Fortnightly Book, October 11

 Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961) was a poet, whose poetry had quite a fair amount of acclaim. It of course did not pay the bills, and, despite recurring health problems, he spent both of his life doing manual labor to get by.  It didn't help when the Great Depression struck and the same time his parents began to have health issues. By this point his poetry had brought him into contact with a lot of literary figures, so he helped ease the burdens slightly by writing fiction. There was more of a market for short stories in magazines, and Smith, with his poetic ability for verbal fireworks, fit in perfectly with the weird fiction market. Most of his fiction was published in Weird Tales, and to this day he is regarded as one of the 'big three' of Weird Tales, along with H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, with both of whom he had an extensive correspondence, despite the fact that they never met in person. His mother died in 1935, Howard died by suicide in 1936, Lovecraft by cancer in 1937, and in 1937 his father also died, so Smith, still overworked and enduring blow after blow, essentially stopped writing fiction. But he is often considered the best writer and in particular the best stylist of the Weird Fiction Golden Age. 

During his fiction-writing period, Smith, wrote a lot of fiction. The next fortnightly book is Zothique: The Final Cycle, which consists of all of Smiths fiction that takes place in the setting of Zothique, the last inhabited continent of the dying Earth, when all the civilizations we have known have vanished without a trace, and the world has become a world of strange worshippers of strange gods, filled with demonism and sorcery and despair. The various stories were put together by Lin Carter, who tried to work out a coherent narrative chronology in doing so; Zothique: The Final Cycle is edited by Ronald Higer, who makes some adjustments and modifications to Carter's arrangement to get a result that fits more tightly with comments Smith himself made about the stories.

Zothique
by Clark Ashton Smith

He who has trod the shadows of Zothique
And looked upon the coal-red sun oblique,
Henceforth returns to no anterior land,
But haunts a later coast
Where cities crumble in the black sea-sand
And dead gods drink the brine. 

He who has known the gardens of Zothique
Where bleed the fruits torn by the simorgh's beak,
Savors no fruit of greener hemispheres:
In arbors uttermost,
In sunset cycles of the sombering years,
He sips an amaranth wine. 

He who has loved the wild girls of Zothique
Shall not come back a gentler love to seek,
Nor know the vampire's from the lover's kiss:
For him the scarlet ghost
Of Lilith from time's last necropolis
Rears amorous and malign. 

He who has sailed in galleys of Zothique
And seen the looming of strange spire and peak,
Must face again the sorcerer-sent typhoon,
And take the steerer's post
On far-poured oceans by the shifted moon
Or the re-shapen Sign.

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement

 Introduction

Opening Passages: The First Movement consists of three short novels, A Question of Upbringing, A Buyer's Market, and The Acceptance World. From A Question of Upbringing:

The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a mocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakesperian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and, as if performing a rite, cast some substance--apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper--on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind.... (p. 1)

From A Buyer's Market:

The last time I saw any examples of Mr. Deacon's work was at a sale, held obscurely in the neighbourhood of Euston Road, many years after his death. The canvases were none of them familiar, but they recalled especially, with all kinds of other things, dinner at the Walpole-Wilsons', reviving with a jerk that phase of early life. They made me think of long-forgotten conflicts and compromises made between the imagination and the will, reason and feeling, power and sensuality; together with many more specifically personal sensations, experienced in the past, of pleasure and of pain. Outside, the spring weather was cool and sunny: Mr. Deacon's favourite season of the year. Within doors, propped against three sides of a washstand, the oil-paintings seemed, for some reason, appropriate to those surroundings, dusty, though no displeasing; even suggesting, in their way, the kind of home Mr. Deacon favoured or himself and his belongings: the sitting-room over teh shop, for example, informal, not too permanent, more than a trifle decayed. His haunts, I remembered, had bordered on these northern confines of London. (p. 1)

From The Acceptance World:

Once in a way, perhaps as often as every eighteen months, an invitation to Sunday afternoon tea at the Ufford would arrive on a postcard addressed in Uncle Giles's neat, constricted handwriting. This private hotel in Bayswater, where he stayed during comparatively rare visits to London, occupied two corner houses in a latent, almost impenetrable region west of the Queen's Road. Not only the battleship-grey colour, but also something at once angular and top-heavy about the block's configuration as a whole, suggested a large vessel moored in the street. Even within, at least on the ground floor, the Ufford conveyed some reminder of life at sea, though certainly of no luxuriously equipped liner; at best one of those superannuated schooners of Conrad's novels, perhaps decorated years before as a rich man's yacht, now tarnished by the years and reduced to ignoble uses like traffic in tourists, pilgrims, or even illegal immigrants; pervaded--to borrow an appropriately Conradian mannerism--with uneasy memories of the strife of men. That was the feeling of the Ufford gave, riding at anchor on the sluggish Bayswater tides. (p. 1)

Summary: In A Question of Upbringing, Nicholas Jenkins, whose family may or may not be related to the Robert Jenkins of the War of Jenkins' Ear, notices a fire in the snow, which reminds him in turn of Nicolas Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time, which in turn leads him to think of mortality and the march of time. He thinks back to his school-days, when he was friends with Charles Stringham and Peter Templer; he remembers in particular their discussions of an older student, Kenneth Widmerpool. After they leave school, Jenkins visits both Stringham and Templer, and meets Templer's sister, Jean, with whom he imagines himself to be in love. At university, Jenkins meets a number of other people, and in particular, Mark Members, J. G. Quiggin, and Bill Truscott, and eventually witnesses the end of Stringham's and Templer's connection. Thus they end up going their separate ways; it was all perhaps always destined for collision, but one of course never knows that at the time.

In A Buyer's Market, Jenkins happens to meet up with Kenneth Widmerpool when they attend the same dinner party. Jenkins has become involved in art publishing, which has resulted in his crossing paths with the painter Edgard Deacon, who weaves in and out of the story, and his pacifist activist friend, Gypsy Jones, who also weaves in and out of the story. Widmerpool and Jenkins happen to both be interested in the same woman at the party, Barbara Goring; Barbara ends up embarrassing Widmerpool (and herself) in public when she accidentally pours an entire pot of sugar over his head. Afterward, Widmerpool becomes interested in Gypsy Jones; he ends up paying for her abortion, but the relationship goes nowhere, and Widmerpool becomes focused on his work because of it. Jenkins meets up with Stringham as well, who is engaged to and eventually marries Lady Peggy Stepney. Deacon happens to die on the same day; Jenkins attends his funeral, and afterward sleeps with Gypsy Jones.

In The Acceptance World, Jenkins, having recently published a novel, is caught up in a set of problems arising from his work in the publishing industry; his firm has engaged a famous novelist, St. John Clarke, to write a preface to a book on a painter who has recently died, Horace Isbister, whom St. John Clarke had long known. It turns out that St. John Clarke's secretary is Mark Members, with whom Jenkins meets up. This happens to lead to Jenkins meeting Peter Templer again. Templer, who had always been a lady's man, has married a model famous for toothpaste ads. Members happens to be outmaneuvered for his position as Clarke's secretary by J. G. Quiggins; through Jenkins, Quiggins happens to meet Templer's wife, who eventually leaves Templer for him. Templer happens to have come across Widmerpool, who is now employed by a firm of bill-brokers, also known as a discount house. Bill-brokers negotiate the sale of bills of exchange, providing investors with ready money while using the buying and selling to make a profit, an early form of what is today often called futures contracts; Templer calls it 'the Acceptance World'. Jenkins meets up with Jean again, who is married, and begins to have an affair with her. By happenstance, Jenkins meets up with Widmerpool again, and they in turn happen to meet Stringham, who is divorced and has ever since been heavily drinking.

If this makes it sound like the books are lists of characters, in some sense they are. This is not a plot-focused series. The plot, such as it is, could be summarized as 'Something happens to happen', often in the form of 'Nick Jenkins introduces two people and something happens to happen' or in the form of 'Nick Jenkins is introduced to someone and something happens to happen'. Likewise, although the story covers the period of the 1920s and the 1930s, for practical purposes it might as well all occur in a timeless void; you get occasionally references to the Great War, and the Bolshevik Revolution, and various economic events and fashions, but for the most part, these could just be anything. The story is really just the people, moving in and out of each other's lives. They more or less run in different parts of the same circles; it could be years, but inevitably you hear bits and pieces about each other and eventually cross paths in one way or another. It's the description of the characters from different angles that is the interest. In the first two books, this seems to me to be somewhat tentative and exploratory; it is with The Acceptance World, I think, that things start coming together in a more natural way. 

It also becomes clear by this point that what we see in the stories is as much about Nick Jenkins as it is about anyone described; Jenkins sometimes attributes to other people things that seem clearly to be projections from his own attitudes. This is not consistent, but in a sense, Jenkins approaches everything in the way he starts in A Question of Upbringing, reflecting on the events as if they were a painting and the people as if they were portraits. In a painting there is a fact on the canvas, the paint and the color and the texture; but when contemplate a painting you also contribute something to the viewing.

Favorite Passage: From The Acceptance World:

When, in describing Widmerpool's new employment, Templer had spoken of 'the Acceptance World', I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element--happiness, for example--is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that. (p. 170)

Recommendation:  Recommended. I liked The Acceptance World the best, since it is in that work that the story really seems to come into its own, but it presupposes the other two.

*****

Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 1995).

Dashed Off XXXI

 part
(1) happenstantially
(2) formally
(3) finally
--- --- (a) actually/actively
--- --- (b) deontically/normally

Good description in English requires the use of the active/passive contrast, as a general matter. Contrasts (not necessarily, but sometimes, oppositions) are what make description vivid and useful. Extensive description with only active or only passive mood flattens the description, making everything of equal importance, or unimportance, in the description.

The intelligibility of a sentence depends on its possible context.

A word is part of a sentence in ways that are happenstantial, formal, and final.

All of mathematics is built on practices of measurement that are, as a whole, infinitesimal in comparison with all the fields of mathematics. The size of the foundation, however, is not relevant; it is secure. The infinity of mathematics is just an explication of how much tehre is in things like tallying, or comparing lines, or applying scales to intension and remission.

In anger we experience things as things that could have been different.

One thing we find in human learning and opinion-change is that human beings do not really 'update' their beliefs; when beliefs change, the prior beliefs continue to exercise some force -- their 'shape' continues to influence how other beliefs work -- and following through on change of implications is patchy and sporadic. Further, beliefs often transmogrify and get 'stuck' at various stages of half-change, being part one and part another, or sometimes belief-tracks split, so that both are held until something forces a resolution of two to one, or else a decision is made about which to begin discarding.

the imperfect commensurability of pleasures

that which tends to be unable to be (dis)approved

An open question is not a recurring question but a question not fully answered.

what is owed the state vs what is owed our fellow citizens vs what is owed civil society as a whole

Different kinds of account of personal identity get us different accounts of memory.

Every 'theory of truth' captures an aspect of language as an instrument for pursuit of truth.

Disquotational theories of truth capture the semi-transparent or self-submerging aspect of language as an instrument. (Both sides of a disquotational equation are propostiions, but on the quotational side we are considering the lens showing us something and on the disquoted side we are considering what is seen through the lens.)

language as an instrumental system of references reflecting & interacting with the world as system

The family is an inherently juridical entity, albeit one that reaches out to other juridical entities.

drama as a study of ontological exigency, of our fit in the broader realm of being and beings, whether clearly or vaguely conceived

Faith is the first step to experiencing being as love; it first does so by revealing it as grace.

gift as an experience of love

In music we experience something transient that nonetheless continues to exist.

All art seeks to be as participatory as music.

Every fine art is a distinctive symbol of the Incarnation, in part by being a symbol of our own incarnation, but in part precisely as being different.

Each person is the ethical commonwealth in seed; each virtuous person, the ethical commonwealth in one.

Prayer, like music, wells up from silence.

the social-welding function of music

We experience little bits of sound as possible parts of a whole.

Music often jogs our thinking simply by getting our thinking moving.

The  modern sense(s) of what is 'obective' and what is 'subjective' is a complex of broken parts inconsistently mixed together.

Our vulnerabilities are always beyond the limits of our loves. People think that love makes us vulnerable because it by contrast makes us aware of the vulnerabilities that we did not know that we had and to which it has not yet extended to heal.

Fictional characters arise from a wellspring of personhood, which we find in ourselves.

We live in an age of Now We Know Better, whose curious feature is that 'Now we know better' is treated as an assumption, not as a discovery, and is taken to be true on no evidence at all except that it is the assumption made. The betterness is not something we have learned; it is there, and we must discover what it is, whatever it might be. We approach perfection in our self-aggrandizing, approach the limit of self-enclosedness; we apotheosize ourselves antecedently to merit, and not consequently from any established merit, and all things other than ourselves are treated as imperfect unfoldings of ourselves. But we are not to the utter end yet; we are sometimes shaken; and our journey has not reached the true realm of Now We Know Better, which is also called hell.

Sexual fantasy is morally dangerous because in it we often indulge the thought of other people being entirely within ourselves, of their being nothing but a relation to ourselves. It is not the only kind of fantasy in which this can happen, but the association with sexual pleasure makes it especially likely that we will keep indulging it.

"A world in which men no longer sing is a degenerate world." Marcel
"The beautiful is what, in a certain way, has authority over us. Authority is the distinguishing mark of a work of art, whether it is exercised immediately or not, whether it must struggle or not with a rebellious sensibility."
"To love a being is to give him credit, that is, to be attracted to him at least as much for what he will be as for what he is."

In the solidarity of the shaken, people reach for communion with a more promising past or future.

the role in narrative adventure of the morally unsafe yet justifiable

Growing as a person is an exercise in learning how not to sabotage oneself.

overwhelming plausibility and the aesthetic sense of teh real world or reality

The Dowager Duchess in the Wimsey stories gives us, by comparison and contrast, insight into Lord Peter's thinking, without having to show the latter -- he has inherited a more practical variety of her allusive hyper-associativity.

honesty before one's own conscience

music as a system of prescriptions -- considered abstractly, notationally, and implementationally

instruments as characters in the symphony

the musical plane of feeling

attacking a problem from many different directions

The statue or painting is performed in displaying and seeing it.

the painting's frame as part of its performance

"To restore man to himself is in truth to restore him to God." Marcel
"Never will one be able to meditate too deeply on the marvelous affinity that connects music and memory, from the most mechanical to the most intimate, from the one that is a mere 'reproduction' to the one that is a *revivre* and a *survivre*."
"Like every expression, music is a restitution, a release of what one has breathed in."

Music is an imitation of music; artificial music of natural music, designed music of received music, actual music of suggested music.

We express because we are already aiming for something, or because we are provoked, or because we are inspired.

We express by judgment as part of a larger expression.

music as constituting a fairy space (Marcel)

We live in a world of sound, and music transforms the whole sound-world.

initiating vs reactive expression

One thing that is noticeable about most expressivism is how useless it is for understanding expression or expressiveness.

preparation/need fairness vs achievement/desert fairness
(many disputes over what is fair seem to arise from disagreement over which of these is the relevant fairness)

Those who reason well will often fail to reason well; they just don't stop there.

With a lying or unreliable narrator, we have a subfiction nested in a fiction whose apparent incorrectness implies another fiction that is perhaps never directly stated.

When people earn money, they most often earn it for their whole household.

It is impossible to design a system in which people's life-chances are only determined by what they do and never by the choices of those with whom they do it.

Faith sheds new light on everything moral.

The nation-state seems primarily a product of the unusual degree of tribal territorial stability in medieval Western Europe.

We learn adequation of mind to thing in the way we learn most things, by imitation.

"Although freedom is an exercise of the 'I', it comes into being through the 'we'; it cannot be assumed that people will still achieve freedom in a world where the 'we' is merely imagined and relationships and attachments no longer exist." Scruton

We come to understand our capabilities by thinking ourselves from the perspective of those capabilities -- the intellectual man, the person qua imaginative, etc.

In Sikhism, langar and pangat serves as a symbol of Sikh doctrine itself.

Every social progress is within a tradition.

"Things that have a relation of brotherhood are not, as some persons have supposed, 'consubstantial', but when both the cause and that which derives from the cause are of the same nature, then they are called consubstantial." Basil (Ep 52)
"Nothing can be consubstantial with itself, but one thing is consubstantial with another."

Everything human rots eventually.

imperfect shadows of perfection.

St. John Henry Newman

 Today is the feast of St. John Henry Newman, Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons:

My Brethren, there are those who imagine that, when we use great words of the Church, invest her with heavenly privileges, and apply to her the evangelical promises, we speak merely of some external and political structure. They think we mean to spend our devotion upon a human cause, and that we toil for an object of human ambition. They think that we should acknowledge, if cross-examined, that our ultimate purpose was the success of persons and parties, to whom we were bound in honour, or by interest, or by gratitude; and that, if we looked to objects above the world or beyond the grave, we did so with very secondary aims and faint perceptions. They fancy, as the largest concession of their liberality, that we are working from the desire, generous, but still human, of the praise of earthly superiors, and that, after all, in some way or other, we are living on the breath, and basking in the smile, of man. But the text, and the train of thought which I have been pursuing, remind us of the true view of the matter, were we ever likely to forget it. The Church is a collection of souls, brought together in one by God's secret grace, though that grace comes to them through visible instruments, and unites them to a visible hierarchy. What is seen, is not the whole of the Church, but the visible part of it. When we say that Christ loves His Church, we mean that He loves, nothing of earthly nature, but the fruit of His own grace;—the varied fruits of His grace in innumerable hearts, viewed as brought together in unity of faith and love and obedience, of sacraments, and doctrine, and order, and worship. The object which He contemplates, which He loves in the Church, is not human nature simply, but human nature illuminated and renovated by His own supernatural power....

["The Secret Power of Divine Grace", Sermon 4 in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.]

Bath'd in a Cold Quicksilver Sweat

The Apparition
by John Donne

When by thy scorn, O murd’ress, I am dead
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feign’d vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tir’d before,
Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep will from thee shrink;
And then, poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I.
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent, 
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threat’nings rest still innocent.

A Good Rule for Finding Truth

 A good rule for finding the truth is to draw near it with a unprejudiced mind and a will equally disposed to receive whatever the truth has to give -- if we do not approach in this way, we hear not what it says to us, but what we want to hear. When we consult the truth, we should receive and love in the same spirit everything that it has to say to us. Indeed, we should love whatever we love only because the truth has said it.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991) p. 183 (sect. 1316).]

Planet-Blinding Sprays

 Even in Slumber
by Clark Ashton Smith

This separation cleaveth to the core. . . .
Even in slumber I am fated
To seek thee in vast throngs and dreamlands desolated---
And find thee nevermore. 

Bewildering phantoms rise between, and ways
Where demons claim their olden debt;
The rote of sullen streets and streams; the spume and fret
Of planet-blinding sprays.