Don't Assume Anything

Well, it's not my habit to show these off. I'm justifying this as a curiosity of English bureaucracy, where everything has a place even when there's nothing there.

Death

From the DrudgeReport:

PELOSI SAYS BIRTH CONTROL WILL HELP ECONOMY
Sun Jan 25 2009 22:13:43 ET

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi boldly defended a move to add birth control funding to the new economic "stimulus" package, claiming "contraception will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government."

Pelosi, the mother of 5 children and 6 grandchildren, who once said, "Nothing in my life will ever, ever compare to being a mom," seemed to imply babies are somehow a burden on the treasury.

The revelation came during an exchange Sunday morning on ABC's THIS WEEK.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children's health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those - one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

There are so many things hideous about this statement I couldn't discuss them all without consuming your entire lunch-break, but let me list just the some of the worst:

An utter lack of moral sense (call it conscience). All right, she wants the best interest of the state, but the best interest of the state is evil, and thus not at all best, if built upon the slaughter of innocents.

It's premeditated.

It's shameless. They've dropped all pretense for concern for the woman's welfare.

They're all godless Philistines, damn them.

I'm sure there's some great sentence somewhere in Western literature on this point: once a culture treats its children as liabilities, it is doomed to die. Children are the promise of someone to carry on our work of today into the future, and the hope of greatness surpassing what we accomplished. A woman commits suicide on part of her soul when she allows her child to be killed, and a culture commits suicide when it AIMS at killing its children.

Consequent on the last point: its the last stage of the decay of political imagination. It's like the author who can't figure out what to do with the protagonist, so kills him off. There ARE problems with a booming population, but there are GOOD ways to deal with it, and even to channel to unsurpassed heights the latent energy and power of that most marvelous creation, impossible to manufacture, the human being.

And further: when the Speaker of the House treats citizens as items in a pocket book, you know that 1) she's hopelessly out of touch, and 2) that she hasn't read Dickens. Do we really want such a person governing our country?

A Gentleman and a Gamester

Hilaire Belloc had several selves, even several poetic selves. Some have expressed irritation at the clear pleasure with which he kills off the bad children of his cautionary tale, though for my own part I think their fates largely to be just; consider that of Henry King:

The Chief Defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly Knots inside.

Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
"There is no Cure for this Disease.

"Henry will very soon be dead.''
His Parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his Untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,

Cried, "Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch, and Tea
Are all the Human Frame requires...''
With that, the Wretched Child expires.

He also had a violent exuberant democratic self:

On Two Ministers of State

Lump says that Caliban's of gutter breed,
And Caliban says Lump's a fool indeed,
And Caliban and Lump and I are all agreed.

The Pacifist

Pale Ebenzer thought it wrong to fight,
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.

And a courteous chivalric self:

A Trinity

Of three in One and One in three
My narrow mind would doubting be
Till Beauty, Grace and Kindness met
And all at once were Juliet.

Juliet

How did the party go in Portman Square?
I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there.

And how did Lady Gaster's party go?
Juliet was next me and I do not know.

And many more which I will introduce in the future.

Everything Seems to Aim at Some Good (Part 1 - Anime)

I've been watching an anime called Full Metal Alchemist. I highly recommend it - you can find the episodes on youtube.

The combat resolves itself in a way that is mostly alien to our Western imagination. (FMA is somewhat westernized, but I'm going to treat the eastern elements.) Our villains are rarely attracted to the good side. In this anime (and in other Japanese anime films that I've seen) the villains may join the good side at any time, but the switch is not caused by a crisis of conscience. Rather, they realize that their best interest lies in allying themselves with the hero.

From the start, the villains have their own ends and ambitions, only vaguely related to either their master's plans or those of the hero. Thus they make far more interesting -human- villains, who can sustain hours of dialogue and development. They generally have some secret which is the cause of their ambition, and if the hero can discover it, he can use it to persuade them to join him, not because they'll believe in the right, but because with him, they can get what they want. The only villains completely invulnerable to his persuasion are (logically) the ones who are dedicated to the ruination of the project he has at hand.

The villains may even tag along and help the hero accomplish his mission, as long they will have a chance to kill him afterwards. It seems that even the 'boss' villain can be persuaded to change, and the storyline can randomly end with the hero and the ultimate evil just agreeing to stop fighting.

It has some similarity to the Platonic idea that knowledge is equivalent to virtue - when you know enough, you choose rightly. But a person can be unprepared for too much knowledge, because knowledge forces you to choose, and a person is not always prepared to make a difficult choice. Thus masters often hide things from their pupils. The sublime greatness of the pupil usually appears when he makes the right choice in the face of unforeseen knowledge.

An ethical comparison of the characters looks something like this:

Chaos

c) Desiring some good, but have forgotten the Way
b) Desiring some good
a) Desiring some good, and with an inkling of the Way

The Way

Characters develop in either direction, perhaps change direction, through the course of the story. The conflict is between combinations of all three types. Sometimes two characters dedicated to the Way end up fighting, both for the right reasons. This way, there is a possibility of a beautiful fight, and beautiful death; and from the possibility of the beautiful death you get the warrior, whose life is dedicated to war, for the sake of the beauty of war. This is the most alien notion of these anime - the locality of the good. Good can come into conflict with other good. (Hilaire Belloc, incidentally, has the Christian solution - ''There may be shrines and shrines on any land, and sanctities of many kinds. For you will notice, Grizzlebeard, or rather you should have noticed already, having lived so long, that good things do not jostle.") Though the Japanese do have some notion of universal peace - I think this may be the promise of the Emperor of Japan.

The combat makes sense given Aristotle's ancient claim, in the Nicomachean Ethics, that all things aim at some good. All these characters do aim at some good - and it's not only some perceived good, but some real good.

Nevertheless, the greatest of the characters choose the best of the real goods, and on a rare occasion, they choose to live in the Way, which is to live according to no individual good, to have silence and absence of volition in the centre of being, and therefore to be able to honor every individual good as it deserves, and never to be swayed by the selfish interest. I've an idea that for the Buddhist, individuality is imperfect. And that's as much Eastern philosophy as I shall attempt.

Shrike - Miyamoto Musashi (17th century Japanese swordsman, painter, and philosopher)
"The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways...but if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything"

Hapless Priests and Princes

1. I don't believe it is a coincidence that the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer to the "Prayer for the Clergy and People," which it situates near the end of the Order for Evening Prayer, asking that God "send down upon our Bishops, and Curates, and all Congregations committed to their charge, the healthful Spirit of thy grace; and that they may truly please thee, pour upon them the continual dew of thy blessing," prefaces the following:

"Almighty and everlasting God, who alone workest great marvels...."

2. Shakespeare is subtle. In Hamlet's famous proto-emo speech, he poses what looks like two possible solutions to the ultimate perplexity:

"whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, / And by opposing end them?"

But the rest of the speech, hinted at here, goes to show that Hamlet is not really considering both options. The second option is little more than an ironic jest, for in fact it is impossible to fight a sea with force of arms.

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)