The Nottingham lace of the curtains

I was today reading an account of the Oscar Wilde scandal by Hesketh Pearson, and wish not to have done it. Not a pleasant scene, no. I don't know at which stage the feverish revisionism and counter-revisionism of historiography currently resides, but the last time I looked (and it was in the early 90's, I'm afraid) it was fashionable to claim that "the Victorians" were not at all as prudish and inhibited about sexuality as it was once common to think.

And of course there is a point to that: most people in any age are lustful and carnal, naturally. Victoria herself with her thirty-odd (as memory serves) children was surely no stranger to sex and would undoubtedly have been bored to death thinking only of England while engaging in it. But to admit this obvious fact does not mean that there did not also exist awful and disgusting public middle class taboos about sexuality and sex. There did, and Oscar Wilde was one of countless of victims to them.

There is a certain peculiarly Anglo-Saxon (it seems) mode of hypocritical moral outrage even today - perhaps not as strong as it once was, but it's certainly still capable of rising to feeding frenzy every now and then. Not to speak of the unspeakable Anglo-American justice systems which seem to exist pretty much just to make a particularly nasty and sadistic section of the middle class to feel smug about itself. Och aye, shouldn't have touched that story this morning...

Furious affections

Thinking back to more tumultuous times of my life I am struck how little we change in some respects: love is an almost constant, no matter the age group. I'm now in much contact with very young persons, and though there is an immaturity there, in most, there is also a maturity that comes from the very fierceness of the feelings. Once again, or maybe actually only too rarely, I am reminded of my own luck: I never would have thought that I would turn out to be lucky in such central matters, in being able of fierceness... Anyway, youth is a kind of an automatic immunization against non-fierceness, non-furiousness - it's no good to advice, and I don't, but the young surely would do well to remember that it is only too possible to lose that immunity with age ("the only enemy"). But if they do find love, and surely many will, they will keep their connection to the essential and not lose it in the routine triviality of daily life.

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Yeats is... - Yeats is one of the wonders of the Western world. I believe literature is the most humanity has ever achieved: really, all we pretty much have to show for ourselves are our books, and now that we are slowly but surely distancing ourselves from literature, are we not regressing? This thought came to my mind once again as I was delighting myself in R.F. Forsters great, great biography of Yeats.

It is very hard to characterize Yeats - of course, one can say, and I have, that he was completely dotty, disconnected, and he was, but that's actually almost totally misleading: he was very, very shrewd even in his dottiness (and compare that with Pound's quite pathological version). He was no politician, no idealogue, and that he knew - in some ways he really knew himself. And the poetry: light of evening, Lissadell... It's quite something, quite something else, and equally hard to characterize. I often find myself ambivalent: it's no ancient dusty tomb, it engages, enrages, delights, one of the wonders of the Western world.

And that is really what we have to show for ourselves, as much civilization as we have ever had: art, literature. Increasingly unimportant things.

But it still goes on

I believe I have mentioned how important an experience it was for me to read Paul Fussel's Great War and Modern Memory in my early 20's just having arrived to study in Helsinki. It was more a personal and literary experience at the time, an esthetic experience of the combination of literature and history and personal life, a theme ever since very important for me. But as the years have progressed the First War has become ever more central for me as an historical event in its own right, as a central event directly in our own continuum. It still does go on: our civilization has been largely shaped by that catastrophy and the one that shortly followed, and in many senses we are shell shocked survivors from those two twin collapses of the progressive and optimistic West. There is not much trust, confidence in non-material things any more here: wealth is our strongest support and main reason for action.

Another year ends this evening, and I wonder whether my sense of a new constellation being on its way is correct or whether we just will struggle on, untransformed.

A shining city in a trough

In these past few years I have read various books on the George W. Bush administration's policies concerning Iraq and Afghanistan (the latest, the dry, academic, devastating study of Afghanistan by Tim Bird and Alex Marshall). The blindness, the pride, the ideological hubris of those years is beyond belief. The decadence: if you wield great power, you have great responsibility over people's lives - if you take decisions that will mean life or death for hundreds of thousands, for millions, you are then obligated to be extremely well versed, well adviced (and intelligently critical and questioning of your advice) about the people whose fates you will affect.

The moral and intellectual corruption of that administration is mind shattering, dispiriting. It is the clearest sign yet of the end of the American empire, this decadence, this casual ignorance of that president and his advisers.

Those were the times that were

Helsinki in November must be one of the most dismal places on earth: rotting leaves, darkness, subdued, tired people hurrying to get indoors, no sign of winter, of clear freezing air and snow reflected light. A moment in history too, as all moments are, this one surely better than most: no physical lacks, no war, silly, shortsighted elites certainly, but, more or less, that's what elites always are. (To be fair, this time Brussels cum Berlin seems to be outdoing itself in stupidity - no Lord Keynes around now, and these elites wouldn't listen anyway.)

Well, I should concentrate on other weightier matters, only this is not a time for concentration, November in Helsinki. Some years have earned their right to feel nostalgic about. Today I found myself bringing to mind one such... This is not to say that I would have regrets about this one: I have found my place, my voice - living life recklessly, to the full, seriously. But at times seriousness is not all you need. Not in this November.

Kaks naist, üks pilet ja pliaats ja paber

It is amazing, stunning how bad the trash media is, how reactionary, utterly supporting the existing structures while constantly working to make them even worse. This is surely no corporate conspiracy, as many on the left seem to think, any conscious, co-ordinated effort. It's much worse: it is how our society works, how it functions.

We have reached here, and will reach further, by taking small, relatively rational steps. There never was, or only briefly was, any deliberate awareness about the social democratic compromise, how satisfactorily it functioned. And it did, for a while. Now we are sliding, essentially randomly, towards something else - something that certainly does not seem to be as rational, as fair or as embracing of as wide social competition as possible.

There is no rational, calculated counter-force to this because that's not how our society works - there is also no rational, calculated effort to make things worse. Just human nature and ever unpredictably changing historical structures. Who knows where we will end, maybe at some stage we'll grow up and into rational control, but at the moment there is no control, only passion and short sightedness.

Love in a cold climate

Going through this dismal rainy fall morning was rewarded by an image of Turing entering mathematics in the 1930's Cambridge ("second only to Göttingen" in those times, according to Hodges' classic scientific biography, a classic biography - it hardly gets much better than that). That pure world independent of twisted human constructions, certainly fitting to Turing always so destined to be at the receiving end of that twistedness.

Not that I would really know whether that assesment of mathematics is totally true: that door has always been closed to me (maybe I have gotten occasional glimpses of glimpses of it), our human world, as twisted as it mostly is is, has been the centre of my interest, along with the process of experiencing it. But, I do suppose, suspect that it really is wholly independent, good that something is.

Art cannot do that, isn't that, but art does something similar, only in a radically different way. Extremes meet. I suppose I remain where I once began this blog (in the midst of a positively biblical decade of challenges): not far away from G.E. Moore and Principia Ethica - love, friendship, art, science, these are the long views, the constants.

θάλαττα! θάλαττα!

I still vividly remember reading in my early teens in the 80's John Fowles' magical descriptions of the Greek landscape in "The Magus". Far in dismal north, in dismal circumstances such strange places were imagined. The merciless light, the stillness of the Greek air, the pagan, amoral brightness of the decidedly non-Nordic azure sea, the sense of the mad beauty of it all - the amazing power of literature (no film can ever be made, no place visited that would make justice to human imagination). Such contrasts in that burning, painful life, such places visited ("only" in imagination, it is rather incomprehensibly said). But not only a half-forgotten private memory: ever since I have had a real interest for antiquity, not Roman or Hellenistic, but for that brief, wild explosion of classical Greece. It is a central place, a central era for us, even now.

This strange inheritance

There is much in us that has come via Jerusalem - our vague, christian-agnostic humanism is basically just the New Testament translated into secular society. In my personal case the connection is of course much stronger coming directly from a background of living, if very liberal, Christianity. Liberalism though, in the final analysis is not a very Greek value. And we don't hold it in the Greek way, but tepidly, half-heartedly. But this basic modern situation: freedom, passion, emptiness, is quite pure Athens. Not that many really would confront it. Obviously, problems do arise in connecting these liberal humanistic values with the Nietzschean condition of being in the world, but to my mind there is nothing inherently impossible in achieving a rational balance.

Art also is very a Greek thing - especially in the form where esthetics are seen as fusing with ethics (a view very close to my heart). Art is the central thing, next to it love and justice. Perhaps that is the fusion, our common inheritance - increasingly wasted inheritance, I suppose.These recollections, echoes are indeed quickly fading. And not only of Athens but of Jerusalem as well, and there is a certain Roman luxury and opulence in our lifestyle, a certain decadence. One does wonder what is to follow all this, what rough beast.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

I admit I do see the present-day USA as largely a decadent society. This does not come from any traditional European anti-American world view - the USA has been indispensable for the preservation of the Western world in the last 100 years. Its leadership would even now be indispensable for the West. But there doesn't seem much energy left, only a dysfunctional, corrupt political system and ethically and intellectually failed elites.

I have been re-reading the excellent Battlecry of Freedom (in the Oxford American history series), and even though it was a bloody, violent era, there was also an unmistakeable austere, ethical, forceful spirit in the nation. There was corruption, naturally, and ethical collapses, but also a strong, intense and serious will to progress and reform. Of course we do still have intensity, awfully misplaced, intellectually corrupt intensity in the various right wing groups, but that seems more a symptom of a steep decline than a sign that there hasn't been much decline.

Oh well, I'm inclined to pessimism in any case and as regards the future only an open mind is a completely rational view: we cannot know what signs will prove to be significant and which won't, but certainly a depressing spectacle, this exhaustion.

What do you see my blue-eyed son?

I guess it is telling of my character that now having children, having experienced such intensity of affection and love, having seen such innocence and vulnerability that I don't think about the wonderfulness of the world but about the awfulness of its scope. How almost anything can happen, how there are no safety nets below us, below them.

I am not suited to this age in the sense of feeling like Donne: no person is an island - the awful, the crazily cruel things have already happened to us, are happening to us. A hard rain's a-falling right now, it has always been falling.

But of course this doesn't make the love, the innocence meaningless but only more meaningful, desperately meaningful. Our experience is a wild experience, as sharp, as real as it gets. It's an awful inheritance, but not only awful.

Introducing history into physics

It is not often that books outside literature and the study of it concern quite directly with my major preoccupations - but Philip Ball's Critical Mass does exactly that. Of course, it does not really offer even rudimentary approaches for the actual study of history, but surely natural science is the direction where the much needed paradigm change will eventually come. Actually, Ball's approach probably corresponds quite exactly to sociology, but I suspect that the kind of statistical understanding that goes for gaseous molecules will not do for humans - the particulars are too important for the overall state of affairs. But surely we will once be able to posit a functioning physical model of historical change and be rid of the current tools far too crude to capture any certain connections between historical occurences.

Maybe this sounds, even now, over-ambitious and mechanistic, nevertheless I have never been able to fathom the distinction between physical and human sciences. It is just that human affairs have been much too complex for the natural sciences that have been more gainfully employed with simpler matters, such as the origins and structures of the universe etc. Perhaps we are now, at long last, developing sophisticated enough tools for the natural sciences to engage with our own experience...

The same old druid

For some reason the Finnish expression "sydämen maisema" sounds much more authentic than its English translation "a landscape of the heart" which has an oddly literal feel to it. In any case there are magic places in one's life - should one be so lucky - that stay disproportionately sharp in mind, in memory. 

Places that somehow retain their original magic and thus distort time: strange, strange places. I visited one such place this weekend, and can't really make full sense of the experience: how 28 years vanished and became heightened, how one could hear very distinct echoes of long since passed words in the summer night, young, laughing voices over the still waters. How not much had changed: due to its nature this particular river had kept its name exceptionally well. 

I cannot really regret my path, at all, apart from a universal sense that we all should in this fallen world. But back then I could not take all in that was so generously on offer, and there is a certain sadness in recognizing that. But for the circumstances I took much in, and that place, those people did stay and do stay in my heart, sharply etched.

Shakespeare

It is a strange feeling to read even high quality literary criticism about the Bard. I have not yet encountered an approach that would make full justice to that scariest of writers. I don't think I'm romantizing him at all: he is as universal, as comprehensive as we have gotten to be in this civilization. And he was writing in the very beginning of it. Of course there is the period aspect, surely, but there is also that intimidating distance from it, that space. I have never had very intelligent things to say about him: he just doesn't leave much room for breathing. Something quite out of the normal scope of human discourse.