The New Beatitudes

 

Xerxes, my friend the former left-wing columnist (who seems to have decided to clip his wings), wants the Beatitudes revised. He feels they no longer apply in modern times.

Are there indeed new problems or issues to which they should refer, but do not?

Xerxes cites drug overdose deaths. This is indeed currently an epidemic problem, but in principle, not new. Alcohol was a drug, and potentially a deadly drug, available in Jesus’s time. Not to mention hemp or opium, which seem to have been known. We must assume that Jesus did not consider this a moral issue, or an important moral issue.

In fact, he actually seems to have aided and abetted drunkenness at Cana.

Surely the more interesting question is, why did he not? Is it a moral issue? Or is addiction a symptom of something else?

Xerxes then notes that the Saviour would surely have had something to say about fossil fuel emissions. Granted, fossil fuel was probably not known in Jesus’s day; perhaps coal was sometimes used. But why is fossil fuel an issue? Carbon emissions, surely. So the same issue existed when people in his day burned charcoal or wood to get warm or cook their food. Jesus could have mentioned it; apparently he did not see fit to mention it. 

Is it a moral issue? Or is it an engineering problem: what is the best fuel to use?

“Would he have harsh words for those who know their product does harm, and keep doing it?” Xerxes asks.

People have always produced and sold products. Jesus was a carpenter; Paul a tentmaker; Peter a fisherman. Jesus could have mentioned this, but did not.

No question, this is a moral issue; but selling harmful products, a rotten fish or an unsound cabinet, is obviously and self-evidently wrong to the human conscience. There is no need for God to incarnate to tell us so, and no cause to bless anyone simply for not doing so.

“He talked about those who are persecuted. By the Romans. Or by other authorities. But I wonder what he would say about persecution by the social media, where individuals taking unpopular stands are hounded by hate messages and death threats. “ 

Jesus said “blessed are those who are persecuted.” He did not restrict this to persecution by legal authorities. It applies just as well to social media.

Yet he did restrict his blessing in another way: he did not bless simply for being persecuted. It was for being persecuted for righteousness. 

The distinction seems important. If you advocate the extermination of the Jews, raping women, eating children, or kicking puppies, you might indeed be unpopular, even persecuted. But this does not put you on the side of the angels.

So, in sum, there does not seem to be any demonstrated need for new Beatitudes. Why invent some?

Now, take it from the other end. Is there a case for any of Xerxes’s proposed new Beatitudes? For of course, he goes on to propose some.

“Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are those who doubt, who aren’t entirely sure, who can still be surprised.”

This jumps out as obviously contradicted by the title of C.S. Lewis’s famous spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy. Surely this contradiction needs to be addressed.

If God is a person, with whom we can have an ongoing relationship, if he is not some abstract concept or cosmic watchmaker, he can be full of surprises. Just as a friend or romantic partner is in any vital and living human relationship. The world of faith is one of wonders and miracles, because everything is a conversation with him, and everything has meaning.

An agnostic, on the other hand, is one “who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena.” Sounds like a pretty dead and boring life. For the agnostic there are no surprises; he can never be surprised by anything except perhaps what’s for dinner.

And it of course beggars belief that Jesus would bless us for not believing in him.

“Blessed are those who have nothing to offer.”

If this is simply a restatement of “blessed are the poor”—blessed are those who have few material goods to offer—fine; but nothing new. If not, it contradicts what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, immediately after the Beatitudes: “let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” We all have much to offer; if we do not offer it, we are hardly to be blessed.

“Blessed are those who have buried loved ones, whose tears could fill an ocean. Blessed are those who have loved enough to know what loss feels like.

Blessed are the mothers of the miscarried. 

Blessed are those who can’t fall apart because they have to keep it together for everyone else.”

Fine, and it all sounds noble and empathic. But surely these are just specific cases of “Blessed are those who mourn.” Best not to single out specific sorrows; it shouldn’t be a competition. And causes for sorrow are too varied and complex to all be enumerated in this way.

 “Blessed are those whom no one else notices. The kids who sit alone at school lunch tables. The laundry staff at hospitals. The sex workers and the night-shift street sweepers. The homeless guy sleeping in a doorway.”

One of these things is not like the other ones. Five are already covered by “blessed are the meek.” The unnoticed, the lonely kid, the laundry staff, the night sweepers, the homeless. But are soliciting prostitutes meek? Are they trying not to be noticed? And do they generally go unnoticed? Do they generally lack companionship?

There were of course prostitutes in Jesus's place and time, and he might have declared them blessed if he saw fit.

But what happened to our wish to condemn those who sell harmful products?

“Blessed are the unemployed, the unimpressive, the underrepresented.”

Blessing the unemployed contradicts Jesus’s admonition to “let your light shine.” Of course, if unemployment is not a choice, it is a hardship. But why would doing nothing be blessed in itself? 

Similarly, why would being unimpressive be blessed? Jesus says of those he beatifies, “you are the salt of the earth; you are the light of the world.” That sounds like being impressive. Having no talent is not a sign of holiness; our very term “talent” comes from Jesus’s parable of the talents, reflecting the assumption that our talents are given by God, and are there to be used. To go out and impress.

“Underrepresented” seems simply too vague to be meaningful. Represented where, and in what sense? If the intent is to apply race and sex quotas when putting together any representative body, per “DEI,” why is this meaningful? Why are race and sex so important? As opposed to, say, being left-handed, or bald, or having green eyes?

As the makers of the current series The Chosen insist on pointing out, there were surely black folks passing through Judea from sub-Saharan Africa in Jesus’ time, as well as Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Phoenicians. pagans, Zoroastrians, and of course many women. Not to mention various classes and social strata. Yet when Jesus chose his twelve apostles, there was no race, sex, ethnic or religious diversity: all “white” Jewish working class men.

Presumably Jesus was not against diversity; but “seeing yourself represented” was not important.

“Blessed are the wrongly accused, the ones who never catch a break, the ones for whom life is hard.”

This is already in the Beatitudes; almost their entire point. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” 

Xerxes: “Blessed are those without documentation.”

Why is someone blessed simply because they do not have ID? I presume the intent is to bless “illegal immigrants.” Which is a dubious sentiment: bless those who break the law? Unjust laws, perhaps. But Christianity assumes a duty to obey the law in most circumstances. Jesus told his followers to pay their taxes.

“Blessed are those who make damaging business decisions for the sake of people they serve.”

This is difficult to parse. An employee of a business enterprise serves the investors in that firm, and has a fiduciary duty to make business decisions that are not damaging to their interests. That business, of course, also serves its customers. The employee has a duty to serve their interests as well. But if in doing so he damages the business, harming his employers, his position is morally ambiguous.

Jesus actually addresses this problem in the Parable of the Unjust Steward. It is, the parable seems to say, always in the self-interest of a business to be as helpful as possible to their customers. 

“And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely: for the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”

And it is in the interests of its customers, in turn, for a useful business to remain in business. 

Thus the conflict never actually arises.

Adam Smith pointed out the same thing.

“Blessed are the burned-out social workers and the overworked teachers and the pro-bono case takers”

Why not just “blessed are the overworked”? That Beatitude might have some traction. But the claim here seems to be that some occupations are more blessed than others. If so, teachers and lawyers are not the groups Jesus singles out for praise. “Teachers” and “lawyers,” awkwardly enough, translate in his day to “Pharisees” and “scribes.” He was actually not too keen on them. “Social workers” are probably also subsumed under “Pharisees.”

The proper and more interesting challenge is to understand what the Beatitudes mean. Why are these groups in particular blessed? And what does it mean to be blessed in this sense?

Xerxes actually responded to my dissents from his proposed new Beatitudes. He argued, firstly, that just because Jesus did not mention a thing did not mean he thought it was unimportant. Second, that he might have said many things, in his three years of ministry, not included in the Bible. And finally, that the Beatitudes as preserved by the Catholic Church needed to be amended because they excluded some from feeling blessed; they too should feel part of the flock.

This is a shift in his ground from his original argument, that Jesus would have said these things were he speaking today, but they were simply not present in his time. Apparently that point he concedes.

I do think it is a fair inference, however, that, if Jesus—or anyone else--did not mention something, that thing was not part of his core message. Otherwise, you could impute anything to anyone.

Jesus could have said these things, but they were not recorded? 

But we have four accounts. Assuming the sermon on the plain and the sermon on the mount are the same event, we have only this sermon, which we must therefore assume, by consensus of those who were there, included everything in Jesus’s core message. If there were other sermons, he must have said the same things in them—as is demonstrable if the sermon on the mount and the sermon on the plain were different events.

As with any text, we must go with what the text actually says, and not put words in anyone’s mouth. Once we do that, anyone can make anything say anything. No point in even reading the Bible then; or Shakespeare, or the Constitution, or any text.

Xerxes’s concluding argument seems to be that Jesus should have said these things, because nobody should feel “outside the fold,” that everyone should “feel blessed.”

But this is not Jesus’s message; he was making it clear that not everyone is in the fold, not everyone is blessed. Only these people cited in the Beatitudes. Luke pairs his four Beatitudes with the Four Woes, in which all those not covered by the Beatitudes are called out and excluded from God’s favour. 

“But woe to you who are rich,
   for you have received your consolation.
Woe to you who are full now,
   for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who are laughing now,
   for you will mourn and weep.
Woe to you when all speak well of you, 
for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

Elsewhere, of course, Jesus speaks of the sheep and the goats—goats, being goats, are not “in the fold.” Jesus speaks in parables so that those outside the fold will not understand—here he calls them “swine.” Elsewhere, “vipers.” 

He is, in the end, alarmingly judgmental. Of the living and the dead.

That’s the text.

The Mirror Shattered

 

It is not generally understood, but Western civilization shattered sometime in 1917.

Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. – T.S. Eliot

Before this, the culture was a mirror, in which you could see the face of man. This is Shakespeare’s “Mirror held up to nature.”

Since then, what do you see?

Only a shattered land, a shattered landscape, only shards of mirror reflecting each another’s emptiness.

This Is Just to Say

 

One of the features of the Saint John Exhibition—formerly the Atlantic National Exhibition—which I attended yesterday, was an art competition featuring entries from across the region.

And the work of these amateurs was remarkably good—a few things worthy of hanging in a genuine art museum.

I have found the same from a Facebook page I follow, “Artists trying to make a living with their art.”

But what do we so often see in art museums? Drek. Sometimes literally. Things like a room filled with actual garbage.

One has to wonder why.

I credit it to the academicization of art. True art needs inspiration, and inspiration does not come on call, or with regular attendance at class.  Nor can one be educated into it. So something else must be substituted to fill those classroom seats; something must be taught.

What is taught must not require talent, let alone genius. It must also be counter-intuitive. You cannot teach what everyone already knows.

From the point of view of the professional artist, as well, it is best to find some trick that does not require actual inspiration or even fine craftsmanship--so that you can crank it out. Inspiration is a shaky foundation on which to build anything like a career. And spending too long on any one piece is going to hurt your income.

So stuff must be made up, which would appear to the average person to actually be bad art, to keep out the amateurs, and then those who do not appreciate it can be scorned as the philistines.

The philistines with fat wallets will buy it if told to, because it makes them look sensitive and bohemian and not the philistines they are.

Hence all this conceptual nonsense. Hence the only good art left will be folk art and popular art. The art of amateurs.

It is the same in poetry. I recall a book fair at which I overheard one well-dressed woman pick up and read to another William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Ending with “Isn’t it marvellous?”

And her acquaintance was obliged to assent or lose face by admitting she saw nothing in it.

Anyone without talent can write like this, but it conforms to and illustrates an academic theory. By appreciating it, you show you know what “imagism” wants in a poem: essentially, just an image, of something perfectly ordinary and mundane, with no comment or obvious symbolism.

It is anti-art, which is most often these days the point.

Is the Pope Catholic?

 

A Catholic friend sends me this link, Pope Francis complaining about “reactionary American Catholics who oppose church reform.” He asks for my response.

My response is that Pope Francis is a heretic. He speaks of the “evolution” of the faith, “church teaching evolving over time,” and of “backwardism.” “True doctrine always develops and bears fruit.”

This is the heresy of modernism, which Pius X called “the synthesis of all heresies.” In a nutshell, that, as Justin Trudeau put it when asked why he insisted on half his cabinet being women, “this is 2015.” As if a date on the calendar made a difference.

Truth does not change with time. An evil deed does not become a good deed through the passage of time. Therefore, Catholic teachings on faith and morals, the “deposit of faith,” cannot change; they cannot “evolve.” They can only b elucidated, perhaps to apply to new circumstances. Just as in an Act of Contrition, the Ten Commandments are applied to one’s individual circumstances.

Pope Francis gives examples of Catholic morals supposedly changing over time.

"Today it is a sin to possess atomic bombs; the death penalty is a sin, it cannot can be practiced, and it was not so before. As for slavery, some pontiffs before me have tolerated it, but things are different today."

It could not have been declared to be a sin to possess atomic bombs before there were atomic bombs; but it is not a sin to possess atomic bombs. It would be a sin to detonate one over a city.

Tolerating slavery is not the same as declaring it moral. Politics is the art of the possible. The Catholic Church is obliged to tolerate many things it thinks are sinful.

The death penalty, it has become illicit due to applying s consistent ethics to changing circumstances. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.” The death penalty was once justifiable to preserve public order when there was no prison system, and less effective law enforcement.

Francis especially has in his sights “the so-called 'sin of the flesh',” which he accuses traditionalists of having under a magnifying glass.

But it is not traditionalists who chose this focus. It is the modernists, who as of the 1950s began scorning sexual sins as “conventional morality,” and preaching, “if it feels good, do it.” It is the modernists who chose this battle, on this ground.

One might, by construing Francis’s words in a very careful, lawyerly way, avoid the charge of heresy. 

I do not accept that. It is his duty, as pontiff, to be a reliable shepherd. Even if he is just obscuring the matter, he is doing Satan’s work. He seem to be consistently obscuring, at best, the correct teaching. Surely he is not so stupid as to be consistently doing this by mistake. He believes the heresy; or, rather, he wants to promote it.

The Three Phases of Culture According to J.J. McCullough

 

J.J. McCullough divides art into three categories, pre-modern, modern, and postmodern, and opines that now, after postmodernism, there is nowhere else to go.

Pre-modernism, he says, is characterized by beauty, craftsmanship, and religious values.

Modernism is defined by rationality and efficiency, rejecting beauty, craftsmanship, and religious values.

Postmodernism is defined by the rejection of rationality and efficiency. “Subverting whatever art is supposed to be.” “Weird for the sake of weird.”

McCullough sees these as the only possibilities; and we have exhausted them. So from now on… he suggests perhaps we will see a mix of them all.

His analysis seems flawed. To begin with, it takes no account of non-Western art. And restricting ourselves to Western art, there is a strange imbalance in his timeline. Pre-modern goes up to the late 19th and early 20th centuries; postmodernism appears in 1917 with Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” Leaving perhaps 17 years for modernism. McCullough suggests that postmodernism too is now exhausted and done.

If these really are the three inevitable approaches to art, why is it that only one of them ever occurred to artists in the millennia up to 1900? Why wasn’t art always a mix of them all, as McCullough suggests it should be in the future?

Rather than three approaches to art, it looks as though we have art, then two failed approaches to it. Art is craft plus vision; it means to convey the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Rejecting craftsmanship and religious values means, then, rejecting art.

If, as McCullough says, modernism is about rationality and efficiency, “form follows function,” we have a problem. Art performs no obvious function. Again, this is a rejection of art.

As is postmodernism, as McCullough says, it is “subverting whatever art is supposed to be.” That speaks for itself.

What we have is a collapse of the arts about the beginning of the 20th century, which has since then progressed to the point of nihilism. Not three approaches to art, or even two, but just one. Duchamp’s “postmodern” “Fountain” actually appeared three years before Eliot’s “The Waste-Land,” from which modernism dates in poetry.

The real difference between modernism and postmodernism is simply that modernism lamented the loss of art; postmodernism celebrates it.

Which is why there is now nowhere to go. The last embers of the gallery have been burned down to ash.

It is the suicide of a culture.

Modernism and Postmodernism

 

These days, being in the arts is generally thought to mean being politically on the left. Despite the fact that some of the biggest names have let slip that they are not really with the program: Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol.

Folks forget that a couple of generations ago, such literary lions as W. B. Yeats or T.S. Eliot or Hermann Hesse were publicly on the political right.

I think this marks the difference between modernism and postmodernism. The modernism of the early 20th century saw Western civilization as in a state of collapse, lamented the fact, and sought with little hope for solutions. The postmodernism of the late 20th and early 21st century sees Western civilization as in a state of collapse, and wants to hasten the process by whatever means necessary.

Eliot or Yeats celebrated the old aristocracy, as a class freed from the tedium of making a living and able to live the aesthetic life. Yeats referred to the need to earn as “this rock” we all live under. Re-reading “The Waste Land,” it is clear Eliot feels contempt for both the working class--Sweeney and Mrs. Porter; and the bourgeoisie--Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant. He mocks popular art, the music hall and the gramophone, contrasting it with the old high art of the landed aristocracy, which he considers superior. Hesse similarly laments the gramophone.

In sum, when Yeats or Eliot mourn the decline of Western civilization, they are thinking of the decline of the old ruling class; Yeats’ “ceremony of innocence.” This is what died in the First World War. They see this as meaning the decline of the culture itself, into crass “bourgeois” values.

The left, in theory, champions the working class, not the old aristocracy; they agree on hating the bourgeoisie. But this looks like a con. The working class has its own traditions and tends to be conservative. Who the left really are is the remnants or wannabe successors of the old privileged class. They react to their own declining fortunes by wanting to pull down the entire culture instead. 

It seems to me the notion that the landed aristocracy has a finer appreciation of the arts is not tenable. Why should it be so? 

No doubt the argument is Plato’s, that they are educated into it. But art is inspiration, and the spirit goes where it wants. How many mute inglorious Miltons, in the words of Grey, does a class system exclude from consideration? Shakespeare was from the petit bourgeoisie. Blake was working class. Given all their free time, the aristocracy has contributed surprisingly little to the arts, other than appreciation.

This preference for the upper classes in the judgement of art also violates the teaching of the Bible. That ought to matter to Christians. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls specifically to the “little ones,” to the poor, the meek, and the oppressed, to “let their light shine,” to be “the salt of the earth,” to express themselves through the arts.

 Moreover, they are those who will understand the arts: “those who have ears to hear.”

With Andy Warhol, I find greatest beauty in the folk arts, in popular art, and in commercial art. Most recently, in comic books, in folk music, in rock and roll, in some film and TV. Yes, most of it is junk. Most of everything is junk. Great art of the past is just that 5% that was good enough to survive. But much of the current sense that art is moribund is due to looking in the wrong places, at the galleries and concert halls and academies. 

There are good cultural and technological reasons for the decline of the old ruling class. What that really was all about was the rise of the lower classes, to greater prosperity, more leisure time, better communication, better access to information, to the arts. The upper class is increasingly superfluous.

We should see as a result a great blossoming of the arts. What we see now is the academy and the old mainstream in a rearguard effort to suppress this great blossoming.

That bloom may come soon.

Pulp Fiction

Like a dog intent on a squirrel up a tree, linguists have been trying in recent years to figure out just how it is we read. Their conclusions, predictably for the social sciences, are either outright wrong or common sense. Nevertheless, the obvious facts they have stumbled over in their charmingly pedantic way offer some useful tips for writers.

They find we do not read letter by letter, or word by word, or even sentence by sentence. We no doubt do as we need to, but we also read by pattern recognition. We anticipate what comes next.

A famous example is the phrase:

Valleyfield in the
the spring.

Most people will read that without the second “the.”

Or this example:

It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe

Who knew? Besides everybody. But have we as writers thought through what this means?

Kintsch and van Dijk (you can’t beat the Dutch as academics; in my experience, they stand a half a sliced door above the rest) suggest that this is also true at higher levels: at the level of the paragraph or, in editing terms, at the structural level.

This is the appeal of genre writing. If writing is a tool to communicate, genre writing is the best writing, because the predictability allows us to dispense with the more mechanical parts of reading, and concentrate on the meaning.

If we are reading a medical paper, for example, that is following the conventions of that form, we can extract what we need efficiently. Or a technical manual; or a news story. We can read it at a higher cognitive level; less of our attention needs to be occupied by annoying little individual words and letters and sentence constructions.

This is the opposite of what most writers, most editors, and most writing instructors currently profess. Recall George Orwell’s famous advice, in “Politics and the English Language”: “Never use a word or phrase you are accustomed to seeing in print.” We look down our bespectacled noses at genre writing. Genre writing is for hacks and dummies. Romance novels, cowboy stories, detective novels, comic books. Pulp fiction.

There’s a collection online, at the Internet Archive.

But myths are also highly generic—more so that these modern forms. And myths express the deepest thoughts of most cultures. Poetry is more generic, has more rules, than prose; Shakespeare preferred the sonnet, a highly mannered medium. And he was a decent writer. Classical Greek tragedy, surely as deep as any writing, followed strict rules approaching a ritual performance, Aristotle’s “three unities.” For a more prosaic example, philosophical writing is always concerned with clearly defining terms, and then using them consistently. Each philosophical essay may amount to its own genre, but it follows strict rules so that the thought is not obscured by any unnecessary novelties.

That heavily generic writing also works for low-level readers simply shows that its communicative value is absolute. For the marginally literate, or for children listening to a fairy tale, it works for all the same reasons that it works with Aristotle and Shakespeare: it allows them to assimilate the information efficiently, to participate in the story or the emotion or the idea, without getting bogged down by the mechanics of reading, in which they may be unskilled.

And for all the rest of us, generic writing is the most enjoyable, for exactly the same reason. We can get fully engaged in the story, and with our own imagination, without being distracted.

Introducing some unnecessary novelty is like letting the boom microphone appear in the shot; it kills the willing suspension of disbelief.

Orwell is close to having a point, with his cliché against cliché. The problem is not the use of a stock, familiar phrase. The problem is that, when a phrase becomes too familiar, it starts being resorted to unthinkingly, and so without meaning or even incorrectly. That is what grates, and what impedes communication. Every night is not “a dark and stormy night.” But if you want to tell the tale of a haunted house, then it ought to be.

Every once and again, some writer comes out with something generic and good, violating all the academic norms by following all the norms, and makes a big splash. That’s what JK Rowling did with Harry Potter. That’s Stephen King. That’s JRR Tolkien and Lord of the Rings. That’s Star Wars; that’s Indiana Jones. These do not experiment with or violate norms, or treat them ironically; they follow them well. And readers appreciate it.

For a narrative, genre allows us to enter more fully into the fully imagined world.

The fact that “sophisticated,” “serious” writers do not write this way goes a long way towards explaining why reading has become less popular. We have forgotten what good writing is, and are instead self-righteously scribbling inferior stuff, interesting only to other writers. Good writing is, by definition, what is easy and enjoyable to read. 

We have stumbled into this because, beginning at about the start of the 20th century, certainly by the 1920s, we came to idolize science as the crown and measure of all things. Accordingly, we got the notion that good writing should be like science, or like technology. James Joyce declared himself “the greatest engineer who ever lived.” Strunk and White compared an essay to a machine.

So literature should, like technology, be undergoing constant improvement. It must not rely on the tried and true. It must, like science, always be “experimental.”

Art does not work like that. That makes as much sense as inventing your own alphabet. Experiments might be useful in the writer’s private study, or among artists, but art as a whole does not progress. It is tied to eternal truths, eternal truths of human nature, and eternal things do not change. The tools of communication are relatively incidental, and the only issue is that they are clearly comprehended by both author and audience. There is a point at which that cannot be improved upon, and it can never be improved upon unilaterally. “Experiments” cannot work in actual communication, because any unexpected novelty reduces communication for the reader.

There may be times at which you want to inhibit communication in order to make a point; to jolt the reader out of a familiar and false way of thinking. But this will be the exception, not the rule.

James Joyce is a magnificent writer in detail. Nevertheless, he is unreadable.

Genre writing is the way to go.

Did Darwin Do It?

Thesis: in the Modernist and Postmodern periods—say, 1918 to present—Western culture in general has been undergoing a period of depression. Or rather, first depression—Modernism—and then acedia, willful spiritual sloth--Postmodenism.

I anticipate an obvious response: look at all the progress we have made in the Twentieth Century. Do you really want to go back to Victorian times?

No, I do not. The issue is self-evidently not to go back into the past, since that is intrinsically impossible. It is to reconnect with specific vital things we have lost, and still had then. To that extent, and only to that extent, we should want the future to resemble this past.

You have lost your watch. If you take some time trying to find it, does that imply that you want to go back to the time before you lost your watch? And you are foolish and unrealistic to do so?

Acedia.

Specifically, what we have lost is our general and confident social and cultural connection with the Good, the distinction between right and wrong; with the True; and with the Beautiful. The three things that give life meaning.

But, you will say, what about all the wonderful social progress we have made in the Twentieth Century? What about sexual equality, the Civil Rights movement, the end of colonialism, the end of laws against homosexuality?

Let’s grant that these are all good things. However, in terms of social progress, do these things compare with what happened under the old cultural standards during the 19th century? Are they not, by comparison, fairly trivial? The ending of slavery worldwide—something that had been the norm throughout the centuries; the development of democratic government in France, the US, and, by mid-century, pretty much throughout Europe? How’s that for a record?

Colonialism was big, true, but this was not a new thing; it was not something the 19th century was responsible for, but something it did not correct. Empires have been the standard form of government everywhere for millennia, after all. One could also make the case that those European empires were, on the whole, more benevolent than those of the past.

And is nationalism—the alternative doctrine—such a self-evident value? It has itself led to some nasty things, like ethnic cleansing and Nazism and the Second World War.

Nor is it nearly as clear that the changes in relations between men and women during the 20th century have been as substantial and as clearly of benefit to women as those during the 19th. Votes for women happened just over the line into the Modern era, by our set boundaries, but it was the culmination of a long process. Philosophically, the whole thing happened over the Victorian era, starting with Mary Wollstonecraft. The vote was fairly symbolic by comparison. How low was the status of women in a time symbolized and ruled over by Queen Victoria, all of whose perceived sentiments became informal social convention?

One might even say that, since these great blows were truck, Victorian blows, getting the vote and since ending slavery, it has all gotten a bit confused. As though we had since lost much of our sense of purpose and direction. We fought segregation in the Sixties. Now we fight hard to protect segregation for native people. We fought to end colonialism, then we fought nationalism, now we try to form large tariff-free zones, recreating empire.

Gee, it is as if we are changing course with every wind that blows. As if we are sailing without a rudder or an anchor. Or without clear principles.

At the same time, to balance any claimed accomplishments of the Twentieth Century and Modernism, we really have to throw into the balance as well some other important claimed social advances of the Modern period: Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of people they willfully and needlessly killed. And the hundreds of millions more lives they blighted or destroyed. These were all also Modernism social “improvements.” No need to mention abortion, so perhaps we won’t.

Next question: what went so off kilter?

I once thought it was the trauma of the First World War. But no, that does not fit. Truth is, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is plainly a Modernist work, well before that war. That war was a result of Modernism, not a cause.

I think, awkward as it seems to say so, it was Darwin. Darwin, and, to a lesser extent, Marx. But Marx came after, and very much built on, Darwin. As did Freud. It took time for their influence to work through the wider culture, but here is where the unravelling began.

People miss the real issue by saying Darwin was threatening to the religious culture because his theory seemed to disprove the existence of God. It did not. No doubt some wanted to believe so, but this is hardly apparent. Never occurred to the Catholic Church, for example, to think so. It might have weakened one of the most obvious arguments for God’s existence, the “watchmaker” argument from design, but if so, that hardly amounts to a disproof. Nor is even that so clear: if we believe that God is behind all the other laws of nature, and does not fling the lightning bolts personally, why is it a special problem to believe he is behind a process of evolution through natural selection?

There is, at first sight, a problem with Darwin’s word “random” in “random mutation.” If it is truly random, then God is out of it. But it is a principle of science, as much as of theology, that nothing in nature is truly random. That word used to seem to me to be unacceptable, but it is not if understood in the sense “mutations not appearing specifically for greater survival value.” And this is its only possible meaning in scientific terms.

No, the real problem with Darwinism—and this was what people like William Jennings Bryan apparently objected to at the time—was its corrosive effect on morality. Darwinian nature, as Tennyson put it, was “red in tooth and claw.” Darwin conceived the law of the jungle as an eternal war for survival, “survival of the fittest.” Given that God was indeed behind nature, this apparently gave divine sanction to pure selfishness. Or else there was not God, and again we had full sanction for selfishness. Life, properly understood by the woke, was a matter of kill or be killed. You try to be nice to your fellow man, and you’re just a loser.

You can trace the genesis of the First World War to exactly this concept. This was how Germany was seeing the world. They had to grab their chance, now, because in a few decades Russia was going to exceed them vastly in population and close the technological gap. They had to conquer and destroy Russia now, or, in a few years, Russia would destroy and conquer them. Kill or be killed. We are, after all, only weasels fighting in a hole.

And of course, more obviously, you can trace the genesis of the Second World War to it as well. A reading of Mein Kampf makes it plain that Hitler's guiding principle was Darwinism.

This has ben fudged recently by inventing the concept of “Social Darwinism,” as, supposedly, a gross misapplication of a scientific concept where it does not belong.

Perhaps. But if so, Darwin is himself guilty of this very misunderstanding, for he explicitly applied his theory to human societies in his followup to “The Origin of Species,” “The Descent of Man.” A bit hard to find the clear separation here.

Communism is a more complicated example, because it traces back more directly to Marx rather than Darwin. But it is the same issue at base: conventional morality was defenestrated, and society conceived of as a life and death evolutionary struggle of class against class.

One can indeed even make the argument that the actual evils of European colonialism came not from conventional Victorian morality at all, but from Darwin. It was when Darwin’s concept of the survival of the fittest was superimposed on the enterprise, and conventional morality was jettisoned. This is what led to “subject races” being seen as lesser beings. Surely that is exactly what Joseph Conrad is saying in Heart of Darkness. A woman at home imagines Empire as a benevolent matter of helping the Africans to develop. But in reality, it is a case of “painted sepulchres.” The Africans are instead being lied to and ruthlessly exploited for gain, on Darwinian principles.

So the underlying problem of modern life is that we have lost our connection to morality. To the clear distinction between right and wrong.

And what could be more obvious, as the wild parade of postmodernism tramps on outside our window, that this is what it is all about?

Modernism and Acedia

The Waste Land: Waiting for Godot

The literary movement known as Modernism is now widely misunderstood—indeed, misrepresented to be its opposite.

I am a big fan of modernism: W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Hermann Hesse, and so on. But the common perception now is that they were a bunch of angry or exhuberant young men seeking to overturn cultural traditions and do battle against the sureties of religion, art, and Western Civ.

Go back and read what they were saying. They were lamenting instead that we have lost our moral core. Here is Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

He was lamenting, and sounding an alarm, that we were losing touch in our modern life with the essentials, with truth, good, and beauty.

“Many ingenious lovely things are gone,” he begins the poem 1919:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror as before
We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,
And planned to bring the world under a rule,
Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

This is hardly a celebration of the new freedom from conventional moral restraint.

In “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” Pound laments:

All things are a flowing,
Sage Heracleitus says;
But a tawdry cheapness
Shall reign throughout our days.

… Faun's flesh is not to us,
Nor the saint's vision.
We have the press for wafer;
Franchise for circumcision.

Modernism was a lament over lost culture. Not a rebelionl against culture.

In The Waste Land, Eliot writes:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

This is a vision of modern London as Dante’s Hell. Nobody looks up any more…. Eliot was seeing the spiritual Waste Land that soon enough manifested itself physically as the waste land of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.

Conrad captures the same sense of loss of meaning again and again in Heart of Darkness:

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere.

We had lost the plot.

Somehow, more recently, this lament at losing touch with the good, the true, and the beautiful has been transformed into a claim that there is no good, no truth, no beauty. And aggressive persecution of anyone who suggests otherwise. Now we are no longer waiting for Godot. We actively do not want Godot to show up. Yeats or Pound lamented that people were destroying the beautiful, ingenious, lovely things. Now we are run around demanding that anything thought beautiful or meaningful be shunned or destroyed as oppressive.

What we now call “Modernism” is plainly enough the very thing the Moderns were fighting against.

This is a good illustration of the difference between two vital concepts: melancholia and acedia. Melancholia is true, involuntary depression, the result of psychic shock. It is a sense of loss of meaning. The moderns were describing a culture going through depression, thanks to the First World War, and the new doctrines of Darwin and Marx which seemed to deny morality. The Waste Land or the landscape of Waiting for Godot are perfect literary portraits of the experience of depression.

But people today are indulging the sin of acedia. This was once recognized as the worst of the Eight Deadly Sins, then dropped when the list moved from the cloister to the general public. It is spiritual sloth: giving up the hunt for truth, the good, and the beautiful, the quest for which we humans exist. It is deciding it is all too hard, and you might as well just stay in bed. Or that it is more important to drink that next slug of whisky and stay oblivious to it all.

The task at hand, to use Yeats’ imagery, is to get closer to the falconer, back within earshot, and re-establish our ability to hear his voice. It is not to deny he exists.

Of course, the future is not going to be the same as the past. But we need to reconnect the threads. Until we do, we remain in the Waste Land.

One does not and cannot, of course, simply choose to believe in Truth or in God because it might be comforting to do so. That is necessarily not belief in Truth or God: you cannot choose to believe. The point is to keep looking, to keep waiting, to keep oil in the lamps.

But that is not the temptation, is it? Not according to the Modernists. Nor the Ancients. The temptations are the world, the flesh, and the Devil. A too-facile belief is not in that list. That is a bogus excuse for not looking. Accepting the existence of God and of moral obligations, or of Heaven and Hell, is not obviously more comforting than the doctrine that we are all free to do and believe moment by moment whatever we want or find pleasing.

But one must sincerely seek Truth and God. Not succumb to the temptation of acedia. Which is where we are, as a civilization or a culture, right now. If you do, you have his promise: you will find.

And that is the terribly inconvenient part about sincerely seeking for God. You are sooner or later going to find Him.

An Old Hope

Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war!

I am no expert on economics. It fascinates me, but it is, in the end, a social science. Which means to me that its data are unreliable. So I am not qualified to comment on this recent piece. But I include it because of its possible relevance to my own point that Western Civ died in the First World War.

Despite the title, its thesis seems to me to be hopeful. It argues that free trade and globalization make war increasingly unlikely. The century of relative peace between Waterloo in 1815 and Sarajevo in 1914, sometimes called “Pax Britannica,” was, it holds, no lucky accident. The First World War was a desperate rear-guard action by the traditional old landed elites, seeing their powers slip away. And, if we can ever shake off the last vestiges of socialism and Keynesianism, we may yet get back on track.

The argument seems to me to make some sense. After all, more land or even more resources means nothing in an industrial economy and given free trade. Let alone that, in modern democracies, you have to give any conquered people the vote. The one group to whom it would matter is the old landed warrior class, committed both to land and to war, who would see an expanding empire as an opportunity for their younger sons. Moreover, going to war would magnify their political power back home.

Germany was clearly more worried about Russia than France...

I note that the nations most responsible for the war’s outbreak were those in which the old landed warrior class were a) most dominant, and b) most threatened; yet also the nations that c) as nations, had the most to lose. The initial culprit was Austria: a terribly rickety aristocratic government already clearly in decline. Next to break the peace was Czarist Russia, by mobilizing in response: still run by aristocrats, but developing quickly. After that, industrialized but autocratic Germany. It was the ancien regime’s last throw of the dice, driven to desperation by their declining importance in the modern world.

The Waste Land

Dali, "The Persistence of Memory"

Western civilization has never recovered from World War I. It has PTSD and has been trying to commit suicide ever since.

We saw Yeats’ prophecy of this in “The Second Coming,” first published in 1920. But there was another great poem published just two years later, in 1922: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Many consider it the first great trumpet blast of Modernism. Which is to say, the general nervous breakdown of the arts in the West.

Yep.

It was written by Eliot when he was himself suffering from what we now would call depression: "nervous exhaustion," they called it then. The poem is a profoundly accurate depiction of the experience of depression. If we really want to understand depression, we ought to be studying it carefully. It is hard to see spiritual things. We need someone with Eliot's talent to show them to us clearly.

Thomas Stearns Eliot. "T.S." to you.

The most notable aspect of the poem, of course , is that it is all frustratingly incoherent. That is the point; that is the essence of depression. There is no protagonist, no consistent sense of self: "depersonalization," the shrinks call it. Instead, a seemingly random parade of narrators take up seemingly random threads, as if an invisible hand were turning a radio dial. Sensible narratives carry on for a while, then are interrupted by something else. Shrinks call this "inability to concentrate." Most notably to my mind, there is a sense of meaninglessness: things seem to mean something, but the meaning always remains just beyond reach, ephemeral, like a will-o-the-wisp. A lot of dead-end allusions. "A lack of interest in anything," the good doctors will conclude. There is certainly a pervasive sense of anxiety: something bad is always coming. Sorrow? Perhaps there is sorrow; you decide, reading through. I do not see anything resembling ordinary sorrow. A sense of loss, agreed. But sorrow is not, in fact, the defining element of "depression."

It is, in sum, a "Waste Land." A barren landscape. It is the desert sands of Yeats' prior poem. But Yeats was foreseeing this state; Eliot is living in it. The image is so apt, for what Western civilization has been struggling through, that we have been writing about it ever since. Becket's Vladimir and Estragon inhabit the same landscape. So does Orwell's Winston Smith. Dali paints it in "The Persistence of Memory." Ginsberg's angelheaded hipsters prowl it in the predawn of "Howl." Steinbeck's Okies experience it as the Dust Bowl. More recently, it has appeared as Mad Max's Australia, Dylan's "Desolation Row," Blade Runner's decaying LA, Luke Skywalker's Tatooine, Katniss Everdeen's Panem, and the Georgia of The Walking Dead. Not to mention ten dozen other zombie matinees. Steppenwolf secretly lived there. The Waste Land, perhaps originally inspired by the No Man's Land of the World War I trenches, has become the ruling metaphor for the modernist era, and for modern life. It is also sometimes known as "the rat race." 

Duchamp's "Fountain," 1917.

We have been wandering these barrens for the past hundred years. Our art is at a dead stall; we cannot find our way out of this maze; we have never yet managed to discover a new centre for our cultural mandala, a new cosmic organization of truth, goodness, and beauty. There was a brief period of optimism, true, in the 20's, and a longer one after the Second World War, but things soon settled back into permanent twilight. We have been doing nothing but repeating Eliot's Waste Land and Duchamp's "Fountain" ever since.

The Second Coming

The two beasts of the apocalypse.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

For my punts, Yeats’ The Second Coming is one of the finest poems in the English language. It is of historical importance, too. It was written in 1919, just after the First World War and the Russian Revolution, at the moment European civilization seemed to stagger and fall, leaving only the steampunks behind; the day Western Civ ended. It may offer us clues as to why.

The more so as it presents itself as a prophesy. The best artists are inspired, and inspired by the same spirit that inspired the prophets: the Holy Spirit.

The poem is usually supposed to express Yeats’ elaborate gnostic theory of civilizational gyres, in which everything eventually flips into its opposite, in 2,000-year cycles. An early New Ager, he supposedly was speaking of the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Durer's Apocalypse.

Maybe.

I believe this interpretation is unnecessary. After all, a good poet and a good poem will not rely on an esoteric theory known only to a few; it must resonate with many, if not everyone, or it will not work as poem. Yeats was no tyro in this regard. Further, Yeats himself always declined to say that he believed in the theory of the gyres. He said it only gave him “metaphors for poetry.” He self-identified to the end as an Irish Protestant, and Protestant means Protestant Christian. If he toyed with esoteric symbols, why, so did Freemasonry, so did the Orange Order, without regarding themselves as anything other than Protestant. And, if he had really been a pagan, would he not have heralded the dawning of the Age of Aquarius with a little more enthusiasm than is shown?

Moreover, Yeats himself says that this poem is not planned by him to express any definite meaning, but is a spontaneous vision. I take him at his word. This may well be a truth God wishes us to know.

Note that the poem makes perfect sense in orthodox Christian terms. The Book of Revelations itself predicts a rough beast, appearing before the Second Coming of Christ. There will first be a Great Apostasy, and terrible turmoil. And a beast will appear from the wilderness.

Paul says the same in 1st Thessalonians:

For that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness[b] is revealed, the son of destruction,[c] 4 who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God. ... 9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. 11 Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, 12 in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness.

To Paul, the primary significance of the anti-Christ is apparently lawlessness, a rebellion against the Divine will. So too for Yeats. The first lines of the poem indeed speaks of “gyres”:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

But no background theory of history is necessary. This can be seen quite simply as a mandala, universal symbol of cosmic order, coming apart. A bird is a classic symbol of the soul, as in the case of the Holy Ghost. The centre of the mandala is God. A diagnosis, then, of the civilizational problem: we have stopped listening to and obeying God, as a falcon the falconer. And we have stopped doing so in favour of our innate predatory animal instincts, as if birds of prey.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

Quite likely a reference to the First World War. And what is the "ceremony of innocence" but baptism? At the Christian apocalypse, the seas and rivers will turn to blood, according to Revelations.

3 The second angel poured out his bowl on the sea, and it turned into blood like that of a dead person, and every living thing in the sea died.
4 The third angel poured out his bowl on the rivers and springs of water, and they became blood. – Revelations 16

Beast of the Apocalypse.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

This again sounds like a Biblical reference. In Revelations 3, the church in Laodicea is told:

15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

Egyptian sphinx at the Met.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The very expectation that such scenes of chaos predict the Second Coming is a Biblical one; and here is a direct reference to the Book of Revelations more or less by name..

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

“Spiritus Mundi” seems to be Yeats's own invented term. It is ambiguous: it might refer to something like Jung's “collective unconscious,” but it might as well refer to the Holy Spirit. As to the nature of the beast: its “vastness” suggests materialism: big thing; “things” are getting big. Space is getting big. The desert imagery echoes, or rather prefigures, TS Eliot's “Wasteland” as an image of the modern era. One might see it as a time stripped of all soul or spirit, hence of all living, growing things. All that is left is the purely material, which is in the end just barren sands.

The shape as described is obviously the Egyptian sphinx; implying paganism generally; the situation as it was before, or is without, Christianity. But this is also a sub-human image; an image of man as mostly beast. Like the image of the unleashed falcon, a return to a bestial life of pure predatory instinct. It is perhaps time to breathe the fateful name: Darwin. This is Darwin's universe, “red in tooth and claw.”

Note that Revelations already predicts such a beast appearing before the Second Coming proper; in fact, two:

Then I saw a second beast, coming out of the earth. ... 13 And it performed great signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to the earth in full view of the people. 14 Because of the signs it was given power to perform on behalf of the first beast, it deceived the inhabitants of the earth. ... 16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads,17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

This is of course the notorious “mark of the beast,” 666. It is hard not to see this as a reference to overreaching by government. But that may be more the Bible's point than the point of Yeats's poem.

Beast of the Apocalypse.

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The blank gaze seems to me especially important. I think under the influence of scientism, and the scientific imperative of “objectivity,” it has come to be seen as an unambiguous virtue to be unemotional on our approach to the world. In other words, it is “cool” to be “cool.”

It should not be. This is a direct rejection of the prime Christian commandment to love. What is left when emotion is stripped from our world view is pure predatory self interest. The Nazis saw pity as the gravest sin. There is no room for pity or love when it is all survival of the fittest.

The “slow thighs” of the beast surely suggest something sexual. This is a natural concomitant of the reduction of man and the world to a purely physical entity. When it is not about eating, it is about having sex.

The new mandala, the new cosmic order, of scientism, forms around the beast, as the “reeling shadows of the indignant desert birds.” But if birds are souls, here the bird-soul is alienated., from a centre that keeps moving.

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Slouching towards Bethlehem need not suggest a new faith set to replace Christianity for the next twenty centuries, in keeping with the gyrational theory of history. Both Paul and Revelations speak of the beast or anti-Christ setting itself up as a false God and demanding worship. But this they say will not last.

More interesting is that image of a rocking cradle. Because it cannot refer specifically to the birth of Jesus the Christ twenty centuries ago.

First, and famously, Jesus had no cradle in which to rock. Secondly, that infancy ended a long time ago; how is the cradle still rocking.

No—instead of referring to the Christ child, Yeats is referring to children generally. If the Christian doctrine of love is replaced by a doctrine of bestial pleasure, the first and worst victims are sure to be, not the Jews of Europe, or the blacks of the southern US states, but children generally. The new cool bestial man will want sex free of the responsibility of childbirth and child care.

Yup.

Moloch is back in business.

Reflection on Visiting the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Barnett Newman's floor-to-ceiling "Voice of Fire."

A basic principle of modern art: the larger the canvas, the smaller the talent. It is a simple thing to achieve impact just by drawing something very large. Everybody is doing it these days. It is fantastically tedious.

A similar principle applies in rock music: the greater the volume, the lesser the talent. As Keith Richards has noted, the essential trick of rock is to achieve an impression of power without resorting to volume.