mRNA vaccine safety data

 

When someone like John Campbell is calling them out, you know they've done wrong.

I for one have become deeply disillusioned. When this pandemic began, I trusted the authorities to, in the end, be of good will. 

I no longer belive this.

Predictions for 2023

 

My record for predictions is appalling. Just like everyone else. Who, looking forward to 2022, predicted the Freedom Convoy? The declaration of the Emergency Act? The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Ukraine’s ability to push back? That the UK would run through three prime ministers? That Elon Musk would buy Twitter and open its files? That the US Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade?

But it is my tradition to make my predictions at the New Year, so what the heck. 2023 looks particularly unstable. I have an intuition that we have reached a watershed, and 2023 will be a year of change. 

The regimes in Iran, Russia, and China all look shaky. If any one of them tumbles, this will make the fall of the others more probable. If all three go, we may have a new world.

Russia perhaps looks most likely. It seems now as though Putin cannot win his war, and losing a war usually means the fall of an autocratic government. Wise men say that, if Putin goes, it will be a palace coup, and he will be replaced by somebody more hard line than he is. But this does not seem viable: Putin is not losing in Ukraine due to lack of trying. What could a harder line produce? War against NATO? Given that Russia cannot deal with Ukraine, expanding the war simply looks like suicide.

It seems to me the only path open to Russia is to dump Putin, blame the war on him, withdraw all troops from Ukraine, and pursue a new policy of rapprochement with the West. If you can’t beat them …

Iran looks next most likely. My Iranian contacts all seem confident the regime cannot survive the current wave of protests. And if that regime falls, its successor is again likely to be pro-Western. Just as the reaction to the pro-Western and secularizing shah was to go fundamentalist and Islamist, the reaction to an Islamist regime will likely be to go pro-Western. Rumours are that mosque attendance in Iran is low, and there are many secret conversions to Christianity.

If Iran goes pro-Western, and Russia pulls in its horns, we may have peace in the Middle East.

I have been predicting the fall of the CCP since 1992. It looked shaky then. I think the original appointment of Xi and his strongarm tactics were themselves acts of desperation. They are now coming unglued: Xi had to back down over zero Covid. All he had was fear, and now fear is not working.

Worldwide, there is a struggle between government elites everywhere, who see the internet as an opportunity for Big Brother-style control, and the people, who see the internet as an opportunity to organize themselves without the need for government elites. The Freedom Convoy in Canada was a set-piece example. It is getting nasty, and could get nastier. But I am hopeful that the essential logic of the internet, improved communication, leads in the direction of greater democracy and freedom, not more government control. As did the invention of printing, or the Industrial Revolution, for parallels. Technology favours freedom.

Economists predict worldwide recession, and inflation slowly easing. This is beyond my area of expertise. Broadly, though, I think the improvements in technology through computerization ought to continue improving general prosperity, even if there are bumps in the road, and the effects of the Covid lockdowns, like those of the Spanish flu, ought to be transitory. If the war in Ukraine has been costly, there ought also to be a “peace dividend” if any or all of the three bellicose regimes actually fall.

Housing prices are crashing all over the place. They needed to; housing costs were unrealistically high. It was an investment bubble. 

It might be an unexpectedly good year, after a string of bad ones.

Spanish Is a Loving Tongue

 

In the Beginning

 

My Late Brother Gerry Loved This One

 

Ian Tyson's Pilgrimage

 

Cowboys Don't Cry

 

Was It Fifty Years Ago?

 

Irving Berlin is 100 Years Old Today

 

Four Strong Winds Blow Lonely

 

See You Someday Down the Road, Ian

 

Ian Tyson Has Crossed the Great Divide

 

Kind of tears me up.

The Mississauga Byelection

 

Look! The very heavens are turning Liberal red!

The results of the recent byelection in Mississauga were disappointing for all of us who think Justin Trudeau must go. The Liberals actually increased their share of the vote, winning an absolute majority.

The most striking thing was the collapse of the NDP vote. It has halved since the last election. This explains the Liberal success: votes moving from the NDP.

Nationwide, according to the conventional wisdom, this is bad news for the Conservatives. They count on the Liberals and the NDP splitting the vote on the left to allow them to come up the middle, the Conservative vote traditionally stalling  in the thirties.

It is worse news, of course, for the NDP. It makes them unlikely to want to force an election any time soon.

But it also suggests a lack of vitality on the left. The NDP has always been a ginger group, pushing the discussion toward the left. They were a place to park a protest vote, and feel virtuous. Every election was a “moral victory.” And their presence has supported the Liberals as the safe middle ground.

Their collapse, and the increasing inability to distinguish themselves and their platform from the Liberals, suggests that the left has lost the moral high ground. Voting left is no longer about principle. It is perhaps about fear of change, perhaps about power and self-interest for your client group. There are no more moral victories. That is a bad portent over the longer term. Moral authority is important. Ask Dr. Martin Luther King. Ask Gandhi. Ask O’Connell.

The NDP has abandoned the working class. The unions are moving to the Conservatives. Now you only vote NDP, or Liberal, to maintain the status quo. The attack on conventional sexual morality, the adamant support for abortion, the seeming grooming of children in the schools, the encouragement of racial division, the lies and suppressions during the Covid crisis, have begun to trouble the average conscience. 

Folks are apparently not ready to make the big move yet, from left to right. They still fear the unknown, and the neighbours they have always been told are racists and Nazis. But this swelling of the Liberal ranks looks like a bubble about to pop. 

Facing uncertainty, confused, people will huddle towards the known and familiar while they try to decide what to do.

Deck Them Halls

 

A very old secular Christmas song.

More cowbell!

I Wonder as I Wander

 

An unhappy Christmans carol, of all things.

Yet this makes sense. We are speaking of serious things here, not "happy happy joy joy."

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

--T.S. Eliot

Our Religion

 

Artemis at Ephesus as the all-nurturing "Mother Nature"

While we claim as a society to recognize religious freedom, in fact we have a state religion. We call it, incorrectly, “science,” but it is the thing we commonly know as science; and our god, or rather goddess, is Nature.

It is not tolerant of other creeds. Its rituals of worship, things like rules for recycling, or buying electric cars, are mandatory. It is heavily state subsidized; tithing is not optional.

Unlike the Christian God, but like the other pagan gods, Nature is not well disposed towards man. Her temples, the nature preserves, often ban human beings. Mankind becomes, to quote more than one writer, “a cancer on the planet.” 

She is clearly and commonly personified, and specifically as feminine. She has all the characteristics familiar from Isis, Artemis, and Gaea, previous nature goddesses. She is aka “Mother Nature” or “Mother Earth.”

Gaea or "Mother Earth" at the Montreal Botanical Gardens

The religion also makes no allowance for ethics. Ethics are unnatural; “unscientific.” Instead, we have definite obligations to the goddess, on pain of provoking her wrath and retribution. 

The priesthood dresses in distinctive white smocks. At the same time, because the goddess is feminine, mortal women in her image seem to be given unlimited power over life and death. Child sacrifice, common in earlier pagan periods, has returned. There is no more value to human life, after all, than to that of an animal.

The field of psychology/psychiatry is in effect a permanent Inquisition, seeking out heresies.

This is not going well. This has reached its strongest expressions, so far, in Nazism and in Communism; but we would be naïve to think these cannot be bettered in future.

Pachamama

But, you might protest, science is simply truth. 

So it is; but scientism and nature worship have nothing to do with science.

Or with truth.

Imperial Christmas

 

The Christian New Year Begins

 

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. 4 In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it….

14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. 

John’s gospel is to guide us through the new year. And this is how it begins.

What does it mean, that Christ is the Word? The Word pre-exists and creates the thing it describes? Does this sound odd to you? It is certainly counter to the usual theories of language.

Yet the idea is endorsed as well in the Book of Genesis. God the Father creates the universe by calling it into being. 

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

This is an endorsement of the Platonic concept of ideal forms. We are not speaking here of literal sounds, but of the essence of a word, the concept in the mind. Words are ideas. The idea in the mind of the thing exists before the thing exists, and the particular thing is an emanation of the symbol.

Put in human terms, we would not be able to experience “cat” if the idea of a cat was not previously planted in our mind by God. Otherwise, we would only have random sense perceptions. If we cannot form the word “cat,” in whatever language, we cannot experience the thing, “cat.” 

This is the opposite of the Aristotelian idea which dominates our current culture: that thoughts are inducted, induced, from physical experience.

This seems a logical impossibility. But in any case, this notion is not tenable for a Christian.

For when we say we are Christians, that we worship Jesus Christ as our Lord and Saviour, we do not mean the mortal man Jesus. Him we have never met, in the flesh, and his name was not Jesus. We worship the incarnation; we worship the cosmic Christ; we worship the Word, whom John identifies with light, grace, and truth. Light here being the light of consciousness; as we say “I see,” “it is clear to me now,” and truth “dawns on us.” Grace being beauty.

Elsewhere Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the light.” 

Plato would formulate that as “I am the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”

This is what the true Christian seeks, wherever they are found in life. These are the emanations of the divine as they are experienced in this life, and seeking these is the meaning of life.

Everybody Knows

 

As a Christmas present, I treated myself yesterday to a visit to the current exhibit at the Art Gallery of Ontario on Leonard Cohen.

It was a disappointment. But then, I expected it to be. How do you host an art exhibit on a poet? Wrong medium. 

You got to see his notebooks under glass; but usually just the covers, and the covers look like any other notebooks, after all. Letters to and from other celebrities; very hard to read in handwriting and under glass, with others crowding you. Much better printed as a book or a web page. One of his guitars; his electronic keyboard. Look very much like any other guitar or Casio keyboard. Videos of him singing; using clips readily available on YouTube. So what?

When I went to an AGO exhibit years ago on William Kurelek, it felt life-changing. I left with a sense of what Kurelek was all about, what he was saying. When I went to a more recent exhibit on Andy Warhol, I left with a sense of what Warhol was all about. When I left the exhibit on Cohen, I was feeling, “was that really all he was about?” 

I had to remind myself of the actual lyrics. Being a writer, Cohen was far better at revealing himself than any museum curator’s collection of memorabilia could be. 

Had I known of Cohen only from the exhibit, I would have thought that Cohen was interested only in producing tunes that someone could enjoy while doing the laundry, or dance to. Ironic, since Cohen often did not write the tunes, only the lyrics. And did not have one of the world’s great voices. Again and again, the clips chosen seemed to downplay the significance of the lyrics, the poetry, and the novels. Beautiful Losers was the product of sunstroke. “First We Take Manhattan” was an attempt to say “something about Berlin.” “The Future” was gloomy, but saved by an upbeat tune.

If there was a core message, okay, Cohen loved his mother, his family, and his hometown. All actually highly dubious assertions, based on what he actually wrote. If true, merely bland and pedestrian. He was fascinated with guns, for some unexplained reason; he was not a pacifist. He thought the ultimate meaning of life was getting laid. Totally soulless.

At the exit, you had the opportunity to buy a trilby hat like the one he wore on stage, or a keychain, or a t-shirt. Fan stuff.

I felt Cohen’ legacy was being falsified and crassly exploited, either by his surviving family, or by the museum, or, most probably, both.

The title chosen for the exhibit was appropriate: “Everybody knows.” It merely traded on Cohen’s fame, and withheld anything not apparent to everybody.

The Rebel Jesus

 

My friend Mithras sent along for Christmas cheer the song “The Rebel Jesus,” which he really likes. Nice tune; but I dislike it intensely. Jesus is Lord, the rightful ruler of the universe. So against whom is he rebelling? The premise of the song must be that the Devil is the rightful ruler, and God is some troublemaker.

Perhaps the thesis is that Jesus was just a mortal man, and was a rebel against the government of his day? Then not true, even given the atheist premise. “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” Political revolt was an obvious option, expected of the Messiah and endorsed by the Zealots. Jesus rejected it.

Next problem: the narrator says he worships in nature. Nature is fallen, and it is our duty to redeem it. I do not worship cancer, or Covid, or cockroaches, or instinct, or the survival of the fittest. Nature worship is an alibi for spiritual laziness and self-indulgence. The Devil is the Lord of nature: Lord of the Flies. 

“But if anyone of us should interfere

In the business of why there are poor

They get the same as the rebel Jesus.”

This is an attempt to avoid our responsibility to help the poor: instead of helping, blame the system. It is not possible to “eliminate poverty.” As Jesus says, “The poor will be always with you.” That is a Marxist con. The rich love it, because it lets them keep their money and blame someone else. “After all, I voted socialist.” Costs nothing.

Feast of Stephen

 

St. Stephen's Day in Ireland

 

Happy St. Stephen's Day

 

A Star Is Born

 

 

Merry Caribbean Christmas

 

Soothing.

The Cherry Tree Carol

 

This one is special to me. For some reason it rips me up. One Christmas I directed a Christmas play for our parish acting out the song.

Merry Christmas!

 

Christmas in the Third Reich

 

The Daily Mail has more on this.

Happy Christmas Eve

 

The ultimate Carol for Christmas Eve, and the ultimate rendition.

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.

Christmas in Canada

 

Mary Had a Little Baby

 

One of my favourites.

Christianity and Hypocrisy

 

In my book Playing the Indian Card, I point out that Christian missionaries coming to Canada had every reason to try to preserve Canadian First Nations cultures, and they did. This is the opposite of the usual claim. They are commonly scapegoated as supposed cultural imperialists. In fact, most of what we know today about Canadian First Nations culture comes from their work and writings. For the natives had no writing system.

This makes sense purely in terms of self-interest. Keeping the natives separate from the civil culture magnified the authority of the missionaries as intermediaries. But more nobly, the Jesuits and Recollets were concerned with the depravity of the general culture. Far better for the souls of their charges that they not venture into the cities with their alcohol, prostitution, and sharp trading.

My editor objected. Surely they were imposing on them their culture, their Christian religion?

Only the irreligious see religion as culture. To the religious, religion is counter-cultural.

Andrew Breitbart famously said “politics is downstream from culture.” Similarly, culture is downstream from religion. True, adopt Christianity, and you are liable to come up over time with things like empirical science, liberal democracy, and the Enlightenment. But Christianity, or Catholicism, is highly culturally diverse.

For people who are not religious, it is true, religion is their culture. These are the people who have never thought about it, or read the texts. They just do it because those around them do it. They celebrate Christmas, because it is a party, and everybody does. They get married in a church, because that is the way it is done.  They attend mass because their grandmother did, and their father.

But this attitude is the very opposite of true religion, which is above all a search for the truth: for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

And it produces something social that is the opposite of true religion. It produces a dull uncreative social conformity. It produces “happy happy joy joy” Hallmark-card-sentimental self-satisfied “be nice and get along” attitudes and behaviour.

Christianity is profoundly counter-cultural. If that is not obvious to you, consider that its founder figure was crucified by his culture as the worst of criminals.

So are the other great religions, but for Islam.

A recent example of how different the cultural facsimile is from the real article: one of Xerxes’s readers, a United Church minister, recently opined that she saw no distinction between secular and sacred Christmas songs for her services. “After all,” she remarked, “We are called to be a people of this world.”

This is the opposite of what the Bible says. 

1 John 2: 15-17:

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

John 17: 14-17:

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

John 15: 18-9:

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

The cultural Christianity almost systematically asserts the opposite of the actual Christian message. It generally asserts what is most comfortable, especially for the rich and powerful.

It is, in itself, proof of the existence of the Devil.

We are warned of this, of course, in the Bible. This is the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees.

This is why everyone should actually read the Bible for themselves; and Catholics should read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Arthur McBride

 

An unconventional Christmas song.

The Holly and the Ivy

 

One of my all-time faves.

Beauty Is Not Skin-Deep

 

Traditional Middle Eastern talisman against the evil eye.

We are often warned not to judge by appearances. We must not judge a book by its cover. We must not assume, because a woman is beautiful, that she is either especially intelligent or moral. This, we are told, is an unjust prejudice. Beauty is only skin deep.

On the other hand, fairy tales always show the beautiful heroine as also highly intelligent and, in the end, moral. And fairy tales are, in effect, the distilled wisdom of our ancestors, advice on life meant to be passed on to the younger generation.

The same is true of the hero legends: Sir Galahad is always handsome, brave, intelligent and highly moral.

So who is right?

We have one automatic reason to assume the fairy tales and hero legends have it right. Not just because they are the wisdom of the ages; because we naturally do not want to believe that beauty, intelligence, and morality go together. It is a harsh thing for the majority of us, who are not exceptionally beautiful, to accept. It means we lose on all counts. We have an ulterior motive to believe the contrary, against all evidence.

In fact, unfair as it might sound, there is good reason to assume that an attractive man or woman will most often also be intelligent.

Here’s why: beauty is most highly valued by men in a mate. A beautiful woman has the best evolutionary chance to get married young to a good husband and have lots of children. This makes evolutionary sense: beauty equates to good physical health. Of course, men also value intelligence, but less so.

Intelligence, in turn, is most highly valued by women in men. This too makes evolutionary sense. While good physical health is less important in the father, the ability to provide financially is vital. An intelligent man will probably be able to support more children. 

So a highly intelligent man usually marries an unusually attractive woman: like Hephaestos and Aphrodite in Greek myth. 

What is then likely to be true of their progeny? Combining the two characteristics, refined and amplified over generations, their progeny is likely to be both highly intelligent and physically attractive.

Fairy tales and hero legends are less likely to equate beauty with moral goodness. In Snow White, the wicked queen is also beautiful, almost as beautiful as Snow White, according to her magic mirror; but she is pure evil. In Cinderella—the original, not the Disney version—Cinderella is prettiest, and good, but her sisters too are beauties. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle is both a paragon of beauty and of morality; but her sisters too are notably attractive, and are selfish and abusive.

So here there seem to be two opposite possibilities.

A beautiful or intelligent child is liable to be spoiled by proud parents or eager suitors; leading to a lack of concern for others. This is so in the original legend of Narcissus.

But a beautiful or intelligent child is also at least equally likely, like Snow White, to be subject to the envy of others. The less beautiful or intelligent, especially those who have invested their self-esteem in being beautiful or intelligent, are liable to hate and wish to destroy the exceptionally beautiful. This is almost the prime lesson of the fairy tales. Even the opposite sex: the reaction may be a desire to possess rather than concern for the well-being of the beautiful. It is the unusually beautiful who have most to fear from rape or sexual harassment; or, for intelligent men, entrapment into marriage. 

Hedy Lamarr,  Hollywood love goddess and co-inventor of wifi.

If being forever flattered and favoured leads to a lack of care for others—and it does—being forever attacked and criticized, as or more often the case, leads to identifying with the downtrodden and a sense of empathy for others. 

So it can go either way, and is liable to be extreme in one direction or the other: either the Wicked Queen, or the exemplary, dutiful Cinderella.

The more extreme the beauty or intelligence, the more likely to have been subjected to envy or harassment rather than favour and support. This too is the lesson of the fairy tales.

Perhaps we have to say it in fairy tales because it is too controversial to say out loud. Envy is powerful.

A Song for Midwinter Night

 

Important News of the Cosmos

 

Alternate History

 

Recent intimations that the Kennedy assassination was indeed a conspiracy, by the Deep State make me start to wonder what they destroyed. What would the world look like today had Kennedy completed his term, and been re-elected?

Things went pretty crazy in the USA within a few years of his death. The culture got knocked into a cocked hat later in the Sixties, and has not recovered. Perhaps this was a reaction to the loss of Kennedy and what he represented: the idea of a brave and better postwar world. People stopped having kids at about the same time: a sure sign of pessimism about the future. And weren’t the Sixties the classic “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die” reaction to a loss of hope? “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

We can be sure the Civil Rights movement would have continued: it was Kennedy’s initiative, and Johnson continued with it on the strength of his imprimatur. Perhaps the folk boom with its sincerity, concern for social causes, and ultimate respect for culture would not have been supplanted by the Beatles and more raucous rock and roll. Which was less about improving the world and more about getting drunk and getting laid.

Imagine all that energy being better channelled.

I think it is a fair assumption that the Republicans would still have nominated Goldwater. Kennedy would have won a second term. His brother RFK insisted that he would have pulled out of Vietnam had he survived. I suspect this is true; he did not have Johnson’s macho insecurities, and showed his ability to admit and learn from mistakes during the Cuban missile crisis. We might have avoided all that. We would have avoided LBJ’s vast expansion of government and his Great Society, which so devastated the black family.

I assume the Republicans would still go with Nixon in ‘68. Johnson would not run, due to health. The most likely Democratic standardbearer would have been RFK. Let’s assume Kennedy would still be popular enough that RFK would beat Nixon on his brother’s coattails. It was a close run thing for Nixon even against Humphrey, with the latter fighting the headwinds of Vietnam, a dubious nomination, a bitterly divided party, no charisma, and a raucous convention. 

Would RFK have been very radical? I think he was at base an opportunist. He would play it by the polls. He would probably, in these altered circumstances, be a relative centrist. And he would not have been assassinated; nor would Martin Luther King have been. These were copycat crimes. We would have been spared those two traumas, and have had King’s input in the years to follow. It could have been a glamourous time, with RFK in Washington, Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa, Expo ’67 still recent, and civil rights passed.

Nixon would presumably not be back for another round in 1972; that would be one too many resurrections even for him. Whomever the Republicans ran that election, we would have missed the trauma of Watergate and the aura of “Tricky Dickie” in charge of the globe. They might well have run Ronald Reagan, who was by then well established as the standard-bearer of the party’s right wing, and was serving as governor of California. Imagine him winning this election—after three terms, the electorate is usually hungry for a change—and being able to govern in his prime.

Would Reagan have made the same deal with China that Nixon did? Perhaps. But without Vietnam, he would have had less need or incentive to do so. And subsequent events suggest we might have been better off had Nixon not made that deal. The Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union would probably have collapsed anyway, for economic reasons, and China would not have been built up to replace them.

Give Reagan a second term, and he would have been in power during the Iranian Revolution. We can imagine him giving the Shah the backing that Carter did not; we can imagine the Ayatollah and the Iranian theocrats not coming to power. That might have saved much strife and anguish in the Middle East.

Although we’ll never know, it seems to me it could have been a happier century. As one left-wing British commentator remarked, before the Kennedy assassination, everyone admired America. After it, everyone fell out of love with America. 

Imagine that had not happened.

Now Banned on the BBC

 

... for a few forbidden words. See if you can spot them.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

 

Watching Dreyer’s 1928 silent movie “The Passion of Joan of Arc” with my kids. It is a harrowing experience, that must be had and cannot be undone. It is unfathomable the spiritual suffering this uneducated girl of nineteen must have gone through.

She was in the hands of her enemies, of course. She was threatened with a painful death, as painful as they could conceive. She was abandoned by Charles VII, who might have ransomed her—although he owed his throne to her. Put not your faith in princes.

But worst of all, those who actually tormented her at her trial were not just fellow Frenchmen, but religious authorities. They put her in the unspeakable position of having to deny either her direct relationship with God, or the authority of the church. She was all alone and could trust no one. And, if she chose wrongly, she risked eternal damnation.

If anyone ever earned heaven, she did. As Leonard Cohen wrote of her case,

“Me, I yearn for love and light;

But must it some so cruel, and oh, so bright?”

Yet her dilemma also expresses the experience of every abused child. The authority of the abusive parent keeps pulling against one’s own conscience; their plausible lies against one’s perception of reality.

It is probably this resonance in so many souls that makes the movie immortal.

The actress, Renee Falconetti, gives an incredibly compelling performance as Joan. One believes she is experiencing everything Joan experienced. One feels she must have been drawing on her own personal experiences.

May all abused children receive their reward in heaven.

All I Want for Christmas Is U

 

Carol of the Bells in the Original Ukrainian

 

Especially meaningful this Christmas...

Angels Heard on High

 

The Grandfather of All Conspiracy Theories

 

In recent years, we have been learning that one “conspiracy theory” after another is actually true. Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilia ring. Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide. The Russia hoax. The vaccines and the lockdowns. The excess deaths. UFOs turn out to be legit. The FBI was manipulating and shadowbanning on Twitter. 

“Conspiracy theory” became a pejorative in the wake of Oliver Stone’s implausible film on the JFK assassination. Whether it was intended to cast derision on the concept of conspiracies, it had that effect. For the term as common parlance dates back to theories on that assassination.

Now that we learn conspiracies are genuinely possible and apparently common in government, have we been wrongly dismissing the big one?

Was the Kennedy assassination actually the moment the CIA and the Deep State seized control of the US government? Was it a secret coup?

Scott Adams has argued for years that any country with a large spy agency can, will and must be taken over by that agency eventually. There is every incentive, and nothing to prevent it. These spies have a license to do whatever they want, essentially unlimited government funding, a license to keep it all secret, a license to kill. Are they going to sit idle and not make use of this power? Are they going to use it only on external enemies? 

Russia has been visibly owned by the KGB since at least Yuri Andropov. Britain has been run by MI5 for generations; the British don’t particularly care, because they are used to deference and historically trust their ruling class. But America has always had these quaint delusions about democracy and the popular will. 

Those of us who remember the Kennedy assassination remember it as a generational trauma, the end of our innocence. Nothing has ever felt right since. 

Perhaps our instincts were right.

Perhaps now it will all come out. 

Perhaps that might start to make it right.

"I now feel that most of my adult life, what I have thought was real, has been erased."--Roger Simon

Attacks on Churches in the US

 

And it's worse in Canada.

Dobry Vechir Toby

 

What we need now is a good rousing Ukrainian Christmas song, in honour of their struggle this season.

The Season's Upon Us

 

What Rough Beast?

 

It seems clear to me that our contemporary fear of “judgementalism” comes from the secular culture, and owes nothing to Church teaching, or the Bible, or traditional Judeo-Christian morality. It traces back to the “do your own thing” popular culture of the 1960s; before that to such figures as Marcuse, Freud, and before them Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx. 

Jesus himself had no problems with judging the moneychangers, 

Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. “It is written,” he said to them, “‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it ‘a den of robbers.’”

or the scribes and Pharisees, 

“You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?”

or those who mislead or miseducate children. 

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

He judges the living and the dead, and divides humanity into sheep and goats.

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’”

Is this peculiar to him? Is it only he who is competent to judge, being God incarnate? No; John the Baptist, “the greatest born of women,” also has no trouble condemning the Sadducees and Pharisees, 

“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his baptism, he said to them, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?’”

or judging the acts of Herod Antipas. 

“For Herod had arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been telling him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’”

And in this, he is doing the same divine work as all the prophets of the Old Testament: issuing a warning to those who are on the wrong path.

“Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.’”

If we lose this, we lose the ethical essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

I see our contemporary refusal to make moral judgments leading to the destruction of a growing number of souls; and in the end the destruction of society at large. As W.B. Yeats put it, we are living in a time in which, increasingly,

"The best lack all conviction,

While the worst are full of passionate intensity."

This is what happens when we refuse the call to "put on the full armour of God." This is what comes whne we refuse Jonah's commission.

A Canadian Christmas Song

 

Gabbard on Trudeau

 

A Disturbing Piece on Election Fraud

 

If we cannot trust elections, everything is out the window.

I used to think Canadian elections, at least, were secure. But then Canada started moving from paper ballots to voting machines--the very thing that began to call US elections into question.

Voting machines should be banned. And, obviously, voting must be in person with ID.

Community

 

Avonlea Village, Cavendish,, P.E.I.

Dave Rubin, who is gay, recently and properly said on air, “There is no such thing as the LGBTQ community.”

Your community is the people you run into on a typical day, the people you spend time with. Most naturally, the folks on your block. 

Other than sex, gays do not have anything in common. No number of one-night stands adds up to a community. Nor does a solitary couple. And gays have nothing in particular in common with lesbians, or transsexuals; no more than the average straight male.

Similarly, except for those who go to the same mosque, Muslims in Canada are not a community. Except for those who live on the same reserve, indigenous people are not a community. Unless they attend the same women’s club, feminists are not a community. Mariposa is a community. Avonlea is a community. Cabbagetown is a community.

These false so-called “communities,” moreover, are used to cut us off from our communities: from seeing and celebrating all we have in common with our neighbours. They promote hostility towards anyone who is different from us. They alienate.

A Canadian Christmas Song

 

One Explanation for Cancel Culture

 

Just saw Jordan Peterson give his explanation for the mysterious growth of narcissistic and psychopathic behaviour online—not just things like the Canadian blue whale euthanasia ad, or the Balenciaga child bondage and child sacrifice ad. Also the whole edifice of “cancel culture.”

Peterson’s premise is that “virtuality enables narcissism.” Put simply, and without the psychological terms, some people are evil, selfish, and delight in doing others harm. Peterson puts the figure at 5%. In ordinary society, they are restrained purely by the fear of punishment—“external constraints.” Online, they can often operate in the shadows, anonymously. They can dip in to a chat group, then dip out, and nobody knows who they were. Or they can back-door manipulate at a hosting site like Twitter. Power! Torment the weak!

It makes sense. A narcissist or a psychopath will not fare well in a small town. Everyone quickly gets their number. They will become a pariah—or rather, they will soon move out, to the big city. The likelihood of getting robbed or shot or raped or seduced into an abusive relationship goes up significantly once you move to a big city—where people can remain anonymous, and keep encountering strangers.

The Internet is a city the size of the world itself. There are few or no constraints on narcissists and psychopaths. And the harm they can do can be amplified—rather than only devastating the lives of a few close relatives, say, they can possibly devastate the lives of millions. Which they will tend to do for enjoyment.

If there is a solution, Peterson cannot think of it. And neither, for now, can I.

Christmas is Coming

 

Kipling's Recessional

 

Recessional

God of our fathers, known of old,

   Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

   Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

   The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

   An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;

   On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

   Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Rudyard Kipling could hardly be less fashionable in these anti-colonial days. He was a promoter of empire. Worse, like Trump, he was a populist. He wrote for the common man. 

He has also never been to my taste. His prose seems unnecessarily foggy at most times; he rarely seems to make an interesting point. I won Puck of Pook’s Hill as a prize back in grade school, and could never get my head into it. In both poetry and prose, his upper lip is far too stiff for my Irish Catholic temperament. All that English stuff about doing your dooty and dying at the drop of a hat for king and law. Sounds blasphemous to this Mick.

Yet I cannot deny his immense skill as a poet. In the craft of casting memorable lines, he puts anyone writing today in the shade. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the youngest person ever at that time, and the first Englishman.

He is the ultimate “people’s poet.” His poem “If…” for all its weird Englishness remains the most popular poem in England. 

I was recently looking again at “The Recessional,” with my students. I think it is his best poem.

Perhaps we ought to see what he has to say. In this poem, at least, I think he does go deep.

The first point I think he makes worth making is that the British Empire is under God’s dominion, and derives its legitimacy by doing God’s work. God is “Lord of our far-flung battle line.” He is “Lord God of Hosts”—of armies.

Kipling is right. To the extent that any government can claim legitimacy, it is because and to the extent that it is doing God’s will. This is more or less the same point made in America’s Declaration of Independence.

Does God then command the armies? Does he play favourites among combatants?

Of course he does. Pacifism is not a Judeo-Christian principle. God plainly favours the Israelites in battle in the Old Testament; the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Seleucids, the Egyptians, are unambiguously villains.

What is unique about the Judeo-Christian tradition is the idea that God expresses his will and his divine plan through human history. That means in any given war, one side is probably doing his will, and the other side is with the devil.

More broadly, the creation is an eternal war between good and evil. We are to take up our sword and defend the right. Pacifism is simply moral cowardice. 

This ought to be clear enough to natural reason. Whenever a fight breaks out, between two individuals, two groups, or two nations, it is almost inevitably an aggression by one party against the other. Why else? Misunderstandings can be talked through. One party merely calculates it is stronger, and can take what it wants. 

The current war in Ukraine is an example. No, there are not perfectly balanced rights and wrongs on either side. Russia wanted to control Ukraine, and thought they were strong enough to do it.

And here we even also see the hand of God. Who could have predicted that Ukraine would hold out and begin to advance? A close analysis of history actually does suggest that, given anything approaching equality of forces, the side in the right always wins. This is true because we all have a conscience, and it weakens us when we go against it.

So the question is whether the British Empire was rapacious, or was doing the will of God. This is exactly the question Kipling asks, and struggles over.

Being an Empire by itself does not figure: it is neither good nor bad. There is no moral value in being governed by people with the same skin colour or ethnicity as yourself. The question is whether the British brought better and more moral government than the governments they replaced.

Kipling would no doubt see them as doing God’s work in ending slavery, ending the caste system in India, suppressing human sacrifice, toppling oppressive rulers in Africa who practiced cannibalism, ending interminable tribal wars, and so forth. All of which they certainly did. Along with instituting governing structures and infrastructure that successor regimes have almost never seen fit to discard. 

It was no doubt in Kipling’s eyes the world’s police force, introducing and protecting human rights. At a minimum, the case must be made that it was not, that it was oppressive and self-interested. It cannot be assumed.

The usual claim, I suppose, is that Britain exploited the colonies financially, leaving them poorer than they had been. It can certainly be argued that mercantilist policies might do this; but trade generally benefits both parties. And my impression is that the actual numbers do not bear that out.

But this is background. This is not the key message of the poem. It is, rather, that the British might lose their grip on this moral foundation, like “lesser breeds without the law.” 

Who are these lesser breeds?

“Gentiles.” “Heathens.” The distinction made is not racial, but religious. 

And Kipling is more specific: 

Heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard

Kipling is not talking about African tribalists or Amerindian natives. Iron shards are products of the Industrial Revolution, not stone age cultures. Reeking tubes are most obviously found in chemistry labs.

Kipling is warning against “scientism,” the worship of science and technology as our new God. Which is indeed the disease that is currently killing Western civilization.

The prime danger of scientism is that it has no morality. It is “without the law.” 

Kipling was writing ten years after Nietzsche had published Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morals, arguing that man had now replaced God and could create his own morality to suit his purposes.

Such boasting as the gentiles use.

Not Looking Forward to Another Christmas Alone

 

What to Do about Trudeau?

 

What can we do about Justin Trudeau?

Voting him out of office, if we ever again get that opportunity, is not enough. 

Uniquely among all prime ministers, he has damaged our democracy, our civil society, and our civil peace. He has militarized the police. He has subverted the media. He has censored opposition. We must get rid of the subsidy paid to media, we must get rid of his censorship of the internet, we must get rid of his ban on hunting rifles, we must get rid of legalized euthanasia, we must get rid of back-door subsidies to big corporations, we must make sure the Emergencies Act can never be used frivolously again, we must get rid of ArriveCan. But that too is not enough.

Speaking of ArriveCan, there may be a reason more sinister than simple graft that an app that, according to specs, should have cost a few hundred thousand dollars, cost $54 million. And the government will not reveal who got the money, and for what. 

It may be that ArriveCan was designed to do more than acknowledged. The extra cost may have been to install the hidden necessities for a social credit system like China’s. We have every reason to suspect this.

At the same time that he has done all this , Trudeau has destroyed Canada’s reputation around the world. This was for generations Canada’s great advantage in the world, our supposed “soft power.” This was the work of generations. Now we are largely held in contempt: by Americans, India, China, Russia, the Arabs, much of the rest of the English-speaking world. While two Western province are passing “sovereignty laws” threatening to split the country.

Given how far Trudeau has gone, voting him out of office is not enough. A friend of mine insists on assassination, which would be the worst thing—but that is how angry people have become, and something must be done now to restore civil harmony. After all, most federal governments get voted out anyway by about their third or fourth election. So it looks like no punishment at all. The next government, or the government after that, might well still be tempted to try the same tactics.

Yet it is unwise to prosecute. The problem with prosecuting those who have left office for being unscrupulous is that, given they are inclined to break the rules in the first place, this gives them every reason to refuse to leave office, or at least try to seize power and hold on.

So what can we do?

One possibility is to pass a resolution in the next parliament censuring Trudeau, and requiring that no official portrait be commissioned. By tradition, each former prime minister gets a portrait, displayed in the House of Commons. Trudeau’s can be missing or all black to express history’s disapproval. It would be an insult to the others honoured there to feature him in the same lineup.

Other official commemorations of any kind might also be prohibited. It would at least send a message.

Happy Gaudete Sunday!

 

Christos est natus

Ex Maria virginae

Childhood Memories

 

Wise words from W.B. Yeats:

We should not make light of the troubles of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can never see any end.

Of his own childhood:

I know that I am very unhappy and have often said to myself, “when you grow up, never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness of childhood.” I may have already had the night of misery when, having prayed for several days that I might die, I had begun to be afraid that I was dying and prayed that I might live.

 

Canticle of the Turning

 

All I Want for Christmas...

 

Here's an example of a modern secular Christmas song not written, as Xerxes, complains they all are, by a Jew.

Al Purdy's Racism

 

In a piece he titled “Norma, Eunice, and Judy,” Al Purdy lamented, as I do, the general disrespect in Canada for Canadian culture. He regrets, in his own day, Canadian children growing up thinking they live in “a nation without culture, art, or literature.” It is, he says, “a country where the native literature is added to English Literature or American Literature like an afterthought. Where it is said to be not worth teaching.”

It is the colonial mentality. And, if anything, it is getting worse, with our own prime minister (eternal shame be upon him) claiming there is no Canadian culture, with government cultural funding going as a priority to “multiculturalism.” In other words, any culture but Canadian culture.

Purdy then tells the tale of Jim Foley, an unusually well-educated Ontario high school teacher who “realized that Canada must be the only country in the world where high school kids aren’t taught their own literature.” He began his own database of Canadian literature, confident that in a few years “Margaret Laurence, Atwood, Layton, Garner, and all the others who talk about the place we live in, their voices will be heard and taught in our schools.”

These words were spoken in 1974. It is now the butt end of 2022, and it still has not happened. Instead, the reverse. Kids now read American pop novels in school, watch Hollywood movies, and read and discuss anything written by anyone claiming to be aboriginal. Or failing that, they will be assigned a book by an immigrant with views hostile to the country and the culture. 

Precisely the attitude of a colonizer.

And Purdy and Foley would now be declared “racist” for wanting to promote Canadian literature.

If Worst Comes to Worst

It does look as though the Trudeau government is taking all the necessary steps to impose a Fascist or even Nazi dictatorship; some of them stealthily, which looks all the more suspicious. It seems possible we will not get another chance to vote the rascals out of office and reverse this slide into totalitarian nightmare. And they are reducing the danger of an armed insurrection by seizing even hunting rifles.

So, is our Canada goose cooked? 

I think not, because of several factors.

Our first defense is Canada’s federal structure. If the feds get overly sassy, provincial governments can sass back, and have a natural incentive to do so. Ontario under Ford looks prepared, even eager, to go along. The Maritimes are, like the press, wholly-owned federal subsidiaries due to transfer payments. But Alberta and Saskatchewan are already resisting to a historic degree. BC, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Quebec are also capable of such resistance, depending who’s in power, and have shown signs of it in the past. And the aboriginal groups.

Once strains look bad enough, I would expect the feds to pull back. They don’t want to be blamed for the breakup of the country. 

Otherwise, I turn to our second defense: the USA.

We are almost all within an hour’s drive of the border. Assuming the US does not go Fascist at the same time, any one of us can get in the car and get out. If the government shuts down communication, we can all get reception from the US. If the federal government decides to go to war with Alberta or Saskatchewan to prevent separation, Alberta and Saskatchewan can appeal to the US for help. And why wouldn’t the US respond eagerly, in the name of manifest destiny and to acquire two or more grateful, freedom-loving new states?

The US had plans to pile in if Quebec separatism ever came to blows. They’d have more motive this time.

But well before it came to that, if the Canadian government went too authoritarian, wouldn’t American popular opinion press for intervention? If Canadians are flooding the border with horror stories, wouldn’t the public demand it? Do they want a Cuba of the North? 

Even now, American news sources and YouTubers, not to mention Indian sources, UK sources, Australian sources, and so forth, are speaking with alarm of things happening in Canada. Through them, word will still get out to the world, and to the average Canadian, no matter what the Canadian government tries to do to shut down the internet. At worst, VPNs are not that hard to set up, and hard to prevent. It is hard to block broadcast signals at the border—one of the world’s longest borders.

So why does the Trudeau government seem to be trying to do this, if it is pretty likely to fail?

Because they are not that smart; and because they are panicked.

They know something we don’t know, and it must be very bad for them.

Time to Get Out of Toronto?

 

Every time I take the subway, thee train seems to stop between stations for a "Security incident."

Philomela's Metamorphosis

 

King Pandion of Athens had two lovely daughters. King Tereus of Thebes asked for the hand of the elder daughter, Procne, and after suitable celebrations, brought her home to his kingdom.

After some time, and the birth of their first son, Itys, Procne grew homesick. She begged her husband to invite her sister Philomela for a visit. So Tereus travelled to Athens and asked King Pandion if Philomela could return with him for a short visit. Pandion was concerned about his unmarried daughter travelling abroad. Especially since she was so lovely. He made Tereus swear he would watch over her as if she were his own daughter, and bring her back soon.

So Tereus gave his oath, and Pandion agreed. But his lust had already been awakened. He had other plans for Philomela.

Once he got the lovely girl back to Thebes, he did not go directly to his castle. Instead he led her deep into the woods, to an abandoned cabin. There he violently raped her. When she protested loudly and warned him she would not be silent about this, he bound her, cut out her tongue, and raped her again. Then he abandoned her in the cabin, posting guards so she could not escape.

He returned to his castle and told Procne that her sister Philomela had died.

In her enforced silence and isolation, unable to tell anyone what had happened, Philomela took to weaving, like the Lady of Shallot. She began a beautiful tapestry. Into it, she wove images of everything that had happened. When it was done, she bound it up and somehow managed to convey to a guard that this was meant as a gift for the Queen.

Procne unwrapped the tapestry, not knowing who had sent it. She immediately understood. She found out where this girl was living.

Then in the evening, she dressed in leaves to perform the rites of Dionysus. The female devotees of Dionysus, the maenads, would dance in the woods in a frenzy, supposedly possessed by the god or feigning possession. So this gave her cover. Feigning a temporary madness inspired by the god, she danced and stumbled her way to the isolated cabin in the woods. She broke down the door as if manic, and found her sister. She dressed Philomela as another maenad, carefully concealing her face with vegetation, and together they danced and stumbled their way back to the castle and slipped inside.

Little Itys ran to greet his mother. In a fit of rage at her husband, Procne suddenly started hacking her son to death. He reminded her too much now of her husband. As she was stabbing wildly, Philomela slit his throat. Perhaps as an act of mercy. Then they cooked him in a stew.

While Philomela remained hidden, Procne called her husband to supper.

Once he had finished, he asked for his son. Procne told him he had just eaten the boy. At that moment, Philomela emerged from the curtains and threw Itys’s head onto his lap.

Tereus grabbed an axe and came after the two sisters.  But just as he was about to catch them, the gods transformed Procne into a swallow, and Philomela into a nightingale.

And so, when you hear the nightingale singing in the night, a song famous for its sad beauty, that is Philomela, mourning her fate.

Later writers have regularly understood Philomela and the nightingale as images of the artist. The story explains where art and the artistic temperament comes from.

It comes from a child or young person who has been cruelly treated by someone with authority over them--a parent or perhaps someone in the place of a parent. When Hemingway was asked how to become a writer, he answered, “Have an unhappy childhood.” As often as not, this cruelty has to do with the adult fulfilling some illicit sexual desire. Freud saw this, but got it upside down. This being the usual motive, the dysfunctional childhood is most likely to happen to an especially attractive or impressive child—someone highly sexually desirable, or else someone who appears to the adult to be a potential sexual rival. Because the parent or guardian is in authority over them, and they are a minor, or perhaps in early adolescence, they are unable to say anything; they are wholly dependent on the adult. If they do say anything, they are not listened to. It is as though their tongue had been cut out.

Like Philomela’s tapestry, art is the sublimation of this urgent need to speak. As Emily Dickenson wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies.” Art is the representation by other means of whatever needs to be screamed to the heavens, yet cannot be said outright. It exists in a folded state to get past the posted guards, and to the ears that can and need to hear it.

As Jesus said of his parables, “Let those who have ears to hear, hear.”

If Philomela the nightingale represents art and the artist, what does her sister Procne the swallow represent? A second strategy employed by an abused child: madness, or feigned madness. Madness or the mask of folly is another way to say what needs to be said, or do what needs to be done, without destruction; at the cost of being ignored. Strategic madness perhaps accounts for everything we call “mental illness.”

The prime symbolism of the swallow is of a frequent flier, a constant traveller, on long migrations. This is the fate, a “wandering mind,” or perhaps the prescription, for Procne, the mad sibling: for God’s sake, get away from the family.

What about Itys? Why is that part of the formula? 

The murder of Itys is especially morally disturbing. Tereus is the villain; Itys is an innocent victim just like Philomela and Procne.

Nevertheless, this is just how dysfunctional families work. Instead of confronting the adult authority figure responsible, even when the rest of the family really know who is responsible, children, spouses, siblings, generally turn on each other instead. This may be out of fear of the power of the true villain—he or she has done what he did because he was powerful enough to get away with it. Therefore it is risky to attack him or her directly. It is easier to take out your anger at someone else—a family scapegoat.

In the epilogue, Tereus, the selfish king, the narcissist, is transformed into a hoopoe, a notoriously preening bird with a crown on its head.