October Night

  October Night

I stood at dusk and looked around the garden small and dim;
the fountain dry was cracked, with dust and vines around the rim.
The roses dead were long and spare, the weeds were rising high;
then ghosts from ancient worlds arose and said that I would die.
In long and spectral robes they swept along the garden ways
and sang the songs no longer sung, the songs of distant days.
A Templar march I thought I heard, a troubadour's sad plea,
a hymn of love to loves long gone, a shanty rasped at sea.
Like breezes drifting, softly sped those tunes, like secret sigh.
And 'midst it all a whisper sang; it sang that I would die.
The darkness fell, it drifted down, a-float like falling shawl;
it settled over roses dead and draped across the wall.
I strained my ears to hear again that gently whispered word,
but silence through the darkness fell, so nothing then was heard,
and nothing felt by rising hairs, and nothing met my eye,
until at midnight down the way I heard that I would die.
A maiden walked like water's wave along the crumbling wall
and here and there an elegy from out her lips would fall.
A hint, a clue, a fragile thread, the song would drift my way
with meaning barely out of reach and sense just out of play,
but here and there it rose to reach the keen of sobbing cry,
and then no doubt remained at all: it said that I would die.

The moon was silver on the road, but stars were hid by clouds
that, dark and thunder-mutter-thick, were gathered up in crowds
like ghosts in endless number in some graveyard in the sky,
and somehow in the thunder's tones I heard that I would die.
On far and distant hills the wolves began to raise a howl
and down the moonlit road I saw a figure in a cowl
as black as night in color so that scarce could seeing see
where ended figure and the night; it clearly came for me,
and in its hand a scythe was held, that swept through air with ease,
and at its heels a hound did walk, as pale as death's disease.
The crows in murder raised their wings, all croaking out a cry,
and clear I heard it in their noise: they said that I would die.
The wind was blowing in the leaves and rustled roses dead
and mingled with the panic that was buzzing in my head,
till time itself with nausea was turned upon its ear
and death itself was manifest to brain enmeshed in fear.
I sought to turn, like trembling bird in pit I sought to fly,
but dizzy chills sped up my spine that said that I would die.
A hand was clamped upon my mouth; I could not scream or cry;
a voice was snarling in my ear and told me I would die.

And Brood with the Shades Unblest

 Hallowe’en in a Suburb
by H. P. Lovecraft 

 The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
 And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
 And the harpies of upper air,
 That flutter and laugh and stare. 

 For the village dead to the moon outspread
 Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
 Where the rivers of madness stream
 Down the gulfs to a pit of dream. 

 A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves
 In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
 And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
 For harvests that fly and fail. 

 Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
 That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r
 Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne
 And looses the vast unknown. 

 So here again stretch the vale and plain
 That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
 Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
 To shake all the world with awe. 

 And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
 The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
 Shall some day be with the rest,
 And brood with the shades unblest. 

 Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
 And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
 Of horror and death are penn’d,
 For the hounds of Time to rend.

Music on My Mind

 

milet, "Anytime Anywhere".

Fortnightly Book, October 26

Joris-Karl Huysmans's Là-bas had been rather scandalous, in a literary way, and it associated Huysmans in a sensationalistic way with occultism and Satanism, an association that Huysmans did nothing to suppress. But a bigger scandal than being associated with the occult was on the way.

In writing Là-bas, Huysmans doesn't seem to have had any particular thought of extending Durtal's story beyond the encounter with Satanism, but he seems to have felt, in publishing it, that there was more that needed to be written. Some of this is perhaps structural.  Là-bas leaves Durtal with a negative recognition -- that the rationalistic mythology of the self-image of the age is a lie, as seen in the occultists who are not, as the mythology suggests, relics of an older age (the way Carhaix's obsession with ringing church bells actually is) but created by the modern age itself -- but such a negative recognition raises a lot of questions about what better way of seeing things there might be. There are also reasons connected with Huysmans's increasing Decadent distaste for the timidity of Naturalism as an artistic  movement; he had already done something to show that Naturalists failed even seriously to explore evil and suffering, and now he could show that it also failed seriously to explore penitence and mysticism and sanctity, a white book to follow his black book. And, of course, some of it may well have been psychological -- Là-bas had drawn heavily from Huysmans's own psychological state and reflection at the time, and he himself had already been moving beyond where Durtal had been left at the end of that work.

In any case, he set out to write Là-haut (Up There) to complement Là-bas (Down There). This turned out to be quite difficult. He wanted a book that captured the aspects of human experience that we associate with mysticism, but when he attempted to work through this, he find himself dealing with a very different aspect of human experience that he found personally difficult to disentangle from mysticism: sex. One of the early working titles is The Carnal Battle, as it seems to have become heavily dominated by his struggle with sexual temptations at the time. Further, Huysmans found that he was much less well equipped to explore perennial mysticism than he had been to explore modern occultism; the whole thing mired him in a massively greater amount of research. For someone with a Naturalist background, the research was not necessarily a problem, but it required learning a very different vocabulary and set of assumptions than necessary for, say, reading sociological studies.

What is more, he had difficulty pinning down key elements of his story. His original idea seems to have been to weave in the story of the Marian apparition at La Salette in 1843 (which was controversial even among Catholics, in something like the way Medjugorje is today), but as the novel approached completion, he scrapped the entire thing, rewriting it again without anything to do with La Salette and trying to distance it even further from Là-bas. He also seems to have felt at times that it tended toward the artistically dull, and when he finally published it in 1895 under the title En Route, he expected it to be disliked by everyone, Catholics as well as freethinkers.

It was indeed scandalous; the sexual temptation theme from the Carnal Battle stage of writing was still on display, and shocked even some freethinking types with how explicit it was. But that was nothing compared to the scandal of conversion. The literary world could tolerate occultism as a sort of artistic eccentricity; it had no idea how to tolerate religious conversion as an artistic eccentricity. Indeed, pretty much everybody, freethinker or Catholic, had difficulty accepting that Huysmans really believed any of the religious material that made it into his novel. Everybody agreed it was very vividly written and everyone was also skeptical of the idea that it was in any way really Christian, rather than just mining Christian symbolism for literary effect. They also, despite liking the writing, found the book itself puzzling -- a novel that was not really a novel, brilliantly describing a short period of events in which nothing much actually seems to happen, as if someone were to write a 'novel' about an uneventful vacation. Perhaps the best way to summarize the novel is Huysmans's own summary:

The plot of the novel is as simple as it could be. I've taken the principal character of Là-bas, Durtal, had him converted, and sent him to a Trappist monastery. In studying his conversion, I've tried to trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created.

[Interview in Le Figaro, 5 January 1895, as quoted in the Introduction to J.-K. Huysmans, En Route, Brendan King, ed. and tr., Dedalus (Sawtry, UK: 2024), p. 15.]

Maurice Leblanc, The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsene Lupin

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

It was close upon half-past six and the evening shadows were growing denser when two soldiers reached the little space, planted with trees, opposite the Musee Galliera, where the Rue de Chaillot and the Rue Pierre-Charron meet. One wore an infantryman's sky-blue great-coat; the other, a Senegalese, those clothes of undyed wool, with baggy breeches and a belted jacket, in which the Zouaves and the native African troops have been dressed since the war. One of them had lost his right leg, the other his left arm. (p. 1)

Summary: Patrice Belval and his Senegalese friend, known as Ya-Bon, help out a local nurse whom they have known for a short while, Coralie Bey, interfering with a plot to kidnap her. Patrice and Ya-Bon are both war heroes, Patrice having lost his right leg and Ya-Bon both his left arm and much of his power of speech (he is called Ya-Bon, because "ya, bon" is mostly all he can manage clearly to say with his injured throat). Coralie is the wife of Essares Bey, a banker of supposedly Egyptian extraction. Patrice and Ya-Bon, in their attempts to protect Coralie, find themselves in a series of events that lead to Essares Bey's murder, and a deepening series of mysteries resulting from it. The mysteries mount until Ya-Bon, who knows Arsene Lupin, having once saved the latter's life when the latter was in the Foreign Legion, connects Captain Belval and Lupin, and the mysteries finally begin to unravel.

This is a very unevenly developed book, I think; parts are very well done and parts seem to fall short of their promise. Ya-Bon is an engaging character who is underutilized in the story. There is an international mystery -- Essares Bey is part of a plot to drain gold out of France, and it is unclear who is behind it -- but it is greatly shortchanged. There is a domestic mystery -- despite having only met relatively recently, Patrice and Coralie find their names written down and linked together going back decades, and there ends up being a shared mystery involving their parents -- and this is mostly handled quite well. There is a mystery concerned with hidden gold, three hundred million francs worth (in 1915!), arising from the international plot, and this is also handled well, although perhaps too quickly and in a way that could possibly feel anticlimactic. I think part of the issue is that Patrice and Coralie, while charming, are not really strong enough characters to carry as much of the plot as they have to carry. Nonetheless, the twists and turns are mostly enjoyable.

In the Introduction, I suggested that Lupin being less visible here might benefit him as a character, and this was definitely the case. This is a much more likable Lupin than several of the more recent Lupin books have shown us, and his handling of the mysteries is quite masterful.

Favorite Passage:

They went nearer. There were bead wreaths laid down in rows on the tombstone. They counted nineteen, each bearing the date of one of the last nineteen years. Pushing them aside, they read the following inscription in gilt letters worn and soiled by the rain:

HERE LIE
PATRICE AND CORALIE,
BOTH OF WHOM WERE MURDERED
ON THE 14TH OF APRIL, 1895
REVENGE TO ME: I WILL REPAY.

Recommendation: Recommended; although it's somewhat uneven in execution, the twists are engaging and interesting.

*****

Maurice Leblanc, The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsene Lupin, Fox Eye Publishing Ltd. (Leicester, UK: 2022).

A Being that Is A

 A exists, for if it did not exist, no good would exist without evil, no greatness without littleness, no eternity without beginning; and the same thing would be true of perfection, which would not exist without imperfection, nor would justice exist without injustice, nor nobility without baseness, and so on for the others. But since goodness, greatness, etc. are concordant with being, and their opposites with privation, therefore one should not doubt that A exists, nor should one deny the existence in it of goodness, greatness, etc.; because if there were no goodness, greatness etc. in A, then it would be impossible for A to exist, since this existence is in accord with no being in which there is not immense goodness, greatness, etc., and in which, through bonification, there is no goodness in greatness, nor, through magnification, any greatness in goodness, and so on for the rest, which bonification is so great, etc., and which magnification is so good, etc., that it could only accord with a being that is A.

[Ramon Llull, Ars Demonstrativa, Distinction II, Part II, in Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316), Volume I, Bonner, ed. and tr., Princeton University Press (Princeton: 1985), p. 356.]

A is God. This is generally seen as an ontological argument, and allowing for the classificational mess that is the category 'ontological argument', this is probably right as intended; that is, it is an a priori argument for God's existence, of some kind. However, I think there is a more fruitful way to think of it (and indeed, of most of Llull's arguments), which consists in seeing it as a sort of limit-converging transcendental argument concerned with the conditions of coherence for our thought about the world. That is to say, Llull's idea is that in remembering, understanding, and willing the world, we have these various unified intelligible domains -- for instance, insofar as remembering, understanding, and willing go, we find ourselves concerned with things that are able to be good (bonus), that are actually being good (bonificans, bonificating), and so forth. This only makes coherent sense if there is something that unifies these in some way; this is the dignitas (the axiom or principle), in this case goodness or bonitas. And so it goes, he holds, for a bunch of other things: greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will (or love), virtue, truth, glory, perfection, justice, generosity, simplicity, nobility, mercy, and dominion. These are the dignitates that unify entire domains of thinking (remembering, understanding, willing) about and in the world. But how do these domains of thinking relate to each other? They can't be regarded as wholly separate, nor can they be regarded as inconsistent, as if entire domains of our thought were establishing that other domains of thought were wrong. The dignitates of these domains, at least, have to 'concord with being', to be the principles of domains of thinking about what is, and as such, have to have some kind of coherence with each other; since they concord with being, their opposites are privations of some kind. If you can never have being that is good without its opposite, then goodness (and thus the entire domain of thought of which it is the principle) has defective concordance with being. If goodness is inherently defective, however, that means that it is going to be defective in its coherence with others; for instance, if the greatest good is also defective in good, that means that its goodness has to be defective in greatness, or eternity (i.e., duration), or power, etc. The dignitates would then not have a complete coherence with each other, and the domains of thought that they unify would be inconsistent with each other.

Thus A is not God as such, but God specifically as principle of coherence among the dignitates, the principle that must exist if, for instance, the goodness-domain of our interaction with the world is to cohere completely with the power-domain, the truth-domain, etc. In the wheel of the dignitates, and of all our interaction with things, A is the central point that makes the wheel a wheel rather than a mess. If there is no A, Llull wants to say, then our thought about the world is ineliminably inconsistent and incoherent. It's not just a matter of goodness fitting imperfectly with wisdom, but of everything we think and do with regard to things having conflicting aspects. But in order to be the principle of coherence for the dignitates, A must be the limit case of each, in which all of the dignitates have perfect concordance: A is where goodness is great, eternal, powerful, wise, etc., and greatness is good, eternal, powerful, wise, etc., and power is good, great, eternal, wise, etc., and so on and so forth. All the domains of thought cohere, and are only able to cohere, because they all converge on A, the point where all their unifying dignitates are in complete concordance. Since incoherence of the domains of thought gives us endless contradictions and inconsistencies, A must exist.

In this sense, Llull's argument is somewhat like Kantian and Neokantian moral arguments: in those arguments we have a possible conflict, and practical reason authorizes postulating God to prevent the conflict, in those cases of some aspect of the moral domain and some aspect of the natural domain, from being insuperable in practice. Llull has a very different metaphysics and epistemology; there are many more domains than the moral and the natural;  he takes the argument to be demonstrative for reality rather than a postulate for practice because the conflict and inconsistency he is trying to avoid is not merely practical; but the general structure is analogous. The dignitates posit A as a condition of their coherence, both in themselves and of their domains with each other; the fundamental conditions of remembering, understanding, and willing cannot contradict each other. In another way, it is like Aquinas's Fourth Way; indeed, while Aquinas wouldn't himself put it quite the same way, the Fourth Way has an explicit step that corresponds to Llull's 'concordance with being' point. In fact, I think the best way locate Llull's argument in 'argument space' is as an intermediate form between something like the Fourth Way and something like the Kantian moral argument.

Down the Gray Border of the Night

An October Sunset
by Archibald Lampman

One moment the slim cloudflakes seem to lean
With their sad sunward faces aureoled,
And longing lips set downward brightening
To take the last sweet hand kiss of the king,
Gone down beyond the closing west acold;
Paying no reverence to the slender queen,
That like a curvèd olive leaf of gold
Hangs low in heaven, rounded toward sun,
Or the small stars that one by one unfold
Down the gray border of the night begun.