Bad moon rising

It is interesting to be somewhat well read in history and then live to at least mature middle age: one appreciates recurring themes. A violent illiberal wave preceded my generation and confronted my parent's generation when they were children. But it was convincingly beaten back in the West and by the West. And so I lived in a halcyon era of peace and prosperity leading up to "end of history". I guess basically everyone sensed already back then that there would be no end, as much as it was needed, to grasping, greedy, blind history, to this mad dance. There just are no permanent safety nets. So, illiberal winds are again gathering strength, some gusps are already scarily strong and one does sense a bad moon rising. Maybe here we go again?

One of freedom''s wars (revisited)

A laughing boy exploded into unidentifiable gobs of flesh - I believe Pat Barker has said about the WW1 more essential things than any historian ever has or ever will. Obviously she hadn't said everything or even every important thing but far more than mere historians can. Just as obviously - and most often for all I know - a work of fiction can say far less than a solid work of historiography. But the exceptions do blow the competition away.

A concern with the study of history has always remained with me and I still find it odd how little this subject has been seriously analyzed. I would presume that the best explorations would be works of fiction, not of philosophy.

What liberalism is not?

Well, it is not something selfevident like the air we breath and don't notice and take for granted. It is actually a very specific and very contentious ideology whose present positions are unimaginably dearly bought and which have at times been ever so desperately, even irrationally defended.

The post-WW2 broad social liberal consensus reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet bloc might have deluded us of these facts - and accordingly this lukewarm official ideology of the Western world has become less social and more materialistic, more hollow, increasingly benefiting capital instead of labour, no longer based on once very specific selfawareness and loyalty.

And now it then not so totally remarkably happens that this liberal understanding of the modern world is under a very broad and very intense attack both within and without with scarily few passionate defenders indeed. These structures won't hold without support - where is this desperately needed collective effort to be seen or to be sensed (at least) at this ever darkening hour?

A note to self

I came rather innocently across a book of academic criticism by Geoffrey Hill and have now hard time remembering when was the last time a text has aggravated me so much. Apparently he is not even a catholic. I find a certain style of conservative-traditionalist (or whatever you would call it in his case) approach to literature truly abhorrent: passive-aggressive stuffing in between the lines, ever so, well, catty. From now on one is once burned and that should be well enough.

Ecalpemos

Currently enjoying Ruth Rendell's fiction. At its best it certainly transcends all genres and is simply great literature. As the best writing in pretty much any subgenre does. I have been criticizing the mainstream bias earlier in the blog and even though things probably have marginally improved the silly snobbishness is still there. It is very frustrating but hopefully the situation keeps improving. In the meanwhile having Rendell's unsentimentality and non-cynicism as great, august, entertaining company as the year draws to its end.

Europe's sorrow

I have written earlier about the tragedy of the Russian nation. Such suffering, such gifts to humanity, such corrupt, sadistic rulers. And so today. Asymmetric, highly ingenious web warfare, injecting vile poison to liberal societies. To what purpose? What is the positive vision? There is none but impotent ethnic-gangsteric rage, nothing to aspire for, no progress imagined, an age old despotism wishing for its old glories of rape and conquest. An empty shell, the rulers of Russia, as always.

Butler's jihad

The decades seem to be getting more low and dishonest as they go. One thought the 00's were the low but they seem now only an innocent prelude. The social liberal settlement that has turned increasingly less social and more Victorian liberal seems to be shaking to its roots - and what are those roots now that the historical memory has waned? Rather shallow it seems. So one is left wondering what is to come.

I only wish for a more self-confident defence of the post-war West, the one and only exception from the slow holocaust of all other human history, as partial, as imperfect as it has been, and as reliant on injustices elsewhere. But the alternative to all this imperfection will not be anything better, only a full return to history and cruelty.

Those dying generations

Sailing to Byzantium is one of my key texts as probably has been clear from the multiple and constant references I have made during these years. I can't wait to have humanity to get out of nature and give up our natural forms and assume something better and more complete and more beautiful instead. As we now are we are not whole, not coherent.

And in the meanwhile we are all part of dying generations, briefly in each others' arms if that lucky. It is good for a person to lose his/her perspective for a while to regain it again perhaps slightly wiser, slightly gentler, having been taught a lesson about the ways of this world.

So, the tide has probably turned but this will be shortly seen.

A short note on Bloomsbury

I suppose they are now rather unfashionable, seen as lukewarm liberals at best and not certainly any fighters against oppression, and undeniably being rather a snobbish and incestuous ingroup. This said, and admitted, and despite many flaws and failings they were brilliant and even radical in their own way and did unflinchingly inflict strong blows against established ways, personal is political. I would never dismiss them easily or otherwise.

On seeing happy young people in the past and present

When young myself I often kept surreptiously looking at happy young people being myself desperately unhappy and unable to connect. I could not reach at the world, at my own experience, and, most importantly, at other people. A horrible failure and impotence of courage and character. So, I kept seeing happy young people and idealizing and misjudging them to a degree, not understanding their own incomplete happiness often interrupted by their own mistakes, weaknesses and occasions of bad luck.

Then it happened that finally I too became rather happy while being still youngish and I understood better lifes, and their imperfections including my own, and did connect with the world, experience, with amazing people justly loved by me. The issue seemed quite resolved then and I did not have time or inclination to rehearse the old regrets. Strangely enough though this fall I have restarted seeing happy young people and have felt that decades old pain again for no visible reason but, one supposes, due to certain unhappinesses of the present that manifest through these old traumas. Flashbacks in other words. I wonder even if therapy would be needed but it would seem rather pointless to analyze and grieve for the life my early 20's self so unhappily missed and wasted. Life is indeed a strange and slippery thing.

And if I should not have lost my way?

As I wrote earlier life regrets come in slow long intervals, reflecting undoubtedly the low tides of current life and raising to the surface old hurts, old failures. My youth was dominated by emotional trauma and lack of social courage and understanding. I fled to books and thinking, and there are worse hiding places, and partially through reading and thinking I did achieve a healing and I did return to the land of the living, to the world of acting and feeling, of touching and being touched. I started living, grievously late, yes, but I did start and still do despite the horrendously late beginning.

But deep old wounds never seem to heal completely and the past has a way of returning in bad times and moments taking the shape of regrets and obsessive analysis of what did go wrong and how much of my best years I really did lose, and how much even in these better times I have lost as the recovery has never been complete and I have never been completely free of my old inadequacies. It is curious how strong this reflex can be and how clearly I can both see the complete fruitlessness of going over these long past issues and nevertheless be unable not to do so.

So then, once again the awful, cul-de-sac of a question: if I should not have lost my away after a series of basically unrelated blows at various crucial stages of my development? How much less pain, how much more happiness and love? A stupid, pointless question.

The radiance of John Keats

I have now at hand one of the great treasures of the English literary tradition, the letters of Keats. His poetry touches me only at places, but in his short career he did touch perfection and one is left wondering as one always will be with him: what incredible brilliance there could have been if only some more years, not to think of decades of production? It's a bitter thought of loss.

But then there is his shining person; his marvellous, intelligent, joyful, loving and gentle, sharp and ironic letters. Not much at all in the whole majestic genre of letter writing in English to compare with this blinding young flame. As always with Keats as with Sorley I'm thinking of myself in the same early age: clumsy, insecure, fearful, blindly fleeing life and experience with not a trace of wisdom or compassion - a hideous emotional cripple. But illuminated at least by light even if at one remove, and gaining at least some grace and some wisdom with age having been led among others by these youths.

The words I did not say, the steps I did not take

This certain kind of feeling comes in immense slow waves, very slow, lazily reaching to the shore. And so, one is now here again leading me back to the thoughts I've already thought, the regrets I've already felt. And, yes, there is the old retort to counter it, of being not so much more deceived this way, for that other, never taken, would have also led to questions like this, there would still be words not said, steps not taken, touches not felt.

But at this moment, once again, it is a very cold comfort to know this, for that one unique time was already enough of deception, selfdeception, cowardice to last a lifetime. As it evidently will do.

The vast intelligence of Mary Ann Evans

Allegedly it has been said that if there is no God, George Eliot will do. I'm even more than usually inclined to be sympathetic to this view reading currently the extraordinarily good biographical study of her by Philip Davis. The sentiment of the anecdote is obviously ironic but not completely, not completely at all. She was much involved with the absence of God (as an empirical reality contained in the material universe) and brought a scary, scarily comprehensive intelligence and wisdom to the task of constructing a viable alternative world view to (protestant) Christianity.

I have several times remarked on this blog that one of the reasons why I find George Eliot to be such a profound writer and influence, is that in some way I actually mirror her background - coming from nonconformist protestant background (though one already turned to liberalism and pluralism unlike her far more rigid context). I find her concerns fundamental, but certainly not only because they are shared concerns but because they really are fundamental to our civilization that has lost so much of it's heart during the awful 20th century. We are hollow now, hedonistic, materialistic, and, yes, immoral.

The scale of her thought and human her sympathy and unsentimental clearsightedness is terrifying. If one compares her analysis of religion with, say, Richard Dawkins, it is to compare a clever 13 year old schoolboy who has freshly discovered logic and empirism to a several lifetimes worth of knowlegde and merciless, hard reflection. The brittle quality of thinkers like Dawkins or Lord Russell is put to cruelly sharp focus against such vast reach and depth - and human feeling. Though at least Bertrand Russell did largely know what he was talking about.

Frederick the Narrow

Frederick the Great has been among the historical figures that I have been profoundly uninterested in. I believe one of the core reasons for that has actually been reading Grimberg's Världshistoria (in Finnish translation) at an impressionable age - and that was very pro-Maria Theresa. In mature retrospect she is hardly much more inviting figure. Hard to think of any pre-modern autocratic or semi-autocratic monarch who would have been. In any case Frederick's curious mixture of (mostly) bad art and philosophy and rather Hitlerian gambling in warfare have not seemed very interesting.

Now reading Tim Blanning's excellent biography he emerges as marginally more sympathetic. I have been dimly aware of the main facets of his life, but had not for example realized just how dismally sadistic his father was and how awful his youth in the shadow of that abuse. In that sense even bad art and philosophy seem more fresh than expected. And he can be amusing in his cynicism and disregard of pieties (and the pieties of that disgusting age richly did deserve cynicism and disregard). His surprisingly open homosexuality - or homoeroticism - at least was a kind of a protest too.

But such rigidity and narrowmindedness in the heart of it all. I guess no monarch of that age could have escaped absurd and baseless haughtiness and sheer blindness to any decency and humanity (the whole ghastly era led the priviledged away from such values). And with his awful upbringing Frederick could surely not have escaped the inevitable concequences - thus many of his strengthts became disastrous failings. Speaking of the human being, that is, as a monarch he was not much worse than most.