13th September, 2017

Was there ever a time of simplicity?
I have borne witness to the tangled garden,
And the tangled web of the thrice-clouded sky,
And the tangled strings of a smogged pigeon wing,
And the tangling of a half-massacred mouse, fur gummed with stoat saliva, a heartbeat waiting to die.
And I have wanted to bend my knee and beg, "Release me from myself!"
But You are the same God whose nature is always to have mercy.
You have pared my prayer to resistlessness,
Only an upward eye and acquiescence;
Only,
Thy will be done.

Why did You strip me of all the other prayers?
There are tangles in me that are crying out for combing:
Why must You mute me when I beg for simplicity?
I want to bargain;
I want to suggest Your ways to You, to author Your ways for You;
I want to say, "Take away my tangles! Have mercy! Give me a comb!"
And I want it to be done.
But You are the same God whose nature is always to have mercy.
There is nothing I have asked for that You have not granted;
There is nothing You have granted that I haven't repented.
And so my prayer closes to a point,
One essential straggled heartbeat.
Only,
Thy will be done.

Was it necessary for me to be a fool, mind-maimed?
Could I not have had the wisdom to be good, the goodness to be wise?
Was it necessary for me to be a farce,
Tangled as a tumbleweed,
Craving with the pain of childbirth a prelapsarian simplicity?
I am knotted as a manrope.
I keep picking at myself futilely trying to pull myself undone, trying to unravel.
I want to beg for simplicity,
But You steel my tongue. 
It is only,
Thy will be done.

One day, if it is Your will, I will stop resisting.
I will let the tangles be.
I will bear witness to the fallen garden,
And understand that when You said You would have me perfect
You meant Your perfection, not mine.
I will bear witness to the tangles in my soul,
The knot that You have tied,
And know that 
You are the same God whose nature is always to have mercy.

And my will will be
Only,
Thy will be done.

10th September, 2017

I have been thinking about Jack. Today, for the first time in months, I tuned my guitar and attempted to play some of the old songs. The callouses have worn to an unpracticed softness and my right hand has lost its stamina for much strumming, but the routines return without much coaxing. I should practice more. Before I fell ill, I had begun taking lessons; a guitar instructor would come to the shop after work on a Wednesday and we'd set up stools and music stands and play passages from Cohen. Then the sickness came. Sometimes I wonder at the sickness and how much destruction it has wrought. Almost a year of suspended animation; almost a year absent from myself--degenerate, microscopic, humbled to a pinprick, Ozymandias sawn short at the knees.

The last time I saw Jack he was sitting in his wonted corner of the coffee-shop with his guitar and his flamenco scores and his dreams of up-sticking to Spain to serenade the flounce-frocked senoritas. He always treated me as if I were visiting royalty (although this is not unusual in America: an English accent in the States is a near guarantee of getting one's puddles overlaid by cloaks). He would throw his arms meadow-wide, strain his eyes heavenward, intone beatific nothings in cassock-Latin, affect a gesture of thespianic supplication with one arm thrown back like a swan-wing and the other hooked under his waist, bowing a bow deep as the mid-Atlantic ridge, then he would take my hand and lay upon it a kiss which was the very definition of courtliness, and I would buy him coffee. Jack made his living odd-jobbing and music teaching and washing windows, but he couldn't bring himself to charge those who couldn't easily pay and so his income was half comprised of grateful sandwiches and indebted hugs, a fact which meant he was permanently penniless. He cycled everywhere even in the dead of winter, with two repurposed paint buckets on the handlebars to hold the soap supplies, and wore weeds just presentable enough to permit him to sit on the warm side of coffee-shop doors.

Jack had lived in a monastery before he wound up washing windows in Michigan. He was hobbit-high, with hair blanched as Dover-bluffs, teeth-numbers roughly comparable to those of the Graeae sisters, eyes pale as Spring puddles and just as watery, and skin softly manifold-folded as a closet full of towels. He was beautiful: Rembrandt should have immortalised him. It's not in my power to do so. 

Jack would regale me with anecdotes about the great composers and, leafing through notes and scores he'd brought the cafe, desperately trying to locate this or that quote, explain to me in an understated yet overpowering earnestness the importance of becoming a master. One must become a master, he said, as that is the only way to do justice to the music, and music is one with prayer, and prayer is one with Love. One must therefore become a master as it is the only way to do justice to Love. 
      I wish I could do honour to Jack. I should try. I haven't the necessary stuffs to become a master, but I can at least work to approach the works and deeds of my hands with the reverence of prayer.

I remember Jack sitting opposite me at a wooden table, demonstrating a point about Rachmaninov's fingers. "Strong enough to break glass," he said.

The last time I saw Jack--that last time in the corner of the coffee shop on a winter evening where he sat playing Flamenco pieces and improvising ditties about myself and Tom, a college lad from South Wales who sat at his other side--I played for him. I never play in public; my fingers tense and jitter too much to allow it; but that evening I was able to play. I played "Look Over Your Shoulder," and when I was done Jack turned to me and said, beaming, "That's the 'Ethics of Elfland,' isn't it?" He knew! I could have cried. I should have hugged him.

We sat and talked and played and laughed for upwards of three hours that last evening, Jack and Tom and I. It was well I did not know it would be the last. I cannot conceive of a finer final memory. Jack died, suddenly, of a heart attack, two weeks later. I returned to England the following Spring.

I still imagine Jack is with me even now. Now and then I imagine this. Not in any material sense; only as a warm, benedictory presence, a faraway face re-presented to affect dramatic bows, and rumour-monger about Dvorak, and perfect his Flamenco pieces for the sake of the Spanish senoritas in the flounced-frocks and for the sake of prayer and of Love.

9th September, 2017

One of my father's many inventions:
The high-altitude bed, for when one wants one's dreams to be closer to heaven.

On being charmed.

I have been feeling achingly low of late. Now and then it is right and proper to feel so; now and then it is the right and proper response to the world. Aches have the capacity to put us in the right relation with the world. Aches also remind us that we are not automata, and it is important to be reminded of this every so often, particularly when there are so many voices declaiming the contrary.

Upon returning from work this evening, the aching got up again like an abscess in a shark's tooth. It is very tempting to simply sob and sob and degenerate and feel very poetically and nobly sorry for oneself when one has sharks' teeth with abscesses upon them.  The degree of pain always seems to justify the melodrama: to the right personality, a mislaid pencil could justify throwing oneself off the Ponte Vecchio. Alas, I have somewhat misused an adjective: "O Dio, vorrei morir!" I fear I may be the right sort of personality.

In a bold attempt to disprove I was the right sort of personality, and to unleague myself from Tosti and Puccini, I pulled my head out of the stage-prop basket of my hands, dabbed the tears sensibly away on the pleats of my skirt (for what are the voluminous swathes of fabric on women's skirts for if not to serve as handkerchiefs?), took Aristotle off his neglected column, and set to rereading, for what must be by now the fourteenth or fifteenth time, the beginning of the Metaphysics. I'm so voluminously ignorant. My ignorance rivals my skirts. This is a sorry state of affairs, and it seems wasteful to spend my hours a-weeping when I could be making at least a little dent in my denseness. I missed out on a classical education. I known't a lick of Latin, and not even the chastest cheek-peck of Greek. I haven't a hope of catching up with Western Civilization's bullet-train of thought, but I may perhaps at least walk a little faster than I do. It's worth a try.

So there I was, raw-eyed but determined, rereading the first paragraph of the Metaphysics for what must be by now the fortieth or fiftieth time, when who should come bounding up the stairs, looking very pleased with himself indeed, but my father, calling out as he ascended praises for my goodness as a daughter as I'd brought him home a bagful of tails. Then he turned to demonstrate the swish of a twelve-foot long, rather distinguished, plastic eco-packaging tail comprised of materials I'd saved for recycling. He walked around the attic room, like a gentlemanly tyrannosaurus, dragging the plastic behind him, and as he walked the cat followed, at once confused and intrigued by this new modification to her owner's anatomy. Then he let me know dinner was ready and headed back downstairs as bouncily as he'd ascended, the cat pouncing eagerly in pursuit.

How can one stay melancholy in the face of silliness like that? My father used to be a psychiatrist, but his methods of cheering me remain those of a father. When I was low as a child he used to place bags of onions on his head to make me giggle. I couldn't help it. No matter how miserable I was, something about the sight of onions in their string-sack on his head just couldn't be borne straight faced. Now, as an adult when I am blue he sticks into his ears and nose, a la Blackadder feigning get-out-of-the-push lunacy, the compostable packing-peanuts I rescue from work (I rescue them in order that he might dissolve them in buckets in the yard, for my father is the most avid recycler that ever there was). Or he does what he calls his "Trump Jump" (this is a sort of ungainly cheer-leading routine involving a fit of hoe-down-esque leaping, while requesting, at every bounce, a letter of Trump's name). And even now, as an adult, I cannot help but laugh. The laughing may not last long; the melancholies may be more severe these days and the mitigations more fleeting, but still, for at least a few seconds, for a snapshot of reprieve, I giggle as I did when I was hip-high.

So. There is pain, but there is also Aristotle and my father and a cat pouncing on a twelve-foot plastic tail. I need to remember this. It is still a charmed life.

8th September, 2017

When water gets caught in habitual whirlpools,

dig a way out through the bottom 

to the ocean. There is a secret medicine 

given only to those who hurt so hard

they can't hope.

The hopers would feel slighted if they knew.

-Rumi-

What does that secret medicine look like? When do they give it to you? And why did they not give it to all those who took their lives? Why did they hold off on giving the secret medicine to them?

I don't mean to be Job. I want to say only, graciously, lovingly, "Thy will be done," but I need Your help. I need You to hold me. I need You to let me feel You. I need the secret medicine. 

 

13th August, 2017

St. Mark 

"I believe; help my unbelief!" Mark 9.24

Palm Sunday's reed cross holds pinned to my wall beside the watercolour aviary and the jar of cut flowers (peach roses and yellow carnations today, replacing last fortnight's coronet of sunflowers). "Carry your cross." These are the words with which one receives one's reeds. "Carry your cross, Sarah." I had been ill all winter; I had been away from church all winter; my baptism had fallen through; I was as the boy with the spirit that from childhood had "cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him," the boy whom the disciples could not heal, the boy who could only be restored through his father's cry, "I believe; help my unbelief!" Palm Sunday was my first day back at the church. I was handed my reed, and told "carry your cross." I took the cross home and pinned it beneath the moorhen, and I shall not take it down until I receive another next year. I shall carry my cross.

"Love only knoweth whence it came

and comprehendeth love."

J. G. Whittier

John Greenleaf Whittier

The Gradual Hymn today was Whittier's "Immortal Love." We are rather tuneless at Holy Cross, on account of most of us being over ninety and partly deaf. I haven't that excuse. I think I really ought take singing lessons and see if my tunelessness can be repaired. If I could sing better, I could sing at a higher volume, and then the vicar wouldn't be left doing all the work. The vicar has a resplendent singing voice; there is no finer moment than when, during the second to last verse of the recessional hymn (and it is always the second to last verse), he proceeds down the aisle, his baritone causing even the candles in the corners to quake, and as he passes, for one sublime instant, every tongue in the church is transformed, and we become angelic choirs not tone-deaf nonagenarians.

One by one all of these tongues will fall silent, and then it shall just be me. I should learn to sing. Even if I am the last voice in an emptied edifice, even if it is only I and the dust motes, and the lonely spears of light that pierce the hands of stained glass saints, even if it is only this, I should learn to sing. I should learn to sing for all that was, in remembrance and reverence of all that was, for every soul that brought his yearnings to the pew, her aching to the altar, his penitence to the prayer cushion, her love to the altar. I should learn to sing for all who suffered, and all who rejoiced, and all who cried out, "I believe; help my unbelief."

The last congregant may pass, and there may be no other to replace him, and the churches may fall silent, and the stones fail, and the stained glass saints bleach to a blankness, and even the dust motes return to dust, but Love shall not perish. There is no end to Love. My singing shall not be a threnody. I believe. Help my unbelief.

Images: 

St. Mark: By Jean Bourdichon - Bibliothèque nationale de France, lien/link ici/here, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24527937

Whittier: By BPL - John Greenleaf Whittier, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9722792

8th August, 2017

It would be conceit and folly to attempt a counterattack on a philosophical movement when one's exposure thereto/knowledge thereof consists of little more than one article in one popular philosophy magazine. As luck would have it, I am both egotist and eejit, and thus just the woman for the job. Hurrah! And...Onward:

Panpsychism: the belief that pans have consciousness. (Also the belief that colanders, cheese-graters, paring knives, and salt-cellars have consciousness. And salad bowls. And tapas dishes. And the grains of rice you put in the salt cellars to keep the crystals from congealing like Lot's wife. And everything else.) 

Before laying into the demerits of panpsychism, I suppose it would only be sporting to say a thing or two about its, well, its non-demerits. Spoonful of sugar and all that, even if the sugar isn't quite sweet enough to merit the unprefixed affirmative. 

• Panpsychism isn't physicalism. That's something. The panpsychist doesn't reduce everything to physical entities and processes. So your average panpsychist is one-up on Empedocles and Anaximenes and...let me see...Hippasus of Metapontum. The panpsychist's world isn't all a confluence of Earth, Wind, and Fire (no disrespect to Thales and his water-water-everywhere monism; it just doesn't jive with Mr Maurice White's horoscope).
• Panpsychism recognises that something-coming-from-nothing is a hitch in the ontological giddy-up. The notion that consciousness can arise out of non-consciousness is tricksy and rightly deserves more consideration than physicalists have afforded it.
• Panpsychists likewise acknowledge that entities are more than what they do. A pan is not simply a bundle of behaviours "brought about by mass, spin, charge, etc." There must be "more to [a pan] than what it does; and according to panpsychism, mass, spin, charge, etc, are, in their intrinsic nature, forms of consciousness" (Goff).
• Panpsychism adds quaint heft to one's notion that one's potted cactus is genuinely, subjectively happier on the left side of the mantelpiece than on the right side. Come on, admit it: you know full well your cactus wants to be by the photo of Great Aunt Clara and the misshapen pencil-pot you paid £50 too much for at a Cotswold pottery kiln.

Grand. Now for the quibbles:

Who needs panpsychism when you've got idealism?

Goff argues that "common sense intuition" must prevent us from sweeping consciousness under a singularly physicalist carpet, but surely that same "common sense intuition" should shield us from sweeping matter under a singularly mental one. Naturally, the panpsychist will protest that he hasn't swept the carpet under the carpet, that he never does any sweeping, that he doesn't even own a broom (in which case you can get him on charges of intellectual slobbery). The panpsychist is going to argue that he has, on the contrary, tread the middle path and reconciled the Scylla of substance-dualism with the Charybdis of physicalism. But, really, methinks the panpsychist does protest too much. For if one is going to redefine all "mass, spin, charge, etc" as "forms of consciousness", one really hasn't done much more than Anaxagoras, who, as Aristotle tells it, "avails himself of Mind as an artificial device for producing order, and drags it in whenever he is at a loss to explain some necessary result" (Metaphysics I.IV.5). Anaxagoras was less philosophically crude than the aforementioned Hippopotamus of Megapondus, granted, but that's not exactly an achievement you'd want to frame and put up on the wall: "I hereby certify that Mr. Pan Psychist is less primitive than a pachyderm".

I think it in my fingers, I think it in my bones

If all the world is busy ruminating, right down to one's individual electrons and subatomic charges, does that mean one's body really does have a mind of its own? Does my stomach think different thoughts than I do? Do my digestive fluids likewise have a separate subjective experience to my stomach (do my digestive fluids, ahem, digest)? And do the enzymes therein have a different experience yet again to said fluids? That would give a whole new pith to Melville's "Hell is an idea born of an undigested apple dumpling". 

There is something tantalising about the prospect of my atoms being philosophically at odds with myself. It's a charming image; I'm tempted to let it go unquestioned if only to allow myself the pleasure of debating with my knees. Yet, sigh, I can't shake the problem of pluralities. It's one thing to say an electron has consciousness, but what of two electrons together? Do the duo have a combined consciousness independent from the individual consciousnesses of the electrons which comprise them? Or are the two consciousnesses blended into one single superconsciousness? If that's the case, though, where does the blending end? At a universal consciousness that subsumes all things? Then how is it I feel my subjective experience to be individual and limited? Do individual elements go on having individual subjective experiences while the larger matrices thereof have larger, more complicated ones? What then determines which groups of individual elements will give rise to a new, more expansive consciousness? 

      The physicalist can get away, more or less, with a physical monism by maintaining that a pan isn't really a pan at all, but simply a bunch of fundamentally identical bits-and-pieces (subatomic energy packets or whatnot) distributed in certain arrangements in space and time. The physicalist's premises are flawed as your average Greek Hero, no doubt, but there is some coherence in his argument's form. The panpsychist hasn't even that advantage. For the panpsychist, as best I can fathom him, would seem to want to say that a pan has its own consciousness, and that said pan's consciousness is subjectively different from the consciousness of the atoms that comprise it. Yet this leaves the mystery of how the pan's consciousness arose as resolute and inscrutable as if its consciousness arose out of nothing, for the pan's consciousness is not, in this model, simply an illusion brought about by indivisible bits-and-pieces of consciousness hanging out together in the same spatio-temporal arena (as the pan was in the physicalist reduction). Even if the panpsychist was content to say that the pan's consciousness was an illusion, and was reducible to subatomic consciousness-packets (or something like that), he's going to run up against the problem of how those consciousness-packets produce the illusion of pan-consciousness. 

I know you are a reductionist, you said you are a reductionist, but what am I?

Panpsychists do not simply declare animal and human consciousness a sacred mystery which must have arrived by magic. Instead, they try to explain animal and human consciousness in terms of more basic forms of consciousness: the consciousness of basic material entities, such as quarks and electrons. It is true that consciousness itself is not explained in terms of anything more fundamental: the basic consciousness of basic physical entities is a fundamental postulate of the theory. But there is no reason to think that science must always follow the most reductionist path. (Goff)

Let's untangle that, shall we? 

1. Animal and human consciousness are not sacred nor the product of magic. Jolly good. Nice to see religion (the sacred) and superstition (magic) being leagued together as per usual. Sign of the times, I guess: it's a lonely day in the Apologetics aisle if I'm not rubbing shoulders with a Wiccan; Crowley and Kierkegaard have never been closer bedfellows.
2. Consciousness is to be explained by the basic consciousness of basic material entities. Lordy. Okay, so I assume basic here means, what, smallest? Least complicated? The most reduced? The most basic material entities Goff mentions are, after all, the poster-children of material reductionism (namely, quarks and electrons). Thus, consciousness is to be explained, presumably, by its most reduced form as manifested in its most reduced material counterparts.
3. You can't reduce basic consciousness to anything more fundamental than basic consciousness. Well, quite, otherwise presumably it wouldn't be "basic" consciousness. Tautology taken on board. No infinite-regress reductios allowed.
4. Out of left-field comment on science being non-beholden to reductionism, a comment which, by its placement, is naughtily positioning itself as a conclusion, despite actually being a non-sequitur. Goff describes panpsychism in reductionist terms, then says "not all science needs to be about reduction, folks." One might as well say "all omelettes require breaking eggs; but one doesn't have to break eggs to make a nutritious breakfast." Both statements ("omelettes require breaking eggs" and "nutritious breakfasts don't") might well be true; both might have subject-matter in common; but the one doesn't follow from the other, and to make it seem as if it did would be intellectual chicanery. So, tsk-tsk Goffum. Tricksy habitses.  

But, enough for now. I'm off to the store to buy me some thinking milk.

Panbrainism.

7th August, 2017

I do not ordinarily keep to-do lists outside of work. At work, after opening shop according to the usual routine, the first order of the day is always the to-do list which I indelicately scrawl in a series of smudgy bullet-points in a notebook that is really too pretty to deserve such ill-treatment (not that ugliness pardons ill-treatment; pity the fairy-tale dupe who fails to treat the snaggle-toothed crone as respectfully as the inevitable Venus she conceals). At work, the to-do list is a necessary corrective to my otherwise day-dreamy proclivities; without it I would run the risk of, well, of being as I am when I am not at work.

          To order my non-work time by a to-do list, on the other hand, would seem like a category error. At work it is necessary for me to be a machine to a certain extent (albeit one overseen by a stridently human soul, an Anthropos-ex-Machina as it were). At work I must be the instrument by which certain things get done; away from work, I must be anything but a machine. Away from work, my fullest attention must be on developing my humanity, my soul, and while this development may (indeed, probably always does) take the form of particular activities, to think of those activities as activities (i.e. as things “to do”) would be to turn soul-development into a variety of self-improvement seminar, something that involved completing a certain number of assignments to a certain standard before being handed one’s certificate and going on one’s way to pursue other activities. Perish the thought!

Yet today, a non-work day, I have broken my rule and have written a to-do list. I excuse myself in part because my primary reason for writing said list was to ensure I didn’t end up being a bad friend through forgetfulness. I am notoriously hopeless at maintaining punctual communication with the people I love, in no small part because I feel those people deserve more than boilerplate fripperies on every occasion, no matter how trifling, and so I can’t reply to even the simplest text message without at least fifteen minutes' pause to consider the most considerate response (despite the fact that the most considerate response is often the unconsidered, immediate one). On account of this lack of punctuality, I end up with a backlog of messages on one medium or another, and then I forget to reply at all. Thus today’s list. And yet I failed to stop there. Although it is true that most of today's list consists of “text so-and-so” and “call such-and-such”, other items have ended up slipping in also: “Vacuum room”, “Finish Typography Book”, “Read something by Chesterton”, “Write blog post”.  I suppose, in my present state of mental wellness, I have been feeling strong enough to overcome the lure of completion-for-completion’s-sake (or, more accurately, completion-for-check-mark’s-sake). Herein lies hubris. Not unamalgamated hubris, but I admit I did end up approaching Chesterton as a task to be accomplished, and not, as he deserved, as a friend to be enjoyed or a teacher to be minded. (Of course, it is impossible to treat Chesterton entirely as a means to a check mark; there will always be points at which he breaks through one's utilitarian trance and biffs one, as one quite rightly deserves, on the metaphorical nose).

It is now late afternoon. This was not the post I intended to write. That post was on the article on Panpsychism, the reading of which also finagled its way onto the to-do list. That post shall have to wait (or pone? as in postpone?). The order of the afternoon is to walk. This too is on the list, but it is also on the heart (and, hummty-tum, the sole), and so can’t be wounded by a bullet-point.