Findan

This is a view of the Holm of Papay across from the main island of Papay, papa-ay, priest island. Findan was captured by or given over to a Viking slave-raiding party on the Irish coast (around 845AD) and was en route to Norway. According to Christopher Lowe, '(d)uring an enforced sojourn in Orkney, during which the raiding party rested and awaited a fair wind, Findan was able to make good his escape from an uninhabited island. On meeting a group of strangers, he was subsequently taken to a bishop whose episcopal seat was nearby' (p 8). He stayed with the bishop for two years. The bishop 'had been instructed in the study of letters in Ireland and was quite skilled in the knowledge of this language'. It has been suggested that the uninhabited island was the Holm and that the bishop would have been based at Monkerhoose or St Boniface kirk. Could Findan really have slipped away and landed on South Wick and found 'strangers' who took him to the bishop a mile or so away? Perhaps the raiding party didn't miss him or think it was worth the trouble to go after him. Perhaps they would have met with too much resistance, enough to keep them on the Holm until they got their fair wind? How hard would it be to find him, anyway? But an Irish adventure in Orkney and an episcopal seat on Papay, part of a mission station with good farming land ... An early raiding party, before they got serious. Was there genocide later on these islands?

Stones and the women

Stone has been on my mind, not just because stone is so visible in drystone walls and flagstone and boulder and rock and pebble, not just because one is surrounded by the stern silent stoniness, the impassiveness of stone, and not by trees (where is my Maytime of beechen green and shadows numberless?) but because it all reminds me of once reading a passage from a poem by Hugh MacDiarmid, On a Raised Beach, extracts I read in a book about Metaphysics by Donald M MacKinnon, one of those revelatory books that restore your faith in philosophy because you know you are palpably in the presence of a poetic intelligence among so much vacant, directionless, visionless analysis. I once heard one of the four or five women philosophers who flourished from the late fifties, Anscombe, Foot, Warnock, Murdoch, Midgley, I cannot remember which, probably not Anscombe, who was asked in an interview why they were so different from the male philosophers of their generation. Oh, the men had all gone off to the war, and we were taught by MacKinnon. I cannot really remember how I came upon the book, maybe it was a rare moment of browsing in the university library, anyway, it was wonderful and gripping and it had this long passage from MacDiarmid at the end. Perhaps the ubiquitous presence of stone on this rocky island made me think of McKinnon again, made me think of the experience of reading him and its effect on my imagination, enabled by MacDiarmid. I found the book on the internet and it arrived yesterday and at once I realised how tricksy imagination can also be, because the extract was so much shorter than I remembered it. In fact, at first I couldn't find it. At last I came to it and read it again, and since it was so long ago, it was as for the first time, and very quickly I had to throw it down because there were lines I could not read with conviction. That itself is a strange experience, reading bad verse becomes impossible, I can feel the badness in my bones and I rebel with unexpected violence, or maybe it's just embarrassment, I remember having to stop reading out loud a passage from Yeats because it was so bad, the conviction drained at once from my voice ...

The inward gates of a bird are always open.

It does not know how to shut them.

That is the secret of its song,

But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.

I look at these stones and know little about them,

But I know their gates are open too,

Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,

That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer

Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,

Though through them no man can see.

Perhaps it is the McGonigle quality of the last three lines, and maybe it would be better if I knew what it was for birds or stones or men to have their inward gates open. Anyway, it does improve and perhaps I am unjust, but what remained in my imagination, and was not found now, was the echo and repetition of the word, stone, stone, stone, aeons, as he says, of stone, upon whose surfaces the residue of extinct humanity dries and shrivels like seaweed in the sun.

Death steals in

I knew him as a colleague twenty years ago, he moved on, we hardly met again, once, I think, when I gave a talk in his Department and once when he came to ours, a couple of years ago, when I was struck by how similar were his themes to those he struggled with years ago, our preoccupations deepen, they do not widen, it seems, but at last we start to see our own pattern .... And his girlfriend, who used to visit, then news of their marriage. And now, out of the blue sky whence nothing unforeseen can come, his death after illness is announced, 'his family were with him at the end'. I remember them when they were young, before there were children, how old was he, his mid-fifties, perhaps, a little younger. We are sad and surprised, but it is still a relatively distant death, we do not suffer grief but we think of what it is to die, of what it is to face its prospect.

Seals, they are always there, bobbing in the water, in the surge of small waves, or basking on the shore from which they roll and shuffle when they see us come, but we have a strange affinity, we and the seals, have reason to observe each other: we meet on the foreshore or in the shallows, in and out of each other's element, but only ever in the shallows or on the foreshore. In our element they are ungainly and vulnerable, in theirs so are we. And we merely observe each other, the seals at their edge, regarding us at ours as thus our two worlds touch and shift with the swirl and movement of water over sand and rock. We cannot survive long in their world, nor they in ours, and so we observe each other and, when we think we are unobserved, we creep into or out of the water, to test and bask and rest and float, another world, with struggles and ecstasies we know nothing of, the limits and otherness of death.

Be quiet, I'm thinking

No particular reason for the title, except that a Facebook friend had announced that they were thinking and I was recalling that for many philosophers thinking is a rare act, maybe an anti-Cartesian thought ...

I picked up my old school copy of Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroeger in translation and started to read one of the other stories in it, Tristan. Slightly chilling to realise that these two were published in 1902 and 1903 respectively, and that Death in Venice was published in 1912, all before the Great War. My Irish grandmother would have been a schoolgirl in Ballybricken and her brother Paddy would not have known of course that he was to die quite soon. There was also a cousin Paddy, who fell from a railway bridge and died aged 14, and my mother had superstitious feelings about the name, otherwise my brother would have been christened Patrick. As it is she still calls him Paddy. Anyway, where is this all going. I saw a documentary about VW, Vaughan Williams, and the voice-over recalled that his first wife never quite recovered from the death of her brother in WWI. A similar event caused my grandmother to leave Ireland:

Oh yes, I turned and looked back towards the train,
leaning at Heuston against a pillar,
and wept for your young, slight, long-coated ghost:
'well, Katie Grant, ma’am, so you’re twenty four ...'
the same age as my eldest daughter now,
unable to live in the small cramped house

crowded with sisters, parents and your grief
you left Ireland, wept as the steam train screamed
as it tore apart wildly clutching hands
and fled from Paddy’s death to Liverpool.
Did Mary sadly take you in her arms
for comfort, or did you stand there, stiffly
forbidden to grieve, unless by cold nods
and absences, of mind and in your words?

Was that the task you set me when you died
and I lay in bed terrified you’d come
to break back into my protected world:
to recall the source of your stern-set jaw
lament your bitter, unhealed wound of war?

Tonio Kroeger was an important text for me, reading it in German in the VIth form, the only pupil, sitting with Laz over his exiguous fire. It seemed to give a sense to my adolesccent alienation, to see that my sensibility was after all acceptable in its unacceptability, that there were others ... But, reading Tristan now, I only mention it because it is has a nice image of how we seek to swindle conscience: but it gnaws away at us till we are simply one wound. Well, a touch of the vapours there, but I liked the use of 'swindle'. ...

Walking towards Leaper's Geo

Yesterday I walked for the first time from South Wick to North Wick and then up along the cliffs to Leaper's Geo and on to Fowl Craig, the sun was warm, the grass was green and springey, the thrift glowing pink, nothing but mild wind, the sound of the sea, the call of birds overhead, and on the sandstone ledges colonies of birds as remote from human life as they would have been a million years ago, though we share some of their simple mechanisms and they throb with life.

A footprint in the sand

This is not a footprint in the sand

I was bemused a while ago to receive an email from Big Jim in which he described the great Scottish Philosopher as 'that clown Hume', bemused because he is after all the great Scottish philosopher.

But I have been thinking about his empiricism recently and recalling what I had long ago forgotten, that the distinction between impressions and ideas upon which everything in Hume rests, rests in fact upon a metaphor which, if we take it seriously, undermines everything he says. One always forgets things in philosophy, partly because one is carried along by the flow of philosophical writing in which authors settle too readily on a premise and then race to a conclusion. Everything depends for Hume on tracing 'ideas' back to the 'impressions' of which they are faint copies (in fact these ideas or images are better candidates for 'impressions' than the alleged impressions themselves) and Hume's sceptical rejection of our ideas of necessity, causality, the spatio-temporal continuity of bodies, the permanence of the self or soul, relies on obvious features of what he calls impressions as they impress themselves, as it were, upon our minds. Such impressions last as long as they are perceived, they do not hang around unperceived, so what grounds do we have for talking about the same body when all we are aware of is a qualitatively identical impression, etc.

Which takes us back to the footprint in the sand. Now that is an impression, an impression of a foot, just as a crater is an impression of a meteor or a child's handprint on a piece of paper an impression of their hand, etc. The footprint gives us some idea of the size and shape of a particular foot. It doesn't look like a foot, but it shows us the outline and the indentation tells us something about the weight of the body relative to the softness of the ground. But impressions of this kind belong within our epistemological economy and are not its basis. We can reason from footprint to foot because we know about footprints and about feet, and we know what an impression is and why and how it is made. The idea of an impression is the idea of an impression of something that is known independently. In that case Hume's impressions are not impressions, he has no title to that word. We don't see impressions of bodies, we see bodies, we see things, stones, for instance, on a raised beach. The Humean trick lies in persuading us that what we really see is only ... This is not an argument against scepticism about empirical knowledge, it is just an argument against Hume. It doesn't deliver us back a permanent self, either, for that there is no such thing is not to be argued for in terms of Hume's failure to find a self.

The whole discussion of empirical knowledge is vitiated, it seems to me, by a failure to take seriously the grammatical or conceptual difference between talk of objects which are essentially mind-dependent, and things, which are not. Philosophers are always talking about objects as though they were talking about things and things as though they were objects, and they get the grammars tangled.

Now how can I say this in a semi-public space without sounding mad: when I say that we see things and not merely impressions of things, I am not asserting in Johnsonian spirit that we see things, I am saying that it is a mistake, conceptually, to claim that we see impressions of things. What we see are things and if we are to raise sceptical questions, as we should, in a spirit of epistemological vigilance, then we must address the issues in those terms, and not in terms of impressions, which is a bad place to start from.

small teething issues

Well, of course the car wouldn't start after ten weeks in the garage. It did start, actually, for as long as it took to get out of the garage, and then it died, to be revived with the help of T's jump leads, so to charge up the battery I headed off briskly to North Hill and then down towards Moclett Bay where as we passed over the cattle grid (by 'us' I mean that animate of metal, the car and me, who am animate of dust) the accelerator had no response and animate of metal petered out, gracefully, but without remorse:


But, hey, it's June, and the grass is green and the fields are yellow with buttercups, and the sky is blue, though the wind be strong and the clouds on the horizon heavy, and I need a walk, and a mile or so is no great thing, though in the end I got a lift from a satirical builder friend who was forced to attend later after I realised that despite the reassuring sound of the pump the radiators were not getting warmer nor the water hot. I had misread the oil levels, there were no oil levels, the cupboard was bare, the tank empty, the next boat on Friday, and 900 litres will cost more than £600. A helpful fifty litres were not enough to force an oil flow along the almost level gradient, so I starve until Friday or, more accurately, go without hot baths. Now is there an immersion heater that no one told me about, pray? But everything is so green here, so sharp the change from early April, and there is so much good will here ...

Stones

Heading north

Well, sunrise on Tuesday in Orkney will be 0401 hrs and sunset 2220 hrs. I have spent the day cleaning in a slightly feckless way, recycling paper, trying to pack and work out the logistics of taking 23kg on one plane but only 15kg on the Islander. Solution: the boat, I can get to the ferry after 7am with plenty of time to reach the airport. Then meet the ferry when it arrives mid-afternoon. It leaves Kirkwall at 1030 but goes to North Ronaldsay first. Tomorrow to Lancaster via the dump and the university library ... entrain Monday, meet a friend in Edinburgh, fly to Kirkwall, overnight stay. Unfortunately, from the point of view of convenience, I have to do some external examining later in June, a quick dash to Norfolk and back to receive friends. There is much to do down here but I need a change and a chance to orient myself towards future writing tasks.

Walking through the shopping mall, two very young women with prams, both smoking hard, sad, but they look cool and it gives one a certain poise, alas. Thinks. Do I leave my Bose, hidden in Birkenhead or do I send it up by post?

A dance of branches, sea gulls call

I am clearing my desk in the Department, my door is open, as is the window, one is in a dreamy state as one makes a basic assessment of papers, to be kept or recycled, sounds from the corridor, traffic noise, footsteps in the street, and voices, the ash tree, green, a cooling breeze through the window, calm, change, the possibility of change, the wind, the metaphors, touch my brow.

A girl of seventeen

Ma mere, in the early days of the war, presumably 1940, she is 85 now and still has that truculent, independent look of an irish colleen on her face, and six years before I was born. She starts to grow frail and angry that she can't do things, like work in the garden, still feels as though she is in her twenties but now trapped in a body that is is less cooperative than it was ...

But when you think about it ...

... in a way, religion is almost irrelevant to the troubles that afflict our planet, except for the extent to which it intensifies them, and when it does it is mostly because it is a product rather than a cause, an expression of reaction, though one which can also reinforce reaction, and also to that extent an irritant and an obstacle. Perhaps it is safer to say that it is 'good' religion that is almost irrelevant.

The thing that we most have to contend with is human nature in its negative aspects, and all we have at our disposal is our own nature in its positive aspect, and it is already in our nature to make that distinction in those terms. All that really matters is states of mind and their expression in conduct, as I constantly tell my students. Those men and women of 'good will' who profess religious convictions may be inspired by their spiritual traditions, as any of us might be by the right kind of literature, and our admiration for them is entirely a matter of our moral judgment about what they propose and what they condemn, about what they do. Basically, what we contend against is greed, hatred and delusion, grasping, cruelty, indifference, narcissism, self-preoccupation, sloth and arrogance. And all we have to contend against them with is generosity of spirit, energy and compassion. Who cares whether there is an uncaused cause of all there is? Well, yes, lots of people care about that, and some will say that it is because it is true, but even if it is, what difference does it make? Answer, it makes no difference at all except as one source of ethical inspiration among others.

This is also basic Buddhism as well as 'humanist' and maybe the point for me is that humanism just needs to develop its moral language and learn from the kind of ascesis found in that tradition, an ascesis that seeks to overcome the hindrances, undermine the sway of the passions without repression, in favour of a newly energised compassion for sentient beings, including, naturally, oneself, 'let me be to my sad self, hereafter, kind/ Charitable ...' as Hopkins wrote.

Why I needed a new camera

(I found these notes in a suitcase and this is one way to preserve them)

I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw; full oft 'tis seen
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father's wrath!
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I'ld say I had eyes again!

There is no single metaphor of light and darkness, but several, and they can appear to contradict each other even when they don't. We have to start from the human experiences which we seek to make sense of and give coherent form to by reaching out to evocative comparisons. Of course there is an association that we make between light and darkness, good and evil, it is one of the oldest associaations: the image of the dark engulfing the light, the Manichaean story of the interpenetrating pendulums, light and darkness, good and evil, separate and distinct and then their mixing, always though with the sense that it is the light that shall be swallowed up, that will falter in the presence of darkness. Two eternal, metaphysical principles. But although this pattern fits in with theism in different ways, God's light but also his darkness, we do not need to attach the imagery to strictly theistic reflections: it can shed 'light' on our progress through life in other ways.

Primal emotions, fear, dread, hope, relief, associated with the coming on of night, the dawn, the coming of evil times, the possibility of rescue, or of being 'saved'. The sense of the presence of evil, a vivid reality, always also cold, the sense of dark and relentless forces. But in another context, not unrelated, we think of the light of understanding and the darkness of ignorance, partly because we think of these already in moral terms, understanding is a good, ignorance an evil.

However, we can become over-attached to the light and over-fearful of darkness. Unconscious forces, the shadow, fear of looking into the dark places of the psyche, because we put things now in the wrong order and associate darkeness too readily with evil (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Enduring the darkness, and learning to distinguish between what is merely an object of fear and what is genuinely evil. Lawrence and Nietzsche on the desire to be rational, conscious, daylight at any cost, etc. But we can also be 'fearful of light and enlightenment' (maybe it is the same thing expressed in an opposite way) and there is the instinct of concealment of action ('light thickens and the crow ...') but we are also night's black agents: we do not wish to be discovered, exposed to the daylight.

But in another context it makes sense to embrace the darkness in a positive way: the ordinary light of day can conceal a greater light but it can also conceal the presence of the heavenly bodies. An ascesis of becoming familiar with the darkness, enduring, living without the stimulation of the senses, in the hope that with their cessation and that of quotidian desire, new insights might dawn ...

But what about 'grace'?

Nor hope nor dread attend
A dying animal.

A walk in Sheffield, or the outskirts thereof, memories of the late eighties, bringing up children, and the unexpected heron, so primeval, what has it to do with Sheffield or any city, any human habitation, working before Sisyphus to stay alive, alive, alive until it dies, dies, nor hope nor dread ... no beating of spirit wings, moving out of life with slow and awkward grace.

If what I said about karma and Sharon Stone earlier is right, then surely we have exactly the same problem with talk of grace, as when someone says that such and such an event which had perhaps a significant effect on their lives, was a grace of God, or was the action of God's grace. Surely that won't do, either? We should have to say that the comment acknowledges something true, viz that it was not through my action that this happened and saved me from myself, but then tries to explain, which it cannot do, since all this belongs to a realm of unknowing, though even that turn of phrase is merely a kind of concession. All this sounds like D Z Phillips and yet is surely no less right for that,Dewi, who died last year, in the library at Swansea, in the middle of his projects, had been complaining of dizziness a few weeks before at the memorial for Bob Sharpe.

Talking of grace might provide someone with a general picture of what it is like to live in this world, a general truth about the multiple ways in which we are dependent in our moral lives on forces that we do not command and do not expect, but it can never then come down to particulars ... but of course, for religious people, it always does come down to particulars, a particular event seen as God's intervention, whether it is to save us from ourselves, or to punish us for our sin, and I cannot go there, nor have any inclination to do so, even though there have been many times that I have precisely felt that I was saved from myself by the course of events, by a grace of nature, as I should rather say. Others will talk here of their conviction or their faith that this was the hand of God .... but it is no more than Glenn Hoddle or Sharon Stone talking of karma or the fundamentalist talking of God's punishment of America or whatever it might be. I suppose someone might object here, that they are not on a level, that there are different theologies involved, that God is a God of love and intervenes with grace, but for that reason doesn't punish us in the way implied, and that is certainly true, but still, neither the good theology nor the bad brings us to something that we can establish or know or even have reason for believing.