Time present and time past

The grandparents of my parents were children of the last great famine in Western Europe. In the late 1860's several concequent bad harvests led to widespread starvation and disease, and almost 10% of the population of Finland died. It can be said that I have been largely formed by people in whose immediate historical memory this disaster was. There is thus a tenuous living connection that undoubtedly will no more be carried over to the next generation. Our son was born ten months ago into a dynamic, postmodern and cosmopolitan high-tech society that is busily consuming and being amused by the global entertainment industry. He will have no real connection with that passed away rural civilization.

It is in fact almost inconceivable to think that this land of brightly lit shopping malls and cutting edge mobile techonology was starving to death by the roadsides only mere five generations ago. Certainly this is not much thought about now: we occupy ourselves almost entirely with the present and the near future. The speed is too high, too dangerous for any meaningful reflection. So much has changed so quickly. I myself - as can be seen so clearly in retrospect - witnessed the ending of the last remnants of the rural Ostrobothnia that was still the unquestioned mental and cultural background of my parents. This huge change happened with astonishing speed largely only after the Second World War with the social change skipping industrialization and shifting the emphasis directly from agriculture to services in one generation. I still believe that I have the feel, the texture of that rural civilization that now has vanished. It is a wild ride we are on, uncontrolled and uncontrollable.

Many believe that there is no use in remembering even this quite recent past, only the previous half hour in historical terms - certainly such remembrance can sometimes hinder finding new perspectives and new solutions to largely unprecedented social situations. Still, without this long view we would surely get a wrong understanding of our position (on the crest of a huge wave racing towards an unknown destination), we would see the current moment out of all proportion, one-dimensional and shallow. It is hard to believe, even if civilization will eventually persist, that we are now done with all collapses and calamities. There is too little behind us though to know anything for sure: this mad, chaotic progress is only a few centuries old - there is no way of predicting how this process will continue or whether it will continue at all.

In any case it is difficult not to feel half-nostalgic about those times and meanings that were once so real and immediate and which now seem unimaginably distant and strange. I suppose it is more the fact of passing than the content of what has passed: most things are much better now. But so much has so easily vanished from living memory, and this is what will happen to our moment too - hard to imagine though that anyone would feel any nostalgia about this society but that no doubt also depends on what's to come.

The great tradition

I was recently reading a biography of George Eliot and was much struck by the majesty of the turn of the British non-conformist intellectual elite towards political liberalism, agnosticism and progress during the middle part of the 19th century. Yes, this great shift surely was absurdly highminded, demanding impossible moral and intellectual rigidity (and frigidity) from people, expecting things not remotely possible in this fallen world, doing not only much good but also much harm in the process. This said, compared with the contemporary high Tory wallowing in the miserableness of the human condition, there is a tone of great human decency in this partly absurd wish to create (and the expectation of seeing) a new Jerusalem on Earth. They were momentous times indeed and we still do feel the impact of this great hope for improvement and progress - even if it is ever weakening, being gradually drowned by the current Western orgy of consumerism and materialism. Of course, coming from the liberal Christian background of modern Finnish Pietism, there is much that is familiar with this peculiarly Protestant form of secular longing for a proper home in this world. There is an unmistakeable continuum of thought originating both in the sources of the Reformation and in the Reformation itself that is still supporting progressive political structures around the world - surely, naturally, getting gradually fainter as is any faith in conscious progress.

The winged chariot sung

It was on remarkably many levels that the news of the death of Jaan Kross were felt. Such an irreplaceable loss. Being an Estophile his unique broad perspective on his native country has of course been hugely influential in forming a personal understanding on Estonian history and culture. Still, I did not read him for information but for art: the excellent Finnish translations brought out the majestic rhythm of the language, the intricate beauty of the sentences. The texture is dense and deep - and the interplay between theme and language is mostly flawless. The result is a slow, universal, almost a mystical beat behind the surface action that the reader becomes only gradually aware of: a huge canvas is painted with sparse, understated strokes. The themes themselves were mostly Estonian but his was a universal Western voice, concerned with our particular modern predicament of unmoored individuals in time, at the mercy of history. There are not many such writers in any generation and it was quite a miracle that such an authoritative Western voice would be coming from such a small nation - quite like the improbable emergence of Sibelius from the nationalistically awakened and in many ways narrow confines of Finland. Such a body of work, such a life - we can only be grateful and priviledged to have been able to share even if only partially this majestic, polyphonic historical and cultural perspective.

Tempus adest gratiae

I must confess to liking the Christmas time. Perhaps it is due to the awful darkness of the sub-arctic winter (these days we don’t even reliably get permanent snow to Southern Finland before January which makes the 20 hours long night pitch dark and the 4 hours long “day” quite dismal). So, all lights and candles are very welcome in the midst of this darkness. But, in some respects, so is the message of that ancient story. Christianity is much, or more accurately, totally, disfigured by the various official Christian churches and sects and their incredibly primitive dogmas and superstitions. Any average Dawkinsian atheist can blow away the Bible as a science (or even philosophy) book along with all the assorted fundamentalists and traditionalists that read it as the literal word of their literal, small minded "God".

But I would argue that something immeasurably valuable of all the world religions escapes their dismal followers with their dismal sects and power structures: and so I do seriously believe that heavens really did open to the humankind two thousand years ago, regardless of any empirical evidence for or against. This particular message of forgiveness and redemption echoes on even through all these organizations and dogmas that seem as if designed to silence it.

Gaudete, Christus est natus...

Confessions of a book addict

It is only quite lately that I have considered that my intense relationship with reading could perhaps be seen as somewhat eccentric. It has been such an integral part, a central part of my life that I haven't really noticed my reading habit as anything very odd. By the age of eleven I already had a system set: there were two libraries that I would visit weekly, our own Nurmo Municipal Library and the Provincial Library in Seinäjoki. I would have a maximum limit of eight books for each visit and in most times I reached that limit. That made on average ca 14-18 books per week for about ten years. (How that was manageable, I wouldn't know.)

About the time of my tenth birthday I had already exhausted the children's departments and had moved on to adult shelves. So, I was a true addict already then, an escape artist, with my thoughts most of the time anywhere else than in the rather grim reality that was my life those times. Anything went: thrillers, detective stories, serious novels, fantasy, science fiction, history, biography, even poetry already in those early days - I was not a discriminating reader, if anything the preference was for the lighter stuff that I now see was often horribly badly written.

This I suppose is still fairly understandable - I was growing up in any case, gradually getting more interested in more than mere escape, reflecting, reconciling books with experience and vice versa. But that magical initial burst is still quite inexlicable to me: around the age of 9 years I had read all the books we had at home (well, not quite all: I mostly skipped, strangely, the plentiful religious literature there was). For the time and place we had a wide selection with the emphasis on the classic Finnish fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. This selection was combined with an utter respect for books and learning that no doubt is getting quite rare these days.

So there I was, compulsively reading Kivi, Canth, Jotuni, Kauppis-Heikki, Aho, Lehtonen, Leinonen and many others: a 9 year old boy from a very sheltered home background - I surely couldn't understand anything I was reading about. What could it have been about? It was a long ago, I have changed and can now hardly remember what I was searching for, but I do remember, I do remember that the experience really was magical, strange, compulsive - I had found a gate and gone through it and have since never returned, or glanced back.

For that first burst I have no real explanation - simultaneously I did go for conventional children's literature which I could genuinely understand and enjoy, but I did enjoy also those other books at home, having clear preferences and favourites among them though I certainly couldn't have understood much of those serious adult motivations and complexities of language and meaning. Since that long bygone time reading has been an integral part of my life, a very central part. By my twenties I averaged I think about a book per day. I switched to English around my 19th birthday, first basically for the wider selection, then for the glories of the English literary tradition.

Helsinki City Library, University Library and Student Library were paradises for me: I remember feeling drunk at the mere sight of the endless, dusty shelves of the Student Library Book Storage. Bright flames in great darkness were those places for me during that bleak time. I think I exceeded the limit of my earlier times for many years, I gulped down English literature. And even these days I think I read on average about a couple of books per week navigating still regularly back to those self-same beacons of thought and feeling. It really was a true gate, a true escpae, a true portal to something more than what is routinely, self-defeatingly on offer in this mortal world.

Themes have changed though - escape gave gradually way to intellectual search which in turn has been much replaced by more independent and more detached reflection. I'm now not able to read badly written fiction or clumsily thought out, shallow factual studies. Fiction and history are the main interests, I have overcome my snobbish (History Department) disdain of biography (if well written and thought). I can still enjoy good thrillers (say Barbara Vine) or thoughtful science fiction (in many ways a more politically and socially relevant genre than mainstream fiction that has largely lost its intellectual self-confidence and scope in the postmodern era), but altogether the subject matter is more serious and fiction is now in a distinct minority (poetry is something separate again, intensely meaningful but in some sense hardly literature for me, I have a very narrow selection of poems and poets that I return to again and again).

Writing this I notice that I find it very hard to describe the actual, concrete meaning of books to me, the actual texture of the feeling of reading, the rush - the polyphony of voices, of angles, the added scope, the limitless complexities of language, meaning and experience... In some sense all texts are speculative fiction, whether they are fiction or not, just as in some sense our lives are a speculation, a gamble - we are provisional and shifting, never fixed and permanent. We see myriad possibilities but no absolute solutions. So I read sceptically and critically but with an open mind and suspended judgement, coming only to provisional conclusions, trying to take in all possibilities, all meanings. As impossible as it is.

In many respects reading has been my true occupation all these years: I have kept endlessly travelling through strange landscapes while supporting myself by in comparison with trivial occupations. At first it was a panicky escape, but lucky in direction (at a time when luck seemed to be in very short supply). Though not to paint any overly rosy image: for long, immensely painful years there was no reconciliation between mind and body, between intelligence and experience, I was immature, uneven, only partially a real person.

I have changed much since, for the better, being now more settled, intellectually, emotionally more self-confident (though remaining an abysmally poor writer as always), pursuing now the origin and course of love, and not fundamentally meaningless intellectual abstractions. But to this day I have remained thoroughly addicted, thoroughly hooked, still spending long hours somewhere else, with this glorious dialogue and two-way interpretation that is reading. I am now in much less of a hurry and much more inclined to draw more permanent conclusions, thus narrowing the scope - it is not possible ever to reach any real certainty, so we have to settle with what limited understandings we can have in this world.

Writers like George Eliot and E.M.Forster have become the lodestars: I keep trying to connect, to reconcile, to comprehend our experience in a liberal, open-ended fashion, avoiding absolutes and unsupported certainties. It has been a strange pilgrimage through a rapidly passing civilization - but with such excellent, incomparably grand company. I can't imagine how it would be without this added scope, without these long views, without these harmonies.

That madcap Lord Mayor of London

The last 18 months have been an education. For the first time in life to lose a truly close person without any regard to any personal wishes on the matter was an admirably clear lesson of the limits of this world. Then to have welcomed a new person here, utterly vulnerable, without any real guarantees whatsoever of being able to protect his way has been a logical continuation of that selfsame lesson. 

This is what we have here, at maximum, and these things, these people, are what we will lose, one way or the other. Much of our human activity is designed to enable us to forget this state of affairs. But it is the wildest, unsafest ride imaginable and you have to be stubbornly narrow indeed to remain unaware of this. The terms are brutally harsh but in this brief span there is admittedly some tragic grandeur - and also moments of pure exhilaration in not having any safety nets available: a strange journey through the wildness.

Liberal positions

Surely the sum of our enlightened experience is that the only reasonable hope for us is in historical progress leading to a transformation, the nature of which we can hardly even begin to imagine. As we now are we will never escape: imprisoned by the cruel spectacles of history and nature and our own panicky animal instincts. A state all the more hateful because not all hateful: so many acts of human kindness, of integrity, of love flicker in the darkness, brightly, briefly, perpetually surrounded by the eternal freezing cold that is our human stupidity, ignorance and fear. That instinct towards the better, those acts of love and integrity, we must set free thus fundamentally changing ourselves into something else and leaving (hopefully) all history and nature behind. 

This is the fundamental liberal position, surely. A refusal of both the narrowly shrewd, self-perpetuating conservative wallowing in the wretchedness that is humankind and the blind radical insistence that this wretchedness is not integral to us and easy and simple to abolish. This is what our serious human inquiry has established, and on this bleak position any hopes for future must be based.

In defence of George Eliot

In the course of the assorted tragedies and collapses of the 20th century we surely have lost an essential tone of doubt, inquiry and worry that was simultaneously perpetually, and rationally, uncertain of its own significance but still crucially confident of its internal coherance. It was an unflinching but humane gaze on mankind and our messy and bloody history of ignorance and aggression - nevertheless combined with a firm belief on the possibility of progress. Now instead we have the forever shifting language of the largely - and self-confessedly - irrelevant and self-doubting, self fleeing postmodern tradition accompanied with the most destructive and amoral materialism that it refuses to confront in its all pervasive relativism. Surely this is an overreaction to these not any more so recent shocks? History, quite apart from its modern guises, has in any case been one slow holocaust - and will perpetually continue to be so by the weight of its own logic and motored by our blind, panicky, animal passions.

The only exception, thus far, has been our brief enlightened, though largely failed, quest and hope for human understanding and progress. Just one pitiful, first attempt in all this time - and one reaching so far even in the deepest failure. There surely is ample time yet for change for the better, for developement, for reasoned self-control - for further attempts. And what is the alternative: should we never attempt more than what unspeakably little we have, and are? Who can set a meaningful limit for human growth, for serious human inquiry?

On not being an island

Now with a new member in the family I have noticed an excess of Donnean feelings: a sunny, vulnerable little boy has made the harshness of the world very concrete. Yes, with any luck we’ll be able to protect his way till the time he’ll start choosing it for himself (hopefully doing it also under lucky stars). But I know, we all do, that this is not the case for countless of families, for countless of children: today, tomorrow, every day random tragedies strike from blue or stormy skies. Every day we offer ourselves, our loved ones for this reversed lottery. The callousness we need for living is largely devoted to ignoring this reality. More horror than boredom in this world certainly.

Not that I would think that we are entitled to any perfect sorrow, or perfect joy here: we are, will perpetually remain, incomplete and hesitant beings, unsure of meanings, impermanent, quickly fading. But as much as we have permanence and promise it's connected with love, with giving, with this offering of hostages, however reluctantly, to the fate - with this decision to live with reckless abandon. When I survey the remains of my once proud ramparts that were so impenetrable and intricate, I now notice gaping holes: walls have been throughly razed down, no resistance will be possible here. That truly is a measure of success, but it comes at a high price, as everything valuable does.

So many of the ways of the world are designed to hide, to ignore and to protect us from this realization of how much we have gambled - or how much, out of base fear, we have not dared to gamble and grasped something graspable instead. Of course in place of any serious tones on this subject of living we have endless entertainment, corrupt, ignoble politics and sheer physical and mental tiredness: this society has its way chosen for itself and it will not be a conscious path towards increased awareness. And perhaps that is for the better, humankind cannot bear very much reality. If we could we would be something else, be somewhere else, in a different situation - but one wonders whether it would really be an easier situation... Still, my own preference would be for a far more austere, more serious disposition in this world of love and loss.

On the suicide of Alan Turing

I never cease to be amazed at how stupid our organizations are and how stupid, unimaginative and ignorant are the people in charge of them. Perhaps it is a failing to be surprised by this: it is the way of the world. Any philosophy will be used as an excuse for power - that may be their most fundamental use - and stupidity will forever congregate around power and its institutions. This is how it goes, how it has always gone. Perhaps our tragedy is that we can always see amazingly far beyond our painfully narrow scopes of action but we will always remain powerless to free ourselves from them. So, the stupidity is only a half of the story, the other half is that it couldn't be otherwise: we remain poised, wise enough to see the cruel limits but incapable of ever breaking them down. Not without a transformation that would change us into something almost unrecognizable. That transformation will surely remain the dream, but hardly a goal of practical action. Not in any foreseeable future.

Marie, Marie hold on tight

Reading Ackroyd's biography I have been quite struck how odd a person T.S.Eliot really was. In many ways his beliefs and personality were actually much crazier than those of Yeats, and that is much said. He was forced to construct an iron cage of a philosophy, however absurd, literally to survive as a poet, as a person. One sees disintegration and chaos following on his footsteps, and a panicked flight away from them. Touch and go it was on the way, a desperate survival game but one that yielded such majestic, such odd poetry. Strange music. 

Now it is easy to see the response to the Waste Land as a significant historical phenomenon itself, so much of it surely unintended and unforeseen by the author: that badly shaken, wounded era demanded an artistic expression and would have gotten one in any case but Eliot's disjointed, apocalyptic language was uniquely suited those circumstances. In many ways violence was done to his art in the process, but I don't think that either the poetry or its effect, diminish from the misunderstanding. Perhaps the opposite. Such a century to have.

Decline and fall

I have lately been wondering whether I should stop following US politics altogether. This largely for the same reason as I don't any more much follow contemporary Russian politics: the truth will not emerge, or change anything, just causes will not be rewarded and the whole political discourse is absurdly skewed and unreal, vile things are said, celebrated and rewarded. Where is now the American Revolution with its enlightenment values, where is the proud and selfconfident Republic that once took seriously the idea that there are inalienable rights and an absolute equality before the law?

I am not saying that those principles were ever perfectly implemented but they were taken seriously and there was a sincere, widespread faith in progress and rational political discourse. Now we have a staggering 30% of the electorate obsessively, even voluntarily divorced from the empirical reality. We have amazing concentrations of wealth that cannot but corrupt the political process. We have an alliance of primitive fundamentalist religion and cynical corporate elites that has created a very permanent seeming corrupt populist logic to the political process. Yes, there might be a polite, housetrained Democrat elected to the presidency in 2008, the majorities of polite, housetrained Democrats in the Congress might increase. There might be some temporary, marginal tinkering of the system before the orchestrated media onslaught and the unavoidable burdens of office will create a new, hysterical and irrational backlash.

We would desperately need a fundamental shift of the political constellation everywhere in the West but it is very hard to see any such transformation happening with the current distribution of power. There is an irrational and atavistic lock on political power that seems in many ways organic and natural concequence of the structures of the modern Western society. I'm no longer that sure that the system works anywhere: the wheels are slowing down and once coherent political traditions are gradually disintegrating into corruption and meaninglessness. History has always followed power and the highest form of power are increasingly in the stupendous concentrations of capital that we now have in the modern world economy. Once capitalism was best protected by a (limited) selection of enlightenment values and protestant Christianity but now it does quite well with just the entertainment industry combined with the increasing demands of "work place efficiency" and painkilling doses of primitive religion purged of any genuine thought.

I really wonder what permanent improvement any progressive movement can accomplish in these hostile circumstances (certainly at their most hostile and most powerful in the USA but in existence everywhere in the West). The deep currents of social and economic change seem mostly to be against any serious reform and return to enlightenment values and to the discourse of progess and reason. Perhaps this is a too pessimistic and in any case unhelpful, impractical contribution. Still, I would think that the modern left is quite in need of the broad perspectives and coherent, holistic approaches to the political process. These chaotic skirmishes and daily battles with the irrational and atavistic opponents are invaluable, a civilizational defence indeed, but on this ground, with this balance of forces, can they be anything more than holding actions? Inch by inch we seem to lose real ground even when having scattered local successes and apparent reversals of fortune. Can we turn the tide?

(A cross post from DK.)

Homines maxime homines

I have never found any classical control or proportion in the ancients. They have seemed untame, reckless, uncouth - dare one say - barbaric. Certainly there is much nobility in that wild leap forward, but such narrow nobility: no universal themes of redemption and compassion that our civilization was only infused with by Christianity (and then liberalism). But this said, with the burst of Athens into the world history a theme of emancipation was introduced that has not ever been since silenced. Yes, originally it was interpreted very narrowly, very harshly indeed, in a way almost contradicting itself, but that theme was of a nature to rupture any arbitrary boundaries.

So, even with the softening influence Christianity, we are fundamentally still in the same position: recklessly exposed to fate as free individuals, as individuals striving for freedom. That has led in history to similar bloody and cruel dominions and cul-de-sacs as Athens experienced, but our human experience has in any case been dominated by those issues: what is radically new is this new note, this promise and hope of emancipation, of reason and self-control. It is dangerous to exalt those barbarian times (remembering poor Friedrich, for example) but they nevertheless constituted a majestic beginning of a great experiment.

Joseph, my little man

In 1923 the Catholic Bulletin bitterly berated Yeats for his failure to write more like this: "Una, my little one, be a nun. Joseph, my little man, be a priest if you can." But the call went unheeded - instead Yeats kept stubbornly producing this kind of language: 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: a waste of desert sand; 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 Wind 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?

The contrast is humiliating: this is Christianity shrunk and enfeebled by modernity, once universal, universally serious world view is shrivelled to a set of narrow rules, blindly and unquestioningly to be followed against all dictates of reason, esthetics and humanity. Today the equivalents of this parochiality of dogmatic religion can be seen in the clumsy, pseudo-scientific formulations of intelligent design and creationism. These forms of religion cannot any longer operate without denying reason and empirical observation - there was a time when Christianity self-confidently saw no reason to doubt that reason and empirical observation would be in any conflict with its teachings. If Christianity as a force in culture cannot any more reach to the complexity, the majesty and tragedy of our being in the world, it will have lost its meaning. It might remain popular as an easy pain killer, a handy blindfold, but it would not have any moral significance or value. 

I know from my native Finnish Pietism that there are approaches that can still easily escape any blunt Dawkinsian instruments - but outside such occasional oases of universal visions directly connected to the original revelation, we seem to have increasingly only a choice between bland, convictionless official churches or then shallow and escapist fundamentalist interpretations. Not really encouraging thinking of the gift, the vision once so memorably received.

Once out of nature

I have again immersed myself in the excellent biography of Yeats by R.F.Foster. Foster’s text does need several readings, a subtle and beautiful study. Surely that personality, those poems are one of the miracles of the Western world. Yeats must have been such a maddening person abounding with self-centred childishness, half-baked philosophies. In some ways craving for art, for otherness, must be a sign of immaturity, a sign of not having come to terms with the world, as it has dictated those terms. In that sense full maturity, full satiety is a kind of surrender: how could we not want more, strive for more than this? Yes, Yeats was childish, self-centred, maddening, but under what aesthetic control those forces were kept, what amazing, haunting poetry was written about our condition in the world. Perhaps real maturity is actually based on part on reckless folly, on not fully accepting this world, its harsh limits. “The light of evening, Lissadell, / Great windows open to the south”…