A Proleptic view of 'A Tale of Two Cities' by Charles Dickens

I think I suffer from Post Delusion Syndrome. This is when you know that a position long held by you is objectively false but its patination remains.  You see I know that I have never read ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by Charles Dickens but I somehow feel that I have.  I am rectifying that idee fixe  by actually being now in the process of reading and the depthless sheen of my rereading it is due to be corrected.  Is it this that emboldens me as I pause at a 60% reading of it to offer a proleptic review?  These are the sorts of reviews that are never written and yet are frequently excogitated.  We often think as we draw back from immersion whither this is going and is the unfolding of the plot, not logical, but under the dominion of the active imagination.  Ordinary rational epideictic novels make sense under the canon of common sense however they fail in living verisimilitude which brings life through what Hindu ritualists call‘apurva’. A poesis in the work leaps forward to create connections which are real across the gap of facticity.  Thus they say that this is how ritual fructifies without the billiard ball causality of the Humean sort.

The theme of counterparts is well established.  Good Darnay against the functional alcoholic depressive Carton, the one rising the other in free fall.  The theme of imprisonment: Manette of course but also the fell hand of the bank and the sans cullotes languishing under the ancien regime.  Shoemaking lapsed into as the father is thrown back into the dungeon. Tingles and sparrowbills, the knife, the curiously shaped French hammer and the awl; items of self harm probably allowed for that hoped for end.

“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on these street stones?”

The doctor speaks of his daughter:

“—any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever, new or old, against the man she really loved—the direct responsibility thereof not lying on his head—they should all be obliterated for her sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me than wrong, more to me—Well! This is idle talk.”

Carton’s vow:

For you, and for any dear to you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you.

We know our Dickens and the intertwining of all fates in a congeries of karma will be expected.  So far so very good. It is claimed to be the most read novel in English literature.  It is first in the rank of popularity on gutenberg.org which must stand as a confirmation of a sort in the digital annals.

 

Morte d'Urban by J.J. Powers

 

om bhurbhuva

06:45 (6 minutes ago)

 

This novel, by the best new-to-me writer that I’ve read this year, has been described as a satire.  It’s not.  More of a situation comedy with wry but kind humour.  It’s a fish thrown back into the water of mediocrity after the life of being feted as a prominent ‘missioner’ in the wide untroubled water of 50’s Catholic America.  The ‘mission’ is the analogue for Catholics of the camp revival meeting without the indecorous slaying in the spirit.  Fr. Urban is a star who has been given the green banana.  He is taken off the circuit by his Provincial c.i.c. and sent to an artic station in the frozen mid-west.  This is an  ex-sanitarium previously poorhouse mansion ravaged by squirrels with a cast of woebegone prelates whose hope it is to turn this wreck into a retreat centre.   They have no money so DIY reigns under the guiding hand of the incompetant Fr.Wilf, Wilfrid with two  is.  He is a demon of the sort of thrift that ends up fouling the universe with end of stock green paint and varnish that won’t dry.  There is also Fr.John who is a saint of the charitable observation that may not quite align with reality. Who said saints had to be intelligent?

Duesterhaus is a difficult arena for the talents of Fr.Urban not that he was reared in ease and comfort in his early days as Harvey Roche whose father was a greenkeeper.  Golf plays a role in this novel.  A benefactor buys up a neighbouring farm to make a course that will attract the better sort of retreatant the sort that might leave a donation to cover their stay.  Needless to say Urban is a just under professional level golfer and his match with the Bishop’s champion has more than a touch of the tourney about it.  By the way don’t expect Urban to die at the end.  The Morte is a sly sneer at the publication of Morte d’Arthur an attempt at diversification that like fizzles out.

On the way to discovering the dark side of his various benefactors there are lighter moments like the sad saga of Fr. Chmielewski’s pants and Fr.Jack and the two lost railway passes.  It’s very subtle, you’d need to read it.  A punch line:

“Wilf was in possession of the telephone, was saying good-bye, hanging up. Apparently he hadn’t trusted Jack to do the talking, after all. “I don’t know what Father Chmielewski must think of us here!” he said to Father Urban. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life!” And then to Jack: “Both wallets where you left them! Don’t you see what this means?”

Jack obviously didn’t.

“You’re still wearing Father Chmielewski’s pants!”

Jack looked down at himself in horror.

“What the hell,” said Father Urban, trying to take Jack’s part, but not finding it easy. “Why, a thing like this could happen to anybody!”

This is probably the best novel that I read last year.  It won a Pulitzer prize in ‘63 often a mark of decent quality.  Read and say a prayer for my intentions.

Anirvachanaya

 I see anirvachanaya has come up as a topic in an advaitic blog which does not welcome ontological pondering so I won’t engage with it there. 

anirvachanaya

  It gets to the anirvachanaya quandary by way of an initial stipulation of  what is really real.

“Sat (Real): That which exists in all three periods of time (past, present, and future) and is never sublated or negated. Only Brahman/Consciousness fits this definition.

1. Asat (Unreal): That which is absolutely non-existent and can never be perceived, such as  “the son of a barren woman” or “the horns of a hare”.

Framing a position by starting from a stipulation is I would suggest a pointless venture.  That quandary about the co-existence of the real and the unreal only arises when conclusions have been reached by other means, down the line as it were.

Ask yourself: How does Sankara open his ontological position on the real?  He accepts sense perception but is puzzled by what the Greeks called an aporia (plural aporiai) : How is perception possible?  How does that out there concrete reality somehow come to be in here in my consciousness as an awareness of the thing as it is.  The concrete and immaterial consciousness are incommensurable.  

I have gone into the nuts and bolts of the progression of Shankara’s  thinking on this subject several times so I won’t repeat it here (follow the topic heads below).  Essentially what allows us to know the object is the unity of the substratum. (vritti - upadhi- adhyasa).  If I may be so bold as to add my own twist on the problem.  Ask why the overall form of awareness, which is ‘I AM’ , does not reflect back on itself instead of reaching the object.  

This is the fundamental transcendental hypothesis as sketched in the Preamble to the Brahma Sutra Bhasya.  I would hold that it dissolves the Real/Unreal dyad by establishing the concept of the non-dual or Advaita.  That division has become factitious.

 

'To the Lighthouse' by Virginia Woolf

 I have written before about the element of panpsychism in the novel.  Here is the perfect expression of the pervasion of consciousness delivered by Mrs. Ramsey’s handmaiden Lily Briscoe who is attempting to complete her painting of the beautiful mother and her son James sitting on the steps leading from the french windows.

 

“She seemed to be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays’; the children’s; and all sorts of waifs and strays of things besides. A washerwoman with her basket; a rook; a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some common feeling which held the whole together.”

But it won’t come together for her, composition eludes her.  The empty space that is Mrs.Ramsey, gone, a portal to inanition. She misses her, the reader misses her as an avatar of the Moirae all combined in the one person but one  whose thread has been cut.  Prue gone, inheritor of beauty, Andrew gone, the mathematician, yet lingering on is Mr.Ramsey, Augustus Carmichal with his yellow stained beard now a famous poet and a personage, Tansley has a fellowship and probably still thinks women can’t write, can’t paint .  Ramsey continues to bully with his moods and the need for reassuarance from women.  Lily does not give this homage to the great man whose pondering on the reality of the kitchen table may be the source of his irascibility.  

The house has a speaking part.  In the ‘Time Passes’ section the passage from desuetude to near dereliction beautifully plots the course of decline of the energies of its inhabitants.  Once it was, could Woolf be so parallel, a lighthouse. Philosopher Ramsey, Poet Carmichael, Scientist Bankes, Tansley young scholar, Briscoe seeking a vision and lattely finding it.  The long Edwardian summer is over, the happiness of Paul and Minta, now the Doyles, cankered by infidelity.  The thread of fate is cut, the clew falls back.  Were those brown stocking ever finished?  

What is it that they bring as offerings to the lighthouse:

“Then, wheeling about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the path, his children following him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to be drawn acquiescent in their father’s wake, obediently, but with a pallor in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered something beyond their years in silence.”

Is it possible to reconstitute your world?  A mark, a smudge, an impressionistic blur is Lily Briscoe’s way of finishing her picture.  There seemed to be a flash of white across the french windows.  Mrs.Ramsey?

“Yes, with all its green and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Ethos

 Ethos is one of the three aspects of rhetoric based on the reliability and general authoritativeness of the rhetor or the one that is trying to persuade us.  Pramana theory (Indian epistemology)  of the sources of valid knowledge regards the utterance of an ‘apta’ (reliable person) as a source.  

What I sense is that once you lose that reliability seal of truth telling even when you speak sooth that can be objectively checked it somehow lacks its force. The virtue has gone from the utterance.  The Israelis have reached that point.  Even the truth falls dead from their lips.  

Shaftesbury's epistolary essy on 'Enthusiasm' applied to Covidology (from his 'Characteristics' 1709)

 With all the panics that we have had here, what Shaftesbury would probably have called ebullitions of enthusiasm, I haven’t seen any reference to his epistolary essay on the topic of enthusiasm its genesis and his proposed remedies.  Enthusiasm from the Greek en theos - the god within refers generally to the excesses of religious fervour which can overwhelm individuals and groups causing them to become detached from their normal sober selves.  One thinks of Holy Rollers, snake handlers, and the ecstatic devotees of the ancient forms of religious fervour.  Shaftesbury would include all sorts of mass psychosis which can be spread through mimesis. He also refers to it as a form of panic having its origin in melancholy or black bile which may affect the body politic as well as the human body.  

“ may with good reason call every passion ‘panic’ which is raised in a

multitude and conveyed by aspect or, as it were, by contact or sympathy. Thus,

popular fury may be called ‘panic’ when the rage of the people, as we have

sometimes known, has put them beyond themselves, especially where religion

has had to do.”

“For vapours naturally rise and, in bad times especially, when the spirits of men are low, as either in public calamities or during the unwholesomeness of air or diet, or when convulsions hap￾pen in nature, storms, earthquakes or other amazing prodigies–––at this season the panic must needs run high, and the magistrate of necessity give way to it.”

The major panic which we have had recently due to Covid follows precisely the pattern observed by Shaftesbury in his epistolary essay ‘On Enthusiasm’.  The arguments put forward for its grave nature were of the solemn foolery type which he called ‘formalist’.  This is the presentation, by very serious people who follow the science, of a chilling message which may not be trifled with.

“Perhaps so, but let us see first whether they are really grave or no, for, in the manner we may conceive them they may peradventure be very grave and weighty in our imagination, but very ridiculous and impertinent in their own nature. Gravity is of the very essence of imposture”

Now the normal way or the wise way of dealing with such societal vapours is ridicule and persiflage.  In other words ‘don’t be silly, you are imagining things’.  The problem with Covid though was that the ‘magistrate’ instead of letting it go or having the black bile vent itself and thus be exhausted rather chose to amplify the panic.  Moving more than 5 km away from your home was restricted and entry into a cafe or public house was on the basis of a QR code which assured your vaccination status.  The remedy of ridicule was voided by the fact that you had to remove your mandated mask to eat and thus open yourself to the certainty of contagion.  Shaftesbury saw what would happen when heavy handed remedies are applied by the legal system to stem the excesses of panic enthusiasm.

“For to apply a serious remedy and bring the sword or fasces as a cure must

make the case more melancholy and increase the very cause of the distemper.”

The mention of fasces brings to mind the close union of the great corporations with the Fascist Italian government.  In Ireland too our tax bonanza from the multi-nationals that avail of our tax haven, the pharmaceutical industry being most salient during the time of Covid, made the government very attentive to their needs.  We are after all home to 19 of the top 20 pharma giants.  Sententious assertions of the wisdom of ‘following the science’ became a quasi religion, a melancholy that lay on the nation like a miasm or ‘pestilential exhalation’.  The proposers of those nostrums such as vaccination which did not prevent infection but somehow magically lessened its effects, Ashley-Cooper, the 3rd. Earl, calls formalists.  A footnote to my text defines this species of jobsworth:

“In Shaftesbury’s vocabulary, the formalist was the person who sustained his views through self solemnity and what Shaftesbury regarded as the imposture of gravity”.

Babes we have been here before.  It is likely that at any time in the history of any individual country there may be festering a pustule of pus gathered round a mental obstruction, a malign fidget that becomes contagious.  The saurian watchful grasp the moment to launch a factory reset towards the fata morgana of transhumanism, transgenderism or any transformation that draws us away from the image and likeness of God.

Advaita and the Paradox of Realism

 Advaita’s paradox is that what makes perception to be a reflection of the real world, what Adhvarindra calls perceptuality, is also that which derealises the evident.  What is true falsifies.  Realism inverts itself.  This is similar to the thought of Plato.  Our personal fire creates the shadow world but when we emerge into the ultimate fire of the sun that shadow world is annihilated in the light of Logos.  

What does ‘mithya’/false mean in the case of advaita?  Is it not false by stipulation if you talk false to mean uncontradicted in the three moments of time, past/present/future.  Like Parmenides they hold that what is changeful is unreal, it never really is or both is and is not.  This rigorism is balanced by the concept of the non-dual.  What is false is a world that is freestanding, self established.  Both levels of reality are symbiotically linked, they flow into each other.  There is the absolute (paramartha) and the relative (pratibhasika) the metaphysical and the conventional reality. 

To controvert that opposed categorisation of conventional and metaphysical you have the moment of supreme insight called akhandadara vritti, the unbroken mental modification which reveals the truth of how perception is possible.  We have, as it were, a window overlooking the metaphysical. It is the one through which we see.  Everything flows together in a unity of being that allows for realism within the bounds of ‘the cave’.Empirically there is always more to know, to find out but knowledge itself has realism as the default position.  Even getting things wrong proves it otherwise ‘wrong’,  pace neo-modernism, is a meaningless concept.  

Here I am weltering in a slough of mixed metaphors and analogies, windows, shadows, snakes, ropes, mirages.  ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’?  

Recall the tantric saying: What is here is there, what is not here is not anywhere.

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