“Rambling on the Path to Rome” by Peter Francis Browne

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

For decades I’ve been an admirer of Hilaire Belloc’s The Path To Rome, so in a charity shop in Lancaster I grabbed at Peter Francis Browne’s account of his late-20th-century retracing of the same journey. Belloc’s walk had been a pilgrimage, the fulfilment of a vow which he made when stationed in 1891 at Toul in south-east France, to walk from there in a straight line to Rome; he carried this out 10 years later. Browne replaces Belloc’s Catholic motive with a literary one: his was a vow made on reading Belloc’s account, to retrace Belloc’s steps. Subsequent vows form a theme of both books: Belloc’s to use no wheeled transportation; Browne’s not to deviate from the earlier route – both were broken.
The details of Browne’s ‘pilgrimage’ are interesting in themselves: where Belloc followed goat tracks, and found inns in every hamlet, Browne has to negotiate juggernauted dual carriageways and a tourism industry often hostile to the lone bedraggled walker; the characters he meets are memorably well drawn; and Browne’s depiction of himself – the character of Browne – is strong and clear. What sticks in my mind most, however, is the centrality of weather to the world of the long-distance walker – Browne successfully makes the reader feel not only a companion, but also out of doors.
Just before arrival in the Eternal City, Browne muses (p278): “I remembered the Moselle, along whose valley I had walked all those weeks ago. Only weeks? It seemed many months. I pictured myself there, far beyond the Apennines, the Alps, Jura, Vosges, limping along rainy lanes with my blistered feet and the apprehension I could not share.
I hardly recognised that stranger. The man who had left Toul no longer existed.
And that, I suppose, is the only criterion by which one can judge a journey.”

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“The New Jerusalem” by Emanuel Swedenborg

Posted on January 28, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

Starts as a promising attempt to work out a spiritual life from first principles. Swedenborg’s (admittedly naive) mutually-derived binary oppositions (so Good and Truth give respectively Will and Intellect, which, again respectively, give Charity and Faith; so, Good leads to Charity via Will, and Truth to Faith via Intellect) take this sympathetic reader some way. His discussions of who is our Neighbour are also interesting, moving in a hierarchy from the neighbourliness of one’s own body to the Lord. When in later chapters, however, he falls back to more traditional Christian doctrine such as Heaven and Hell, he loses me. Like Descartes, he tries to use more modern methods to justify the same old stuff: an interesting transitional phase of the Enlightenment.

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The Courtauld Gallery

Posted on January 1, 2012 by Houyhnhnm

A first proper visit since sixth form. Lots of very good stuff, particularly the Impressionists.
Quite a revelation, in my recognising for the first time, through looking at the Impressionists, how all artists construct what is always in some sense abstract form, using to greater or lesser degrees the visual world as a basis. Merely the selection of which view to paint is a decision of abstract form. With the move into Expressionism comes on the one hand a similar understanding of the visual world inspiring abstraction, but on the other a recognition of a turning-inwards of the artist’s eye to at the same time represent (express) the inner world of feeling. At this point it all got too complicated; I need to go back.

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“Smiley’s People” by John le Carré

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

Developing to some kind of resolution the story of Smiley and Karla, subtly making clearer the binary connections between them. P450 tries to make this explicit: Karla’s being brought down by Smiley’s defining compassion; Smiley’s being somehow damaged by his use of Karla’s defining fanaticism… They somehow swap traits, in a Harry-Voldemort wand-battle. But Smiley doesn’t, as far as I can tell, use fanatical methods, so the switch doesn’t ring true…
Smiley is more Aeneas, drawn into triumph and unhappiness by an unarticulated and problematic sense of duty (pietas); Karla his Turnus, moving within the story from primitively brutal, a representative of forces primitively brutal, to a victimhood engineered by the directly personal.
Le Carré’s basic technique is here, as elsewhere, and more than other writers, to tell his story in backward segments: we and his protagonists first encounter puzzles (“who’s this?” “what’s going on now?”, and then find explanation; it’s like starting a novel many times over. This sometimes operates works at a micro-level, for example on p167, where (in an uncharacteristically self-conscious passage) he teases the reader by a lengthy description of Smiley’s struggle to get a fire going as a “heavy symbol”, before eventually reminding us of what this might be a symbol. This self-consciousness intrudes with much greater success, however, in the book’s final stages, where use of the present tense makes narrator and reader partners in a Circus debrief, le Carré’s story now a case study in the training of spies and Circus mythology. By this simple device he raises the tone of the dénouement to another plane.

New words: soutane; spavined; St Luke’s Summer.

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“Hans Keller and Internment” by Alison Garnham

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

Garnham’s book ‘tells’ (see below for more on how) the story of the Austrian émigré musician, writer and broadcaster Hans Keller from his beginnings in pre-War Vienna to his bursting onto the British musical scene in the late 40s. She cleverly and successfully shapes this linear story of Keller’s finding his voice by framing the kernel of her material – a series of his letters from British internment camps – within Keller’s own writings: beforehand the gripping and upsetting account of his escape from the Gestapo, and afterwards his first writings on music. She presents her material (as in her other writing) by letting other voices speak alongside hers; she contextualises, nudges our memories, and draws out threads of truth which make sense of her sources. The form tells the same story as the content: the finding of a writer’s ‘voice’ finds its correlative in the way Garnham’s structure eases the birth of this voice: after her introduction of the painful dislocation of leaving Vienna, and strong scaffolding around the repetitive and frustrated letters from captivity, she gives him a push with an original explanation of how three epiphanies, all experienced after arriving in Britain, effected what is the book’s dramatic conclusion: Keller’s synthesis of his hitherto separate intellectual worlds of words and music, by writing about music. She then lets go of the bicycle. Keller’s voice is then free: we are given four essays, and finally a transcript of an interview in which the now dead Keller is remembered by colleagues. The voice lives on after death, truly brought to life.

For me there are echoes of katabasis, or at least the return from such a descent: there’s certainly in the final interview, despite the fact that the participants are discussing Keller after his death, a feeling of a glorious coming-into-life: his voice is Garnham’s true protagonist.

Above all the book, a work of scholarly and archival biography, nevertheless, by this weaving of many voices, achieves an effect which is firstly literary.

New words: lettre de cachet; cathexis; characterologically

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“The Last Philosophy” by Don Cupitt

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

A masterpiece in atheistic religion.
Cupitt steers a path between realism and non-realism by on the one hand arguing that the three ’worlds’ of external reality, inner consciousness, and language are all made of the same stuff, all language-formed (or at least sign-formed – i.e. that all are presented to our attention necessarily in sign-form). So much of his argument is based on this premiss, yet he doesn’t tackle what seem obvious objections: firstly, musical or visually-artistic thought, which seems to be both intellectual and non-linguistic, and, secondly, animal-style instinctive responses to stimuli. He does sort-of address the second, by attempting to explain animal consciousness as also sign-formed (a deer has to interpret a shape in the bushes as “predator”, “another deer” or “carrier bag” before responding), and I guess he’ll address the former in a similar way, claiming that we interpret elements of music or painting as parts of a language of signs. But he doesn’t attempt this, so it’s left as an objection.
Partly through this argument, that our inner thoughts and external observations are presented to the self through the same channel, language, he deconstructs the idea of self, of a integral entity contemplating the world; he also does this by (as Lacan?) attempting a view of the self as a collection of contradictory voices (à la Bakhtin). This leads fascinatingly and convincingly to an explanation of human action (artistic or otherwise) as an attempt to create something actually non-contradictory, something which resolves the mind’s disparate elements into “something recognisably a something” (apologies to Robert Graves).
There is some great writing – he’s really engaging – and some fantastic rewriting of Christian concepts in his sceptical and non-realist terms: so eschatology refers not to some distant end of time but our present lives, as we are individually near the end of our own times…

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“We Need to Talk About Kevin” by Lionel Shriver, and film

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

The three of us sat in silence at the end and had to have a beer before going home. I’d read the book, another had read its beginning, the other none.
Two significant changes: removing the epistolary form of letters to Franklin was I can see necessary, but we thereby lost the final shock the addressee was dead; also necessary (I guess, as to keep the image would have been inconsistent with the film’s reluctance actually to show horror) was the moving of Kevin’s sister’s body from archery target to lawn.
What the film showed more clearly than the book, and that only, and rightly, at the end, was the connection and “love” between mother and son: “Why [did you do it]?” “I used to think I knew [to get at you, mom], but now I’m not so sure”. This redemption warms the departing audience, and leads to comparisons with myths: Oedipus obviously, but also Medea (killing family members to get at another one), and, strikingly clear in form, but harder to read thematically, the Odyssey’s Mnesterophonia where Odysseus shoots the trapped Suitors with his bow and arrows. With this the story completes Cold Mountain: the slaughter following the journey home.
And there’s no end, no separation: as in Fiona Shaw’s Medea the protagonists are left to work out their lives together – Eva’s joke about going to burn in Hell, although the film expertly never lets us directly know what she is thinking, is what she is actually living.

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“Tinker Sailor Soldier Spy” by John le Carré

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

As the later “A Most Wanted Man”, a slow-burning ascent, but different, and superior, in its significantly bathetic climax. There’s no real surprise when we see the traitor with Polyakov (a point made tellingly in the recent film), and the more we think about the book the more we realise that it’s not a story about spies, but a story about personal betrayal, national betrayal merely a foil to the personal.

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“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

A sustained poem, genuinely great in that it combines a modern(ist) absence of overall narrative, and a concentration on the modern, young, world, with a profound literary resonance both explicit (references to e.g. Le Grand Meaulnes & Proust), and implicit, in its reworking of, from Homer, Telemachus’ search for his father, and Achilles’ preference, later reversed, for a short life of kicks over a longer but less eventful one.
Firstly the narrative [SPOILER ALERT]: Dean appears soon after the start, and disappears at the end, but we’re not told that Sal will never see him again after the novel ends, as it were, and the pattern of the novel suggests that Dean will never finally go away… And there is a progression, a linear growth, an intensification, shown through e.g. Dean’s behaviour, the crazier and crazier descriptions of musicians, and the A to B of hometown New York to the very Paradise of Mexico. But the overall feel of Sal’s story is of a Beckettian cycle of loops, trips, recurrences; a texture rather than a thread; as Sal puts down his pen Dean turns another stolen car into his street. And it’s got this fecund mythicity: how Dean is like a character trait which won’t go away, an alter ego; and how its kinship with the Odyssey (Sirens, Cyclopes, missing fathers, even cars described as ships and land as the ocean) joins with its “Spontaneous Prose” style to make it a follow-on from Joyce.

Words: beat cool jalopy blow cat treed “ecstasy and speed” (end of Part 3). “Cool” is used only twice (as far as I remember), both times of a musician, once paired with “commercial” – i.e. a selling-out, and once as a complement, a style of “blowing” the opposite of “heated”. “Treed” is not a very good example of Kerouac’s easy use of words in unfamiliar grammatical categories, particularly as new verbs and adjectives. Fecundity.

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Plato’s “Euthyphro”

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Houyhnhnm

The best thing I’ve read for ages. Fabulously tight, funny, profound, and challenging. I’d never noticed how Plato sets the (in itself important) argument about holiness in the context of Socrates’ forthcoming trial, and sets up Euthyphro and his father as parallels to Meletos and Socrates – Euthyphro, prosecuting his father for homicide, and Meletos prosecuting Socrates for impiety. Socrates’ brilliant demolition of Euthyphro is consequently an early defence speech, set in the literary frame of Socrates’ seeking religious advice from Euthyphro the ‘expert’. In a powerful double-edged ending, we leave Socrates a failed victor: he’s beaten in argument the representative of conventional piety (‘Euthyphro’ means ‘straight-thinker’), yet has failed on the surface to learn what conventional piety means, and at a deeper level to convince the pious of his position’s incoherence.
The philosophy:
E: the gods argue about right and wrong. “Holy” is what the gods approve. Therefore what is holy cannot be one thing: it must be in dispute.
E: anyway, all the gods agree that what I am doing IS holy, so that’s OK.
S: but your case is so unclear that this is unlikely
[argument then is left]
S: how about defining “holy” as what ALL gods approve of?
E: fine.
S: so is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do the gods approve what is [by another standard] holy?
E: the latter.
S: then you haven’t told me what “holy” is yet.
S: OK then. Is holiness a subset of justice, or vice versa?
E: the former: it’s the aspects of Justice which
a. look after the gods (S: but they can’t be made better)
b. serve the gods (S: but we can’t say what their task is for which one serves them)
c. transact with the gods (prayer and sacrifice, give and take, gratifying them) (S: but gratifying is doing what they approve of – see above)
But this is different, as earlier E was talking about moral acts of which the gods approve, whereas now he’s talking about acts of religous practice.

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