You can't hide your tired eyes

The saucer joke of Monday's post was too close to the truth. I am struggling a bit with computer screens at the moment, so probably no more posts until the weekend. I might even have to start printing things to edit them. Imagine going back to paper. Positively medieval!

Clogspot

The landlady mentioned yesterday that she thinks I am losing my marbles (and she only just noticed!). I don't know about losing my marbles but everything is a bit on top of me at the moment. My eyes are going like saucers from staring at computer screens, I've begun eating raw fish, and it is said that ghastly whispers can be heard coming from my room at night which sound like

'Myyyy Thesisssssssssss (gulp).

Time for some Wordsworth, me thinks:


The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

WHY? A User's Guide Part I

There is an urban legend which recounts the story of a prospective student going to sit an entrance examination for one of the Oxford colleges. The professor who set the entrance examination that year was something of a clever-dick, a man anxious to keep the standards in college as high as possible. Accordingly, he pored over the problem he wanted to set the prospective students with more than his usual scholarly assiduity.

When our prospective student opened his paper during the examination, his eyes fell on the following instuctions:

Please answer the question as fully as possible. Ask for extra sheets of paper as necessary.


Question. Why?

Answer. ...


*************

After the examination, the examiner, our clever-dick professor, bowled back to his Oxford fellow's den with something of the effeminate bustle acquired by many disorganized intellectuals. Donning his reading glasses, and opening the first paper in the pile of examination papers (as it happens, the paper of our prospective student), his eyes fell on the following response to his carefully crafted puzzler:


Question. Why?

Answer. ...Why bloody not?



************


The legend is enticing, although one has to suspect that if it is true, the student in question had already decided he would not go to Oxford and that he might as well pass out of his interview with flying colours (to use those famous lines from the cartoon legionary Beau Peep: 'Have you heard of the expression "with flying colours?'" 'Yes?' 'Well, I have to tell you that you failed "with flying colours"').

There are all kinds of formulations of the question 'why', but the most memorable, at least in the twentieth century are associated with war. I grew up in the age of that anti-nuclear war poster with the mushroom cloud and the word "Why? across the bottom. The one artistic gaff in the Sergei Bondarchuk's wonderful film Waterloo, sees a British Grenadier drop his rifle in the midst of the battle and start running about yelling 'Why?' like some mad Greenham Common peacenik. To be fair, its artistic highlight is also during the battle when the music of a waltz, danced in an earlier pre-battle scene, accompanies a slow-mo passage of Wellington's cavalry at full charge.

Robert Graves did his own marvellous version of 'Why?' in a poem the title of which escapes me for a moment. He takes the Romantic convention of the lonely man wandering in the wood, and blows it to pieces. His lonely man in a wood is a dead 'Boche' whose decaying body has turned green and whose face is a mass of coagulated blood.

But, heck, this is the Internet, and so, in a clickstant, I can find it:

'A Dead Boche'
TO you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
"War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.


Obviously, there are different questions tied up in all these examples, but they all go back eventually to 'why?'

How does one begin to answer such a question? It depends I suppose what level you are speaking about. With minimal technical difficulties, the 'why' of the pathologist is going to come down to about the same, regardless of whether the subject is lying under the sunny canopy of a forest in the Ardennes or on a chilled mortuary slab. The physical 'why' eventually comes down to a cessation of the biochemical system suporting life.

The human or philosophical 'why' is more elusive; of that there is no doubt. The frustration captured by Graves and even by Bondarchuk's Napoleonic peacenik used to be called the 'problem of evil'. It goes a lot further than the battle field, of course, even if its most potent symbols are found there.

But this is a blog, not a thesis, so I'll cut to the chase.

There has to be an answer to 'why?'. How we actually comprehend the answer is quite another matter. Some people regard it as an agnostic mystery that is destined always to be obscure. Others, like me, are happy to confess the mystery, but live, waiting for some kind of understanding slowly to emerge from the sometimes awful silences of God.

But there has to be an answer, even if it difficult to discern. The alternative is simply too terrible to contemplate. This is not because absurdity in itself is too terrible to contemplate. There is no time now to deal with Freud's reductionism about religion, but it can pretty safely be concluded that it is not a flight to an ideal world of childhood; more like an adult opening of eyes to one's own limitations and those of one's existence. Tragedy and comedy either have a hinterland of meaning; or, as for Ionesco, it's all just tragedy in the end, even it it's comedy.

No, it is unthinkable – pace Freud and Ionesco - that 'why?' should not have both a hinterland and an answer. In that case, 'why?' means nothing at all, or at least no more and no less than anything in a universe of absurdity.

And in that case, 'why?', as our prospective Oxford student could have told us, might as well be rephrased:

Why bloody not?

In medio vitae summus in morte

Amanda Simpson is one of many remarkable people that I have had the privilege and pleasure to know from our former colonies across the Atlantic. A down-to-earth-gal from South Carolina, Amanda is something of a scientific whizz. She used to juggle radioactive nuts and bolts on nuclear submarines in the US Navy, and now teaches nuclear physics or some such ethereal subject, still with the US Navy. She is the kind of doughty person who doesn't mind spending long periods in a long metal tube under water. It takes all sorts, of course, and our Amanda is one of them.

Amanda is also a lapsed atheist. As a Maths major (she would say a Math major, of course) in college, she spent her days working through the quantifiable problems of the universe, and her nights pondering the qualitative ones, a process that ultimately led to her baptism in the Catholic Church probably about ten years ago.

I last saw Amanda in Oxford about fifteen months ago. She was on her way back from World Youth Day in Germany, and I took her on a tour of some of the Oxford colleges (okay, and pubs too, I believe). She is a photo buff and snapped away throughout the tour; here's one she took of the back of my head in Christ Church dining room

http://amasimp.phanfare.com/album/13119/13120/556140

Well, who would take a photo of the front?

Not long after she returned to the States, she got engaged to be married to John Bianco. I never met him, but his photo on her website shows a gentle, bemused man with a broad smile and the high forehead of a thinker

http://amasimp.phanfare.com/album/183359/235977/10744775

The photo turns out to have been taken during John's last Christmas. Amanda posted this message on a message board on Tuesday of this week:

My fiancee, the love of my life, John Bianco died on Sunday of sudden cardiac arrest. We were to be wed in a tridentine high Mass this April. He was 32. We were just having a conversation and he suddenly stopped breathing. I called the paramedics and he was transported to the ER, but there was nothing they could do. I managed to get him conditional Last Rites, but he was already dead when the priest arrived. He needs all the prayers for his soul that he can get. He read this forum nearly everyday and I'm sure he would appreciate all your prayers. I, too, could use your prayers as I struggle to find meaning in all of this. It seems so cruel that God would take him away three months before we were to marry. We all have crosses to bare, but this is one I cannot bare alone. I am struggling to find how this all fits into His Divine Plan. So, I beg all of you, get out your rosaries, if you know priests have masses said for him, offer up your Communions and indulgences, please, please, pray for the repose of the soul of my John. He was a good man, a good traditionalist Catholic, and he will truly be missed. Thank you all. Amanda.

The Lord bless you, and keep you, John. The Lord show his face to you, and have mercy on you. The Lord turn his countenance to you, and give you peace.

I have no news as yet from Amanda but I hope to have some soon.

Coughs of glory

The victories of the weekend have been overshadowed by the dratted virus which is hanging around, rather like a bad smell, or perhaps more like someone unpleasant who cannot take a hint.

Bizarre really; I cannot imagine anyone wanting to share this particular week with me. I am lumbering through a translation which, though not as thankless as some I have done, will remain a major burden until I can get it off my desk. Classes for the second semester began yesterday. I now teach for 7 1/2 hours on a Monday, and I arrived home feeling like a man who'd been run over at high speed by a train carrying extra-large elephants. And every academic book I pick up seems like it should have been central to my thesis and isn't.

There are days, weeks, months like that, but is it supposed to last for years? Reminds me of that scene from Fawlty Towers where Basil is talking to himself:

Basil: 'Zzzzzm'. What was that? 'That was your life mate.' Really? Do I get another? 'No, sorry, mate, that's your lot.'

It will all be over soon, as they said about WWI before Christmas 1914.

Which reminds me - in a "word-association-football' kind of way - that today I learnt where Stanley Kubrick got the name for his film Paths of Glory. The film is a marvellous study based on true events during the First World War. A French general decides to launch his men into a suicidal attack on the German trenches, and when they cannot even get out of their own trenches due to the intensity of the German barrage, the French general orders his own artillery to fire on the French! Covering his tracks with alacrity - I always keep a pot ready for covering mine too - , the general orders large numbers of men to be court martialled for cowardice and shot, though he finally settles for three (all of whom are chosen at random and had fought well during the attack). Kurt Douglas plays their commanding officer, a former barrister, and defends the men, showing up the absurdity of the trial. All to no avail. The whole thing is a stitch up to comfort the pride and blind arrogance of the general, and the three innocent men are taken for execution in what must be one of the most troubling scenes in cinema.

So, whither the title Paths of Glory? It comes, seemingly, from a drawing of the trenches made during the war. Two soliders can be seen face down in the mud, clearly dead. You only see this, however, in the uncensored version. The censored version predictably has 'censored' stamped across it obscuring the two bodies. The drawing is called 'the Paths of Glory'. The irony of Kubrick's title is borrowed, but is no less effective for that.

No paths of glory for me today, and I'm grateful; just a tickly throat, a chesty, weakling cough and dull aches.

The night brought counsel

The virus is still hanging on by the tips of its microscopic fingers. I can feel its nails digging in somewhere behind my epiglotis. Mustn't grumble though. Better things are happening in Lyon than sore throats and cold weather. Perhaps some better things are happening even because of the sore throats and bad weather.

Take last night for example. I awoke about 3am in my chilly bedroom. Being on the north face of our building, my chambre receives the full blast of the icy, continental winds, and so is bound to be cold. That, at least, is how my landlord explains the near-deep freeze temperatures in there. Personally, I prefer to think that if he left the heating on at night, my room might have a fighting chance of being a little warmer.

Come 4am, I decided I had had enough of being frozen to death, and made up my mind to make a rush for the warmth of the kitchen and begin breakfast. Turning to the moth-eaten teddy on the fireplace, left there by a previous occupant of the room - probably carried out with frostbite for all I know - , I said soulfully, 'I'm just going out. I may be gone for some time.'

But that early breakfast brought about something of a miracle. I kid you not. Now in the final weeks of my PhD (or should that be dying embers?) I have been struggling to revise my first chapter, a difficult and knotty excursion into the sociology of religion and the problems of secularization. Two of the brainiest people I know have read it and been defeated by it. The signs were not good. But how was I to change it? It seemed like a well-knitted jumper; start pulling out one thread and the rest could come out too. Or perhaps, just a pack of cards!

And then, over my 4am bowl of coffee and bread, it came to me all in a flash how I could revise the entire chapter: what could be cut, what could be rearranged, what could be reshaped. I spent the rest of the morning putting my inspiration into effect. I'll spare you the details. Read the thesis when it's published (if ever!).

On reflexion, I'm not quite sure what it all shows. Such moments are rare in these big projects. I have been trying to work this out for quite some time but to no avail.

Perhaps it only goes to show the virtues of not putting the heating on at night.

Snow, viruses and 'Die Grosse Stille'

I write today from a snowy, wintry Lyon, peeking out in resignation beneath several layers of extra clothing, and suffering, nonetheless, the sharp stabbing pains of some bloody French virus in the back of my throat.

Oh course, I say it's French, but no virus has a nationality or feels strong national sentiment. They promiscuously mix with any old foreigner who trots by happily minding his own business. So, yes - and this is what I'm driving at - viruses are the original internationalists. The only differences being that real internationalists are harder to swallow, and they can rarely be shifted, not even by a course of diarrhea-inducing antibiotics. We await that particular advance in medical science with, it must be admitted, a mixture of anxiety and not a little excitement. In the meantime, death to all viruses, say I.

Thoughts of the powdery stuff take me back to a film I saw during the holidays, Die Grosse Stille, now released in English as Into Great Silence, a documentary giving an aperçu of the lives of Carthusian monks at the Grande Chartreuse in Savoy. The 'Great Silence' is something of a play on words; there is the magnum silencium of the monastic rule, but also the spiritual peace of souls dedicated to God and which come to maturity in the physical silence of the imposing, Savoyard mountain scenery, broken only by the sound of bells, psalms chanted in the dead-of-night, and the swishing of sandals and robes in the cloister corridors.

There is, however, a remarkable scene near the end of the film where the Carthusians go out for recreation, and set up their own toboggan-run on the side of a steep hill. Then, the Grosse Stille is suddenly rent with screaming, whooping, tobogganing monks, zooming down the mountain with their scapulars flapping in the wind. As I recall the scene, I have to blot out from my memory the gentle, faux-bourdon snores emanating from the friend with whom I was - theoretically - watching the film, and who, being on the better side of a good meal and several glasses of wine, had begun what Carthusians would probably call an 'Apostle's meditation' (cf. the Garden of Olives).

Still, as I recall the scene, I'm persuaded to look with a kindlier eye on the chilly, clear-blue, winter sky and the now crusty, freezing snow along the Lyonnais pavements, knowing that somewhere, some happy monk is probably tobogganing down a Savoyard slope with his scapular flapping in the wind.

I hope he's praying for my virus. It's on death row.