Blue Jeans and Western Decadence

 

Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer is one of the best books I've read in recent years. I read it last September, but I found myself thinking of it just now for a particular reason. It's a history of communist East Germany, with an emphasis on culture and social history.

One section of the book describes the mania for blue jeans that swept over East Germany in the 1960s. Blue jeans were a symbol of youth, freedom, pop culture, etc. etc.

The communist authorities frowned on blue jeans and rock music, and condemned them as decadent.

Here's the thing...although communism was (and is) evil all the way through, and the fall of the Soviet Union was a great victory for humanity, I can't help thinking the communist authorities were right in this instance.

Blue jeans did indeed symbolize everything rubbishy and decadent about the West, and still do. (I can never join in the celebration of "Western values"-- they're a very mixed bag, if you ask me. It was the West that spawned political correctness.)

It's a wonderful thing that the Soviet Union fall, but rather embarrassing that blue jeans, rock and roll, and Dallas had quite a lot to do with its fall.

But then again, Western governments also tried to severely restrict the radio airtime given to pop and rock music. In retrospect, this seems an entirely reasonable sort of paternalism. Pirate radio stations weren't doing anything noble.

It's notable that Alexander Solzhenitsyn, surely one of Soviet communism's most determined enemies, also lambasted the West for its "intolerable music" (among other things).

To my boundless shame, I have had a lifelong addiction to this intolerable music-- pop, rock, and all the rest. I've spent endless hours listening to it. Now and again, I've been overcome with remorse for this, and I can even remember throwing out all my rock music CDs on more than one occasion. However, I always drifted back to listening to it.

I read The Closing of the American MInd by Allan Bloom in my twenties, and was greatly affected (and brought to shame) by its chapter on music, especially this much-quoted passage: "Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy." (The book was published in 1987.)

I felt shame, and yet...I came back to listening to rock and pop music, again and again and again. Mea maxima culpa, indeed!

Tolerance and Indifference

I've long harboured a rather contradictory attitude towards prejudice. Sometimes I find prejudice maddening, other times I find myself defending it-- indeed, sometimes I find myself thinking of it as a sign of health.

I think it comes down to this formula: it's good to avoid prejudice through tolerance (or broadmindedness), but it's bad to avoid it through indifferentism. It's especially bad to congratulate yourself on tolerance when you're simply indifferent.

And I'll go so far as to say that, sometimes, prejudice-- or even bigotry-- seems preferable to indifference. To me, anyway.

There was an epidemic of ersatz tolerance in the Ireland of my youth. Citizens of the Republic looked down on their Northern counterparts and wondered why they couldn't just "get over" or "get past" the Protestant-Catholic enmity.

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely believe that it's highly desirable for Christians to "get over" the Protestant-Catholic enmity. In fact, I've complained about Catholic triumphalism regularly on this blog. (I've never really encountered Protestant triumphalism.)

But secularists have absolutely no right to congratulate themselves on overcoming the Protestant-Catholic division. Why should they congratulate themselves on this? They think it's irrelevant anyway. The same applies to wishy-washy Christians.

Personally, I am all for ecumenism-- but all against an ecumenism of indifference. If you don't think doctrinal differences matter, you're not really ecumenical anyway. You're a non-denominational Christian, or a mere theist, or something of that sort.

Even by the time I was growing up, most people in the Republic had effectively become secularists, even if they retained a cultural or sentimental tinge of Christianity. So they really had no right to lecture (or even congratulate) their Northern cousins on tolerance. It was a non-issue for them.

For the most part, of course, the Northern Irish conflict wasn't really about religion. But there were people for whom it was fundamentally about religion, such as Dr. Ian Paisley. And for many others, religion entered into it to some real degree.

It was the declared policy of the United Irishmen, founded in 1791, to unite "Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter", and this became a watchword of Irish republicanism ever since. Personally, I've always felt ambivalent about this motto, and about the "non-sectarian" nature of Irish republicanism. Insofar as it was inspired by the Voltairean ideas of the French Revolution, I consider it a bad thing. (I get the impression that most United Irishmen were not Voltairean, though.)

I apply the same principle to nationality. There's no virtue in rising "above" nationality if you don't care about nationality. Honestly, I would feel more affinity with any national chauvinist than I would with a cosmopolitan or internationalist.

The truth is that I've come to feel more affinity with the Northern Irish Orangemen than I do with almost all of their critics-- precisely because they do care about national loyalties, religious belief, and cultural traditions.

Similarly, I'm very dubious about most advocates for a united Ireland today. I suspect they want to get rid of the border because they want to get rid of all national borders. And personally I would rather have ten more borders on the island of Ireland than get rid of the current border in that spirit, or with such allies.

I've mentioned my lifelong anglophilia in many previous posts. Honestly, I probably love English culture more than I love Irish culture. Naturally enough, I have a bit of an allergy to anti-Englishness.

And yet I can't disagree with this point made by D.P. Moran in his book The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905): "The cry of the friendly Englishman fully responded to by the “reasonable” Irishman is, “Let us know more about Irishmen and let Irishmen know more about us; we will learn to like and understand one another.” As against this view it is absolutely clear to me, though the expression may appear to have some of the form of a “bull,” that when two nations understand one another there is from that moment only one nation in it. International misunderstanding is one of the marks of nationhood."

Well, I think I have made my point.

Priggishness Revisited

I know I've been reposting a lot of old stuff on my blog recently. I guess I'm feeling retrospective. Perhaps the fact that I'm coming up to my twenty-fifth year working in UCD Library (on the fifteenth of October) has something to do with that. Coincidentally, that exact same date will be the fifteenth anniversary of this blog. 

Today I'm going to revisit the blog post that (most probably) means the most to me of everything I've posted. I posted it in June of 2016, so almost a decade ago. It describes my concept of "priggishness" which has great personal importance for me, and towards which I've had a lifelong yearning, but which I find it hard to put into words.

What other word or phrase could I use? It might be called aestheticism, but it's not quite that. It might be called the art of living, but it's not quite that. It might be called intentionality, but it's not quite that. It might be called romanticism, but it's not quite that. It's not quite any of those things, and yet it overlaps with all of them. It has much do with the concept of "enchantment". 

Even trying to define "priggishness" by its opposite is difficult. What is its opposite? Banality? But I love a lot of banality and it doesn't feel like the opposite of priggishness. Consumerism? I think a Halloween-themed window display in a shop is extremely "priggish". Mundanity? The little rituals of everyday life are the very things that cry out for "priggishness" the most.

Whatever it is, I think two influences were important in instilling it in me: first of all, Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings; secondly, having all my schooling through the Irish language, and more important under the auspices of the Irish language movement. The fundamental assumption of the Irish language movement was that everyday life in Ireland was to be transformed; primarily by becoming Gaelic-speaking but also through the propagation of Irish culture: dance, sport, mythology, etc. Although I reacted against the Irish language itself (at the time), I deeply absorbed the subliminal idea that ordinary, contemporary life was something to be utterly transfigured-- and more in a "backward-looking" way than the opposite. And this idea has never gone away.

If that hasn't scared you away already, here goes: 

A Short History of my Priggishness

Readers are warned that this post is going to be even more introspective and idiosyncratic than usual. Perhaps 'navel-gazing' is a better term. Nevertheless I feel the urge to write it. Nobody has to read it-- that is the great thing about blogging.

I wanted to write a few thoughts on my history as a prig.

I have always been a prig. I think I will always be a prig. I am trying to learn where priggishness is good and where it is bad.

Chambers English Dictionary, eleventh edition, describes a prig thus (and the definition is rather poetic): "A precisian, a puritan; a person of precise morals without a sense of proportion; a sanctimonious person, certain of his or her blamelessness and critical of others' failings; a coxcomb".

I think the only part of that definition that applies to me (in the sense I mean here) is 'a puritan'. I have always been a puritan, though my puritanism has been more aesthetic or cultural (or maybe behavioural) than moral. 

I have always had a craving for the purified, the consecrated and the intentional, over the mixed, the ambiguous and the matter-of-fact.

I have often written (to the point of tedium, I hear my reader think) about the Halloween party that fired my childish imagination. The thing that excited me was the sense of consecration-- this night was consecrated to all things spooky. It had a flavour and an atmosphere and a character all of its own.

A time to be spooky

I wanted, and have always wanted, everything to have a flavour and an atmosphere and a character all of its own. I wanted, from my earliest age, human beings to be avatars. I wanted each one to be a vessel of a particular ideal and way of looking at the world. I didn't really care what that way of looking at the world was, as long as it was there. Teenagers who were heavy metal fans I could understand. Adults who were proponents of some political viewpoint, I could also understand. But people who weren't really anything...who expressed no obvious view of the world, whether idealistic or hedonistic or otherwise....I couldn't 'deal' with them. They disgusted me, in the literal sense of that word.

Of course, I could never have expressed all this in words, as a child. But it was there.

I loathed what Yeats called 'the casual comedy' in his famous poem Easter 1916; the banal, business-like, humdrum attitude towards life that, the poem tells us, had been superseded in the Ireland of that time by the high tragedy of the Rising.

W.B. Yeats

The philosphical depth of that poem amazes me more and more, as I grow older. Yeats managed to encapsulate (and anticipate) all the debates about the 1916 Rising in one poem, indeed, in one phrase-- "a terrible beauty". But it has a philosophical depth beyond its historical subject, too. In one passage from the poem, one which I did not even understand when I read it as a teen, Yeats expressed both the seduction and the peril of this urge towards purity, towards single-mindedness:
 

Hearts with one purpose alone   

Through summer and winter seem   

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,   

The rider, the birds that range   

From cloud to tumbling cloud,   

Minute by minute they change;   

A shadow of cloud on the stream   

Changes minute by minute;   

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   

And a horse plashes within it;   

The long-legged moor-hens dive,   

And hens to moor-cocks call;   

Minute by minute they live:   

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart...

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that human beings, out of a desire to escape from the existential freedom which we find so unbearable, aspire to become a thing rather than a person.  I don't believe this exactly, but I think it shows considerable insight.

Yeats himself, who said that poetry is created out of the argument with ourselves, was also drawn to the idea of purity in his own way. "One day when I was twenty-three or twenty-four this sentence seemed to form in my head, without my willing it, much as sentences form when we are half-asleep: "Hammer your thoughts into unity." For days I could think of nothing else, and for years I tested all I did by that sentence." 

When I was a boy, I knew a couple called Holly and Harry. (I am changing the name and the details to protect the innocent.) When I visited their flat, i was delighted with their way of life. They had a piece of sculpture on their bookshelf, and a large and rather artistic painting on their wall. They gave me curry, which was unimaginably exotic, with chopsticks! They had poufs to sit on. I think there was incense involved, as well. It seemed to me they were living the refined way of life that I craved. 

Later on, I realized that they watched game shows and listened to rap music and followed sport like everybody else. And, to make matters worse, they quickly moved away from the aspirations of their early years. I felt unutterably betrayed and disillusioned.

In school, when I was about ten or eleven, we read a story taken from Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was a tale-within-a-tale in which children are told how strict Sabbath observance was in their grandfather's day. Their grandfather (as a boy) goes out to play with a sled on a Sunday, when his own father is asleep, despite Sunday being utterly devoted to Bible reading and solemnity. My sympathies were not with the boys, but with the solemnity of the Sunday. I had never heard of such solemnity and consecration before and I craved it. 

Another time, I fell in calf-love with a girl who was several years older than me in school. I didn't know her name but she seemed to me like a vision of rather vampiric beauty. She had raven-black hair, slanted eyes and an alabaster complexion, and she moved and smiled with a demure grace. She looked very intellectual and as though she came from an upper-middle class family. I imagined her life as being one of art exhibitions, concerts, bike rides, intellectual debates around the dinner table, reading poetry in a meadow, etc. etc.

She should be reading poetry.

I remember how crushed I felt one day when the thought occurred to me: "She watches television. Of course she does. Like everybody else." I was about fifteen. I watched lots of television.

Lord of the Rings was a source of fascination for me; particularly Rivendell. I wanted everything in life, and everything in society, to be graceful and ceremonious and meaningful and stately like it was in Rivendell. Indeed, even the Shire seemed to me more gracious and ceremonial than the 'casual comedy' I saw around me.

I wanted this...

 

Not this...

...or this.

It is understandable that such a boy should be drawn towards cultural nationalism, as I was. When I learned about the Irish Revival, or the Gaelic Revival, of the late nineetenth to early twentieth century, it completely enchanted me. Indeed, that enchantment has never gone away, though I reacted against it for some years.

The Gaelic Revival was part of a wave of cultural and (important adjective) romantic nationalism that swept Europe in the nineteenth century and onwards. Romantic nationalism saw the art, folklore, dress, cuisine, literature etc. of a particular nation as being an expression of its national soul. Where those things had decayed, it sought to revive them.

(All my life, while despising revolutions of the destructive kind which seek to wipe the slate clean and start again, I have been fascinated by the idea of a revolution which transforms everything but which destroys nothing. The title of the much-mocked spoken word album by William Shatner, The Transformed Man, has always beguiled me.)

Thefore, in an Ireland that had been losing its national culture and ways of life for generations, a massive campaign was launched, amongst cultural nationalists, to revive our national language, our national folklore, our national games, our national music, our national architecture etc. in a particularly Gaelic idiom. Traditions would be revived-- and where there were no traditions, new ones would be invented.

This was manna to me. The essence of the thing was that which was unthinking and incidental would become deliberate and intentional-- that which was almost arbitrary would become meaningful. Dressing and storytelling and painting and eating and making speeches and sending Christmas cards would become an expression of the Folk Spirit, as well as everything that they were already.

I have never aspired towards the kind of 'spontaneous' national identity that some cultural nationalists aspire towards. I remember, in one Irish language class, the teacher taking one of my class-mates to task for writing, in an essay, that a particular Irish language writer had "a great love for the Irish language". "Nobody ever says that English writers have a great love for the English language", she moaned. "It's just the language they naturally write in."

But that was exactly what I did not want-- for Ireland to regain her national traditions and way of life just to become blasé about them. This was long before I came across a quotation of Chesterton's which exactly expresses my dislike of this attitude: "This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself". Chesterton somewhere else describes this as: "Losing a thing as soon as you find it."

Obligatory G.K. Chesterton picture

I will go further. I have never been able to really regret that Ireland lost her language and traditions and has had to regain them. I don't wish we spoke Irish today as the French speak French or the Spanish speak Spanish-- matter-of-factly. I think there is something heroic and life-giving in the project of revival. Chesterton said that the way to love something is to think that it might be lost. Ireland had lost so much, and yet-- would we have loved it so much if it had not been lost? Wasn't the 'turn' towards tradition in itself a noble thing, especially when it was an all-but-disappeared tradition?

Kathleen Ni Houlihan; Ireland's Uncle Sam

My cultural nationalism was a romantic, backward-looking, traditionalist, poetic form of nationalism, one that idealized the Irish countryside and traditional ways of life and that personified Ireland herself as Kathleen Ni Houlihan. I simply did not see the point of any nationalism that was not a 'thick' nationalism in this sense-- that did not want to "Irishify" everything in the national life.

When I realised that there were indeed nationalists who had contempt for this attitude, I was shocked to my core. Kathleen Ni Houlihan they considered sexist and outmoded and naive-- they wanted a bullish, anti-sentimental nationalism that wanted to make Ireland a progressive, modern, secular, multicultural nation. Aside from removing the British presence from Northern Ireland, and providing 'language equality' for Irish speakers-- because even seeking to revive the language was a bit too conservative for their liking-- they seemed willing to ditch the entire project of cultural revival. Wearing Aran sweaters and putting up paintings of Blasket Islanders in your living room were out. Bob Dylan songs and blue jeans and plays about tortured sexuality were in. This, in part, caused my strong reaction against nationalism for many years.

I could go on to describe the influence of my priggishness upon my religious faith, but this essay is already longer than I intended it to be.

I'll mention two things in conclusion.

The first is-- ladies and gentlemen, please do not consider me an out-and-out prig. Indeed, I harbour in my soul quite the opposite hankering, too, though it is not nearly as strong. There is a part of me that revels in 'the casual comedy', the infinite openness and indeterminacy of life, and of society. I do want to get outside, or at least to know there is an outside-- I do want fresh air. I have known the rather bracing sense of dizziness when it is borne upon one, through a snatch of overheard conversation perhaps, that other people have preoccupations and ways of looking at the world that are utterly different from one's own. I sometimes revel in the 'messiness' of modern liberal democracy. Louis Macneice's 'Snow' is one of my favourite poems. I even had these lines printed onto a t-shirt once:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

Louise Macneice, renowned tangerine eater

And yet I think the cleavage is not as simple as that, either. Just as Chesterton said that, if you leave a white fence to itself, it will not remain a white fence but become a muddy grey, so I think that the diversity of the world actually requires a solicitude for singleness and purification. Perhaps tangerines only exist through the unnatural selection of fruit-eating human beings over the generations, as certain dogs have been bred for their distinctiveness. Even if this is not the case with tangerines, you know what I mean. Volumes could be written on this tension, this paradox, this dialectic, or whatever you may call it, between essentialism and pluralism.

Finally, I want to leave you with an image. I have been practicing mindfulness for several months now-- something I dismissed as a fad, but I have been compelled to accept as having genuine scientifically-established merit, and something that is of particular usefulness to me. There are many forms of mindfulness, but I have hit upon my own favourite-- staring into the flame of a candle for twenty minutes, focusing entirely upon that flame.

Staring into the flame makes me realise how important fire imagery has been to me all my life. In the Bible, some of my favourite stories involve fire-- the Burning Bush and Pentecost in particular. And one of my epigraphs you will find at the bottom of this blog is from our Blessed Lord: "I have come to bring fire to the Earth."

And then there is one of my favourite lines in all English poetry, the last line of this verse from the poem The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon:
 
The last hollyhock's fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

The wild fingers of fire are making corruption clean. That is what I have craved, intermittently, all my life. That is what makes me a hopeless prig. And, although there is much to be said against priggishness, I think there is something to be said for it, as well.

The Introduction to the Gideon Bible

I'm trying to make Scripture more a part of my everyday life. I decided recently I should acquire a little pocket Gideon New Testament, so I could browse it at odd moments. I've had several of these down the years but couldn't find any. Thankfully, the Christian Union in UCD gave me one.

I find the introduction to the book extremely moving and poetic, whether or not the theology is entirely correct (and I personally don't see anything amiss with it). I can never get on the Protestant-bashing train that is sadly so popular among many conservative Catholics, liberal Catholics, and snooty secularists. If you don't find the following passages beautiful, there's something wrong:

"The Bible contains the mind of God, the state of man, the way of salvation, the doom of sinners, and the happiness of believers. Its doctrines are holy, its precepts are binding, its histories are true, and its decisions immutable. Read it to be wise, believe it to be safe, and practice it to be holy. It contains light to direct you, food to support you, and comfort to cheer you. It is the traveler's map, the pilgrim's staff, the pilot's compass, the soldier's sword, and the Christian's charter. Here paradise is restored, Heaven opened, and the gates of hell disclosed.

"Christ is its grand subject, our good the design, and the glory of God its end. It should fill the memory, rule the heart, and guide the feet. Read it slowly, frequently, and prayerfully. It is a mine of wealth, a paradise of glory, and a river of pleasure. It is given you in life, will be opened at the judgment, and be remembered forever. It involves the highest responsibility, will reward the greatest labor, and will condemn all who trifle with its sacred contents."

Favourite Poems: Golden Stockings by Oliver St. John Gogarty

This poem is fairly well-known in Ireland but, I'm guessing, almost completely unknown outside it. I have mixed feelings about introducing such poems to an international readership: I like the idea of a "national literature" and literary provincialism. But my little corner of the internet is hardly going to make much of a difference.

Do I have to say anything about this poem? Words like "dainty", "delicate", and "delightful" suggest themselves. It has enough pathos to avoid being twee. The last line is perfect.

Golden Stocking by Oliver St. John Gogarty

Golden stockings you had on
In the meadow where you ran;
And your little knees together
Bobbed like pippins in the weather,
When the breezes rush and fight
For those dimples of delight,
And they dance from the pursuit,
And the leaf looks like the fruit.

I have many a sight in mind
That would last if I were blind;
Many verses I could write
That would bring me many a sight.
Now I only see but one,
See you running in the sun,
And the gold-dust coming up
From the trampled buttercup.

And While I'm Posting Videos...

...here's a video of my talk in Belfast in 2019. The only time I've been in that city, and almost the only time. I've made one day-trip to Newry since then.

It's managed to chalk up a colossal 329 views! And one comment!!

A Candle's Flame

 

I put this poem up on YouTube two years ago and it's only had eighty-five views. That's pathetic. Maybe if I post it every now and again I can get it into triple figures.

It was my effort to simply concentrate on atmospheres and phrases that I really like. 

Favourite Album Covers: Working in the Soul Mine by the John Schroeder Orchestra

 

This album was in my home when I was growing up. I've never listened to it, but I always remembered it. These girls look very serious about working in the soul mine. I like it when a metaphor is followed through.

The Best Irish Ads...Ever!

Advertising is a part of life. Some ads are good enough to create shared memories. If you're old enough, watching old television ad breaks (people have uploaded quite a few of them to the internet) is a real trip down memory lane. ("A trip down memory lane" might be a cliché, but it's one of my favourites. Think of it as a "Proustian moment" instead, if it makes you feel better.)

Here are my favourite Irish TV ads from down the years. (Well, some of them are from the cinema and the internet.)

Tourism Ireland's 2011 advertisement for the then-new Terminal Two in Dublin Airport.

A rather naughty ad for the chocolate bar Moro. Yes, the humour is bawdy, but it's undeniably funny, and sharply observed in terms of how Dubliners spoke at this time.

A 2007 ad for the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, which might have been better occupied trying to avert the 2008 banking crisis than making ads. "I don't know what a tracker mortgage is" became something of a catchphrase in Ireland. This is the sort of "everyday surreal" that I love so much. Believe it or not, a spin-off documentary was made twenty years later. Well, sort of.

No list of memorable Irish ads would be complete without this famous 1987 ESB ad, which features the Dusty Springfield song "Going Back". This seems to have lodged in everybody's memory. It certainly did in mine. I remember this ad making me very conscious of my mortality, for some reason. Emigration was a big theme of the period.

Speaking of emigration, this is a 1991 Scottish ad for Tennant's lager that was shown in Ireland, replacing the name "Caledonia" with the words "my land". It's a great piece of story-telling in little more than a minute.

Apparently it was pulled as SNP propaganda. I didn't know that until now!

This 1986 ad for Bórd na Mona (who sell peat briquettes), The Marino Waltz by the Dubliners, is in my view the single greatest Irish TV ad of all time. Such a simple concept, so brilliantly executed. Back when romantic Irishness was still allowed.

I can't resist including this Drifter ad from 1990, even though it was UK rather than Irish. I think I read somewhere that it was shown in Ireland for longer.

"Doctor, doctor, can I have a prescription?". This public health ad was shown on UTV (Ulster Television) in the 1980s, and the character has a strong Northern Irish accent. But, interestingly, the voice-over at the end sounds like a Dubliner.

I remember this one from the cinema rather than the TV, and it was effective on the big screen. I think it's from 2001, but I'm not sure.

A Post from Eleven Years Ago: Ten Reasons I Believe in God

1) Because I am alive. I've never been able to get over the surprise of this. It seems completely unlooked-for and gratuitous. It fits with the idea of a God who didn't have to create anything, but did so out of pure love.

2) Because the world is so dramatic. Nothing had to exist at all. But, given that something does exist, why wasn't it a static, lifeless, unchanging mass of some kind? Or, on the other hand, why wasn't it a chaotic flux with no pattern, no form, no breathing space? As it is, we have a playground for the human intellect, a theatre for the human soul. (I am partly indebted to Carl Sagan for this point. He was merely pointing out how the universe we inhabit allows the emergence of science. He might have been horrified if he realised he was planting a seed of theistic belief in an innocent teenager's mind.)

3) Because things are fundamentally good. We hear a lot about the "problem of evil", but not about the "problem of good". Most of us can expect to live out this day, and the one after that, and the one after that. We can expect that the person sitting next to us on the bus would sooner help us than hurt us. Most of the things we do every single day bring us joy, from the first scoop of breakfast cereal to the caress of a soft pillow on a tired head. Even the things we don't want to do, like working or exercising or waiting in a queue, often end up bringing us an unexpected satisfaction. Whose fault is it that we become blasé about such abounding joy?

4) Because of my thoughts. I am unable to conceive how my memories of a Christmas morning twenty-five years ago are basically made of the same stuff as a pebble, a screwdriver or a tub of lard. I am not sophisticated enough to understand eliminative materialism, just as I would gape at someone who told me that, from the viewpoint of advanced mathematics, two and two actually equalled a pear tree. And the fact that my thoughts seem somehow outside the realm of the physical makes me unable to believe that only the physical realm exists. It also makes me think that there must be an intelligence behind the universe, on the grounds that the greater cannot come from the lesser.

5) Because I have an idea of good and bad. Though I am often successful-- spectacularly successful-- at rigging those notions of good and bad to line up with what I want to do, now and again I find they become stubborn and won't cooperate. Besides, why should I even want to rig them? Why not just ignore them? And I find that other people not only have these notions, but have them to a degree far in advance of myself. It seems as though my notions of right and wrong have a source outside the physical world, too.

6) Because of Jesus Christ. Talk about a magnetic personality! Even the enemies of Christianity seem unable to find anything to say against him. Bertrand Russell accused him of petulance for withering the fig tree that would yield no fruit. It wasn't one of Bertie's better moments; this is plainly a kind of concrete parable for the benefit of his disciples.

I don't know of any character, real or invented, who combines an air of absolute authority with utter humility, as does Christ. He is not some stoic, otherworldly, blissed-out sage, as one might expect of a visitor from the heavens. And yet, how banal that would be! But no; Christ weeps, becomes irritated, has a flair for the dramatic, and dreads his final suffering. And yet every word he spoke seems to glow with irresistible truth.

7) Because of the saints. The saints have the paradoxical quality of being fanatical and yet not fanatics. They were men and women addicted to doing good in the way a teenager is addicted to video games. But, though they seemed to have a kind of craving to feed the poor and comfort the afflicted, none of them seemed to find that these practical acts of charity clashed with spending long hours in prayer and devotion. It even seems as though the two things are-- contrary to appearances and the "social gospel" critics of the Church-- actually one thing!

When you have a group of witnesses who stick to their guns through every persecution, who are even willing to give up their lives for the truth of their claims, and whose stories "check out" with one another to an extraordinary degree, you begin to think there is something to what they are saying.

8) Because of the Catholic Church. Whatever else you may say about the Catholic Church (and everything else has been said, at one time or another), it is undoubtedly the greatest show on Earth. It has run and run and run-- through the rise and fall of empires, the birth of nations, the passing of whole civilizations. I don't know how to account for its survival through persecution, schism, wicked Popes, ideological opposition and the utter changing of the world. What keeps the show on the road? I believe it is the Holy Spirit.

9) Because of the banality of secularism. I cannot believe that the goal of mankind is that we should all have more leisure time to visit museums and art galleries whose masterpieces no longer mean anything to us. "Well, maybe the universe is banal!". But if it is, where did we get this overpowering thirst for the sublime and the transcendental?

10) Because of G.K. Chesterton. I think every open-minded agnostic and atheist should read Chesterton's Orthodoxy. They could read it in a day, and it might change their whole view of the universe. It changed mine.

The Growth of Love (I)

I know my title sounds like it might belong to a marriage guidance manual from the seventies, but that's not what this blog post is about. It's not about romantic love or even interpersonal love. It's about "love" in the sense of enthusiasms, interests, pursuits, and so on. And it's unabashedly personal. I hope it's of interest to someone out there, but even if it's not, I want to write it for myself.

I was watching a horror film earlier today (the one I mentioned in a previous post), and it occurred to me: horror is probably my oldest love in this sense.

I can't remember when I started to love the horror genre. More than anything, it's horror films that I love. I was allowed to any number of horror films as a child, perhaps because my father also liked horror. At least, he liked ghost stories. He often mentioned staying up late as a boy, after everyone else had gone to bed, and reading a collection of ghost stories.

I once asked him why he was so tolerant of ghost stories, when he only had mockery for science fiction and fantasy, which he generally regarded as childish trash. "Because ghosts are real", he said.

How many horror films did I watch in my childhood? I have no idea, and I find it hard to even remember particular horror films. They all blend together in my mind, but they were mostly English: Hammer, Amicus, and other films of that kind.

Horror has always felt like home to me. I feel about horror-- the horror atmosphere, which has to be somehow cosy or appealing as well as scary-- the same way English people feel about the white cliffs of Dover, or Americans feel about Mom's apple pie. 

But speaking of the white cliffs of Dover...my anglophilia, my love of Englishness, was also a very early acquisition, though not as old as my love of horror. Somehow, when I think of it, I think of the image of Big Ben in the cartoon Dangermouse, even though Dangermouse was not a big part of my childhood. I think it was mostly to do with English comics (such as The Eagle) and English TV programmes, though none of the latter suggest themselves to me right now. I do remember that the first "grown-up" book I ever read-- that is, the first book that was mostly text-- was Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

What about my love of poetry? This was a rather late arrival. It wasn't until my early teens that I discovered poetry, and the discovery was sudden. It's hard to write this without sounding obnoxious, but I was astonished-- even then-- at the realization that I had a mature taste for great poetry. As soon as I read W.B. Yeats, I loved him, in the same way that I love him today. I expected poetry to be over my head, but it wasn't. I have no idea how this happened, other than my father reciting poetry to me. (I can still remember the first time I heard the "Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow" speech from Mabbeth-- when my father recited it to me-- and the frisson I felt at the words "a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing").

My love of the cinema was even later. I'd gone to the cinema exactly seven times in my childhood, each of them memorable occasions. But it hadn't sparked a particular love of the cinema per se.

My passion for cinema-going actually began in 2001, when I was already in my early twenties. It sounds ridiculous (and it is ridiculous) but for many years I was reluctant to go to the cinema on my own, being unsure what exactly you did when you walked up to a box-office. I thought there was some kind of mystique to it, like ordering from the menu in a French restaurant.

Perhaps this nervousness was Providential, because when I finally overcame my cinema hesitation, I became an avid cinema-goer, and I experience a profound sense of revelation. I went every week, several times a week, for several years. I read the movie magazines. When people saw me, they asked me what films I'd seen recently-- which irritated me.

The cinema I attended was the Santry Omniplex, which was part of the Omni shopping centre in Santry, not far from Dublin Airport. Importantly, though it was part of the shopping centre, it was semi-detached, as it were-- which meant that, when I left a screening (and I always preferred morning screenings), I would walk from the darkness back out into the cold light of day.

The Santry Omniplex was the sort of suburban cineplex which is called "soulless", but it was exactly what I needed-- although it would take too long to explain this.

The more this great era of my cinema-going recedes into my past, the more important it seems to me. It was like an imaginative rebirth, even a spiritual rebirth. It reminds me of this great line from John Denver: "He was born in the summer of his twenty-seventh year, coming home to a place he'd never been before..."

But that's all I can write for now...

Favourite Album Covers: Technical Ecstasy by Black Sabbath

 

This has been my absolute favourite album cover for decades now. I've never even listened to the album.

It's hard to explain why. I just really like the atmosphere, and the colours-- the colours and textures create the atmosphere. 

I suppose you could say it evokes a kind of technological dystopia, from a human point of view, but that's not what I think of when I look at it. It actually has something of a retro-futurist feel, and the title colours my view of the picture. It's a moment of ecstasy, not of horror. Maybe my reaction, deep down, is: "Perhaps the future won't be too different from the past, in some way." Also, I've always loved escalators.

It was painted (?) by the same guy who designed the cover for Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. I've only discovered that right now. You could hardly get a more recognizable album cover than that one.

A Positive Cultural Development?

Last night I started watching a 2022 anthology horror film called Tales from the Other Side. It was, to be frank, pretty ropey: cheap, corny, and often ridiculous. But I fell asleep watching it and I'll finish watching it today. I love horror anthologiy films so much that I will (fairly) happily watch even the worst ones. I would rather watch a fifth-rate anthology horror anthology film than a second-rate gangster film, war film, or melodrama. Beside, it had some nice moments.

I came across it on Amazon Prime. This service seems to have a bottomless cauldron of cheap horror films-- most of them made within the last few years. The sort of films that don't have a Wikipedia page or any other kind of online footprint, aside from an occasional capsule review, and that will certainly never become widelly known.

I say "cheap" rather than "bad", because not all of them are bad. For instance, The Curse of Crom: The Legend of Halloween was pretty good, and there have been others.

Presumably this avalanche of horror films-- and, I assume, other genres (Christmas movies, for instance)- only exists because of streaming. Is that really such a bad thing? The people who make all these flms are getting paid, and they are also getting to do creative work. That seems like an admirable thing to me. They only exist because they meet a demand, so somebody is getting something out of watching them. (Me, for one.)

Even if you subscribe to an elitist outlook that only creative works of permanent value matter-- well, you need a mountain of mediocrity to achieve a pinaccle of excellence. The bigger the mountain...

Meanwhile, cinemas still exist, and still exhibit all their usual fare: big budget movies, not-so-big budget movies, and obscure little movies that still get a theatrical release.

I'm not often enthusiastic about cultural developments, but this seems like a good one.

There's UFO's over New York...

 ...and I ain't too surprised.

I happened to be listening to John Lennon's song "Nobody Told Me" just now, and I couldn't help being struck by the topicality of this line, given recent headlines.

(I'm surprised to be writing a second Beatles-related post in a row.)

I've long harboured a dislike of John Lennon, based on a few different factors: the lyrics of "Imagine", the way he treated his first son, and his general cynicism. I think of Paul McCartney as the good Beatle and the John as the bad one.

But of course, that's completely daft. John Lennon was a young guy with a troubled background who experienced unprecedented, unimaginable success. It's impossible to guess how that would affect any one of us.

In more recent years, I've come to really like some of his solo tracks that I didn't know about before. Most especially, "Watching the Wheels", but also "Gimme Some Truth" and "Working-Class Hero."

And "Nobody Told Me", which is a wonderfully bouncy and upbeat anthem to life's quirkiness.

More than that, though: it evokes a mood or aesthetic that I particularly relish, one best captured by Louis MacNeice in his immortal phrase "the drunkenness of things being various".

Other things that awaken this mood, or aesthetic:

The Trivial Pursuit board.

Books of quotations.

Reading old diaries, bound periodicals, or even the newspaper.

Compilation TV shows such as the Irish "Reeling in the Years" series.

I also like the "collage" style of the lyrics. It reminds me of other songs such as "Cool for Cats" by Squeeze or "The Mero" by the Dubliners.

There's something miraculous about music (and every other form of art) that awakens in us a particular mood or view of the world. It's almost the opposite of the Matthew Arnold line I posted a view days ago: "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole." That's a wonderful line, and a wonderful gift. But not to see life steadily, or see it whole, also seems important: the ability to see the world as now comic, now tragic, now mysterious, now exciting, now sentimental, etc. etc. And the fact that life can correctly be described in all these different ways!

Life is a shimmering thing.

Favourite Album Covers: Back to the Egg

This is a new regular feature which I will probably forget about immediately.

Anyway, I've long been of this album cover, Back to the Egg by Wings (1979) which is an example of what I call "everyday surrealism". And so seventies!

Favourite Poems: "To a Friend" by Matthew Arnold.

This sonnet is about Sophocles, of whom I know little. Well, it's about Homer, Epictetus, and Sophocles. The opening is a bit shaky and awkward, although that also gives it a sort of halting dignity. But the sestet, the last six lines, are the kicker. "Who saw life steadily and saw it whole" is, in my view, one of the greatest lines in English poetry. "Business could not make dull, nor passion wild" is another wonderful line; the sort of classical antithesis native to the age of Samuel Johnson, here lit by the afterglow of Romanticism. "Mellow glory" is also a wonderful paradox, or at least, a surprising combination of ideas.

It's the sort of poem that makes me regret being so little of a classicist!

To a Friend by Matthew Arnold

Who prop, thou ask'st in these bad days, my mind?—
He much, the old man, who, clearest-souled of men,
Saw The Wide Prospect, and the Asian Fen,
And Tmolus hill, and Smyrna bay, though blind.

Much he, whose friendship I not long since won,
That halting slave, who in Nicopolis
Taught Arrian, when Vespasian's brutal son
Cleared Rome of what most shamed him. But be his

My special thanks, whose even-balanced soul,
From first youth tested up to extreme old age,
Business could not make dull, nor passion wild;

Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole;
The mellow glory of the Attic stage,
Singer of sweet Colonus, and its child.

Poetry and Music is "All or Nothing" For Me

Just a quick observation on my own artistic sensibilities, which may or may not chime with anybody else's.

I've noticed a big cleavage between my own attitude towards poetry and music on the one hand, and pretty much all the other arts on the other.

I'm much more tolerant towards all the other arts. I could watch a film and think: "Yeah, that was OK. It was unoriginal and corny and a bit dull, but it was enjoyable enough to watch-- though I wouldn't watch it again, most likely."

The same applies to books, the visual arts, architecture, and so on. These arts are graded on a continuum.

When it comes to music and poetry, though, I'm looking for something very specific. In those two art-forms, a miss is as good as a mile. It either happens or it doesn't happen.

Now, I don't think this necessarily has anything to do with good taste. In my own mind, I have excellent taste in poetry, but pretty awful taste in music-- for the most part.

The response that I'm looking for, when it comes music and poetry, is something like genuine laughter-- it's an involuntary response. Or it might be compared to a physical shudder, or physical attraction, or (perhaps more than else) the awakening of the sense of wonder.

This is a minimum requirement, of course. It's not to say that every poem, or piece of music, that provokes this response does so to an equal degree-- in the same way that not every laugh is equally intense.

Reading new poetry, and listening to new music, always feels like prospecting to me. Will it happen, or won't it? If it doesn't, all the critical plaudits and hype in the world, all the evident virtuosity at work, mean nothing at all to me.

The Face in the Wallpaper

My aunt and uncle, both of them now gone to their reward, lived on a farm a little bit outside Limerick City. I would visit them every summer and stay in their spare room.

One year they told me that people had seen a face in the wallpaper of that bedroom if they looked at it too long.

On the surface, it sounds like they were just trying to put the wind up me, but I don't think so. Although I can't remember exactly how I was told this, I had the strong impression it was a "true" story-- that is, it at least wasn't made up for my benefit.

I've pondered it ever since, intermittently-- what did it actually mean?

At the time, I assumed it meant the pattern of the wallpaper would somehow "resolve" itself into a face if you looked at it long enough-- like an autostereogram.

Only much later did another interpretation occur to me, one that seems rather more obvious-- that, if you stared at the wallpaper long enough, a ghostly face would superimpose itself over it. 

The funny thing is that, although the first alternative sounds less scary and even naturalistic, it scared me plenty back then.

This is the sort of "chill" I like the most-- a subtle and understated one, with no necessary hint of danger.

I had plenty of scares on that farm, perhaps because it was so far from Dublin and home.

One night I lay awake reading my aunt's magazines, one of which contained an article about the Third Secret of Fatima that suggested it would happen in 1992-- and I was reading it in 1992. I literally lay awake waiting for the bombs to fall. I was my last night in Limerick that summer. Somehow I felt convinced that, if I got back to Dublin, I'd be safe. I think, deep down, I knew it would seem less convincing in Dublin.

In another magazine (she had glossy celebrity magazines as well as religious magazines), I read an account of Michael Jackson filming the "Thriller" video, which hyped up the possibility that he had opened himself up to dark forces.

I can distinctly remember walking out into the sunlight and feeling a sense of "daylight horror"-- that the chill of the story still hung over me despite the summer sun.

I also remember reading a tabloid news story there, which suggested cancer had been mixed with a virus, and this terrified me, for all of ten minutes.

On another occasion, my uncle was telling ghost stories in the "good room", or the parlour, and all the lights went off. That was spooky.

And once I was shown a stone in the vicinity which supposedly had the devil's hoofprints on it. 

I'm very grateful for all these experiences now.

The Life of Brian Debate, Again

I'm rather fascinated by the famous debate on The Life of Brian between John Cleese and Michael Palin (on one side) and Malcolm Muggeridge and Bishop Mervyn Stockwood on the other.

I know I've written about it before, but I come back to it for several reasons:

1) It's interesting to me that the Monty Python team have completely won in the court of popular opinion, all these years later. You can read the comments on any YouTube upload of this debate and none of them are sympathetic to Muggeridge and Stockwood. Even Christians turn on them. I find this depressing.

2) I feel a strange sort of love for Malcolm Muggeridge. He was well-known in his time, a national figure, and now he's completely forgotten. But he was astonishingly right about many things, including the evils of activism and the prophetic wisdom of Humane Vitae. And there's just something endearing about him, right down to the way he pronounces graffiti "GRA-fitti", with a stressed first syllable. 

(I've noticed that this is a marked phenomenon among crotchety old men-- they choose a particular word, or several words, to pronounce in an idiosyncratic way. I knew an old man who always pronounced "immediate" so the second syllable rhymed with "head". My own father insisted Latvia was pronounced Lat-ria.)

3) The most moving part of the programme is this contribution from Muggeridge, where he reproves the Pythons for cheapening the story of Christ: "Remember that story of the Incarnation was what our whole civilization began with...remember that it has inspired every great artist, every great writer, every great builder, every great architect, to celebrate that marvellous thing.."

(At this point John Cleese makes the cheap shot that it also inspired the Thirty Years War and the Inquisition, and gets a round of applause from the audience, who are clearly on the side of the Pythons.) 

Muggeridge resumes: "But nothing can alter the fact that if you were to make a list of all the greatest works of art in all fields, and all the greatest contributors to those works of art, you will find that this scene of the Incarnation, the story of the Incarnation, has played the largest part. Now, in our twentieth century, this film produces a sort of graffiti version of it, and I don't think in the eyes of posterity it will have a very distinguished place..."

On that last point, Muggeridge has been proven wrong, at least so far. But there is something inexpressibly beautiful and graceful about the way he makes his point. He speaks slowly and sadly, pointing his finger (presumably at a screen where clips from it were played), with all the gravity of an eyewitness to much of the twentieth century's insanity.

I'm particularly impressed that Muggeridge bypasses any of the tiresome arguments about artistic or intellectual freedom, or respect for religious sensibilities. I very much doubt he would have been in favour of censoring the film. He is, in fact, saying: "Shame on you. Shame on you for trampling something beautiful and lofty." An argument that conservatives have more or less stopped making. We are too frightened of ridicule.

4) This debate is interesting to me, also, because of its relevance to current debates about political correctness and woke and freedom of speech and all the rest of it. Both John Cleese and Michael Palin have become outspoken critics of political correctness. I admire them for that.

I'm sure they would say-- and doubtless they have said-- "We were opposed to the moral guardians when they were Christian conservatives, and now we're opposed to them when they're woke leftists." The idea is that Mary Whitehouse morphed into Owen Jones.

I'm not at all convinced of this. In fact, I don't believe it for a moment. I think political correctness is part of the same wave as Life of Brian. I don't have time to make this argument right now, and I'll admit it's more an intuition than anything else. 

5) I do think both the bishop and Malcolm Muggeridge were at fault for attacking the film as "tenth-rate". It is indeed a funny and accomplished film. What's wrong with saying that something is both funny and tawdry?