The Strangest Whim Has Seized Me

A Ballade of Suicide
by G. K. Chesterton

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

To-morrow is the time I get my pay--

My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--
I see a little cloud all pink and grey--
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call--
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way--
I never read the works of Juvenal--

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational--
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small--

I think I will not hang myself to-day.

ENVOI

Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Always good for an academic to remember during this busy time of year!

Of course, it's a bit optimistic to think that rationalists are growing rational, but there's hope.

Bowels of Compassion

A salutary warning from St. Gregory the Great, whose feast day it is:

These are wishes peculiar to the haughty, to pray that the lives of those who are suffering may be more severely examined, because the more just they are in their own eyes, the more hardened are they in others’ sufferings. For they know not how to take to them the feeling of the other’s infirmity, and to feel pity for their neighbour’s weakness, as they do for their own. For since they think highly of themselves, they do not at all condescend to the humble. Eliu believed that blessed Job had been smitten for his sin, and therefore believed that no bowels of compassion were to be shewn to him, even in the midst of so many sorrows. But when men, who are truly holy, behold any one smitten, even for his faults, though they reprove some of his inordinate doings, yet they sympathize with some of his sufferings; and they are so skilled in keeping down swellings, as yet to know how to relieve wounds, in order that when their hardnesses are softened, their infirmities may be strengthened. But because, on the other hand, haughty men have no bowels of love, they not only do not sympathize with the righteous when suffering, but moreover afflict them, under pretence of proper reproof, and they either exaggerate trifling faults, if there are any in them, or pervert by wrong construction those points which are really good.

Moralia in Job, Part V, Book XXVI, Section 6. It sounds so straightforward; and yet it's extraordinarily difficult to practice.

IPod Random Fifteen

1. Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell on You
2. Mediaeval Baebes, The Snake
3. The Charlie Daniels Band, The Devil Went Down to Georgia
4. Nena, Leuchtturm
5. Epica, Every Time It Rains
6. Metallica, Nothing Else Matters
7. Ellis Paul, God's Promise
8. Leonard Cohen, Hallelujah
9. Linda Ronstadt, Long Long Time
10. Rosanne Cash, Seven Year Ache
11. Jann Arden, Never Mind
12. Katie Melua, Nine Million Bicycles
13. Cerena, Quelque Part C'est Ici
14. Kareem Salama, Aristotle and Averroes
15. Matisyahu, King Without a Crown

"The Snake" can be found performed live by the Mediaeval Baebes here; and while the sound quality is not great, it captures the catchiness of the song. It's a version -- Catalan, if I recall correctly -- of a kind of poem that's fairly common, in which someone (in this case, a farmer) discovers a half-frozen snake, takes it in and nurtures it back to health, then crosses it at some point, leading the snake to respond as snakes do (in this case, the snake has grown to very great size and so it hisses and wraps itself around the farmer to kill him). You can find another, more swinging variation on the theme in Al Wilson's The Snake. The moral of the story should be obvious.

Links and Notes

* John Farrell has an article on Pius XII and Humani Generis at the WSJ. He discusses it further in a post here.

* My favorite logical positivist, Otto Neurath, at the SEP.

* William Bristow has an article at the SEP on the Enlightenment. I don't think it's a bad article, but I find it odd to read, because in virtually every choice one has to make in writing an article on this topic, Bristow chose the opposite of what I would have done. Unlike Eric Schliesser, I can see the point of saying that the Enlightenment only became self-reflective in its later German form, although it is potentially misleading and skews the discussion. (It's like saying that rationalists and empiricists only became self-aware of themselves as such toward the end of the early modern period; there's a legitimate sense in which this is so, but putting this way is potentially misleading as to the actual disputes between rationalists and empiricists.) I think it was a mistake to speak in terms of general tendencies of the 'the Enlightenment'; the local expressions (the French Enlightenment, the German Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, etc.) are indeed nodes in a general communication network concerned with intellectual development, but they do not all have the same general tenor, nor are their favored projects the same. To do justice to anything in the Enlightenment, one really must focus on the hubs, both the activity within the hub and between hubs. One reason for this is infrastructure: the French Enlightenment, for instance, is radically different from the Scottish Enlightenment, and much of the reason is the different role both educational institutions and churches play in each. A further issue is the abstraction from chronology and historical events; many of the things we associate with the Enlightenment period arise fairly late due to, e.g., educational reforms following from interest in Rousseau; the American and French Revolutions are historical events that leave their mark very clearly on the history of the period; much Enlightenment thought spreads due to specific actions by governments; and so forth. All of this is important.

* The BBC has an interview from its archives with J. R. R. Tolkien.

* There is a European region whose dominant religion is Tibetan Buddhism. The Head of Kalmykia, Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov, is apparently one odd politician, who is obsessed with chess (making it a compulsory subject in school) and believes he was abducted by aliens once.

* Roger Pearse has a good post on the cliche, often uncritically bandied about, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I've criticized it myself before and said that it is gibberish that has the function of furthering intellectual laziness: when you try unpack the meaning of both 'extraordinary claims' and 'extraordinary evidence' you find that the only plausible ways of doing so leave you with principles that are either obviously false or only true given highly controversial assumptions. Its plausibility is entirely a matter of its rhetorical parallelism -- there is literally no substance to it beyond that.

* AS Byatt says, in response to a question about religious belief, "I think Wallace Stevens is my religion," which is about as pretentious as I would have expected her response to be: her abiding sin, in which her books are steeped, lies in a capacity for expression that is too clever by half and too clumsy by far. But she actually says some interesting things in the interview, especially when she starts getting excited as to possible future avenues for novels.

* A good post on homology and analogy by John Wilkins. Some of the commenters note some weaknesses with the abstract algebra, but since we in philosophy have a Manifest Destiny to mangle as we please, and I think the primary interest in the post is not in the finer details but the overall approach, I regard this as a minor matter. This is the sort of thing that needs to be done; that it's still at draft stage doesn't change that. Mathematicians only reach dianoia on the Divided Line, anyway. (^_~)

* Speaking of which last, I think Japanese-style emoticons (both kao-moji proper and the more general 'anime' emoticons derived from them) should be more common; they are so much more expressive than Western-style emoticons.

* Isaac Bonewits, the founder of the Ár nDraíocht Féin, one of the major Neo-Druid organizations, died recently; the ADF has some interesting YouTube videos excerpting eulogies from the memorial service.

* JavOICe: this is a quite interesting Java applet in which you can draw sounds.

* Daniel Fincke has the 113th Philosopher's Carnival at "Camels with Hammers". I think this carnival is one of the more interesting collections of posts in recent times; Daniel is to be congratulated on the work of putting it together.

* Kenny Pearce has been blogging on various points that arise in reading Sobel's Logic and Theism, which I've recommended before as probably the best discussion of theistic arguments from an atheistic perspective that is currently available. So far the posts are:
Sobel's Logic and Theism
Divine Freedom and Worship
Normative Skepticism and the Existence of God
The Dialectical Appropriateness of Ontological Arguments
Sobel's Argument Against Believing in the Possibility of a Perfect Being
A Genuine Dialectical Problem for Ontological Arguments

* Enbrethiliel has a post on theology of the body, at least as commonly understood; fairly harsh and not very wrong, I think.

* Ed Feser discusses Thelonius Monk.

* The beauty of Google: A very long time ago, in elementary school, I remember reading a short story about unicorns. I don't remember the story itself, but I remember very vividly that a character in it was thinking about what to call a group of unicorns -- a word like 'herd' not really doing justice to them -- and settled on 'surprise': a surprise of unicorns. That has always stuck with me, since it's just exactly right, but I hadn't the faintest idea where it comes from. So I googled the phrase "surprise of unicorns" and it came up: "The Boy Who Drew Unicorns" by Jane Yolen, in The Unicorn Treasury.

Eartha Makes It Sound So Nice

I always start my ethics course with the question "Why be moral rather than not?", having the students read selections from Plato's Republic. My class this term didn't manage a very enthusiastic or exciting answer to that question, so I told them today that this was their theme song, and the song that would come to my mind every time I thought of them.

I Mine Own Prison

The Thread of Life
by Christina Rossetti

I

The irresponsive silence of the land,
The irresponsive sounding of the sea,
Speak both one message of one sense to me: —
Aloof, aloof, we stand aloof, so stand
Thou too aloof bound with the flawless band
Of inner solitude; we bind not thee;
But who from thy self-chain shall set thee free?
What heart shall touch thy heart? what hand thy hand? —
And I am sometimes proud and sometimes meek,
And sometimes I remember days of old
When fellowship seemed not so far to seek
And all the world and I seemed much less cold,
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold,
And hope felt strong and life itself not weak.

II

Thus am I mine own prison. Everything
Around me free and sunny and at ease:
Or if in shadow, in a shade of trees
Which the sun kisses, where the gay birds sing
And where all winds make various murmuring;
Where bees are found, with honey for the bees;
Where sounds are music, and where silences
Are music of an unlike fashioning.
Then gaze I at the merrymaking crew,
And smile a moment and a moment sigh
Thinking: Why can I not rejoice with you?
But soon I put the foolish fancy by:
I am not what I have nor what I do;
But what I was I am, I am even I.

III

Therefore myself is that one only thing
I hold to use or waste, to keep or give;
My sole possession every day I live,
And still mine own despite Time's winnowing.
Ever mine own, while moons and seasons bring
From crudeness ripeness mellow and sanitive;
Ever mine own, till Death shall ply his sieve;
And still mine own, when saints break grave and sing.
And this myself as king unto my King
I give, to Him Who gave Himself for me;
Who gives Himself to me, and bids me sing
A sweet new song of His redeemed set free;
he bids me sing: O death, where is thy sting?
And sing: O grave, where is thy victory?

Three Poem Re-drafts and a New Poem Draft

Stone

Farther shores I know than this,
visions vivid like the morrow;
holy heaven, everlightened,
sends its mercy, masters sorrow.
I wish anew on falling stars;
those leaping lights in dance display
a dream of powers pouring down
like righteous ruin of the day.
Rue no more the pastward lesson,
harbor here in love alone;
that castle-keep and quiet eyrie
is blessed upon a saving stone.

The Lady of the Garden

This garden bears the vestiges
of Our Lady of the Rains,
baptized from conception,
gentle Mary without a stain,
never without redeeming grace
from God made flesh and slain.
All are nourished by the praying tears
she beneath the cross did cry:
you are a flower in this garden
and beneath the trees grow I;
yea, the roses grow in splendor here
where their blooms will never die.

Ghost Dance

On Milky Way in velvet skies
now walk the souls that lived and died;
it bears them to the earth below,
to starlit mountains crowned with snow.
Christ has sent the winds of peace!
He bade the war and violence cease;
he brings to morning living rain
and brings the bison to the plain,
He bears the dead to earth below,
from evening stars to crowns of snow.
But feel the darkness in the land!
Such venom in the heart of man!
How will the serpent treat the dove,
the bearer of these songs of love?
The prophet dances, agents lie,
in battlefields the people die
with bullets in their hearts and hands,
their blood poured out to wet the lands;
from mountains crowned with shining snow
their spirits flee this earth below.

A prophet once was crucified
and on the tree he bled and died
as jeers beneath the bloody cross
were mocking him for pain and loss.
He was the Christ; the Roman lance
had pierced him for his spirit dance.
There was a people, proud and tall,
with sun-like mien and worthy all;
for dancing in the winter snow
to bring the spirits here below
they fell beneath the flaming guns,
both score by score and one by one.

What thing may live may also die.
What heart may laugh may also cry.
But those who die may also rise
beneath the starlight in the skies
and hunt and dance and play the games
to which their fathers gave the names.
Thus Christ upon a path of light
will come again some starlit night
to bring the dead to earth below
for spirit dances in the snow.

Darkest Hour

O darkest hour!
You come on me with mounting power I cannot flee!
I have lived well nigh ten thousand years --
but I will die in battle here.
I was born so very long ago my mountained thoughts are crowned with snow;
I was flowered bright in a garden fair beyond the light of the morning air.
The way was long through those endless years;
but I sang my songs and I felt no fear.

And I loved and laughed,
and I felt my way along my path through both night and day.
O! how many thoughts through the mind may run,
and memories caught through those long setting suns?
Though the sun should diminish and time should fail,
my song could not finish the tales I could tell.

But darkest hour!
You come on me with a mounting power I cannot flee.
I have lived well nigh ten thousand years,
but I shall die in battle here.