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 ...