Their Head in Their Own Footprints

Moreover, if people suppose that knowledge of anything is impossible, they do not even know whether knowledge of the impossibility of knowledge is possible, since, on their own admission, they know nothing. Against such people, who have planted themselves with their head in their own footprints, I disdain to argue. However, if I were to concede that they do have this knowledge, I would put the following questions to them. Since they have never before encountered anything true, how do they recognize knowledge and ignorance? What has given them their conception of truth and falsehood? What proof have they that the doubtful differs from the certain?

[Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Martin Ferguson Smith, tr., Hackett (Indianapolis: 2001) pp. 112-113.]

Hume

I see that people have started actively demanding that the Scots stop commemorating Dave Hume due to his racist footnote, as a petition has been put together for the University of Edinburgh to rename David Hume Tower. Given how thoroughly ugly David Hume Tower is, I'm not sure it isn't already an insult to Hume to have named it after him, but so it goes; it was inevitable at this point. The rumor going around is that some people are thinking that the Hume statue on the Royal Mile should be removed, too, although I've seen no formal proposal for it.

Of course, Scots have no moral reason to be ashamed of memorializing an important Scot to whom all Scotland and Edinburgh in particular owes a debt; but, also of course, the motivations behind the dememorialization are not themselves primarily moral either, as I have previously argued.

There has been a lot of bold prophesying in recent years about the death of the modern liberal society, about how liberalism, whether in its left or right varieties, is on the verge of being replaced, but (s I have noted before) the modern liberal society often handles threats not aggressively but passive-aggressively, by co-option and deflection, and I have been almost in awe at the efficiency with which both have been achieved, again and again, the past several months. What precisely is it that renaming David Hume Tower will contribute to police reform? Not a single thing. How much will racial equality be furthered by it? Not one iota. Early recognition that it is the politicians and the courts that are most responsible for the kind of situation that led to the death of George Floyd has completely evaporated, deflected into an increasingly tenuous memorial hunt which many politicians have then co-opted themselves by pretending that they were not the people being protested but somehow entirely on the side of the protesters -- a co-option that seems largely to have worked. It has been remarkable. It also has the unfortunate side effect that almost nothing will actually be done that is not purely symbolic -- if even that. A number of things just seem to be designated as relevant by fiat.

Faithless Electors

The Supreme Court has upheld the rights of states to punish "faithless electors" in the Electoral College; this is a bad idea in general. It is not necessarily disastrous in itself, but depending on state laws governing how pledging to vote a certain way works, it could end up being so at some point. The actual breakdown of faithless electors historically is something like this, assuming I haven't missed or double-counted any:

63 (in 1872) were due to when Presidential candidate Horace Greeley died after Election Day;
30 (in 1832) were protest votes against Martin Van Buren;
23 (in 1836) were protest votes against the Vice Presidential candidate Richard M. Johnson;
8 (in 1912) were due to when Vice Presidential candidate James Sherman died after Election Day;
7 (in 1828) were protest votes against John Calhoun;
6 (in 1808) were protest votes against James Madison;
5 (in 2016) were protest votes against Hillary Clinton;
4 (in 1896) were due to the fact that two different parties, the Democratic Party and the People's Party, endorsed the same Presidential candidate but different Vice Presidential candidates, and some People's Party electors decided to vote the Democratic slate for the latter office;
3 were protest votes against Richard Nixon;
3 (in 1812) were protest votes against Vice Presidential candidate Jared Ingersoll;
2 (in 1832) were protest abstentions against Henry Clay;
2 (in 2016) were protest votes against Donald Trump;
1 (in 2016) was a protest vote against Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence;
1 (in 1820) is supposedly because the elector believed that giving the votes unanimously was not usually reasonable;
1 (in 1948) was due to the fact that the Tennessee Democratic Party had a schism;
1 (in 1988) was to draw attention to the fact that electors could vote for someone other than the person who won the popular vote for the state;
1 (in 2000) was a protest for the lack of Congressional representation for the District of Columbia;
the remaining 4 were for reasons unknown.

Of all the 165 faithless electors, seventy-one were only 'faithless' in the sense that they had to decide who to vote for when the candidate for whom people had voted had died; naturally, they switched their votes to the next party choice. As I've noted before, almost all of the others mark elections in which there was widespread discontent with at least one of the candidates, so that the Electoral College is actually capturing a sense of the people that would otherwise be ignored. This registering of discontent at the circumstances of the election itself is not something most election systems do (in general, I think, only elections with 'none of the above' options do better at it), but it is quite valuable for taking the measure of the election. And as far as I am aware, the Electoral College is the only election system that has registered the fact that there are people who don't like the election system itself. But the poorly written state laws requiring Electors to follow the state-certified popular vote (and they seem generally to be poorly written) do not adequately take into account these kinds of situations, or indeed, any situations that the mediocre and not-notably-creative minds who usually make up state legislatures cannot foresee.

Fortnightly Book, July 5

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, they were well received but little more than that. Holmes may have been born in the novel but he was made in the short story. A new magazine, The Strand, started up in 1891, and Doyle sent in two submissions; the editor, Herbert Greenhough Smith, saw immediately that he had lucked out in getting the interest of such an excellent short-story writer so early in the game, and thus was begun the partnership that gives us Sherlock Holmes as more than an interesting character in a couple of novels. A deal was struck, and Doyle was paid a quite reasonable amount for one Holmes story a month for a year. They were extremely popular. These twelve stories were collected together in 1892 as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a ready-made bestseller. The Strand naturally renewed the offer, and Doyle continued for another year. These were serialized in the magazine as just a continuous series, entitled The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, but obviously they needed a different name when they were collected together at the end of 1893, so were given the title, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. This series, with its two collections, in a sense give us the Sherlock Holmes; they have always been the center of the Holmesian canon.

There is one quirk, though. If you count the stories in The Memoirs, you will usually find only eleven stories, despite the fact that twelve were serialized. The reason is "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box". This story has a weird publication history. It was not included in the first British edition, but was included in the first American edition; in later American editions it was suppressed. Then later British editions started including it again; but as it had by that point been included in American editions of His Last Bow, it continued to be left out of the American editions. In the meantime, when the story had been left out of the original British edition, a passage from it was put at the beginning of "The Adventure of the Resident Patient". In any case, as it happens my omnibus edition leaves the adventure out of The Memoirs and puts it with His Last Bow, so that's what I'll be going with.

As these are the classic Holmes stories, a number of them were adapted to radio -- far, far too many for me to listen to them all while also reading the stories, particularly given that my second summer class begins tomorrow (while my first continues). But I might do a few of those as well.

Nguyễn Du, The Song of Kiều

Introduction

Opening Passage:

It's an old story: good luck and good looks
don't always mix.
Tragedy is circular and infinite.
The plain never believe it,
but good-looking people meet with hard times too.

It's true.
Our ending is inevitable:
long years betray the beautiful.

This manuscript is ancient, priceless,
bamboo-rolled, perfumed with musty spices.
Sit comfortably by this good light, that you may learn
the hard-won lesson that these characters contain. (p. 5)

Summary: Vương Thúy Kiều is a beautiful and brilliant and honest young maiden with an extraordinary talent for poetry. One day she is visiting her ancestor's graves for the Tomb-Sweeping Festival and comes across an untended grave, that of Đạm Tiên, another beautiful and brilliant woman, and she has a premonition that this will be her fate as well. She burns some incense and says a prayer on the spot, and uses her hairpin to carve a poem on the nearby tree. A strange whirlwind shakes the tree, bringing a strange perfume, and they suddenly notice footprints in the nearby moss.

Kiều says: 'See the fierce power of a poem.
Learn how words can leap across the years.
She is my sister, though I am alive and she is dead.' (p. 9)

In thanks for the sign, she carves another poem in the tree bark, and at that moment a young man and a white horse comes by, Trọng Kim. Kim and Kiều fall in love at first sight. That night, however, Kiều has a dream in which she is visited by Đạm Tiên, who says that they are both part of "the Company of Sadness / of all those who are doomed / to live and die with a broken heart" (p. 11).

Love between Kiều and Kim continues to develop, and it eventually proceeds to promises of eternal love and marriage. Before this can happen, though, Kim's uncle dies, and he has to leave for several months to attend to matters related to that. While he is gone, Kiều's parents run into severe financial difficulties, and the only thing that will keep her father and brother out of punishment is if Kiều marries a wealthy man, Mã, and becomes his concubine. This is a serious matter, the most serious kind of matter in a culture that takes filial piety as a central virtue. With great grief, she agrees to marry Mã.

Mã, however, is a man of the worst sort, and he immediately turns around and sells her into prostitution; indeed, that is part of how Mã is so rich, he is a finder for a brothel run by Madame Tú. Kiều attempts at first to resist and then to commit suicide, but she is no match for Madame Tú, who has long experience in forcing girls into compliance, and she eventually gives in and becomes a prostitute, a very high-dollar one because of her beauty. She lives in misery for some time until a young man from a wealthy family, named Thúc, falls in love with her and marries her as his concubine. They live well enough for a short time -- "moon and flower", as the Vietnamese phrase goes -- but Thúc has a first wife whom he has been avoiding this entire time, Hoạn, a woman from a very powerful family. She resents very much the idea of Thúc having a second wife, and even more the fact that he hides her from it, and she is one of those people who is perfect on the outside, the better to stab you in the back unexpectedly. She works out an elaborate plan to have Kiều kidnapped then enslaved -- to Hoạn herself. Needless to say, this makes life in Thúc's household very awkward, particularly as Thúc cannot do anything about it, given the sheer importance of his wife's family, and Hoạn, always putting her barbs and provocations in the form of smiles and jokes, gives him no room to maneuver.

Kiều is saved from this by the power of poetry, which is a recurring theme in the work. She writes a poem so extraordinarily heart-rending that Hoạn herself melts enough to give Kiều the option of becoming a Buddhist nun and tending a shrine on the estate. This gives Kiều some small space, but only for a time; Hoạn surprises Thúc going out to talk to Kiều, and Kiều realizes that it is not, in fact, going to get better. But being an attendant at the shrine gives her an opportunity to run away that she had not had before, and she takes it, stealing some of the implements of the shrine to make her way. She comes to a Buddhist temple, where she gives the stolen implements and is taken care of by the nun, Giác Duyên. However, when Giác Duyên discovers that the implements were stolen, she notes to Kiều that this is eventually going to catch up to her if she stays at the temple. To hide her better, Giác Duyên sets her up with a local family that give lavishly to the temple, the Bạc family.

Unfortunately, we have been here before; the Bạc family is so wealthy because Madame Bạc runs a brothel, and thus Kiều is forced into prostitution again. So it goes until she meets the well-favored rebel lord, Từ Hải, a tall, handsome, broad-shoulder, larger-than-life, and utterly unconquerable man. They hit it off immediately, and Từ Hải gets Madame Bạc to agree to a price for her -- not that Madame Bạc has any negotiation leverage with him. They have an intense marriage, and Từ Hải goes off and conquers much of the south. Kiều is a rebel queen. It is in many ways very satisfying; Kiều is able to reward those who have helped her, and punish those who showed her no mercy. (Lady Hoạn, despite her villainy, she spares because of that brief mercy that had been given due to the poem.)

A new governor comes to power in the south of the Empire, however, Hồ Tôn Hiến (Hu Zongxian), and he is a cunning man. Realizing that Từ Hải is just too good at military matters for direct handling, he pinpoints exactly what Từ Hải's weakness is: Kiều, on whom he dotes, and whose advice he takes seriously. The governor thus sends Từ Hải a message, framing it in a way that he hopes will get Kiều's favor, offering Từ Hải amnesty and confirmation of his authority if he will meet and given a nominal allegiance to the Emperor. The message succeeds. Kiều advises the rebel lord to take the offer and Từ Hải goes to the meeting and is murdered in an ambush (although, being the man he is, he dies fighting and on his feet, unbowing even past death). Hồ Tôn Hiến marries her off to a local official.

Qiao, the historical character on whom Kiều is based, betrayed the pirate Xu Hai to Hu Zongxian in hope of reward; when Hu Zongxian reneged on his side of the deal, she committed suicide by throwing herself into a river, remorseful for having betrayed a decent man for a reward she could not even get. Kiều has been more noble and innocent than her historical exemplar, but she too is overcome with remorse at having been the one weakness of Từ Hải, and when she comes to the Tiền Đường (Qiantang) River, to the very spot where Đạm Tiên had met her own death, Kiều throws herself into the river to die.

But the Tale of Kiều does not end here. This is part of the power of poetry: it cannot make the world go right, but it has a power that goes beyond even death. Qiao's story ended with her suicide. Kiều's does not. Giác Duyên, the Buddhist nun, fishes out Kiều from the river and revives her. Kiều has died, but it was in her case a symbolic death, not a literal one. As she has passed through the waters of death, Đạm Tiên is able to erase her name from the register of the Company of Sadness in reward for her goodness through such terrible things. The past cannot be undone. Fifteen years have passed since that fateful day of ancestral rites; and the hardships Kiều has faced necessarily leave their mark. But Kiều, who in a sense has already died her death from a broken heart, is now freed. And while things can never be quite the same again, there is one person whose story also matters here: Kim.

Allen's translation was very readable. From what I could tell, occasionally comparing the translation with the original Vietnamese, the translation is sometimes closer and sometimes looser, and certainly much less flowery. As the original is infinitely beyond my limited and fragmentary Vietnamese, I can't really judge the quality of most of the translation, whether it was good or bad in general as translation of the poetry itself. Timothy Allen, the translator, faced a difficult task. Vietnamese is a language that tends easily to poetry; it has a very rich poetic diction, full of allusions that make perfect sense to those who have lived all their lives with them, but certainly not easy to convey in a language whose poetic diction is often very different. But what I can say is that I think he made one very crucial and valuable choice in his translation: he prioritized the narrative. This is a very readable translation; it still captures some of the poetic floweriness at times, but Allen generally prefers the way of translating that won't bog down the reader, and he succeeds. This is a good move; it's absolutely essential not to let narrative poetry get too slow and turgid, and I can recommend Allen's translation quite highly because of it.

Favorite Passage:

Her fingers dance about the strings
and the scent of sandalwood grows more intense.
Is this the butterfly that dreamed it was Zhuangzi,
or is Zhuangzi dreaming of his wings again?
Is this that king who became every cuckoo
to mourn from every mountainside
the loss of his land and his love?
Clear notes drop like pearls into a moonlit bay
and shimmer like the heat from sun-warmed jade.

He listens to the weave and weft of the five tones
and it thrills his heart.

'But is this the same melody you used to play,' he says.
'It sounds so cheerful now, though it was sad before.
Why does it sound so different?'

'Probably I lacked the skill before,' says Kiều.
'These fingers on these strings have caused me so much grief.
But now you've heard my little tune
the way it should be played,
I'll put away my lute. That was my final song.' (pp. 148-149)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*********

Nguyễn Du, The Song of Kiều, tr. Timothy Allen, Penguin (New York: 2019).

The Goddess Comes, She Moves Divinely Fair

His Excellency General Washington
by Phillis Wheatley

Celestial choir! enthron'd in realms of light,
Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring's fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven's revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!

The Goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds Her golden hair:
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber'd charms and recent graces rise.

Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates
How pour her armies through a thousand gates,
As when Eolus heaven's fair face deforms,
Enwrapp'd in tempest and a night of storms;
Astonish'd ocean feels the wild uproar,
The refluent surges beat the sounding shore;
Or think as leaves in Autumn's golden reign,
Such, and so many, moves the warrior's train.
In bright array they seek the work of war,
Where high unfurl'd the ensign waves in air.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know'st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in peace and honors—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam'd for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!

One century scarce perform'd its destined round,
When Gallic powers Columbia's fury found;
And so may you, whoever dares disgrace
The land of freedom's heaven-defended race!
Fix'd are the eyes of nations on the scales,
For in their hopes Columbia's arm prevails.
Anon Britannia droops the pensive head,
While round increase the rising hills of dead.
Ah! Cruel blindness to Columbia's state!
Lament thy thirst of boundless power too late.

Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side,
Thy ev'ry action let the Goddess guide.
A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine,
With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine.

Wheatley sent this poem to Washington in October 1775; he replied with a thank-you letter in February of 1776; it seems to have been put in a pile of correspondence and only rediscovered that February when Washington was going through his papers. He then seems to have sent his thanks and showed the letter to Joseph Reed, with a comment that he had considered having it published, but decided he could not because it would like vanity; Reed seems to have taken this as permission to publish it himself, and it was published in Pennsylvania Magazine in April of 1776, as fitting a poetic preface to the rest of the year as any could be.

Wheatley, I think, had the great misfortune of being re-discovered in exactly that period of criticism least sympathetic to all the poetic arts at which she excelled, and least able to appreciate her excellence in them. One thinks of James Weldon Johnson's comment that she was not a great poet but an important one, which is the sort of damning with faint and condescending praise to which she has been continually subjected. And it is all based on entirely arbitrary notions. There is no universal poet; even Virgil or Dante or Du Fu could not have managed that. Every great poet is great at something. Wheatley's greatest strength is personal portraiture; this is an extremely difficult poetic field, and there have only been a handful of poets who are even as good at it as she is.

One of the nice features of the portraiture here (and one reason why Washington may have liked it), that is, the focus on person as such, is that instead of simply pouring out epithets on Washington, it frames him indirectly. We get Columbia, Columbia's armies, then Washington himself, but even the latter is as representing the former. This is good portraiture work, and not at all easy. All of Wheatley's portraiture is good; she is a poet who sees people.

But she's also more technically colorful than poets like Milton or Pope, and thus (despite being heavily influenced by the latter) is easily distinguished as not merely imitative; we see this in this eulogy on Washington for his victories against the French. What strikes me today is the restrained but excellent use of mixed alliteration and assonance as well as meter and rhyme to tie the poem together:

Celestial choir! enthron'd in realms of light,
Columbia's scenes of glorious toils I write.
While freedom's cause her anxious breast alarms,
She flashes dreadful in refulgent arms.
See mother earth her offspring's fate bemoan,
And nations gaze at scenes before unknown!
See the bright beams of heaven's revolving light
Involved in sorrows and the veil of night!

And, of course, we have the soundplay with refulgent and her offspring and with revolving and involved, which connect alliteratively with the v in veil, and the pattern scenes, see, scenes, see. None of this can really be done in a strained mechanical way, and that it is not an accident can be seen by continuing through the poem. She uses meter and rhyme as a trellis, and then runs through a vast and ever-changing array poetic devices and techniques; her metric verse is more free than most free verse.

The Misbegotten Subtleties of Malicious Wits

For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice. By reason of all this, providence decrees that, through obstinate factions and desperate civil wars, they shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection than the first men had been made by the barbarism of sense. For the latter displayed a generous savagery, against which one could defend oneself or take flight or be on one's guard; but the former, with a base savagery, under soft words and embraces, plots against the life and fortune of friends and intimates. Hence peoples who have reached this point of premeditated malice, when they receive this last remedy of providence and are thereby stunned and brutalized, are sensible no longer of comforts, delicacies, pleasures and pomp, but only of the sheer necessities of life.

[Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Bergin & Fisch, trs., Cornell UP (Ithaca, NY: 1984) pp. 423-424.]