book report: Isaac Newton, The Last Sorceror (Michael White)

I’m too thick to understand Newton’s mathematical/scientific work, but heard he was an interesting chap so got Michael White’s biography second-hand for 50 pence on Amazon, and lugged it around for years from Germany to Italy, before finally reading it this summer. It’s a good enough work, mostly because Newton’s life & character were so astonishing it would be hard to write a dull biography of the man. Far from just sitting under an apple tree then retiring to Cambridge chambers for his entire life, he was also Warden of the Mint and became a spymaster, running espionage rings to uncover forgeries & forgers. The austere, seemingly asexual mathematical/scientific genius would be the boss Clint Eastwood’s Secret Service agent reports to after shooting a bunch of counterfeiters in In The Line of Fire:

Despite being stupid, I found White’s accounts of Newton’s scientific/mathematical work fascinating. One has something of the received glow of intellect which, I think, draws non-philosophers to Wittgenstein. Curiously, they both attended Trinity College, and both lived there for years; I’d be interested to know how close their rooms were, over the centuries.

White’s subtitle – The Last Sorcerer – refers to Newton’s decades-long study of alchemy:

Venerated by alchemists throughout history, it was said of Hermes Trismegistus that he ‘saw the totality of things. Having seen, he understood. Having understood, he had the power to reveal and show. And indeed what he knew, he wrote down. What he wrote he mostly hid away, keeping silence rather than speaking out, so that every generation coming into the world had to seek out these things.’

A Wittgensteinian resonance here, the opening and close of the Tractatus. The apparent foibles and silliness (as Auden would say) of many great thinkers is not a contradiction but rather the precondition for their achievements; hence the mystical impulse in Wittgenstein, the alchemical quest of Newton, join onto their more practical efforts:

Newton had acquired the information he needed to verify his lunar mechanics, and used it in the second edition of the Principia. It was this work that lay at the heart of computer programs employed by NASA scientists guiding the first spaceships to the Moon almost 300 years later. 

The biography is quite serviceable, though there is occasionally a sense of the immense gap between the subject and biographer; White is a second-rater, not terrible, just nothing special, and he also launches into unfounded assertions (e.g. that Newton was probably having sex with X) and anti-Catholic vitriol, e.g.:

[Alexander] Pope’s opposition to Newtonianism sprang from a rich vein of religious bigotry.

I googled White, curious to see if his real name was Weiss, and found he was a second-rate pop star in the 80s, and wrote a biography of Tolkien; and surprise surprise the Tolkien biography is full of assertions like “Tolkien was a fanatical Catholic idiot who hated X because he was a Protestant”.

It’s amusing to speculate, what would Isaac Newton have thought of an ex-80s pop star writing his biography, in the last years of the 20th Century?

book report: The 30 Years War, CV Wedgwood

Published in 1938, this study of the ghastly conflict which wasted large swathes of early 17th-Century Europe is almost impossible to follow due to the chain of chaotic event, and various kings bearing the same names; but it’s very well-, humanly-written, and it avoids too much harping on contemporary politics. I probably should have made notes of which king is which and which war is started by which, for what purpose; at the end I was reminded of a line from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men, as the police come across a drug-related crime scene:

Cop: It’s a mess, aint it?

Sheriff: If it aint, it’ll do till the mess gets here.

I enjoyed it in spite of frequently forgetting what was going on, just for the splendid, pre-corporate/Theory academic prose, e.g.:

The energy of the educated was perverted into the writing of scurrilous books, which were joyfully received by an undiscriminating public. The Calvinists exhorted all true believers to violence and took special delight in the more bloodthirsty psalms. But the Catholics and Lutherans were not innocent and force was everywhere the proof of true faith. The Lutherans set upon the Calvinists in the streets of Berlin; Catholic priests in Bavaria carried firearms in self-defence; in Dresden the mob stopped the funeral of an Italian Catholic and tore the corpse in pieces; a Protestant pastor and a Catholic priest came to blows in the streets of Frankfort on the Main, and Calvinist services in Styria were frequently interrupted by Jesuits disguised among the congregation who would tweak the prayer book from the hands of the worshipper and deftly substitute a breviary. 

Wedgwood is very good at bringing the distant – event or person – near, telescoping centuries:

There was one other influence to be reckoned with in the household of the Elector Palatine, his wife Elizabeth. This princess combined buoyant health and high spirits with character, intelligence and beauty. Her loveliness was that of colour and animation, and her begrimed and faded portraits can do no more than indicate a forgotten glory. The splendour of auburn hair, the subtlety of flushed cheek and swift gesture, the expressive changes of the shrewd, observant eyes and witty mouth, mirrors of that ‘wild humour’ which scandalized and bewitched her contemporaries – these are lost for ever. Her letters give us fragmentary flashes of the brave, frivolous soul, fragments too of the harder substance beneath, a courage matched by resolution in which obstinacy and pride played their part.

The Thirty Years war, actually a series of overlapping conflicts between Sweden, Austria, Spain, Denmark, France, England, various Germanic principalities, and probably others I’ve forgotten, presents a tableau of utter savagery and utter indifference, and resilience. There is a hard contrast between the rulers, who continued a mostly untroubled life of luxury, and their brutalized subjects, e.g.

In Spain itself the bankrupt Court maintained its façade of dazzling splendour. The King was growing old, his health was failing and he was much given to melancholy and religion; he continued nevertheless to pour out money on masques and theatres, bull-fights, mistresses and bastards.

And the war on the ground:

Wantonly destructive, the soldiery set fire to villages and slaughtered such cattle as they did not drive off. In their lust for plunder they dug up the graveyards for concealed treasure, combed the woods in which the homeless peasants had taken refuge, and shot down those they found, in order to steal their ragged bundles of savings and household goods.  They wrecked the churches, and when a pastor, braver than the rest, denied them entrance, they cut off his hands and feet and left him bleeding on the altar, a mangled sacrifice to his Protestant God. Nor did they spare those of their own faith; at the convent of Amelungsborn they ripped up the vestments and shattered the organ, carried off the chalices and ransacked even the graves of the nuns.

The people were slaughtered, tortured, starved. But as Wedgwood points out, it was not common for rulers to feel any responsibility towards the ruled. After three decades, about 8 million in the German realms came to an end:

The German Empire, including Alsace but excluding the Netherlands and Bohemia, probably numbered about twenty-one millions in 1618, and rather less than thirteen and a half millions in 1648.

So, an enjoyable read but perhaps not an altogether easy one.

the white awakening

One of my favourite bloggers is the Z Man, a grumpy 50-something who lives in Baltimore. I especially enjoy his lack of illusions about blacks – in Europe I’m surrounded by people who think evolution has granted the non-white invaders different skin colour to the whites (and bone density, and susceptibility to diseases like malaria, cancer, etc.) but identical brains, and thus they only behave differently because of culture: for the purple-pilled, the fault lies in Islam or the gangster-ghetto subculture typically embraced by e.g. Turks in Germany or Pakistanis in Britain; for the blue-pilled, all the blame can be laid at the feet of the white devil.

I was wondering how the Z Man could be so clear and open about the difference between whites & blacks. It’s not because he’s American, as I know several American conservatives who would sputter with incredulity & indignation if one so much as pointed out differences in IQ between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. I know several people who simply claim there is no difference, and handwave away decades of studies, not to mention corroborating evidence such as school results, as a far-right conspiracy; I dare say that even if they could be persuaded that there is a difference, they would say that no one should talk about it, and it must all be the white man’s fault anyway.

So how come the Z Man is so based? I was puzzling over it then remembered he lives in Baltimore. Baltimore is apparently about 62% black. Here are the crime statistics, compared to the US as a whole:

Most whites are not really racially conscious, in contrast to the non-white invaders in Europe, and the blacks in America. As the Z Man wrote once, black identity is formed entirely around their opposition to whites: if whites didn’t exist, blacks would have to invent them. The Muslim invaders in Europe are a little more complex: the less violent Muslims can form an identity as Muslims, and it’s only as one proceeds down the spectrum of violence that you find a Muslim identity which depends upon its hatred of the white Europeans who work & pay taxes to fund the largely welfare-dependent Muslim population.

Identity is formed through opposition to that which you are not. It can be wholly negative, as seems the case with African Americans (judging from across the Atlantic Ocean), a matter of resentment and hatred. It can be positive, as e.g. the sheltered hobbits return to the Shire after Moria, after Mordor, and value its peace & safety as never before.

My guess is that as whites become minorities in Europe and North America, a sense of white identity will become the norm; at present it is mostly only explicit among the skinhead types and intellectuals on the dissident Right – but just as (judging from media) all American blacks have a strong sense of themselves as being black and having been ill-treated by the white devil, so there will be more & more whites who accept that they prefer to be around other whites, that the Pakistanis, Turks, Sudanese, Libyans, Arabs, Somalis, are just not like us and most of them actually want to kill us. From Die Hard 3:

Zeus (another amusing point – American blacks always seem to have the most ridonkolous names) doesn’t hate whites, he just doesn’t want to have anything to do with them, apart from sending his kids to colleges founded by whites, teaching courses created by whites, but hey nothing’s perfect.

White identity, as it already exists, is largely negative, and associated with the early skinhead movements, and of course it often namechecks Hitler and the Nazis. It will be interesting to see if this will influence a future white identity.

My guess is that white identity will become widespread round about the point whites are clearly a minority in the countries their ancestors built; and when it’s clear that the invaders resent & hate the whites. There will most likely come a window of opportunity, as the situation is bad enough to awaken a sense of white identity; but not so bad as to ensure defeat in a military struggle (for at that point, there will no longer be a political solution).

age

A friend sent me a link to this video by James, ‘Sit Down’:

He commented: “Interesting that this song was mostly meaningless in its presentation as teenage anthem but as old jaded honest man with no pretensions, it reveals its true beauty.”

The lyrics:

I’ll sing myself to sleep
A song from the darkest hour
Secrets I can’t keep
Inside of the day
Swing from high to deep
Extremes of sweet and sour
Hope that God exists
I hope I pray

Drawn by the undertow
My life is out of control
I believe this wave will bear my weight
So let it flow

Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down, down, down, down, down
In sympathy

Now I’m relieved to hear
That you’ve been to some far out places
It’s hard to carry on
When you feel all alone
Now I’ve swung back down again
It’s worse than it was before
If I hadn’t seen such riches
I could live with being poor
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down, down, down, down, down
In sympathy

Those who feel the breath of sadness
Sit down next to me
Those who find they’re touched by madness
Sit down next to me
Those who find themselves ridiculous
Sit down next to me
Love, in fear, in hate, in tears

Down
Down

Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down, down, down, down, down
In sympathy

Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down, down, down, down, down
In sympathy

Down

The 1989 original, which I always disliked:

I feel that the lyrics only make sense sung by an ageing man (Tim Booth was born in 1960, so 29 when the original was released, 60 now in 2020). It’s something to hold onto as I myself age; I lack the brilliance of my early 20s; the raw cognitive drive isn’t there anymore, but I have wrinkles and greying hair to make up for it.

awakening

Morpheus initiates Neo:

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.

I have always felt there was something fundamentally awry with the world. It is why I could never have been a peace & love hippy; I felt that the world was a war, and I was myself at war with either the world or large & powerful elements therein.

As an old dog of advancing years, I am sure there is something metaphysically wrong with the world; and all therein – which includes myself. So, I am at war with myself also.

I was not the first to feel so.

For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin. For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. If then I do that which I would not, I consent unto the law that it is good. Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

(Romans 7. 14-19)

or, auf Deutsch:

Denn wir wissen, daß das Gesetz geistlich ist; ich aber bin fleischlich, unter die Sünde verkauft. Denn ich weiß nicht, was ich tue. Denn ich tue nicht, was ich will; sondern was ich hasse, das tue ich. Wenn ich aber das tue, was ich nicht will, so gebe ich zu, daß das Gesetz gut ist. So tue nun nicht ich es, sondern die Sünde, die in mir wohnt. Denn ich weiß, daß in mir, das heißt in meinem Fleisch*, nichts Gutes wohnt. Wollen habe ich wohl, aber das Gute vollbringen kann ich nicht. Denn das Gute, das ich will, das tue ich nicht; sondern das Böse, das ich nicht will, das tue ich. Wenn ich aber tue, was ich nicht will, so tue nicht ich es, sondern die Sünde, die in mir wohnt.

If, as I believe, the world is essentially corrupted by evil (and the world is all that is the case, Die Welt ist alles was der Fall ist) then this is true not merely for oddball Quiggs such as myself, but for Steve and Dave, Rich, Eric, and Todd, all the normies. They are merely unaware, because their nature is more aligned to the world’s. They strive to remain in ignorance, to believe the world and the powers that be are right & good, in spite of considerably evidence; they devote themselves to the illusion of comfort. Eppur si muove. 

In American politics, the essential conflict & evil is being raised to the surface of even normie consciousness. Q has worked for the last 2.5 years to create awareness of the secret war, against not merely Democrat corruption but literal Satanists

and paedophiles. This is one inadvertent use of evil: to awaken the non-evil. As Q posted, after these pictures:

These people need to ALL be ELIMINATED.

Those who know cannot sleep.

Q

Perhaps, in such a light, the grim look on Trump’s face makes more sense here:

knowing what he knows, having seen what he has seen, to be questioned by sneering left-wing propagandists, who would titter at a raped child and then go for a frappuccino, must be galling.

Meanwhile major US cities are ablaze, with hordes of Antifa and assorted criminals burning, looting, and murdering while the police stand back with folded arms. It seems to me that everyone is being brought to an awareness that the world is not, in fact, a jolly pleasant place where good chaps get ahead, but rather a warzone of insane violence & evil.

The Leftists will presumably blame Orange Man Bad for everything, including left-wing terrorists burning down their neighbourhoods while left-wing politicians instruct the police to stand down. For Johnny Prog, the evil in the world is due to white racism and can only be remedied by subjugating and/or exterminating the white race and certain of its productions (chiefly Christianity). That many of these progs are themselves white, of pure Germanic/Scandinavian stock, makes no difference at all.

For the rest, the sense of evil is more complex: contra the tediously fixated anti-semites, our ills cannot be traced to one race or ideology (even if one particular race is vastly over-represented). In a sense, the Q project is Pizzagate writ large – to awaken people to the widespread evil of our elites; and to direct that awareness.

My guess is that the 2020 American election will be a battle of competing blaming: between the progs who know Orange Man Bad is responsible for everything bad that ever happened; and those who (however faintly) discern the corruption of not merely politics but of the world itself, and who see the financial & cultural & political elites lining up to attack Orange Man Bad, and think, “well if the world has long been full of evil and spiritual wickedness in high places, if the elite is full of paedophiles and Satanists, and now CNN and the New York Times and George W Bush and Obama are attacking Orange Man Bad, then maybe Orange Man Bad is actually Orange Man Good.”

If the full details on Anthony Weiner’s laptop are released before November, it could set the progressives to make a hard choice – between recognising the evil of paedophilia, and the wholly invented evil of Orange Man Bad; I am frankly baffled that anyone could see Trump as evil – an obnoxious, abrasive asshole, yes, but evil…?

One way or another the American people will have to face evil, the flaw in the world.

For this reason, I think there will also be a religious revival, most likely Christianity since it is familiar, and it addresses evil, indeed places evil at the centre of its theology.

a song of hope

There are some songs I play when feeling both down & trapped, hopeless. Here is one, Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solsbury Hill’:

The lyrics are obscure but there is a sense of imprisonment and then freedom:

To keep in silence I resigned
My friends would think I was a nut
Turning water into wine
Open doors would soon be shut
So I went from day to day
Though my life was in a rut
‘Til I thought of what I’ll say
Which connection I should cut
I was feeling part of the scenery
I walked right out of the machinery
My heart going boom, boom, boom
“Hey”, he said, “grab your things, I’ve come to take you home”

A comment on the video:

Thomas Bernhard, in many respects raised by his grandfather. I had no one like this in my life, but I became skilled at concealment & evasion. In a sense, most of my life has been a failed attempt to escape from a senseless, violent reality. I was browsing /pol last night and found an amusing thread, beginning:

A going home, a liberation.

film report: Heartbreak Ridge

Part of the old but not too old Clint Eastwood series of films, including In the Line of Fire and Unforgiven. Here, he’s Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway, a badass Korea/Nam veteran who ends up in charge of an (implausibly slovenly) Marine Recon platoon. My favourite parts of (the many) special forces memoirs I’ve read were the training sections, just as my favourite part of Full Metal Jacket was the first half with Sgt Hartman; so here, you basically have a film which is 75% training, but training with Clint Eastwood at his most vicious and acerbic, calling people faggots and homos, disrespecting Big Ed Hurley/Stilgar who plays his stupid boss, and punching huge Swedes in the jaw. The last 25% is the Marines taking on the Grenada jaunt, it’s actually a good choice as they are far too green and boyish for anything serious & harrowing.

It strikes me as a slightly bitter love song to the Corps; not sure if it would make sense with today’s tranny-LGBT US military but certainly it captures some of the atmosphere of the pre-decadence US military, as a second home, in some ways a better home for men like Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway.

the soy face and mortal salience

The soy boy grin has been around for a good few years. Typical characteristics: facial hair and glasses; eyebrows lifted, mouth agape:

 

I was always disturbed by this affectation of amazed jollity. I don’t remember anyone ever posing like this 20 years ago, when I was at university; or 15 years ago, when I was doing office work in England, or any time over the last decade in Germany and Italy. The closest I’ve come to witnessing this grotesque phenomenon was on the Facebook pages of my American colleagues: the men almost invariably sported a dead-eyed grin; I was a little freaked out by the utter lack of expression in the eyes but just put it down to Americans being American – back in the 1940s or 50s, WH Auden noted that Americans seem weirdly unaged and adolescent in their physiognomy, as if they all get plastic surgery in their late 20s. For example, compare a typical American face with a European; the American Matt Damon, in his boyish late 40s:

and the European man, Ernst Jünger:

There’s something smooth and unimprintable about the average American face, perhaps a reflection of the country’s relative youth. There are exceptions, but they are precisely that, exceptions. Perhaps it’s not so much the genetics as the land: for expatriates like Ezra Pound ended up looking as gnarly and engraved by fate & suffering as any European; it’s as if, living in Europe, palimpsest of battlefields, one naturally ends up looking like a warzone:

 

A far cry indeed from the soy boy look:

The soy boy face takes the ahistorical American look to its extreme: these grown men affect neotenous characteristics, attempting to look like surprised infants. Perhaps it is a sexual signal to dominant, paedophiliac homosexuals; or perhaps it is a submission signal, as it were saying “I’m just a baby, I pose no threat!”. The underlying cultural force is, I feel, even more disturbing: it isn’t merely an r-selected mannerism, or an attempt to retreat into infancy; it’s an attempt to retreat from life itself, to neuter & emasculate our mortal existence, to render both life and death meaningless, matter for frivolity, for a blank gaping rictus (the second skeleton from left):

The old Europeans faced death like Max von Sydow’s knight in The Seventh Seal, ready to play chess with the devil himself, almost unsmiling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDZccLLzJL4

Anonymous Conservative recently wrote, in a comment on his blog:

John Jost showed in studies, mortality stimuli ignites K in the brain. Even a picture of a grave stone or a hearse makes people turn more conservative on questionnaires taken right after them. 

Death and pain are the great, unavoidable, tutors of our existence. The fact that the soy face looks so much like a grinning skeleton suggests, to me, something coming full circle in our culture. Mortality salience will bear upon the soy boy very differently to Von Sydow’s Antonius Block; Block coolly challenges Death to a game of chess:

Block knows death well, having fought in the Crusades, having killed. And even for him, the prospect of death is unwelcome, disconcerting. For the soy boy, the exemplar of our modern, degenerate post-civilisation, full mortal salience will come as a mind-shattering terror, as the approach of an unpropitiated god.