Religion, and the Alps

It's the last day of exams, so it might be fitting to take note of Belloc's defiantly (and rashly) placing a statue of the Virgin Mary on his desk while he took his final Oxford undergraduate exam; but it also snowed three inches this morning, I've just finished shoveling it off of the funeral home sidewalks, and it put me in mind of Belloc's meditation on the Alps, which he saw on walking expedition to Rome (which I shall explain in a later post). The passage is rather long; I'm including the first parts because they show off his descriptive and story-telling powers, and the latter for his poetic insight about man. I'm also showing this to clear the cant from the minds of friends of mine who, just from reading his eccentric rhymes, think that Belloc is nothing but a drinking, carousing fool. The last line of this passage, incidentally, tells you much about him. I copied the passage out of The Path to Rome from project Gutenberg.

There, on this upper meadow, where so far I had felt nothing but the ordinary gladness of The Summit, I had a vision.

What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or that, and if you think I am inventing the words, you know nothing of men.

I saw between the branches of the trees in front of me a sight in the sky that made me stop breathing, just as great danger at sea, or great surprise in love, or a great deliverance will make a man stop breathing. I saw something I had known in the West as a boy, something I had never seen so grandly discovered as was this. In between the branches of the trees was a great promise of unexpected lights beyond.

I pushed left and right along that edge of the forest and along the fence that bound it, until I found a place where the pine-trees stopped, leaving a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, was a tree whose leaves had failed; there the ground broke away steeply below me, and the beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped down still further, beyond my sight. I looked through this framing hollow and praised God. For there below me, thousands of feet below me, was what seemed an illimitable plain; at the end of that world was an horizon, and the dim bluish sky that overhangs an horizon.

There was brume in it and thickness. One saw the sky beyond the edge of the world getting purer as the vault rose. But right up--a belt in that empyrean--ran peak and field and needle of intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky beneath them and sky above them, a steadfast legion, they glittered as though with the armour of the immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' march, three days' march away, they stood up like the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped my breath. I had seen them.

So little are we, we men: so much are we immersed in our muddy and immediate interests that we think, by numbers and recitals, to comprehend distance or time, or any of our limiting infinities. Here were these magnificent creatures of God, I mean the Alps, which now for the first time I saw from the height of the Jura; and because they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because they were a mile or two high, they were become something different from us others, and could strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds belong and birds and the last trembling colours of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving as do the things of the sky. They were as distant as the little upper clouds of summer, as fine and tenuous; but in their reflection and in their quality as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of an unknown array) they occupied the sky with a sublime invasion: and the things proper to the sky were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed.

To what emotion shall I compare this astonishment? So, in first love one finds that this can belong to me.

Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted lines compelled my adoration. Up there, the sky above and below them, part of the sky, but part of us, the great peaks made communion between that homing creeping part of me which loves vineyards and dances and a slow movement among pastures, and that other part which is only properly at home in Heaven. I say that this kind of description is useless, and that it is better to address prayers to such things than to attempt to interpret them for others.

These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in some way to one's immortality. Nor is it possible to convey, or even to suggest, those few fifty miles, and those few thousand feet; there is something more. Let me put it thus: that from the height of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of height and of distance, the glory of God, the infinite potentiality of reception whence springs that divine thirst of the soul; my aspiration also towards completion, and my confidence in the dual destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross cousinship with the most high, and it is this contrast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of merriment in the soul of a sane man.

Since I could now see such a wonder and it could work such things in my mind, therefore, some day I should be part of it. That is what I felt.

This it is also which leads some men to climb mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of slipping down.

The Shape of Things that Are

Though shapely curves always deserve uncritical delight, which was what the last post was for, they're also worth some reflection.

What is a curve? It's the way that a shape holds a relationship with its surroundings. There are two main relationships possible: angles and curves. Curves seem to hold their shape in a gentler fashion. They ease into the atmosphere, whereas angles bite. Also, it's harder to hurt yourself on an curve.

Higher geometry pays homage to the curve by extending the meaning of the word in an analogous sense to describe all loci traced by a moving point, so that a line is defined as a straight curve.

A round shape is the final form matters takes when the beating forces of time and the cosmos eliminate all quirks and leave a final tough kernel, in its best defensive posture, like pebbles, or the last-ditch Roman legionary maneuver, the orbem formate. It's the form the planets, the sun and the other stars take to dance across the galaxy. Rivers wind down to the sea, eyes gaze, and tables turn. Curvature is the normal condition of the natural world.

Ambition creates angular shapes. An angle is a challenge to the forces of the universe to break it. It usually has some purpose the environment doesn't appreciate, though most environments eventually surrender - the plow and the pump turned the marshes of East Anglia into fertile black velvet fields. Angles and lines are generally the work of the hand of men to master nature. After the U.S. suffered from its lack of roads during it combat with western Indians in the War of 1812, it commissioned a survey for a military highway from Detroit to Chicago. The inspector found that by the far cheapest route to improve was the old Sauk Indian trail, which wound its way through southern Michigan, fording all the rivers at the shallowest points, and crossing the marshes at their driest. The Indians did not aim to master, and the commissioner had a middling sort of ambition. The Romans, on the far hand, built bee-line roads across Europe that last till this day.

Curved things wear their beauty by fitting into the pattern of the world; their first fresh wildness tugs the heart, but their true grace comes with cultivation. Angles bear their beauty principally in the mind of their maker, and less often for their appearance than for their suitability to his purpose - in a word, their workmanship; but the beauty of a curve is an end in itself.

So there seems to be a natural resemblance between angles and curves and masculinity and femininity, as many have thought before. Also consider that nothing sharpens the loveliness of a curve so well as a line. But now we reach mystic matters, so it's time to be silent.

There is a third kind of relationship of a shape to its surroundings which I haven't mentioned. That is the fractal. It's a shape whose parts resemble the shape of the whole, repeating down into infinity. The curve resembles it more closely than does the angle, just as there's a good argument to be made that the nature of woman is closer than man's to the mysterious centre of God (see Gene Edward's The Divine Romance). It's impossible to conceive apart from its mathematical equation, for at its revelation the image is infinitely marvelous. It's the tuck of design within design. Perhaps it's the corresponding shape of divinity.


Illustration to Dante's Divine Comedy, Paradiso by Gustave Doré. Plate 34. Dante and Beatrice and the Heavenly Host of Angels (Canto 31: The Saintly Throng in the Form of a Rose)

Curves

Beauty: it curves: curves are beauty. Shapely goddesses, Venus, Juno: curves the world admires.
James Joyce - Ulysses










Rock 'n' Roll sur les Quais de Paris
by Paul Almasy






















Venus
by Jean Baptiste Pigalle,
Commisioned for Frederick the Great's summer palace, Sanssouci

I Introduce Hilaire Belloc

Today is a Wednesday, an auspicious day on which one of the dearest people in the world, and the now-dead French-English ex-Parliamentarian curmudgeon, democrat and gentleman Hilaire Belloc were both born. He lived from July 27th, 1870, to some date or other in 1953. Every Wednesday I shall introduce a snippet of the man's life, writings, or poetry, for he deserves to be remembered by any one who loves religion and small things.

The following passage I copy from a passage in Robert Speaight's excellent biography published in 1957. Speaight is translating a preface by Belloc's Oxford undergraduate friend, F. Y. Eccles, to the French edition of Belloc's Essay on the Nature of Contemporary England.

In our little group we never tired of getting him to tell us about his experiences, and he needed no invitation to do so. He would talk about himself without the slightest trace of boasting; but he talked, and as he talked about everything else, with a frankness and a spontaneity, as admirable as they were rare. It was no doubt this marvelous facility of speech which made Hilaire Belloc's reputation at Oxford. Those who knew him superficially remarked that in whatever society he happened to be, he talked more than anybody else; they said this before realising that he talked better and more to the point, and before seeing that there was more substance in what he said. It was not, with him, a matter of mere verbal incontinence, a need to hold the floor and a desire to impose his point of view. Even when he was very young, he always respected the convictions of other people when they were sincerely held. His abundant speech not only conveyed the vividness of his impressions; it also sorted out his ideas. No one would have described him as erudite, but he knew a great many things, and there was more of reflexion than of reading in his mind. He might be talking about poetry or morality, history or gastronomy, navigation or politics, but he expressed himself with a fine decision. He thought his subject out to the end, and his judgments, which were sometimes rash or excessive, though never without foundation, hung together remarkably well. There was a sort of family air about them. The Oxford youth were not much given to general ideas, and it was this, very Latin, trait, which distinguished the conversation of my friend. However, one must not suppose that this vigorous young man of 22 was always serious. On the contrary, he was the gayest of companions...we laughed together a great deal; our conversation was extremely free; we ragged each other; and we sang at the tops of our voices. We feasted and smoked together, we went out for walk and excursions, and nothing could have been happier or more high-spirited. Belloc was never attracted by organised games, but he was indefatigable on foot, on horseback, or in the water. He was especially keen on sailing and canoeing up the river - waiting until he could have a little yacht of his own...Those were good times.

I would comment, but I've got to dash off to the first read-through of The Taming of the Shrew.

On Campaign Promises

Politicians, whatever they are inept at, are, for the most part, masters of grammar. Only a politician would construct a sentence which avoids telling a lie only because it it isn't a statement, and that, only because it doesn't obey the rules of grammar.

I have in mind "If you elect me, I promise to do X...." Now the antecedent of this statement, "if you elect me" refers, in the present tense, to the particular election at hand. The consequent, "I promise" is a clause in the present tense. But the consequent can be in the present tense only if the the antecedent is general, such, as "If (in general) I receive campaign donations, I (in general) spend them on irrelevant commercials." But the antecedent is particular, so this promise of his means nothing at all.

And setting grammar aside, because it's likely he isn't actually as careful as I make him out to be, he hasn't, in fact, promised anything at all. He has told us that if he is elected, he will promise to do something. And indeed would it not be a wonderful government, were our elected officials to spend all their days making promises. No, if he honestly wants to lie to us about what he'll do in power, he has to say, "I promise that if you elect me, I will do X...."

Prelude

Not expecting this blog to be read by any wider circle than my closest friends, I intend to use this space largely to bleed myself of ill-humours, but also to indulge in speculation, good cheer, and praise. I am a friend to ancient and good institutions, largely because ancient institutions are friends to me, and in their defence I shall do my damndest to ridicule, reform, or eliminate the corrupt practices that pack more plague that a festering sewer rat. If there is one noble institution that more than all others protects the dignity of man, his free speech, his companionship, his wantonness, his heroism, and his good taste, it is the public house, of which I heartily approve. All these centuries it has been so common as to have been taken for granted, but it, too, is passing away. Whenever it is fitting, this blog shall be its swansong.

So, to begin.

The House of Commons of the British Parliament voted 311 to 248 not to hold a referendum on a bill being passed through Parliament that ratifies the Treaty of Lisbon. This bill has yet to be approved by the House of Lords. If it passes their muster, and is approved by the queen, it will violate the sovereignty of British law. Read the following to statements from Article 2, section A:

"1. When the Treaties confer on the Union exclusive competence in a specific area, only the
Union may legislate and adopt legally binding acts, the Member States being able to do so
themselves only if so empowered by the Union or for the implementation of Union acts."

These areas include:

• customs union
• the establishing of the competition rules necessary for the functioning of the internal market
• monetary policy for the Member States whose currency is the euro
• the conservation of marine biological resources under the common fisheries policy
• common commercial policy

"2. When the Treaties confer on the Union a competence shared with the Member States in
a specific area, the Union and the Member States may legislate and adopt legally binding acts in
that area. The Member States shall exercise their competence to the extent that the Union has
not exercised its competence. The Member States shall again exercise their competence to the
extent that the Union has decided to cease exercising its competence."

These areas include:

• internal market
• social policy, for the aspects defined in this Treaty
• economic, social and territorial cohesion
• agriculture and fisheries, excluding the conservation of marine biological resources
• environment
• consumer protection
• transport
• trans-European networks
• energy
• area of freedom, security and justice
• common safety concerns in public health matters, for the aspects defined in this Treaty

Now, funnily enough, Britain and Poland demanded an opt-out of the 'area of freedom, security and justice'. This little clause covers our entire system of criminal and civil law. Our reprensentatives to the EU had the sense to withhold our subordination to the EU Court of Justice, but yet the EU Parliament retains the power to legislate upon transport, energy, public health, and 'social policy' as far as our Parliament has not exercised its competence: that is - as long as their law does not conflict with our law, they have the power to make new law. We, in turn, have not the power to contradict whatever law they make. In a great many matters, the people of England will officially have two masters.
Our Labour government has betrayed the sovereignty of our Constituitional Monarchy. What's worse, they seem to know it, else why do they vote against a referendum upon a measure so intrusive as this document?