Iran shows its wares to three airforces.

 Reading the commentary on twitter and elsewhere the significance , it seems to me, is missed,  of the Iranian show of force.  They are demonstrating the palette of weaponry like arms salesment.  We are giving you a small selection of what we have and telling you in advance what they are so that you can be prepared. Today the Israelies will be reflecting that this sample took the airforces of three countries to shoot down which is o.k.as long as they remain willing to continue to do so.  Will their allies stick around?  Genocide is not a good look and the grabbing actions of the settlers alienates.  The Americans will dump them just as they did the Vietnamese, the Afghanies, Iraqis, and so forth.  Consider the cooling of ardour for the Ukraine.  They are not reliable long term allies, AIPAC or not.  The Palestinians will not quit any more than the North Vietnamese did.  Israel is no longer a safe place to ignore the demands of justice.  They should make an equitable peace now or risk losing everything.

Dexter, Ripley and other advocates of the quick and dirty fix

 

There are different sorts of multiple killers that we meet in literature, some who turn it into a avocation which gives life meaning and then those types that stumble into it and find it a useful quick and dirty fix for the grit in the machinery of their lives.  It’s like the WD 40 of locked up nuts or stuck pistons.  I’ve looked at Dexter but not read any of the books which may carry on the satirical aspect of the code of Harry.  He’s the singular and more prolific  assassin than the earlier group of vigilantes ‘The Four Just Men’ of Edgar Wallace which I may or may not have read some time ago.  What Dexter has over them is the police procedural element, the forensic science, blood spatter analysis that give verisimilitude to the gruesome.  De Quincey started it all with ‘The Fine Art of Murder’.  His pedantic footnotes set a style of high toned persiflage which persists in the English essay and perhaps has  influenced such eschatologists as William T. Vollman.

The Gorse series by Patrick Hamilton follows the trail of bodies that the protagonist despatches without a trace of remorse or a scintilla of finesse.  You have money, I want it, therefore I must take it and if you threaten me it’s your own fault if I erase you.  Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is that sort of problem solver, an impetuous boy that regards being slighted as a capital offence.  How close he comes to being caught is part of the tension that is created around this classic sociopath.   I am reading ‘Ripley’s Game’ again and I am pleasantly surprised by how good it is and how much of the plot I’d forgotten.

I’m paused at episode three of ‘Ripley’ on Netflix.  A very stylish version of book one in the series, more low key and real than the glam Damon, Law, Paltrow trio in a previous film which was as much about knitwear and slacks as murder and impersonation.  Andrew Scott is a grim, sullen, resentful man who takes passive aggression into an active mode.  He seems to be able to create a perceptible void about himself, like an aura of emptiness.

Ireland’s own forensic pathologist Dr. Marie Cassidy has created a stylish elegant persona  walking into crime scenes in high class tailoring not quite saying ‘what have you got for me?’.  Her observation "It’s the man in your bed you should be worried about, not the man under your bed"has become a feminist proverb.  Shes Scottish so her pronunciation of 'murder' has the Macbeth ring. '  Ay, my good lord, safe in a ditch he bides,. With twenty trenched gashes on his head —. The least a death to nature.   She has taken to writing novels in her retirement, ‘The Body of Truth’ was her first.  No seriality, just one offs. Must take a look.

James Beattie: Selected Philosophical Writings (ed. James A. Harris)

 

I proceed, in the second place, to take notice of some of the more remarkable phenomena of Memory.

This is a faculty, which, if it were less common, and we equally qualified to judge of it, would strike us with astonishment. That we should have it in our power to recall past sensations and thoughts, and make them again present, as it were: that a circumstance of our former life should, in respect of us, be no more; and yet occur to us, from time to time, dressed out in colours so lively, as to enable us to examine it, and judge of it, as if it were still an object of sense: - these are facts, whereof we every day have experience, and which, therefore, we overlook as things of course. But, surely, nothing is more wonderful, or more inexplicable. (Beattie on Memory taken from ‘Selected Philosophical Writings’ ed. James A.Harris)

James Beattie (1735 - 1803)is less famous that his two near contemporaries Thomas Reid (1710 - 1796) and David Hume (1711 - 1776).  Both Beattie and Reid were opposed to the sceptical Hume particularly on consciousness and memory.

Thomas Reid:

Why sensation should compel our belief of the present existence of the thing, memory a belief of the past existence, and imagination no belief at all, I believe no philosopher can give a shadow of reason, but that such is the nature of these operations. They are all simple and original, and therefore inexplicable acts of the mind.

Further down:

Philosophers indeed tell me, that this immediate object of my memory and imagination in this case, is not the past sensation, but an idea of it, an image, phantasm, or species of the odour I smelled; that this idea now exists in my mind or in my sensorium; and the mind contemplating this present idea, finds it a representation of what is past, of what my exist, and accordingly call it memory, or imagination.

(from An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense by Thomas Reid)

Specifically on the odd idea that memory and imagination were distinguished by vivacity James Beattie writes:

Some philosophers refer to memory all our livelier thoughts, and our fainter ones to imagination: and so will have it, that the former faculty is distinguished from the latter by its superior vivacity. We believe, say they, in memory; we believe not in imagination: now we never believe any thing, but what we distinctly comprehend; and that, of which our comprehension is indistinct, we disbelieve. - But this is altogether false. The suggestions of imagination are often so lively, in dreaming, and in some intellectual disorders, as to be mistaken for real things; and therefore cannot be said to be essentially fainter than the informations of memory. (op.cit)

Beattie’s further ruminations on the difference between the two are closely observed  and follow the rubric of common sense realism that holds that we experience the world before we begin to reason about it and focusing on the ideas we have leaves us marooned on the desert island of solipsism castaway by the shipwreck of idealism.

It is interesting that among the moderns Margaret Anscombe is taken by the irreducibility of memory.

Writing in her essay on Memory and the Past Elizabeth Anscombe:

Then what makes my state or act of consciousness memory of the thing. Is it the mere fact that the thing happened and that I witnessed it? In that case there is nothing in the memory itself that makes it refer to the actual past event. And if so, why should the experience of memory have anything to do with actual past events or show one what it means for something to have happened?

She then in her consideration of the phenomenon of memory examines the present experience of which memory is supposed to be.

 

 But if I consider some present thing (which can, if you like, be a state of mind) and my future ability to speak of it, it is brought out more clearly how difficult it is to make out that anything I may attribute to my future mental state will make what I say refer to this.

Beattie is exceptionally readable.  The 18th.Century was one of prose as Matthew Arnold remarks in his essay on Thomas Grey.  There  is a fine handling of the long sentence with numerous parentheses which are immediately intelligible.  His remarks on the location of memories remind one of the fact that Neuroscience and its accomplices in Philosophy have not moved past the problems that he identified:

The human brain is a bodily substance; and sensible and permanent impressions made upon it must so far resemble those made on sand by the foot, or on wax by the seal, as to have a certain shape, length, breadth, and deepness. Now such an impression can only be made by that, which has solidity, magnitude, and figure. If then we remember thoughts, feelings, and sounds, as well as things visible and tangible, which will hardly be denied; those sounds, thoughts, and feelings, must have body, and, consequently, shape, size, and weight. What then is the size or weight of a sound? Is it an inch long, or half an inch? Does it weigh an ounce, or a grain? Does the roar of a cannon bear any resemblance to the ball, or to the powder, in shape, in weight, or in magnitude? What figure has the pain of the toothache, and our remembrance of that pain? Is it triangular, or circular, or a square form? The bare mention of these consequences may prove the absurdity of the theories that lead to them.

The Jade Cabinet by Rikki Ducornet

 

So ‘Rikki don’t lose that number’ song from 1974 (Steely Dan) is about Rikki Ducornet whose book ‘The Jade Cabinet’ I have been reading having being steered there by my instructor in the avant garde, the youtube book blogger ‘Leaf by Leaf’.  I need help in that region.  I don’t keep up.  What really took me to the book was his inclusion of it in a post on great openings.

“Memory, wrote Mr. Beattie, presents us with thoughts of what is past accompanied with a persuasion that they were once real.”

Oddly enough Google can’t find that quote from Beattie nor is to be found where you might expect it in his ‘Dissertations Moral and Critical’ which has a section on Memory which proves perhaps the fallibility of Memory the presenter of this text. She is a daughter of Angus Sphery.  His other daughter is Etheria a creature of air and ethereal beauty.  “She grew up speechless and yet for all that tremendously clever.”  This is in contrast to Father’s quest for the proto language which would be divine is conjuring up the real.  I have posted on the Vedic words theory of Shankara or the power which underlies mantra to cause to irrupt from the noumenal that which it mentions.vedic words

Adam and Eve thought Angus:

“stumbling from Eden as dumb as stones, had tediously to reconstruct a language which, in fact, could only be a pale copy, a simpleton’s stuttering - compared to the Divine Original which Father claimed was so powerful as toconjure the world of things.  All of Adam and Eve’s needs were seen to by this language of languages which was also a species of magic.”

Intimations of this perfect language might be found in the secret scripture of nature -

“the shells of winkles, on the hides of panthers, tigers, zebras, llamas and giraffes at the London Zoo, goats and cows of the field, cats in kitchens, dogs in alleys, turtles sleeping in gardens.  ........the Primal Language was spelled out phonetically by the planets.”

In this novel esoteric lore ebulliates and not always to the furtherance of the central narrative viz. the fraught relationship between Radulph Tubbs and the airy Etheria.  I would consider the Egyptian interlude might well have been volatilised, fractioned off by the alembic of Ducornet’s mind leaving a pure essence of obsessive lust that destroys the monster of vulgarity, Tubbs.

That rabbit hole she should have filled in and speaking of which Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll is one of the dramatis personae which bring to our attention the striving between the two hebephiles.  When Tubbs first spots Etheria she is but ten years old so he must wait for seven long years to consummate his febrile lusts.  Angus Sphery’s love of jade is the engine of this consummation. Tubbs has a very fine collection:

“The cabinet was Ming and of sober elegance, and the jade of such rare perfection that as he fingered them our father trembled.  Again and again he returned to a piece that Radulph disliked particularly, and although he really could not have cared less, Angus Sphery  informed him that the jade represented an insect, a cidada.”

Angus admires unto ownership and lays thereby a path to the construpation of his beautiful daughter. The invitation to dinner as the fee for the jade piece is the start of Radulph’s courtship.  Etheria is now thirteen.  Another friend of Dodgson was the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson.  Mary Sidgwick, sister of Henry the Ethics man, was eleven, proposed to at twelve, married at eighteen.

The mother as ever has to be won over if the daughter is to be transferred to Tubs and the problem is that she despises this dragon of industry, this myrmidon of mammon and his factories which grind to dust hapless orphans.  Having invited her to his Grimswick manufactury he now must bring it up to a sanitary condition.  However the cucumber sandwich and the strawberry tart which she accepted from the matron must have had lurking germs of the cholera that lately had eliminated a third of the orphans.  “I believe her appetite proved ruinous."(Memory) Fine acerbic satire in this Potemkin factory sanitation passage.

Interspersed in the novel are the memoirs of Tubbs who relates how he fails to answer a riddle set by Etheria who demands as forfeit whatever she wants. The chimera and her pup two priceless pieces of jade that he does not even know that he posses he gladly surrenders.

“She shall have it.”

 “It’s not for her!  The precocious brat bounced up and down in her chair with excitement.  “But for Papa!  It is to be his birthday, Saturday.  He wants it badly.”

The frightful Tubbs gets his prey but of course it is elusive for who can hold the subtle air.

There are many fine things in this book and a certain amount of dross which for me stands out more in a very short book which a longer one might have absorbed.  It's beautifully written, She is a superb stylist and manages the idiom of Victorian English literature beautifully which is not an easy thing to do.   A very good read and I shall revisit her book cabinet again. 

Prodrome of the Present Condition of Ireland

 

My word of the moment is ‘prodrome’:

“In medicine, a prodrome is an early sign or symptom (or set of signs and symptoms) that often indicates the onset of a disease before more diagnostically specific signs and symptoms develop. It is derived from the Greek wordprodromos, meaning "running before".[Prodromes may be non-specific symptoms or, in a few instances, may clearly indicate a particular disease, such as the prodromal migraine aura.” (from prodrome

Where I came across it was in what I would have called the prologue part of ‘The Death of Grass aka ‘Not a Blade of Grass’.  A odd word I thought perhaps ill chosen but having read the book I now think that it is appropriate.  We are given a picture of the comfortable life of the middle class in England in 1933 and 1958. After the war the country is on the mend,  everything is going swimmingly but is there a malaise or a lack of moral preparedness that will manifest itself by a speedy return to barbarism under the pressure of self preservation.  That is the implicit judgement in the choice of the word ‘prodrome’.

What was Ireland’s prodrome or the little signs that prefigure the descent into our present state of malaise, societal dissociation, and a government gone rogue heedless of the people.  What were the dizzy spells, irritability, spontaneous groans, manic laughter of a poisonous village.  There was always those places which seemed madder than a bad tempered dog but now its general.  Plantation 2.0 is the name we have given it.

I offer for the present condition of Ireland the prodrome of The Millenium Candle and your very own native tree planted in a forest near you. More anon.

'The Death of Grass' by John Christopher (pub.1956: in America as 'No Blade of Grass')

 

Speaking of William T. Vollmann; by the serendipity machine that is google I found ‘The Death of Grass’ by John Christopher as a suggestionwhile looking for ‘The Dying Grass’ novel,   Its from 1956 (penguin modern classics) in the dystopian genre.  The prodrome or introductory section sets the scene for the two Custance brothers who are visiting with their parents their grandad’s farm in the lake district.  There having discovered that the elder Davey has a taste for farming and country life it is decided that he will inherit the farm.  The other brother John wants to be an engineer and so indeed it turns out.

Fast forward to 1958, twenty five years later.

It opens up with the news of disturbances in China where the shortage of rice has caused unrest.  A virus affecting the rice crop has destroyed the staple of the masses.

"What's the latest? Did you hear the news before you came out?'

'The Americans are sending more grain ships.'

'Anything from Peking?'

'Nothing official. It's supposed to be in flames. And at Hong Kong they've had to repel attacks across the frontier.'

'A genteel way of putting it,' John said grimly. 'Did you ever see those old pictures of the rabbit plagues in Australia? Wire-netting fences ten feet high, and rabbits - hundreds, thousands of rabbits - piled up against them, leap-frogging over each other until in the end either they scaled the fences or the fences went down under their weight. That's Hong Kong right now, except that it's not rabbits piled against the fence but human beings.'

But like any virus we have scientists to protect us from its predations by inventing a vaccine, a cure of some kind.

They isolated the virus within a month of it hitting the ricefields. They had it neatly labelled - the Chung-Li virus. All they had to do was to find a way of killing it which didn't kill the plant. Alternatively, they could breed a virus-resistant strain. And finally, they had no reason to expect the virus would spread so fast.'

The author has studied his species of grass and is able to tell us that rare rice grass is found in the Lakes district and that it too is affected. But not the grasses we like to eat; wheat, oats, barley and rye. Chung-Li is very selective.

Yes,' John said, 'wheat is a grass, too, isn't it?'

Wheat,' David said, 'and oats and barley and rye not to mention fodder for the beasts. It's rough on the Chinese, but it could have been a lot worse.'

'Yes,' Ann said, 'it could have been us instead. Isn't that what you mean? We had forgotten them again.

And probably in another five minutes we shall have found some other excuse for forgetting them.'

David crumpled the grass in his hand, and threw it into the river. It sped away on the swiftly flowing Lepe.

'Nothing else we can do,' he said.

Two hundred million have died in China despite partial success of the isotope 7 spray.  Unfortunately it has released the phase 5 of the virus which had been masked and ineffective before that.  It became more virulent and attacked all forms of gramineae, wheat etc.  What are you going to feed the stock on without grass in one form or another.

Well not to worry. What?

'Yes,' Roger said, 'that's something that worries me, too. Every government in the world is going to be comforting itself with the same reassuring thought. The scientists have never failed us yet. We shall never really believe they will until they do.'

Can’t we all live on root crops even if we have no butter for our parsnips?  Yes but, there will be panic in an orderly British fashion:

"The disaster in the East, it was explained, had been due as much as anything to the kind of failure in thoroughness that might be expected of Asiatics.”

John talking to David on his farm where he is visiting with his family learns that the order-in-council to plant potatoes where previously wheat was grown has been rescinded.  Just the kind of confidence restoring measures that democracy specialises in.  No good will come of it and David the farmer is going to put in potatoes and beet next spring.  Moreover he is going to erect a high rampart across the neck of the narrow valley that his farm Blind Gill is on.  At the back of the farm is a  mountain so he can barricade himself in. He invites his brother and family to wait out on the farm any trouble which may happen.

Things very rapidly go South, which means that the family must go North from London to the brother’s place, the agricultural bunker. They learn that a Fascist takeover plans to nuke major cities to bring the population down to a feedable size.  Can they make it in time? John’s friend from the propaganda ministry tells them they have got to get out now.  That journey and its adventures have become a stock dystopian device.  They learn that a sharp shooting killer is a useful member of a team and that being strong and ruthless in the war for survival is necessary. Roaming bands of marauders leave the cities. To be armed is essential.  John Custance as leader of the little group driving and walking to Blind Gill must make decisions which would be unthinkable to the middle class engineer of a few days previously. He must kill without hesitation.  Society has returned to a barbarism.

Its a short intense book much better written than the average of the genre.   It was published in America as ‘No Blade of Grass’.  Read it.  Remember it happened to the humble potato.  Now if there were an evil vegan scientist in Wuhan....

'Rising Up and Rising Down' by William T. Vollmann

 

William T. Vollmann was totally unknown to me but a review of his multi volume book ‘Rising Up and Rising Down’ seemed to promise an interesting read in that no man’s land between the IGR (intelligent general reader) and the savant.  A touch of hands on ontology, a report from harm’s way, written by a man who knows the smell of death. Vinegar and vomit but not as experienced outside the chip shop as a drunk’s technicolor yawn.

Hemingway had a go in ‘For who the Bell tolls’.

“All right, Inglés. Learn. That’s the thing. Learn. All right. After that of the ship you must go down the hill in Madrid to the Puente de Toledo early in the morning to the matadero and stand there on the wet paving when there is a fog from the Manzanares and wait for the old women who go before daylight to drink the blood of the beasts that are slaughtered. When such an old woman comes out of the matadero, holding her shawl around her, with her face gray and her eyes hollow, and the whiskers of age on her chin, and on her cheeks, set in the waxen white of her face as the sprouts grow from the seed of the bean, not bristles, but pale sprouts in the death of her face; put your arms tight around her, Inglés, and hold her to you and kiss her on the mouth and you will know the second part that odor is made of.”

I’m only beginning to read the first volume so I won’t be able to give a full account of it but the augeries are good.  Death is his subject and the anatomy of the grave. There is good Doctor Browneian stuff, the catacombs of Paris, the skulls of Cambodia, blunt force trauma in San Francisco, the corpses delivered for autopsy in an upright position strapped to tall sack trolleys to avoid the hills. Then he smells the coffee in Vienna. There’s a cure in that. He says - I take my meaning where I can find it, when I can’t find it, I invent it.’

He is not as keen to make your flesh creep as the Fat Boy in Dickens who offered to recite ‘The Blood Drinkers Burial’ (in character).  Hello darkness my old friend, but there must be a sense of injustice at being compelled to feel guilty over the death of his sister by drowning  when he was in charge of her, he being 9 and she 6.  Care sears guilt into our bones.

He would concur with that other eschatological doctor Saint Francis de Sales in his Fifth Meditation (Introduction to the Devout Life):

“Consider the universal farewell which your soul will take of this world.  It will say farewell to riches, pleasures, and idle companions, to amusements and pastimes, to friends and neighbors, to husband, wife, and child, in short to all creation.  And lastly it will say farewell to its own body, which it will leave pale and cold, to become repulsive in decay.”

The writing is good, clear, sober prose with a moderate cadence, no flights.  There is no sense of running to meet your inevitable fate, that full stop.