The Divine Guru

The Divine Guru is our mother, the Divine Guru is our father;
the Divine Guru is our Lord and Master, the Transcendent Lord.
The Divine Guru is my companion, the Destroyer of ignorance;
the Divine Guru is my relative and brother.
The Divine Guru is the Giver, the Teacher of the Lord’s Name.
The Divine Guru is the Mantra which never fails.
The Divine Guru is the image of peace, truth and wisdom.
The Divine Guru is the Philosopher’s Stone -- touching it, one is transformed.
The Divine Guru is the sacred shrine of pilgrimage, and the pool of divine nectar;
bathing in the Guru’s wisdom, one experiences the Infinite. 
The Divine Guru is the Creator, and the Destroyer of all sins;
the Divine Guru is the Purifier of sinners. 
The Divine Guru existed in the very beginning, throughout the ages, in each and every age.
The Divine Guru is the Mantra of the Lord’s Name; chanting it, one is saved.
O God, please be merciful to me, so that I may be with the Divine Guru;
I am a foolish sinner, but holding onto Him, I will be carried across.
The Divine Guru is the True Guru, the Supreme Lord God, the Transcendent Lord;
Nanak bows in humble reverence to the Lord, the Divine Guru.

Sri Guru Granth Sahib 262

Herlock Sholmès on the Trail of Arsène Lupin

 The first part of Arsène Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes, called "The Blonde Lady", sees France's greatest thief and England's greatest detective playing cat-and-mouse games all over Paris, so I began to wonder how it would look on a map. I started to piece together such a map, but as it turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly) someone had already done it -- Bernadette Pivote, who does a lot on what might be called Literary Paris, the city as seen through novels. 

Her brief summaries of the places and how they appear in "La Dame blonde" (in French) are worth reading, and I highly recommend them -- especially if you are reading the novel, of course, but it is also interesting in itself.

Dashed Off VII

 Dancing to music is something suggested by the physical way we experience music, feeling the beat and the melody.

"Understanding music involves the active creation of an intentional world in which mere sounds are transfigured into movements, harmonies, rhythms -- metaphorical gestures in a metaphorical space. And into these metaphorical gestures a metaphorical soul is breathed by the sympathetic listener." Scruton
"Every sound intentionally made is instinctively taken to be an attempt at communication. And this is as true of music as it is of speech. In the presence of sound intentionally produced, and intentionally organized, we feel ourselves within another person's ambit."

cosmological arguments in the alethic order, in the deontic order, in the epistemic and doxastic order?

questions as a sign of our cognitive contingency

Extremisms often arise from an inadequate attention to everyday duties.

colors as actings (emission), sounds as products (emitted)

the sounding vs the sound
the experience of being acted upon by way of sound vs the acousmatic experience of sound

The physical and spatial experiences of singing and playing instrumetns give us orientations in the figurative space of music, as if we built a kind of coordinate system out of them.

the kinaesthetic inness and outness of speaking and singing

In experience of music we are in music and not of it.

virtual causality in acousmatic space

osculans, os, osculum as Trinitarian (Giles of Rome)

There is not a single order of existence, and existence that is not vague with respect to one order may be vague with respect to another.

A musical cover is not merely an instance of the music but an allusion to another instance of music, which serves as a sort of exemplar (although to varying degrees).

We experience music as both an acting and a product. (This is true of dance as well.) The product-ness is instrumental to the action-ness.

The acousmatic character of sound is experienced as received.

cives optimo iure vs. cives sine suffragio
-- note that in the Roman system, cives sine suffragio are specifically 'sine suffagio' in Rome -- they could have suffrage in their own communities, on independent grounds, but in Rome they had legal protection but no right to vote or hold office.

resonance : auditory medium :: transparency : visual medium

"Our Imagination loves to be filled with an Object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its Capacity. We are flung into a pleasing Astonishment at such unbounded Views, and feel a delightful Stillness and Amazement in the Soul at the Apprehension of them." Addison (Spect 412, 23 June 1712)

Dante's Inferno is a depiction of the forms of being anti-creative.

Cantor's definition of a set requires
(1) a collecting operation
(2) resulting in wholes with parts
(3) where the parts are definite,
(4) separate,
(5) objects of intuition or thought.

The measure of how consistent a social movement or political position  is with a free society, is how it treats pacific opposition. All free societies require a principle of respect for peaceable disagreement.

The handing down of tradition over a long period of time requires an interweaving of organic recoveries, artificial recoveries, extrapolations from precedent, restorative repairs, conserving actions, improvements of scaffolding, anticipatory preparations, functional substitutions, etc.

the Humean general (T 3.3.1.15) or common (T 3.3.1.30, EPM 9.6) point of view in aesthetics, unites us in 'the party of humankind' (EPM 9.5) against disorder and ugliness
-- involves putting ourselves in other spectators' perspectives than our own (cf. T 3.3.3.2)
-- lets us establish general rules (cf. T 3.3.1.20) that ignore possible responses dependent on happenstance circumstances (e.g., whether we are feeling sick or not at the moment)
-- lets us have common ground for aesthetic discussion (cf. T 3.3.1.15) and develop an appropriate language for it (cf. T 3.3.1.16)
-- facilitates practical coordination in aesthetic projects

the role of the principle of humanity (EPM 9.6) in aesthetic judgment

All virtues are useful and agreeable both to the person himself and to others.

Hume's claim that the 'monkish virtues' are not agreeable to their possessors does not exactly square with the history of the practices involved; the same is true of the claim that they are not useful to society.

Hume's 'artificial virtues' are not made-up virtues but virtues involving artifice, i.e., some sort of social machinery like a government, a legal system, or social custom. Hume tends to talks as if they presupposed the machinery, but there is at least an argument to be made that they are actually involved in the building of it -- the virtuous work of our tool-use ability (property-justice) creating the rules of property, ofr instance, or social graciousness creating the rules of etiquette. All of the artificial virtues would then really be natural virtues of cooperation that make use of ingenuity.

What is due someone is not and cannot be a purely conventional matter.

Human beings experience something like Hume's and also Smith's sympathy (both) even for nonhuman animals, plants, and landmarks.

While Hume's general point of view is not ideal in the sense of being that of an ideal-spectator, it is ideal in the sense of being idealized.

The possible meanings of words cover ranges of things with varying degrees of centrality or marginality; the range is constrained by context to varying degrees of precision in actual meaning.

The Copenhagen interpretation effectively treats the world as consisting entirely of possible and actual measurements.

yes/no questions as possibilities of premises

the first four categories as the fundamental preconditions of measurement

ecology and life-dependent being (esse vitalis) -- niche, etc.

(1) Some X's are Y's; therefore (2) All of the X's which verify (1) are Y's.

tutiorism // totalitarianism
laxism // the more extreme forms of liberalism

Only death is fully egalitarian.

Many things must be tried to reach great discoveries; genius discovers how to try things not one by one but as a group or mass.

"If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change." Chesterton

There is no being-in-the-world without co-being-in-the-world.

music as a symbol of the Holy Spirit

The experience of music as an interplay of memory, attention, and anticipation.

the moral sphere, the jurisdiction, and the templum of marriage

'field' as the mediating concept between point-like measurement and area-like measurement

the physical as that which always has a mass-momentum and energy-time measurement relationship

kinds of prudential judgment
(1) disturbance mitigation
(2) feedforward control
(3) feedback control
(4) reference selection (planning)
(5) noise mitigation
(6) state estimation
(7) evaluative reflection

perversion of the state (deliberate use of the state as a means to an end inconsistent with its natural end)

When economists say, 'The economy is in bad shape', they are talking about overall measurements, when ordinary laymen say, 'The economy is in bad shape', they mean that the parts around them are organized in a bad way.

Hb 1:4 -- The Son receives by merit in exaltation what He already possessed by nature in original filiation.

Epiphanius in the Panarium (Aer 65.8) distinguishes homousios with the Father from heteroousios (Arians) and tautoousios (Sabellians).

Lk 1:53 & the ecuharist: "He has filled the hungry with good things."

"For nothing is ever atoned for which the blood of Christ did not atone for and repair." Albert

modes of being
(1) tantum in ratione: negation and privation
(2) admixed with negation and privation: motion and mutation
(3) weakly existing (in alio): quliaties, quantities, and properties of substances
(4) completely existing (in se): substances
-- (3) are referred to (4) as in substances, (2) to (4) as tending to substances or accidents, (1) to (4) as removing substance, accidents, motions.

In every substance there is a power to be, and to be like, and to be so, and to be with respect to another.

God as that being with which all being has co-being

Predicamental vestment as it were forms an extended substance by making one substance subordinate co-substance with another. There is a substance, and it is vested with a co-substance.

being clothed as a physically realized moral status

Every human person re-presents the universe that is present to him or her.

accidental predicaments as systemic capacities (this is certainly defensible for sex principia)

forms of systemic relation: resemblance, mensuration, action

Fictional characters are not purely imaginary but involve references to real and actual beings, and ultimately to the storytelling-testimony, spoken or written, that communicates them.

The artist purifies, illuminates, and completes the materials of the work of art in making it.

What phenomenologists call 'world' is a representation of the world.

If a normative claim is successfully applied, then it is also a descriptive claim.

"People truly have a kind of feeling from human nature (xingqing) that surpasses individual life and finds completion in affective connection with people and things." Tang Junyi
"The most important point for our affirming the value of a kind of cultural activity is that it directly reveals the value of the human spirit itself, and not its instrumental or utilitarian value."

ontic personhood : ground of value :: moral personhood : response to value

In recognizing the personhood of anything, we recognzie that attributing personhood to it is not arbitrary but requires principled attribution.

"Even knowing God, I cannot describe Him; He cannot be described in words." SGGS 2
"No matter how much anyone tries to explain and describe them, / the actions of the Creator cannot be counted."
"You created the vast expanse of the Universe with One Word!"
"Virtue and vice do not come by mere words; / actions repeated, over and over again, are engraved on the soul." SGGS 4
"If anyone presumes to describe God, /he shall be known as the greatest fool of fools!" SGGS 6
"Everyone says that God is the Greatest of the Great. No one calls Him any less. / No one can estimate His Worth. By speaking of Him, His Greatness is not increased." SGGS 15
"The Wine of Truth is not fermented from molasses. The True Name is contained within it."
"Bathe in the waters of Goodness and apply the scented oil of Truth to your body, / and your face shall become radiant. This is the gift of 100000 gifts." SGGS 16
"To reach your True Home after you die, you must conquer death while you are still alive." SGGS 21

Pew Research (June 29, 2021) on Religion in India

self-identified	Believe there is only one God	There is only one God with many manifestations	There are many gods
Hindus	29%	61%	7%
Muslims	66%	22%	3%
Christians	68%	24%	5%
Sikhs	57%	36%	0%
Buddhists	39%	22%	5%
Jains	41%	54%	5%

"A value is characterized not by its strength but by its depth, by the extent to which it brings order to experience." Scruton

As an architectural work, a building is not merely lived in but lived through.

Gothic architecture as an architecture of the uprising symbolic city

Modern church architecture seems primarily cocerned with creating buildings indicative of a congregation.

the aesthetic syllogism:
major (aesthetic reasons)
minor (features of aesthetic object)
conclusion (way of experiencing aesthetic object)

Learning to experience works of art is learning to reorganize one's attention.

As the Body, Soul, and Divinity of Christ are in the Eucharist sacramentally and by real presence, so the sacramental Body of Christ is in the Eucharist representatively and by symbolic presence, in its Head.

Music works on us by being both inside and outside us.

One of the most common patterns is that human beings are stiffnecked on religious matters; we all get obstinate about what we like and find convenient.

All virtues create responsibilities; justice (and its potential parts) create them in the form of obligations.

glorying as an act of hope

the gift vs the effect of the gift (with respect to actual conferring, proportion/suitability to the recipient, and durability of the need)
-- the effect of the gift is the gift in the recipient

zikkaron and the presence of Israel in the heavenly liturgy

The first thing God gave Adam was God.

fictionalizations of fictions and fictionalizations
-- this is a common way versions of fictional chracters are related, e.g., I can write a Holems pastiche that is fictionalization of the Sherlock Holmes

perception, punishment, and argument as the three natural means of persuasion

Dancing and music are things we naturally do, which are then 'packaged' as artifacts in which the dancing or music is intentionally presented as dancing or music.

"Dancing creates a 'sympathetic space' whose meaning is corporate." Scruton

festivity, solemnity, and sublimity as the key values of church architecture

One way we affect other minds is by affecting the possibilities available to them.

We treat our bodies as having meaning in such a way as to require the bodies of others to have meaning.

The body as we experience it is both 'just now' and 'soon' as well as 'right now'.

Fortified and Revitalized

 Hope is a virtue that very strongly befits the office of a knight, for through hope knights remember God in battle, in their trials and tribulations, and through the hope that they have in Him they receive succour and aid from God who triumphs in battle because of the hope and trust that the knights have in His power rather than in their strength or weapons. With hope the knight's courage is fortified and revitalized, and hope allows them to endure travails and makes them venture into the perils into which they place themselves, and hope makes them endure hunger and thirst in the castles and cities that they defend when they are besieged. And if there were no hope the knight would not have the wherewithal to fulfil the office of knighthood. 

[Ramon Llull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry, Fallows, tr., The Boydell Press (Woodbridge, Suffolk: 2013) pp. 71-72.]

Two Poem Drafts

 Love-Illness

I tremble like the blade;
my face is clear and dewy.
I feel ten parts alive,
yet ill, afflicted, fluey;

my voice no longer works,
dry-mouthed, my tongue is swelling,
yet heart now overflows,
too many words for telling.

Let all things be endured;
though I am poor and dying,
my heart is brightly fresh
like breeze in green grass sighing.

A fire thrills my skin;
thus changed, I am elated,
but starving -- how I starve! --
with need divine, unsated.

Three Ravens: A Fragment

Three ravens sat upon a tree;
hey down, derry down day,
hey down!
They sang a song as grim could be,
hey down, derry down day,
hey down!
My love is gone across the sea,
hey down, derry down day,
hey down! --
and I now hold just memory,
hey down, derry down day,
hey down!
Three ravens sat upon a tree,
hey down, derry down day,
hey down!
They sang the sadness deep in me,
hey down, derry down day,
hey down!

Annunciation

The Feast of the Announcement to Mary

The Angel went to Nazareth, Alleluia:
"Peace, O Mary, maiden given great grace,
blessed are you among women, greatly favored!
Have no fear! Your God is gracious to you,
and you shall conceive a Son whose name is Jesus." 

 Mary was with wonder filled: "I am but a girl,
a maiden; how can I bear a son?"
"Mary, the Holy Spirit overshadows you;
with divine might is descending on you,
You shall bear God's Son. With God all is possible." 

 Then did the holy Virgin say, "Let it be so,
for I am the handmaiden of the Lord!"
O Mary, receiving peace from God, you give peace;
you restored Eve's children to their true place;
in you the Word was made flesh to dwell among us. 

 O Lord, we do not understand and are amazed;
we are blinded by Your eternal flame.
The incense of our prayer alone can we give;
we hide behind its smoke in Your presence,
for great is the might that comes upon Your altar!

 Feast of the Annunciation
by Christina Rossetti 

 Whereto shall we liken this Blessed Mary Virgin,
Faithful shoot from Jesse's root graciously emerging?
Lily we might call her, but Christ alone is white;
Rose delicious, but that Jesus is the one Delight;
Flower of women, but her Firstborn is mankind's one flower:
He the Sun lights up all moons thro' their radiant hour.
'Blessed among women, highly favoured,' thus
Glorious Gabriel hailed her, teaching words to us:
Whom devoutly copying we too cry 'All hail!'
Echoing on the music of glorious Gabriel.

A Law of Nature and Reason

 ...We must admit the existence of a law of nature and reason that precedes civil coexistence, and that must be respected by all civil dispositions, and that against such law no civil power can do nor attempt to do anything. If this is fully admitted, sincerely in all its consequences; if the legislative branch submits itself to natural and rational law, which -- like it or not -- overpowers it; then and only then will the legislative branch cease to be despotic irrespective of any form taken by the will of the most, the many, the few, or the one -- as these are nothing but the forms of power, and not power itself. Power itself is what must humble itself before eternal law. Civil power and civil society themselves must recognize that they have no authority whatsoever against the rights that nature assigns to man and consequently all the associations of men independently from their civil association. 

 [Antonio Rosmini, The Constitution Under Social Justice, Mingardi, tr., Lexington Books (2007) p. 28.]

Wondrous Variations

 The world, in its construction, daily prepares and awakens rational creatures to the wonder and glory of that wise Creator. The wondrous variations, which oppose one another, harmonize within it: fire, water, earth, and vaporous air. But that we may not be led astray and think that, because of their diversity, they have many makers, he took and made, of creation, one body in the forming of man, and in him made known to us that he is the Lord of all.

[From the Basilica Hymn fro the Fourth Week of Lent, in The Book of Before and After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East, Fr. Andrew Younan, ed. and tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024), p. 481.]

Fortnightly Book, March 23

 I was considering several possibilities for the next Fortnightly Book, but the set-up of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar for the next published work in the series, Arsène Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes, wetted my appetite for the latter, particularly since, when I listened to a few audiobook versions of the books a while back, I remember this book as being, by far, the funniest of the books. 

In the last story of the first book, "Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Soon", Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes briefly meet, as Lupin is leaving and Holmes, having been sent for but having to cross the Channel, is just arriving:

When the last horseman had passed, Sherlock Holmes stepped forth and brushed the dust from his clothes. Then, for a moment, he and Arsène Lupin gazed at each other; and, if a person could have seen them at that moment, it would have been an interesting sight, and memorable as the first meeting of two remarkable men, so strange, so powerfully equipped, both of superior quality, and destined by fate, through their peculiar attributes, to hurl themselves at the other like two equal forces that nature opposes, one against the other, int he realms of space. (p. 188)

As it happens, Holmes has already deduced, based on the information he has on the case on which he was going to consult and Lupin's behavior, that the other man is Lupin, but he does not regard this as a major priority at the moment. Holmes continues to his destination, where he solves in ten minutes the key to a centuries-old puzzle, which Lupin also had solved, and sets to return. As he does so, however, he is met by a car -- Lupin sent it to him from the train station, knowing that Holmes would not need much time, and Holmes takes it for the compliment it is. But in the car is a box with a watch -- Holmes's watch, which Lupin had managed to lift in their brief meeting. Holmes does not take this gift so well:

The Englishman never moved a muscle. On the way to Dieppe, he never spoke a word, but fixed his gaze on the flying landscape. his silence was terrible, unfathomable, more violent than the wildest rage. At the railway station, he spoke calmly, but in a voice that impressed one with the vast energy and will power of that famous man. He said:

"Yes, he is a clever man, but someday I shall have the pleasure of placing on his shoulder the hand I now offer to you, Monsieur Devanne. And I believe that Arsène Lupin and Sherlock Holmes will meet again some day. Yes, the world is too small -- we will meet -- we must meet -- and then --" (p. 198)

The next Fortnightly Book, Arsène Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes, is the tale of their meeting again. Of course, as the story was being serialized, after the first two chapters were published in Je sais tout, Arthur Conan Doyle squelched the use of the name 'Sherlock Holmes'; so LeBlanc just started calling the detective 'Herlock Sholmes'. (He was not the first to use the name to get around Doyle and later the Doyle estate, although in many ways he was the most talented and successful.) This was how the whole story was done in book format.  Some English translations, perhaps a little less sure that they could evade the matter so easily, used 'Holmlock Shears' instead. Time has proved stronger than the litigiousness of the Doyle estate, so nowadays you can also occasionally find versions that just use 'Sherlock Holmes'.  My version has 'Herlock Sholmes'. The result, in any case, was perhaps the greatest non-Doyle Sherlock Holmes story ever written. Of course, being French, LeBlanc can't resist using the occasion to poke fun at English foibles, as well.

**********

Quotations from Maurice LeBlanc, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar, Fox Eye Publishing (Leicester, UK: 2022).