comrades!... We’ve got unclean spirits in our building!” And he's right: the spiritual cannot be excluded, only deformed, by telling a story that denies the spirit. Such denial is patently a confirmation of what is being denied.

It is through entertainment, 1930's stage vaudeville, that the condition is spread through the wider population. The presumably hidden or at least repressed culture of Soviet consumer society is shown for what it is - impressed as deeply as in any capitalist society by the linguistic distortions of brand names and wealth without purpose. The 'watching mass' has no idea that it is being shown itself, literally exposed, in all its mendacious cupidity.

Even love, ultimately the cohesive force of marriage and family as well as society, is a product of language. It appears from that spiritual elsewhere, "as a murderer leaps out from under the ground in a side street” for the Master. Love may start with a look but it doesn’t progress beyond fantasy unless the look is the beginning of a shared story, interpreted by Margarita as an eternally fated event. The object that keeps them together while apart is of course the manuscript of the Master's book, an alternative gospel.

If the medieval troubadours are not enough evidence of the cultural determination of the meaning of love, surely the varieties of love articulated in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and accepted by generations since, clinch the case. Any society that attempts to limit what love, in all its variants, might mean is doomed by its own contradictions; and not just the Soviet variety. But it is Bulgakov’s conception of divine love that I find the most disturbing aspect of the piece.

Any theologically aware person must at some point confront the problem of evil. Evil demands a story. The monotheistic religions subscribe to the story line that not only the Creator but his creation are ‘good.’ How then does the obvious evil in the world come about? 

The existence of evil is typically explained with one of several largely inadequate theories: Evil is a spontaneous development of a rebellious force against the goodness of God and His works; Evil is not an autonomous force but merely the localised absence of the divine within creation; Evil is actually inherent in a world that was formed by a subsidiary god.

This last theory has a number of designations but is usually associated with the third century CE Persian Mani. So-called Manichaeism is the perennial thinking persons solution to the problem of evil since it accounts for the available facts of life without the need to invent a number of questionable metaphysical entities. It needs only one such beast - the flawed demiurge, a satanic figure who made a few mistakes in the way he shaped the cosmos and we have been dealing with the consequences ever since.

It becomes apparent in The Master and Margarita that Bulgakov rejects all the classical theological explanations for evil, especially Manichaeism. But the resulting theology is not easy to digest. He suggests that what appears as evil, the work of Satan in the world, is in fact the disguised work of God. Bulgakov's contemporary, Carl Jung, termed this the Shadow and conceived it as an integral part of the divine. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov echoes Jung exactly in Satan's criticism of the evangelist Matthew: 

"Would you be so kind as to give a little thought to the question of what your good would be doing if evil did not exist, and how the earth would look if the shadows were to disappear from it? After all, shadows come from objects and people."

In other words: God is Satan; Satan is God. And God/Satan cannot be avoided or escaped. Even within evil, God is present. He is present among the atrocious evil-doers of his demonic ball; among the crass bureaucrats and proletarian graspers in the audience of the Black Magician; among the scammers and players of the system who try to get one-up on their fellow citizens; in Pilate and in Judas. And presumably God is present and active therefore within and through Soviet society despite official protestations to the contrary. (The idea of Soviet Moscow as Paradise Lost is perhaps the greatest irony/truth that Bulgakov expresses in the book)

Of course Bulgakov does not make a theological argument. He tells a story. But in this story Satan as well as his devoted angels transform suddenly into their opposites, caring agents of human well-being; then into clownish Loki or Coyote trinitarian figures whose function is to play the fool with social institutions. There is no logic that can capture this divine turnaround from evil to love and play. But there is a narrative in which it can be described, and, on the basis of that description, be believed. 

Bulgakov’s technique, as well as the substance of his story, is not very different from, for example, the story of Exodus in which the God of Israel both allows the imprisonment of his people and then saves them from the situation he allowed to happen. The story also presents an alternative account of creation itself - as a text produced and protected by Adam and Eve, a couple which is bound together by it. Going beyond biblical bounds, religion itself is accounted for by the Master, the new Adam: 

"Of course, when people have been completely pillaged, like you and me, they seek salvation from a preternatural force!"

And he is immediately corrected by Margarita, the new Eve with eminent practicality, "Preternatural or not preternatural –isn’t it all the same? I’m hungry.”

The theme, almost a running joke, is clear: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord. The situation is dire but not hopeless. Exile from the Garden means freedom as well as toil. This is a theme that demands great faith to assert. More than I have had at times certainly.