I love English

In these days of globalization it would certainly be more original to have Sanskrit or Navaho as a passion but I'm saddled with ever so ordinary English... Though it is not that ordinary at all actually. There is something in that language that just happens to correspond to my preferences, I cannot exactly say what - there is no explaining these things. Of course, it is the language of Shakespeare, but potentially (and in fact) any language has the reach for universality - though not in identical ways, and there is something in the variety and the very suppleness of English that speaks to me. It is a very liberal language I would argue: rational but not mechanically logical, pragmatically open to all sorts of influences - being a mongrel in so many ways (and it appears that there were seeds for strange transformations even regardless of the Normans).

I have great respect and liking for my native Finnish: a dark, emotional, radically non-Western language - there is much beauty and passion in its heaviness and lovely, vowel rich cadences. Still, strangely, it is literature, especially poetry in English that has moved me most. In comparison with Finnish, English is more intellectual, in some ways more shallow actually - English has been used so much that it has become worn, an overly smooth language if not used originally and imaginatively. There are countless of pop and rock songs in English that say absolutely nothing in a way that simply would not be possible in Finnish: you just have to say something in Finnish. But when used properly English is the loveliest of languages.

(This post arose from the pleasure of listening to Stephen Fry talking in heavenly literate English.)

Surprised by innocence

Commenting on Wes Anderson's film Michael Chabon says this about childhood:

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.”

There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives.

A beautiful description. I honestly thought, not being a child person at all, that I would be with Virginia Woolf: waiting for intelligent conversation, patiently enduring the preceding years of silliness. Having had a rather dark childhood in some ways, I certainly did not sport any dewy eyed illusions either about any inherent goodness and gentleness in children.

Well, I guess I did not know small children so well - and I didn't. Sure, there are plenty of signs of non-gentleness and non-goodness there, of possibilities to come, no perfect innocence anywhere. But so much innocence, so much vulnerability and generosity. So much so, that having them growing up into this world, to harden up enough to survive in this world, to develope enough cynicism and self-protection to endure this world, does make the prospect of intelligent conversation to appear in rather less glamorous light.

I just didn't know small children that well. Of course, this is what it takes, currently and so far, to live, to develope into awareness and responsibility. We can have a rough coming of it or somewhat less rough or very rough, but there are no easy ways into personhood: we lose many things of much value on the way, and often have to patiently relearn back into habit of trust, love and generosity.

Party like it's the 1850's

It has been rather fascinating to witness the gradual derangement of the mainstream of the Republican party - quite in the same way as it would be "fascinating" to witness Titanic sliding towards the iceberg. To see a major party lose it's connection to the shared empirical reality and rationality is a, well, quite a thing. It really has reminded me of the 1850's: this seething rage, this disconnect with all sense and moderation. I wonder how it will end. Because end it will, there will inevitably be a closing of this chasm, one way or the other.

I admit to a certain foreboding. The Republic is not as vigorous as it used to be - the elites are corrupt or cynical, and important sections of them on the right actually share the antiempirical lunacy of the extremist rank and file. Even very outlandish things could happen in such circumstances.

What he might have written

Today I happened to come across a long forgotten study on English WW1 poets, a well rehearsed subject with me. And as I often do, I glanced at the section on Charles Sorley - and it happened to be very perceptive on him, so leaving that sense of bitter loss. Such a mind, such balance: mindlessly lost to humanity in a mindless war. As mentioned earlier Sorley has been a strangely alluring, central figure for me, having encountered him at the same age that he still had just time to experience. That is, at a very early age, and being so burningly different from him, his balance and his clarity, he burned into my mind, surely partially unjustly, unrealistically - but I think, after all these years, not essentially so. A strange meeting.

Beacons of civilization

The newly reopened Student Library of the Helsinki University is a miraculous place: it was that already in the late 80's when I was mostly a very solitary figure exploring the dusty shelves of the book storage sections in the basement, but now they have thrown open to non-students also all the libraries of the individual humanities departments. History and English Departments are naturally my favourites, and of course the book storage (consisting of former course books, some printed in the 19th century) which is still there, such a lovely and eccentric book collection of a house, open to all now.

The public library system is still one of the wonders of Finland: amazingly well stocked and well equipped also for the net era. Nurmo municipal library, the brightest flame of my river valley (to quote a juvenile poem), was my earliest paradise - an odd, lonely boy, even when teenager getting drunk on words, not on cheap vodka. Then getting to Helsinki with having just noticed that I can read in English just as easily as in Finnish, was quite something indeed: whole worlds were opened. The Student Library, the British Council Library, naturally the University Library plus the Helsinki Main Library were beacons of civilization for me, they still are: besides love, books are the best we can show of us.

A horribly skewed process

Even in a slightly more ideal world there would be a place for Barack Obama in the presidential election: he is an admirable representative of what used to be the Republican mainstream and which probably still enjoys quite a bit of support among the Republican voters. As it is he's portrayed as a "radical socialist" by a deranged extreme right wing party (financed by deranged billionaires) that has barely been able to scrape up a candidate brazen and principle free enough to satisfy both the party hard core and still be presentable to the great - but diminishing - American middle class (which in most issues is broadly to the left of Obama). He is an ally, potentially a good ally, of the progressives but he is no progressive.

The process is so rotten with money, so distorted, so skewed towards great concentrations of capital that to call it democratic is quite daring. This didn't used to be so: there is no inexorable historical law that it should be so. In fact, this direction, these awful trends are not good to great concentrations of capital, to great inherited or speculated wealth, not at all. Nor are they good for the current global hegemony of the fast disappearing American Republic - I suppose a republic in name only: maybe we really do end up calling this period the Late Empire.

Anyway, an Obama victory will do nothing serious to reverse these trends, only slow them down a bit, no FDR here, maybe a somewhat more conservative version of Nelson Rockefeller instead. And so the global financial crisis of 2008 that so exposed the neo-liberal economy was let go unused.

Tõnisson and Päts

It is curious that both modern popular biographies of Tõnisson and Päts would be written by Finns. I read Turtola's book some years ago and was quite critical, echoing Estonian reactions: it seemed bit glib, wise after the fact criticism of Päts' handling of the Soviet ultimatums in -39 and -40. Tõnisson then, the icon of Estonian liberalism, is of course the more congenial historical figure for me, and has found an exemplary historian, one of my absolute favourites among Finnish politicians, the current Foreign Minister, Erkki Tuomioja. Well, about the only favourite but anyway. A man inexplicably wasting his considerable scholarly talents in politics, of all things.

After having lately read Tuomioja's book I reread Turtola - and partially had to reconsider. Both books are popular, but still solid scholarly work, and though Turtola clearly overstates his case he does have telling points. Päts certainly was more rational than the Finnish government in the fall of 1939: who could have known that madness would work better than calculation. But the summer of 1940 is simply a different matter - I wonder what threats Päts received from the thugs, threats that he was alone confronting, alone and isolated. With Tõnisson in charge, there would have been a civil society, legitimate organizations, the rule of law.

Reason, its limits and discontents

I do suppose that fundamentally all definitions of rationality are local and provisional. The original attempt does naturally come to mind: the chilling, brittle and utterly disastrous 18th century view devoid of any understanding of human passions and all their great dangers. Passions, raw human emotions will always twist us, lead us to astray.

I cannot but privilege the view that the understanding of limits set to will and power by empirism and logic represents the best definition of reason that is available to us in this world, in our experience of being in this world. There are limits to human will and human power, objective limits. Now I understand that anything can be used for repression, but I cannot see many very obvious concrete examples of this particular position being used so. Postmodernity, though valuable in many aspects, has done a great disservice to liberalism and progress by undermining this approach to reason, and furthered all the current cynical forces of reaction and repression. 

Reason is so obviously a weakening force in our culture: both the Enlightenment and Christian/humanist morality are waning, and the positions we still have are maintained increasingly only by force of habit, unknowingly and unthinkingly. They are lightly held, and the signs of times don't point to any easy, unassaulting future. Well, obviouly, to a degree this is what is always said about any era, but I think we truly are in a different position, accountable to unseasonably fiercer demands, and I do wonder how well will we measure against those...

An English unofficial rose

I had never realized what a disorganized, loose mess Grantchester is. I suppose I never read it carefully enough. Yet there is a certain, undeniable Englishness there, only not in a very good sense. And flashes of promise, naturally. There was much poetry in Brooke, whatever they may say. But an awful loose mess of sentiment and fake irony of a poem.

I sometimes wonder whether I am an especially sentimental, syrupy Anglophile, but I think I'm saved from sentimentality knowing that my England never quite existed, outside of words and thoughts, and some actions and sentiments. Yattenden hymnal, of pale green - the Liberal England which never really was dominant, which never quite was, but which is the heart of the central idea of England, that gentle land of liberty that never really has been that gentle, in truth, or that free (except for a small minority). At least until there is New Jerusalem built on it or at least a serious attempt to build it. The attempt, this always failing hope is the England I love.

In memory of WB Yeats

In the course of a typical morning I ran accross Auden's great elegy on the death of Yeats. Poetry shatters the commonplace. When Auden is good, he really is - how well the text is crafted, how beautiful, how serious:

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
          William Yeats is laid to rest.
          Let the Irish vessel lie
          Emptied of its poetry.

These are the long views that are hidden in our busy daily lives. The question to ask at the end is, how long did you ever stray, how much did go to waste?

Guarda e passa

I have been reading Egon Friedell's curious masterpiece Cultural History of the Modern Age - it's magnificent and I do suppose it's war, meaning fundamentally very serious history (surely still quite hated by the academics). Flashes of genius all over the pages building to a perceptive, idiosyncratic vision of our civilisation. I stopped for a while at his description of Montaigne (and the patronising attitude of serious philosophers to him), "too wide a thinker to be contained into the narrowness of a system". A view I'm very sympathetic to (though Montaigne most probably would have been able to build a system, as I'm very obviously not). That surely goes to describe Friedell too, a most curious person himself, a cabaret actor and literary critic turned great historian, politely warning the passers-by before plunging to his death in Vienna a few steps ahead the SA men come to arrest him. A memorable scene part of the cultural history of our modern Western Civilisation.

Dream landscapes

It is an odd experience to visit your childhood places after decades: what you see is partly what you don't see. Landscapes fuse, footfalls echo, quick said the bird. And what do we really have but echoes of echoes of echoes - memories of memories, and neither are the places real that we visit nightly, and it is not us visiting. Yet, our waking selves are thoroughly shaped by these passed things and places. It is a strange, strange thing, this life in time, and we are strange people.

Hiersein

I have been enjoying Bertrand Russell's magnificent History of Western Philosophy - his quintessencially English waspishness on the distasteful continental metaphysical systems is very amusing. And, I can't help it, sense making. I suppose I'm so hopelessly and thoroughly anglophile that I can't avoid appreciating common sense empirism and rationality. Of course, Russell is hugely unfair towards the German idealistic tradition and clearly doesn't seem, for example, to get the point of Mad Friedrich, who, whatever else can be said of him, certainly had a point. But the others certainly could have been clearer and more amusing - I have always been partial to Kant, the most liberal of the Germans, but usually cannot make head or tail of his prose and rely on thinkers who can express themselves in some clarity and even humour even on such a humourless and byzantine subject as Kant's thought.

Nevertheless, as much as I appreaciate the cool and clear English/British common sense analytical thought, it is easy to see that it leaves  much out of our human experience of being in the world. And I suppose we do need, in part, some complicated metaphysics to get deeper insights of this radical experience. But it is very easy to get over the top (think of Hegel) and out of the shared empirical world completely. Heidegger comes to mind as someone who very deceptively seems to make deep sense, fundamentally, but who obviously to a high extent, actually doesn't. So, these complicated systems will need waspish common sense correctives and the insights of more concrete, more empirically rooted philosophies.

широкая натура

Culturally we surely live in a twilight era: both Christianity and Enlightenment humanism are fading, and they have not been replaced by anything more than spiritually dead consumerism. That's a hoary complaint I'm sure many would feel and object that there never was an era that wouldn't have been, at heart, crassly, graspingly materialistic - but that's not really an actual rebuttal. Ideals differ and change by era, and as ideals go Christianity and Enlightenment humanism are not too bad at all. We now have, increasingly freely expressed, a certain frozen narrowness of mind dominating, a certain totally bogus righteoussness that would have felt at home in the early Victorian era though devoid of the fundamentalist Christian cum primitive capitalistic justification for it. A cynical, narrow era. I don't think that it's the Net that creates this impression though it surely has removed many constraints - it mostly just reflects our current reality. Not a good time, this.

The great hatred

I'm reading Rentola's excellent and chilling description of the elimination of the Finnish Communist Party by Stalin (via NKVD) in the 1930's Soviet Russia. Such times: these people had bitterly fought White Finland but were now ludicrously destroyed as "nationalists" and "spies". In Soviet Karelia the campaing got to genocidal proportions as all Finnishness was brutally eliminated and erased. We cannot really imagine the atmosphere of that era, the hysteria and the fear - those years were called "Great Hatred" by the Soviet Finns. It was a strange scattered bunch of leaders that finally emerged, mainly from Finnish prisons, in 1944-45. Those that survived could never forget and never condemn this senseless slaughter, the price would have been too high, but it was too high in any case. They lacked all flexibility, all independence and without the Red Army were always outplayed by the liberal-democratic mainstream. They took no risks, no independent steps. Those few that were left.

Stalin then destroyed Finnish communism, Paasikivi and Kekkonen only finished the job. It was a dead movement at heart, morally dead, and got what it deserved. That's a great tragedy as there was also much idealism in the beginning, with great crimes committed against them in 1918 by the Whites. Such a sad story that they should have encountered and embraced even more hateful and brutal violence in the Soviet Union than in the Civil War Finland. And that year was already the nadir of Finland, progress and liberalism had been recovering ever since while the Soviet Union got steadily worse. Doubly betrayed generations, but one can never excuse or forgive the silence of the survivors - in that moral collapse we can locate the weakness and hatefullness of Marxism-Leninism. We are well rid of that horrible ideology.

(postscript: Rentola's work on Finnish communism is great history of such amazing quality. He has produced three absolute masterpieces that I return to time after time. He keeps his distance, but the story itself is enough and would only suffer from obvious biases. I hope that these studies are constantly read: they show how profound can the study of history be, how illuminating. With such exceptions the rule of unambitious, unimaginative and superficial historiography is even more disheartening. But when historians are good, they exceed pretty much anything there is. Well, maybe theoretical physics would offer some little competition...)