Sonnet Variations XIX

 Sonnet Variation: Anna Seward's Sonnet XVIII ("An Evening in November, which Had Been Stormy, Gradually Clearing Up, in a Mountainous Country")

Ceas'd is the rain; but heavy drops yet fall
as dog-like trees shake off their leaves in wind;
The muddy lands I view, and do not find
a dry spot at all on road or stone wall.
The puddles are many and might appall
the mind that wants each in place and with kind;
they scatter chaos and mess, large and small.
Yet an unseen order may stand behind
the calming scenes, which all worries remove;
to see it is to feel an ease in brow.
The trees against sky form a wooden cove,
like a window, and looking through it, lo!
I see myself, and I with you there rove
on grasses wet and paths where trickles flow.

Fortnightly Book, August 18

 Hartmann von Aue is perhaps the greatest poet of the twelfth century writing in Middle High German; famous for his 'crystalline language' and his vivid descriptions, he exerted a major influence on German literature after him. We know very little about his life. He was born somewhere around 1170 and died somewhere between 1210 and 1220; he seems to have participated in the German Crusade (1197). He was a ministerialis (dienstmann), so he was legally something like a serf but socially a knight and a member of the lower nobility. Beyond that, we only know his authorship: two major Arthurian romances (Erec and Iwein, adaptations of the work of Chretien de Troyes), two non-Arthurian knightly romances (Gregorius and Poor Heinrich), a poetic dialogue (The Lament), and a number of other lyrics.

The next fortnightly book is Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, translated by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson.

Sonnet Variations XVIII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 27

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
eyes drifting downward, limbs heavy and tired,
on satin pillow to lay down my head
with final glimpses of daylight expired.
Now settling in dreams I rest and abide,
perhaps making conversation with thee
while walking the dreamlands spacious and wide.
What sights in that land shall our journey see!
There colors more fair than any of sight
cast out their rays in peripheral view
and shadows are found more jet-black than night,
and every half-step uncovers the new.
-- Our ways go together in dreaming mind;
alas, much less so in waking, we find.

Michael Flynn, In the Belly of the Whale

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From the Prologue:

All this happened a great long time ago, by which we mean not merely that it was long ago but also that it was great. It was an age of drama and romance, of farce and adventure. Everything was bigger; everything was grander. Heroes were more heroic, lovers more lovely, traitors more treacherous, conflicts more conflicted. There were spaceships bigger than mountains. There were spaceships that were mountains.

People dared greatly, and so, failed greatly. At times, they even achieved greatly. This is the story of one of their achievements. (p. 3)

Summary: In the days of glory of the Audorithadesh Ympriales, four great ships were sent out from earth to colonize the stars -- Red Dwarf, Whale, Indiaman, and Big River. Of these, the vast Whale was built out of a hollowed-out asteroid and kitted with the best that the empire had to offer, a hundred Frames long and fifty Decks high, filled with an entire ecosystem to last for the many generations it would take to make the twelve light-year trip to Tau Ceti. It had two crews. The first is the Blue Crew under the in-captain, whose concern was the maintenance of the internal organization of the ship, so that when it would arrive at Tau Ceti, there would be sufficient numbers and resources for a sustainable colony. The second is the Gold Crew, under the go-captain, whose concern was navigation and propulsion.

Tens of thousands of people within a speeding asteroid-ship make a city, and an artificial city at that. The creation and composition of a society from scratch is a common fantasy, but it always suffers from one obvious flaw: we ourselves are not starting from scratch, but from the societies in which we find ourselves. The great Planners of the Audorithadesh Ympriales who planned out the expedition structured the society of the Whale on the principles they knew, as an idealized version of the society in which they lived, even if adapted for the peculiarities of spaceflight. As an aristocratic empire, they could not but give the internal constitution of the Whale society an aristocratic tinge. The Departments of Blue Crew, like Air, Water, Maintenance, and Eugenics, over time effectively became fiefdoms governed by feudal lords.  The society also has begun developing the pathologies of a feudal society, with aristocratic Commanders living well on the backs of lesser crew, demanding protection money and skimming benefits off of anything they can, while acting on behalf of their own Houses at the expense of the good of the Whale as a whole. For instance, at the beginning of the story, the Commanders of Air and of Water are attempting to unite their Houses by marrying their heirs to each other; as Air and Water are already extremely powerful Departments, unifying them threatens to upset the political balances among the different Houses. This is one line of the story, starting off a series of events that will destabilize the society. The Gold Crew, meanwhile, while its nature forces a greater emphasis on merit and achievement, is distant from everyone else; to the Gold Crew, everyone else is just cargo.

The abuses and isolated nature of the aristocratic Houses has led to an increasing amount of discontent among the rest of the population. The second line of the story is that a Mutiny is brewing, as a conspiracy, the Brotherhood, has begun plotting a coup.

In planning across generations, it is also inevitable that the unforeseen will happen. The story takes place eighty years after the Burnout, when about one-tenth of the ship underwent a series of major malfunctions, killing large numbers of people and resulting in part of the ship being avoided by almost all of the rest of the population.This is part of the solution to a puzzle: a man has turned up dead who is not recognized by any of their systems. This is a third line of the story, as we begin to learn by this that the area of the Burnout is not actually uninhabited; there are at least two societies living in the Whale. Civilization is finally going to be faced with its barbarians.

There is perhaps a fourth line, although it seems to have only limited development. Astrogation (Gold Crew) has discovered anomalies that indicate the possible existence of 'tubes' or 'channels' through space that could lead to shortcuts of a sort across vast regions of space. As the Whale has something like eight centuries to go in its journey, this has potentially important ramifications, although the new discoveries also represent significant unknown dangers.

This is a tale of a society collapsing into bloody revolution and attempting to reform in the face of it. It works very well as such, although I think in many ways it would be improved by greater development. All of the lines of the story are well written and full of fascinating aspects; all of them interact in important ways, so that the book works as a unity; but each line seems to move very quickly. The impression this gives -- which may well be right -- is of a first book of a series of two or three books; things are begun that are not fully followed through. This is not a fatal flaw, by any means; the story works well enough on its own, and I particularly liked the tale of 'Lucky' Lutz interwoven throughout, a story of a Marine having greatness thrust upon her very reluctant and unwilling command capability. But many of the things merely gestured at here fit into the larger literary universe of which it is part (the Spiral Arm series) in such a way that some of the through-lines can be dimly anticipated. This makes a good side-tale for In the Lion's Mouth, which takes place in the successor of the society that the Whale will obviously plant on Tau Ceti, and seeing how the society in In the Lion's Mouth began is also interesting.

Favorite Passage:

"You rely on history. But how reliable are records from back in the Dark Ages?"

Venables wondered if his friend was serious. "We call them 'dark' because we cannot read many of their records, not because the people suddenly became stupid and ignorant. They were written with operating systems that soon became obsolete."

"Really? I had always though it ws because they fought a great war. Two of them."

But Venables tossed his head. "Many scholars believe there was only one 'Great War,' not two. To fight a second one so shortly after the first really would have been 'stupid and ignorant.' They think the tale -- what has survived of it -- was reduplicated. Probably different authors told it. They call them the J-version, for Jurman, and the E-version, for English."

"Those were the Doish and the Anglics in Yurp?" Organson folded his hands on the table and presented Venables with an attentive look.

"The two versions are much the same, as you would expect if they were drawing on a common source. A small country in the middle of Yurp fights the rest of the continent -- and holds them off for four or five years."

"That hardly seems likely," Organson said. (p. 164)

Recommendation: Recommended. I would actually recommend reading this after In the Lion's Mouth, although it mostly stands up quite well on its own.

*****

Michael Flynn, In the Belly of the Whale, Caezik SF & Fantasy (Rockville, MD: 2024).

Sonnet Variations XVII

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 23

As an unperfect actor on the stage,
an incompleteness haunts my play of part;
no balanced shade adorns my semblant rage,
and words delivered lack both life and heart.
I often misremember words to say,
I stumble in the ceremony's rite,
fatigue disables skills that they decay,
and rarely do I hit the note I might.
My stage is life; no flowered eloquence
pours forth the feeling of my human breast;
I stammer thanks in shoddy recompense
and pass from scene to scene, heart unexpress'd.
-- In what script are my lines and actions writ?
I cannot improvise with untaught wit.

Dashed Off XIX

 edicts as crutches for weakness of virtue, punishments as crutches for weakness of rites

"When the Way prevails in the world, show yourself; when it does not, hide yourself." Analects 8.13

Taiping Christianity used Huang Shangdi, Shenye (God-Father), and Tianfu (Heavenly Father) as names for God.

Christian faith is the Word in man.

In being personal we are necessarily co-personal; in being co-personal, we are necessarily personate; in being personate, we are necessarily co-personate. Likewise, in being co-personal, we are necessarily personalizing; in being personalizing, we are necessarily co-personalizing.

junzi as phronimos

signs --> rites --> institutions --> institutional systems

prudence as the source of rites

rites as expressions of persons involving feedback

contractual guarantees
(1) external: enforcement
(2) internal: trustworthy purpose
(3) divine: e.g., oath, cuts across external-internal divide

All events are constituted by actions and passions of things.

the Church as the workshop of grace

Piacular apologies are quite common -- 'sorry' in English is more often used for piacular than for culpable cases.

forum as midway between space for grex and space for group

the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces of a gift

Like a parent with a child, God graces us with merit He deems fit to reward.

"Above deliberation we are moved toward some object, which surpasses our powers. Thus, in the natural order, under special inspiration of God, the authorof nature, great geniuses in the philosophic, poetic, or strategic sphere, as well as great heroes are moved." Garrigou-Lagrange

St. Leo takes it to be a central component of our redemption that it was obtained by rational justice rather than brute force.

grace for our actions, grace in our actions, grace through our actions

Our fundamental moral obligations carry no time limits.

(1) Actions reduce possibilities.
(2) Incomplete actions reduce possibilities stagewise and directionally.
(3) Different kind and mode of action, different possibilities reduced.

life as that which pre-selects ends for its actions and for the actions of other things

Artifactual functions do not erase natural functions but subordinate them.

Human dominion is the power to subordinate natural ends to our own, and the mental make-up to approach the world in a way facilitating this.

The Spirit presupposes the Father insofar as He proceeds from the Father as principle and the Son insofar as He reposes in the Son as the Son has being from the Father.

Palamas (Homologia) connects the relics of the saints to Holy Saturday.

(1) Some of our beliefs are co-believings with others.
(2) A group of people sharing such co-believing may be said to have the belief as a group.
(3) Thus group belief is distinct from any joint commitments to believe it.
(4) These co-believings do not have to be identical repetitions of belief -- they may differ in specificity or in focus and there may be defective (deviant) cases.

Arguments from evil tend to be constructed from ad hoc ethics.

Development of doctrine is cumulative; it could hardly be otherwise if there is truth in the teaching.

Newman's notes of development as specifications of the Note of Unity
--> although perhaps assimilation and chronic vigor should be associated with Catholicity?

Development of doctrine is not development of faith, but the expression of one faith in and through many situations.

Development of doctrine, as opposed to degradation, requires not merely logic but also filial piety.

resting assent vs operative assent

Beliefs do not represent how things are in the world; what is believe represents such things.

"Recognized deontologies are what makes human society possible." Searle
"The deontology of private property, marriage, and authority is a natural extension of prelinguistic forms of social life, once you have a language rich enough to create a deontology."

'X counts as Y in C' is something we find throughout animal nature: this is counted as food source under these conditions, that is counted as territory under those conditions, these count as cubs under that condition. Here, as elsewhere, humans differ by abstraction, deliberation, and design, not just individual but especially cooperative.

The most antisocial human being is in a sense more social than the most social beast; language, custom, fashion, consideration of the perspectives of others, in short being with others even when alone, is our natural mode of life.

Status functions pre-exist their collective acceptance; or, at least, there is a presumptive status function prior to any such acceptance.

It seems clear that some status functions just develop out of human interactions, not by declarations. Searle tries to get around this by saying that a 'set of representations can add up to' a declaration, but it's just odd to say you can have declarations without any declarings. What is more, in some such cases, we aren't representing the world as being a certain way, because our representations might not be unified, and the fact that, say, someone is leader may pre-exist anyone representing them *as* leader. You, Bob, and I might represent Joe's role in society differently, and not even in agreement as to his role, and may only later start representing this already existing complexity in a unified way.

"All institutional facts are status functions and all status functions carry deontic powers, and deontic powers provide desire-independent reasons for action." Searle

Many of the status functions of langauge are created through language -- we divide words as we do, and sentence as we do, because of grammar, which is language about language within a language.

liberal arts as sources of status functions

Human beings live by activating classifications and the world adapts to our actions in activating them.

Institutions may or may not be regularities in behavior and may or may not be agreed to by all members of a society. We see this in the cases of residuated institutions, erratically changing institutions, and controversial innovations. Universally agreed-to regularities  of behavior do tend to become institutions, however.

Equilibria accounts of social institutions presuppose social institutions; otherwise we can't get the matrices, payoffs, and costs. Thus they are better for lookinga t stability and instability of such institutions than at accounting for them.

Regulative rules presuppose classifications and tehrefore in a sense presuppose constitutive rules for these classifications; but classifications are in a sense both constitutive and regulative.

Guala and Hindriks's rule-based account of institutions runs into the problem that our rules are in many cases just not that specified; it's an analogous problem to Searle's declarations that have never been declared, in that it assumes that a very aware and deliberate set of choices are the paradigmatic causes of institutions, and the unaware and nondeliberate cases are just primitive versions of those. We can have institutions whose rules are in dispute or flux, or not considered by those involved, or could be different in different populations.

Searle tends to conflate status and status functions.

There are clearly share dattitudes for and against things that fall short of norms; they are common in aesthetics.

values as
(1) features of things
(2) taken as objects
(3) insof ar as they are related to desire/aiming-at
(4) and as such taken as objects
(5) that may themselves be related to desire/aiming-at

Values, as values, may exemplify other values.

It is necessary that there are contingent truths --> It is necessary that there are causal powers

religio to Crhist, filial piety to the holy Virgin, observantia to the saints

the moral debt incurred by the gift of the sacraments

In every culture, builders and artisans tend to develop standard proportions to facilitate making.

ritual bloodletting & kingship among the Maya

the fiduciary obligations of the Church with respect to the treasury of merit

charity-informed chastity as 'school of the gift of the person' and 'promise of immortality'

Like investments, almsgivings need to be diversified in kind to do the most consistent good.

empires as state networks, different kinds of centrality in those networks

The good act is that which is to an object inasmuch as it conforms to reason.

divine remote objective presence in intellect

Guala's rules-in-equilibrium theory of institutions is hopelessly equivocal about what rules actually are.

Smit et al. err by not grapsing that incentives are often social statuses and always have an 'X counts as Y in C' structure.
-- They also err in not recognizing that one can have inappropriate incentives, conflicting incentives, and nonuniform incentives -- like incentives to vandalize, incentives both to do and not to do something, and incetnvies to cross the border and also not cross the bordere. They are right, however that incentivization is a way of creating social entities.
-- note that they have to retreat to prima facie, for-the-most-part incentives.
-- The big gap is that they don't really consider how people know *what* is incentivized.

money in the real world vs money in accounting-world

God communicates goodness to creatures, but the excellence of his goodness is beyond all creaturely capacity.

Beauty is being on which the mind can dwell restfully.

It is inconsistent with our conception of beauty to say that each mind perceives a different beauty; beauty is something that can be shared with others.

Human beings treat almost everything like either a person or an artifact or a manipulable resource.

collective action: cooperation of individuals in pursuing unfied effect
joint-action: coordination of indivdiuals in light of shared goals
team reasoning: collaboration of individuals in practical deliberation about collective action
group agency: action of group as group such that the group-level description of the action is not reducible to the individual-level description

Sonnet Variations XVI

 Shakespearean Variation: Sonnet 22

My glass shall not persuade me I am old,
no matter that my youth is out of date.
My sins are reasons that my eyes behold
a seeming age, that I might expiate,
and know that I must each day give to thee
a contrite, ardent, and devoted heart;
already thou hast given such to me
and to return requires skill and art.
Of weary years we are so wary,
when they are but remembrance to our will
to be not so reluctant or chary
in seeking good or casting off the ill.
-- We treasure more the thing that must be slain,
as youth must be, that youth may live again.