Monthly Archives: October 2020

conspiracies, Archbishop Viganò

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We’re getting to the point where Alex Jonesian conspiracy theories have gone from being an entertaining intellectual diversion to a sound predictive model. In a sense, they were always a reasonably good guide to the future (more surveillance, less freedom), but the correlation was not so exact, and the final destination still seemed improbably distant & surreal. Before 2015, studying conspiracy theories was like watching a horror movie when you’re safe & snug at home, with a warming drink: the titillation of letting yourself get scared, knowing that you yourself are fine. Since the so-called migrant crisis, and especially now with the organised panic of Covid-19, it’s maybe more like reading about wolf pack attacks & tactics as you hear the howling in the distance, and your cat won’t go outside anymore, and Eastern European strangers turn up at your door reeking of garlic and offering cryptic remarks about that which cannot die, and your phone signal just cut out, and your massive TV keeps playing the monolith scene from 2001, and when you look for reassuring naughty teacher porn your browser redirects you to Hunter Biden dick pics, and the milk soured in the fridge, and the ravens have all departed.

When I was younger, I liked Neil Gaiman’s line from his Sandman comics: “any view of things that is not strange is false”. As a wide-eyed youth I just liked the idea that maybe the surrounding banality & mediocrity was not final; years later, I had enough “supernatural” experiences, that I accepted our reality as indeed stranger than we normally suppose. And yet I still find it hard to accept just how evil our rulers are – not so much the apparent rulers, the bumbling Boris, for example, as his masters. Increasingly, the evidence I accrue leads to dark theories. I know that there are malevolent non-physical intelligences, demons if you will, but I always found it hard to imagine they could interact with us in a more than haphazard, opportunistic fashion, serial killer style. And yet, it seems they can.

A letter from Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop of Ulpiana, to Donald Trump:

community

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Here in Italy, the town hall is called the Comune. The word sounds strange to me, amidst a city, for there is little, if anything, of community in any place larger than a village. It occurred to me, the sense of community or lack thereof is one reason city-dwellers are usually Lefties, and country folk on the Right: if we take the following as indicators of the Left:

1. Support for a big government to control as much as possible (child education; what the citizens are allowed to say, eat, drink, read, watch; the health services, etc.)

2. Support for unrestricted, mass immigration from the Third World.

3. Lack of concern for Western civilisation or demographics; indeed, some degree of hostility towards the West.

then cities would naturally attract Lefties, and further encourage these three traits. In a village or small town, there is little need for top-down organisation – everyone knows everyone else, most people naturally cooperate to avoid ostracism & shaming; the group size is small enough that bureaucracy and bureaucrats are unnecessary. In a town of e.g. 200,000 let alone 10 million, organisation takes on a wholly different character & necessity. Extrapolating from the city’s needs, the city dweller tends to think the answer to everything is a government office issuing forms and fines, warnings & adjurations. It is hard, for the city dweller, to accept that there is a limit beyond which bureaucracy becomes cancerous & stultifying; because in the city, things would rapidly disintegrate into Mad Max-style chaos without the police, without the government.

There is no community in the city. A city is an agglomeration of people more or less randomly thrown together, trying to avoid too much contact with each other. The closest one comes to community in the city is the micro-community, e.g. the tennis club, the regulars in their local pub; city dwellers will pay to avoid their neighbours, to have thicker walls, fences, to be able to drive instead of taking public transport. The fantasy of the city dweller is one of isolation amidst variety: to drive through the city in a large car, and if they have to walk anywhere they will immediately plug into an iphone and listen to a TED-talk. For the city man, others exist only to serve or admire him – they are otherwise an inconvenience or a threat.

Without a sense for the community, for the culture (that which underlies civilisation), why should a man appreciate, let alone defend, the West? The community – that slowly-built, nuanced network of relationship & responsibility – is replaced by a large, impersonal bureaucracy; for the meadow, the machine. 

For the city man, community is just an old-fashioned word, a scary Right-wing concept (Blut und Boden). So why object to millions of 3rd-world immigrants? Mohammed and Jamal are willing to work illegally for less than the minimum wage, and so what if crime immediately soars, that’s why you pay more to live in an all-white neighbourhood and drive everywhere in a BMW instead of having to take the train or bus, and eventually you move out of the city altogether because Mohammed and Jamal are basically everywhere now, so you move into a suburb or even into the country and complain about how right-wing everyone is. 

In the city, the only freedom is that of consumption; the city man is free to go shopping, to spend his money in as many ways as the city can dream. He can buy things; his identity is formed not by his actions, by e.g. how well he maintains his property or if he helps his neighbours, but by his brand clothing, his car. In the city, mass immigration merely increases the varieties of consumption, from prostitution to food.

It is telling that for the Leftist, immigration is typically justified by appeal to ethnic cuisine, a mess of pottage. For the man who denies meaning to extended human relationships (extended into time in ancestral respect and care for one’s descendants; extended into space in community), what could possibly have more value than stuffing your face with food? Why not sacrifice a Lebensform, a non-physical form of life, a community comprising not merely those alive today but their ancestors, if you can try a new ethnic dish?

Those who value community recognise that it is a lifeform of sorts, a kind of egregore; not merely a definition of the relations between the physically living, but a definer of their relations and their selves; both a constraint and a blessing; in a sense, even more alive and more precious than the individuals in whom it lives. 

book report: The Secret History, Donna Tartt

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One of the few hyped modern novels (1992) that didn’t leave me indignant & gasping at how much time and money I’d squandered. I read it in 2005 or so, in one of the darkest times of my life, suffering the most monotonous & meaningless of all office labour for 5 pounds an hour. My fancy education had proven not merely useless but actively counter-productive; as a chap I knew once remarked of himself, “I’m overqualified for everything except the worst jobs.”

It was a propitious time to read Tartt’s novel, about a gifted but impoverished student who goes to a good university (in Styxhexenhammer’s ‘hood, Vermont) and then hustles his way into an exclusive Ancient Greek course and an inner circle of rich, dandified students, one of whom is murdered by the others. This isn’t a spoiler, as the book literally begins:

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. 

This is not a whodunnit. It’s more of a whydunnit; and even that can’t really be spoiled: the point of the novel isn’t anything so sensational as murderous motivation; it’s the sense some students have, of being initiated, separated from the lesser man. In this case, the initiation is partly esoteric/magical, with scenes of literally Dionysian ecstasy, and partly that of the good scholar. 

The bland protagonist, a hustling rube from California, inveigles his way into Ancient Greek classes, which are taught by invitation only. His motivation isn’t really clear; he is himself something of a blank, a useful canvas. In the recognisably modern university, the Ancient Greek students stand out; there are five, four men & a woman, all dressed like characters from 1930s Paris. The tutor teaches Ancient Greek for free; he is an unabashed snob who only accepts as students the young, the beautiful, and the rich.

It’s very much a first novel. There were one or two inconsistencies/repetitions which had escaped the editor’s eye (and I got the feeling it had been professionally edited) and in general it betrays a juvenile ignorance of how the world works, of how people work, get paid, pay the rent, survive. But the impression I received in 2005 was confirmed on my 2020 re-reading, that it is a powerful, authentic work; indeed, the “first novel” weaknesses merely make its strengths clearer – unlike most Creative Writing exercises (e.g. everything by Ian McEwan), it’s technically messy but unmistakeably about something, and that something not a theme plucked from The Guardian; it is something personal, an expression of the author’s soul. 

I was pleased to discover that Tartt not only avoids publicity but has an unapologetically formal public persona.

Artifice as an expression of soul. The book has an unmodern sense of things; as with the novels of Thomas Bernhard, The Secret History is both of its time and not; Bernhard feels weirdly timeless and ancient because technology barely exists in his works, or only as a distant prospect (the eventuell airplane flight in Beton) or distant catastrophe (the car crash in Auslöschung), and so with The Secret History.

The Ancient Greek scholars all wear ties and drink fine vintages and gin tonics while reading Plato in the original; they own country mansions and are indifferent to money, not to mention lesser concerns such as eventual employment and a career. They exist in a rarefied world of study and excessive consumption of gin. Dissolute in their personal lives, as scholars they strive to revolt against the modern world, to inhabit the ancient:

The value of Greek prose composition, he said, was not that it gave one any particular facility in the language that could not be gained as easily by other methods but that if done properly, off the top of one’s head, it taught one to think in Greek. One’s thought patterns become different, he said, when forced into the confines of a rigid and unfamiliar tongue. Certain common ideas become inexpressible; other, previously undreamt-of ones spring to life, finding miraculous new articulation. By necessity, I suppose, it is difficult for me to explain in English exactly what I mean. I can only say that an incendium is in its nature entirely different from the feu with which a Frenchman lights his cigarette, and both are very different from the stark, inhuman pur that the Greeks knew, the pur that roared from the towers of Ilion or leapt and screamed on that desolate, windy beach, from the funeral pyre of Patroklos. 

Pur: that one word contains for me that secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs. Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. 

In a certain sense, this was why I felt so close to the others in the Greek class. They, too, knew this beautiful and harrowing landscape, centuries dead; they’d had the same experience of looking up from their books with fifth-century eyes and finding the world disconcertingly sluggish and alien, as if it were not their home.

The Ancient Greek scholars are as it were shipwrecked upon modernity; their wealth permits them a certain liberty, to dress as from a better age, to study a dead language without concern for a future livelihood, to be as the Gospels have it, in the world but not of it. But they are then subject to the laws of their chosen realm, where actions multiplies from action, and all is movement & causation & ultimately violence, always pur of one kind or another. Thus, they murder one of their own, and then fall apart into alcoholic and suicidal purgation. 

All excellence comes of separation. Pure, as suggested by the Greek pur: 

pure (adj.)
c. 1300 (late 12c. as a surname, and Old English had purlamb “lamb without a blemish”), “unmixed,” also “absolutely, entirely,” from Old French pur “pure, simple, absolute, unalloyed,” figuratively “simple, sheer, mere” (12c.), from Latin purus “clean, clear; unmixed; unadorned; chaste, undefiled,” from PIE root *peue- “to purify, cleanse” (source also of Latin putus “clear, pure;” Sanskrit pavate “purifies, cleanses,” putah “pure;” Middle Irish ur “fresh, new;” Old High German fowen “to sift”).

This necessitates not merely separation but hierarchy, order. Before writing this little post, I Googled some reviews, to see if people still esteemed it in the year of Our Lord 2020. On the second page of Google I found this gem:

With some distance now, I know that part of why I disliked the book so much was because of its characters. This was my impression of them: entitled, snobby, privileged to the point of absolute ridiculousness, dramatic, flawed in really boring ways, predictable, and English. I have nothing against the English. It’s just that they weren’t actually English. Sure, the college they all attend is in New England, but NEW England isn’t ENGLAND, okay?! But all the characters wear sport-coats, seem to use phrases like “old boy” and appear to chuckle or glare a lot. They seemed like they themselves were trying to be the characters in Brideshead Revisited.

[…]

All of them were just all so pretentious. They studied Latin and Greek with an eccentric professor who was even worse a snob than the group of friends; they hung around and lounged a lot; and they seemed to be sort of limp snobby fish. 

The Secret History is one of the few books where the reviewers could be read as ancillary characters. The whole point of the novel is to be separated from Becky and Josh, to not have a Twitter account, to not have tattoos, to not have piercings, to not advertise and market oneself, to not look like the aforementioned journalist:

They seemed to be sort of limp snobby fish, quoth the professional, mainstream “writer”; that is entirely the point – the novel is about people who wouldn’t even talk to journalists, let alone tattooed, pierced, fashionable journalists. The point is to submit oneself to study, to form and elegance and restraint, to excellence. One can only imagine the reaction of the novel’s characters, were they to meet the aforementioned journalist, covered with tattoos, studded with metal, shrieking about zir’s mental disorders.

The “Secret History” is not so much that of a group of undergraduates; it is the secret history of Western civilisation, of divine vision & genius, as described by Peter Kingsley. For all the tawdry and revolting manifestations of Western (late) civilisation, it has a secret lineage & secret order. That this book has proven so popular reassures me that many Westerners, however deracinated & debased, lean to the true vein of the West, and will finally reject the poison of modernity, and prefer the true, the beautiful, the good. 

 

by the way, which one’s Pink?

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I’ve been listening to Pink Floyd a lot recently. Until a few days ago, I only knew Wish You Were Here (1975) and ‘High Hopes’ from 1993’s The Division Bell. They are a strange band, not really typically 70s, not really typical of any time for all the psychedelia and prog-rock notes; the band itself has a shifting, chimeric identity with one of the four founders (Syd Barrett) leaving in ’68, followed by another (Richard Wright) in ’79, then the last (Roger Waters) in ’85, leaving the Pink Floyd brand to the drummer (Nick Mason) and relative latecomer Dave Gilmour, who joined the band 2 years after it was founded. As with Fleetwood Mac, only the name survived as three of the four originals left and were replaced, Ship of Theseus-like; but whereas Fleetwood Mac’s transformations mirror their fractured, selfish personae & love affairs, with Pink Floyd I feel it’s more a representation of their music’s fundamental theme: insanity, the fragility of personal identity.

The only photo of all four founders and Gilmour. Gilmour is at the bottom centre, then clockwise it’s Nick Mason with the stache, Barrett, Waters with the white scarf, and Wright.

Syd Barrett, as one would expect from the photo, went insane. Wish You Were Here features a long song suite, ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’ as a homage to the by-now vanished Barrett. Both the sound – an at times almost cacophonous jazz/rock – and the lyrics give me a sense of straying too far from sanity’s planetary orbit; all the promise, the potential of the young man turned against his own mind:

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky

and the sense of being relentlessly assailed by an enemy you will never be able to face or confront, an enemy whose destructive intent manifests not as hatred but as ridicule, a cold, alien mirth

Come on you target for faraway laughter

as if angels (or demons, or aliens) delight in our mental anguish and disintegration, from an impossible cosmic distance. You step outside the protective dullness of the mundane, entering a psychic Van Allen belt; you return with a scarred mind, an awkwardness:

You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon

Insanity, or rather the apprehension of formidable, inhospitable realities just an inch beyond our ordinary limits. For men like Barrett, the world itself is a terrifying challenge; the sky ambiguous:

So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from hell?
Blue skies from pain?

Hence the album’s cover.

Just to be in this world is to be constantly imperilled. The corporate music world, presented in ‘Have a Cigar’, with its hint of Satanic temptation (“You’re never gonna die”), is one expression of this psychic attrition. The man on the cover, shaking hands and bursting into flames, is every unprotected soul in a world that is banal, drab (the grey hues, the warehouses) and yet utterly inimical to us; as if we don’t belong here – but then, in a sense we don’t even belong in our own minds: 1973’s ‘Brain Damage/Eclipse’ from the Dark Side of the Moon:

there’s someone in my head but it’s not me

film report: The Blair Witch Project

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A film I only recently saw, two decades after its release. I wish I could have seen it at the time, 1999, knowing nothing about it, but there it is. It’s presented as “found footage” from three young would-be film-makers who head into the woods to make a documentary about a witch, and of course end up coming to a bad end.

I found it good fun, atmospheric, intelligent, with great acting and discretion. The witch is never seen, which gives the film a psychological depth – we witness not the horror itself, but the characters’ reaction to the horror; with, always, the possibility they are insane or hallucinating. Their steadily deteriorating good sense & hope are what we primarily experience, as e.g. one of the characters kicks their map into the creek out of frustration, leaving them totally lost.

The finale is very good indeed, with the characters finding their doomed way to a derelict house full of bloody handprinted walls and filth.

mutation

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I wrote earlier,

Our biology seems to contain a necessary degree of mutation, even deleterious mutation

Being as we are within time and hence becoming, change is embedded within our mortal being. My personal belief is that the creator/God constructed our universe by fixed principles, e.g. natural selection, but intervenes from time to time: like the theist watchmaker, but one who occasionally opens up the case and oils a cog, blows dust out, or even replaces parts. One can, therefore, see our world as mechanistic or as the object of an interventionist god, depending upon one’s inclination.

Mutation I see as one of the fixed principles, a process by which our reality maintains itself against dissolution. This may seem counter-intuitive, since mutation often enough is an entropic agent, e.g. the development of viruses or freaks:

– but I think a degree of random mutation is necessary, in an imperfect world. Were there no human mutation, then a threat could be engineered, or naturally arise, which could exterminate the entire human race; but with random mutations, it is likely that anything except massive physical force, e.g. a 100 km-wide meteor collision, would leave some mutants untouched. A virus could wipe out 99.999% of humanity, but some mutants would by chance have a genetic invulnerability to just that threat.

Provided there is, around the core human type, a penumbra of random oddities, there is a good chance some of them will be able to survive; they may even contribute something to the benefit of their fellows; and such mutants we could call geniuses.

A few years ago, a German told me that younger children are often the opposite of their elder siblings; she related a theory that the younger see a certain “role” as already occupied, so if their elder brother/sister is wild and emotional the younger will choose to be well-behaved and cool; or vice versa.

I have observed such a phenomenon. However, I think it is at heart a genetic process; I have no idea how, genetically, it would be possible, but I think that each child is created with a certain behavioural tendency, reinforced with appropriate cognitive abilities & defects; and that the mother’s reproductive system will tend to go for an opposite or at least divergent set of attributes with the second child. For example, one of my friends is a little autistic, highly intelligent, thin, tall, and physically weak (he works as a research scientist); and his 4-year younger brother is utterly normal, unintelligent, not so tall, and works as a truck driver.

On the face of it, it seems odd that the mother’s reproductive system would produce two such divergent children; but I think it makes sense as a group survival strategy: if Child A has the genetically successful formula, and survives & has many children, and Child B dies young or childless, then the mother has still produced some grandchildren; if Child A dies childless, then it is likely that Child B would reproduce, since Child B has a totally different behavioural/physical set of characteristics.

So in this scenario, at least one child is likely to reproduce.

However, if Child A and Child B have identical, or similar, attributes, then we have two likely outcomes:

i) Both successfully reproduce and their mother has twice as many grandchildren.

ii) Neither reproduce and the mother’s genetic line ends with them.

In the divergent sibling scenario, there is a high probability of at least some grandchildren; in the similar sibling scenario there is a bimodal outcome: either twice as many, or none at all. Any reasonable gambler would opt for the high probability of some return, rather than a 50-50 win/lose where loss is absolute.

Taking this to a societal level, this could explain why there are always some non-reproductive human beings (the solitary genius, like Tesla or Kafka, or homosexuals) and even what Michael Woodley calls spiteful mutants. Since no society will ever be 100% robust against external threat, mutation is necessary to maintain the hurly-burly of things, where ideas and groups compete, to hopefully produce a healthier society. Without the outlying freak, society would lack the stressors to achieve greatness or resist a true threat:

Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

At present in the West, we see the rise of the spiteful mutants to positions of high power; indeed, those who would once have been burnt at the stake or at the last shunned & despised, are now police commissioners, District Attorneys, politicians, media stars, billionaires, journalists. There is presently a war between the mutants and the healthy, with the former occupying most of the positions of power; and attempting to push their own aberrance as normative.

One could see the loathing many feel for Donald Trump as the instinctive hatred the spiteful mutant holds towards the normal – Trump being, in spite of his intelligence & money, in many ways thoroughly normal, a meat & potatoes kind of man; and one who insistently points out that the mutants are the minority, and should not rule.