Winter inventories

    I'll get the fire if

    you'll do the coffee.

   

 Is there
 any marmalade?

ii Derek

"For herself, avowedly, the world had always interested her .."

For herself, avowedly, the world had always interested her and the study of her fellow creatures been her constant passion. 


She would have been willing, however, to renounce all her curiosities and sympathies for the sake of a personal life, if the person concerned had only been able to make her believe it was a gain! 


This at least was her present conviction; and the thing certainly would have been easier than to care for society as Osmond cared for it.

He was unable to live without it, and she saw that he had never really done so .. He had his ideal, just as she had tried to have hers; only it was strange that people should seek for justice in such different quarters. His ideal was a conception of high prosperity and propriety, of the aristocratic life, which she now saw that he deemed himself always, in essence at least, to have led. He had never lapsed from it for an hour; he would never have recovered from the shame of doing so .. 

Her notion of the aristocratic life was simply the union of great knowledge with great liberty; the knowledge would give one a sense of duty and the liberty a sense of enjoyment .. 
She had resisted of course; at first very humourously, ironically, tenderly; then, as the situation grew more serious, eagerly, passionately, pleadingly. She had pleaded the cause of freedom, of doing as they chose, of not caring for the aspect and denomination of their life - the cause of other instincts and longings, of quite another ideal.

Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
  Chapter XLII
1881
Knopf, 1991©


i, iii, v  Little Augury

Exercising our option to ignore the other news

We are not undemanding, are we

Don't we make a study of faces?

We have hopes, that we bring to

faces, and not to pictures of

anything else. I'm sure this has

been written about, but I have

not read the book or the essay,

some few excepted. I am remiss;

I've spent more time reading in

the philosophy and psychology

of hearing - in which, also, 

there is nothing obvious - and

too little in the study of our

study of faces. I would not care

to be an expert in the matter,

surprise and mystery and delight

being as important as they are

to me.

Almost every day, some days more

than once, there is a face posted

here, to exhibit a point which I

try to develop in writing. Some-

times rather a lot of the body is

shown, or some gesture, but al-

most always I happen to be think-

ing of the narrative of the face

which the body enacts. Henry James

did not do this; he built faces

from the inside, out; and I ob-

serve that what I see in a face

is what I see inside a character

to whom I am attached. This face,
which I know to be professionally
apt and variously presented, has
been published here exactly in
this way, and has come up on my
desktop every morning for years.
I still look into it. It's not
just a stylised exemplification
of an ancient standard; it's an
indefatigably interlocutory prod.

This, previously published here,

is a face I wish to restore to

this page, through the sordid

spectacle in New Hampshire. I

will not comment on its conclu-

sion. What could be the point?

But I wish also to turn away

from this spectacle, which I

apprehended would be enervating

to the page, as it has been, to

my way of thinking. Yet the num-

bers of readers it has drawn

have exceeded the highest ever

to come here; and I suppose, 

for the reason that others 

wish to get away from it, but 

with some sympathy for their 

view of it.

It's a handsome face, bred in

generosity. Let's assimilate 

this, and study what is beneath 

it, that we carry. Let's be 

grateful to each other for car-

rying it. Today, we observe a-

gain the advancement of folly

against our soul. We will turn

that, and we will see it. 

We hear, they're going to advertise Mitt's remedy for Monday

The New York Times reports that ear-nest Republicans of the moment are going to launch widely televised advertisements of our Mitt's career in eliminating Monday's gruesome resumption of the weekly grind, ie, the ignominy of employment. And who should not take note of that elegant freefall into entropy which has so often been the gift of the witty bird to the industrious worm?

Not that this hasn't led to the creation of that foul class of loiterers who staunchly withhold their profitability from our system, only to sap it with obscene deple-tions of its indulgent safety net.

    

  More wars, of course

  are the proper riposte

  to this indiscipline;

  who does not recall

  Bush the Founder's

  justification for put-

  ting half a million

  men on the ground to

  contend for Kuwait,

  in the midst of the

  family's first reces-

  sion, as creating jobs,

  jobs, jobs, only to pre-

  cipitate the most won-

  drous unemployment, our

  Republican remedy for

  Monday.

Has it only warped our grasp of Gilbert and Sullivan, to glance back through our emulation of Britain's imperial decline to see them now as satirists? Has the penchant for piracy in our Repub-licans defamed the good name of their doily art of dress-up derring-do? Something, indeed, must be counted as lost to the breed, when one of its pretenders can siphon off the sympathies of youth with disdain of an overly extended military establishment. Why, how can a paymaster profit from the State, my dear Lord Chandos, without a payroll; where every day's a Monday, the lark of Cheneyism's ascendant.

We can't suppose that those still subject to Monday, give any thought to the socialist regime which laid a threshold to their workplace in mid-air, as the lewd public works project that it is, lingering to mar their perfect alienation. With what disgusting disregard of opportunity do our socialists deliver the masses to their drudgery, that our Mitt would heal?

Has anyone witnessed a field of putative heads of state which has competed so strenuously for the mantle of Most Ridiculous, as to recall absolutely nothing of the naïveté of child-hood's excuse? I never saw such a pack of unregenerate resenters in my life, even at the Cow Palace for Barry Goldwater - of whom, the less said, the better right now, because he is their obvious model; and who could wish to deflect their free-fall into the dustbin of democracy? Bend your knees, Harry, was our Ben's advice on leaping from the train. I suppose they will have heard?

James Toback
Bugsy
  An original screenplay
Carol Publishing, 1991©


ii   Photograph Robert Doisneau
iii  The Slab

"To understand, you know too soon, there's no sense in trying .."

Hanover guys

deal with it

first

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to

Bob Dylan

It's all right, Ma,

  I'm only bleeding

Warner Brothers, 1965©

The union of nothing and compassion: a spousal contingency

They are followers, above all, of tantric ritual and contemplation, and at the end the abbot leads me, as if in challenge, to two statues in towering em-brace. Here is the white-painted Buddha Vajrasattva - shiny, crude, abstract. In his circling arms clings a sinuous consort, her legs hooked around his waist, their loins intermeshed. This is not sex as humans know it, but a marriage of symbols .. The abbot says, 'This is the union of nothing and compassion.'

'Nothing?'

'The god is nothing. He realises nothingness .. she is compassion. She completes him.'

In New Hampshire, the youth 

climb Mt Washington. It would 

be false to conceive of the 

quality of their exertion with-

out this avidity for completion. 

Max Hastings, in his almost des-

perately outstanding new history 

of the second world war, repeat-

edly cites commanders' reliance

on this existential motivation, 

on all sides of the matter, as 

their 'ace in the hole' for or-

dering the impossible.

This quality, of an avidity for

completion, is an element of these

beings which (we have repeatedly

observed) places them in a fun-

damentally distinct moral posi-

tion. We don't expect the geni-

us of the feminine to be toler-

ated in our partisan discourse;

and for this complaisance the

shame is distributed equally

upon everyone. But we do ex-

pect the experience of the mas-

culine to inform the mature at

last. In this election campaign,

New Hampshire youth have not 

been granted that yet, and we

do not hold our breath that they

will be.

But there are people over 35 

who read this page, and they 

will know what it means when

our pretenders to leadership

stand on public rostrums and

demand more war, more inequal-

ity, more contempt for fact,

more waste of our young and

of our world, without their

exercise of mentoring respon-

sibility. To these readers, 

it would amount to an aban-
donment of our climb.

Colin Thubron

To a Mountain in Tibet

Chatto & Windus, 2010©

Max Hastings

All Hell Let Loose

  The World at War, 1939-45

Harper Press, 2011©

Believing their way against understanding

The merry manipulators of our lives met last night at a college named for an 11th Century martyr who said, Nor do I seek to un-derstand that I may be-lieve, but I believe that I may understand. No one challenged, and our dar-ling Mitt endorsed, Newt Gingrich's argument in favour of an establishment of religion in the United States, as the predicate for deciding, in Romney's phrase, who shall possess human rights. Our Mitt exuberantly endorsed Gingrich's canard that a judicial rejection of sectarian distribution of funds from the US Treasury is an act of bigotry.

It is immaculately fitting that this romp of Orwellian casuistry took place at St Anselm's, whose battle with William the Conqueror over the line between Church and State was won by a man the Church lionised as a victim. It is plain, the 'argument' against the human right to matrimony is identical with the final agonies of racial persecution in the American South: gosh darn it, we've always been allowed to do it. Gingrich literally insisted, Santorum concurring volubly and Mitt smilingly, that the administration of the sacramental aspect of marriage is for the State to enforce. As expected, there was no journalism present.

I think no one would query, that rmbl has been a complaisant little blog where our demagogues have been concerned. They are popular with the indig-nant and sustain jobs with their cant. We do not listen in on their rites, offering no more than an advisory here or there of their next move. But this meeting at St Anselm's was all that was necessary to frame one question: How mentally corrupt must they think our people are?