Posted on by Daniel Gustafsson · 1 Comment

Beacons – Brands – The Loki Stone

DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in both English and Swedish, most recently Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). Much inspired by the beauty and history of both his native and adoptive shores, exploring themes of cultural and spiritual regeneration derived from Blake and Scruton, among others, Daniel’s increasingly formal work also shows an interest in alliterative verse. Recent related work appears in The North American Anglican and in Black Bough Poetry’s Deep Time Volume 1. With a PhD in Philosophy, Daniel also makes occasional contributions to academic journals and conferences. He lives in York. Twitter: @PoetGustafsson  

BEACONS

We saw it come. The low,                           

lengthening shade emerged at summer’s close   

to stalk the hogweed, stem the rose,

and leech the commons clean 

of light. Through meadows, mown, and fields

with little left to glean,

                   

the prey was run to ground.

We saw the once unchallenged sun beset;

his trailing robes, resplendent yet

though stained with ochres, snag

on bramble-thorn; his even course

begin to list and lag. 

                   

We knew what darkened lanes

ensued, yet saw the sparks enkindled there;                      

how, birch to quickbeam, beacons flared

to raise the late alarm,        

presaging pathways lined with rust

and ash: a call to arms

                   

for each of autumn’s sons

to carry fire, linking lanterns, hips

with crimsoned haws; an ill-equipped

and self-defeating quest

to halt this great diminishing

that haunts the waning west.

BRANDS                              

The streets are overrun

with marchers; banners climb the righteous tide;

while those who err on caution’s side

remain some way apart,

upholding those unflagging words

the crowd won’t take to heart. 

                   

We’ve seen it all before: 

how slogans, slander, slag of language, smear

the public square. Even so, here    

in this beleaguered town,

a moneyed mob, brought up in arms

to tear its elders down,

                   

declares the end has come,            

the zero sum of all offending years:

the stakes are raised to frenzied cheers

as strawmen take the blame.

Though fury is the fashion now

and all are fans of flame,

                   

this too will fizzle out;                                

through smoke of sleepless nights’ utopian dreams,

the slanting rays and broken beams

when dawning crawls around        

will find us less enlightened still               

for loss of common ground.

THE LOKI STONE

(Fragment of a 10th Century Anglo-Scandinavian cross-shaft;

Kirkby Stephen, Yorkshire)   

While this stone is standing,

still untoppled, pillar                             

guarding grace and order;

guileful Loki yoked here, 

finely patterned fetters

foil him, sinuous coils of                       

bramble; horned-one humbled,           

hate’s designs frustrated;   

                   

threads not loosed yet; these en-

thralling drystone-walls and                     

hog-backed ridges, hedgerows

hooping, bindweed looping, 

braiding streams and bridges;

bands of lore, a landscape’s                  

tropes of love entrap him,

trothless, bound to nothing;

                   

till these tethers wither,

torn at last, unfastened,

reins of roots and vines un-

ravelled, freeing havoc;

columns, ash and elm, up-

ending, arches rending;

rock of ages racked though       

raised for glory; praise it.  

                   

This poem is composed of three dróttkvætt stanzas. Essentially each stanza contains eight lines with three trochaic feet in each line. The odd-numbered lines have two alliterating staves which alliterate with the first syllable in the even-numbered lines. Within the odd-numbered lines, two of the stressed syllables share half rhymes (of consonants with dissimilar vowels; stone-stand, pattern-fetter); while within the even-numbered lines, two of the stressed syllables rhyme (though not necessarily at the end of a word; still-pillar, foil-coils). In the case of both odd- and even-numbered lines, the second partial or full rhyme always falls on the penultimate syllable of the line (the stressed syllable in the third trochaic foot).

Posted on by Janet Kenny

Four poems by Janet Kenny

JANET KENNY is very old. She has been an opera and concert singer, anti-war activist, editor, publisher’s researcher and food writer. Born in New Zealand, sang in the United Kingdom, agitated in Sydney and now watches birds in Queensland. Her poems have been widely published. She co-edited, compiled and wrote Beyond Chernobyl published by Envirobook; Her two collections of poems are This Way to the Exit (White Violet Press) and Whistling in the Dark (Kelsay Books)

Antal Szalai’s Gypsy Band in an Australian Country Town

The country concert hall is full

of old Hungarians who’ve come

from miles away to hear the thrill

of tarogato, cimbalom,

but most of all—the violin.

And what a violin! They say

that after he had heard him play

Yehudi Menuhin embraced him,

so deeply had Szalai impressed him.

When they start there’s such a shock

as though the world had run amok

sound rips around the walls and hits

the ceiling, strikes the metal parts

of doors and watches, and the hearts

of sleepers who have come to life,

and young again, accept the knife

of youth and pain; the lightning bursts

in every space and now it’s Liszt’s

transfiguration, Gypsy grief

and desperation, time the thief, 

it weeps then changes with a bang,

to pure delight as high notes hang

above the hall so high they hurt

with panpipes conjuring a bird; 

they’re old, this audience, and know

that this is love, the silent bow

that holds suspended all they are

then lets them down through sunlit air;

the gypsy and the bird are free

like them, they leave him thankfully

in songs and dances, out the door

to Queensland which they never saw

the way they see it now, with strings

to all the loved remembered things.

Flying Foxes 

Mega-chiroptera

Fruit bats hang in clumps atop

the canopy. Plumb head-down drop

of screechbats. Nosferatu crops

of dangling-grippers shuffle out

on tight-crammed branches; poke to flex

ribbed, leather black umbrella wing

as prod displaces neighbour’s roost.

Stench circles trees in clouds of retch.

Night falls, then lifts of creatures streak

across the sky on ancient tracks,

air-trod by troops of foxbats, hot

to reach the fruit of memory,

wing wafts of time above the road.

Tienanmen Shopper

         Whatever happened to him

  that man with the shopping bag?

     You all saw how

     he moved from side to side,

     head erect, graceful,

     as the tank moved, 

     trying to avoid 

     his intransigent blocking figure.

     The driver was a man too, 

      and felt for this

     stubborn stubborn  man

     who refused refused  to

     move and we watched,

     hearts in mouths, never knowing

     whether he lived or died.

     What happened…what… what did happen

     to that stubborn stubborn  man?

Wild

Here for a flash then not. God, did you see

the streak of eyes, the fleeting blur, the space

vacated when you thought there was a face?

The silent grace where now a stolid tree

refuses to divulge just what it was

passed by its vigil. Four feet, two or none?

Grass won’t expose a creature to the sun.

Discretion in cahoots with beasts because

a law denies betrayal of the catch

to predators who watch but miss the track

till jaws or beak or claws make swift attack

when luck dismembers prey that met its match.

Each on its own united by the same

entrapment in an old sadistic game.

A scientific mechanism made

by particles that never feel afraid.

Posted on by Andrew Thornton-Norris

Richard Whiting – Comedy – The god of modern life

ANDREW THORNTON-NORRIS is the author of The Spiritual History of English, described by The Times as “an enjoyable, erudite and cohesive journey through the history and philosophy of English literature in 150 pithily written pages.” He is also an accomplished poet, described by the University Bookman as “refreshingly direct, in contrast to contemporary poets whose poems are like hearing half of a telephone conversation [his are] like a Renaissance painting of the Crucifixion falling off a museum wall onto a viewer.” His website is at www.thornton-norris.com

Richard Whiting

(Last Abbot of Glastonbury and Martyr)

My little children, lives stretched out before

Them, mine all but behind me. Relics of

The saints provide our continuity,

The ones who live in perpetuity,

Their bones and clothing, just like we are in.

The falling leaves are death, turned into life,

This child of myself, I see him cry,

Beside his father, as his father cries.

Comedy

Among the pagan dead, I caught a glimpse

Of what lies down below, of all the dead,

Their bodies writing in their torment, what

They thought was pleasure, now they know as pain.

The sea of souls above are swimming in

The light, and all the pilgrims on their way

Of penitence, from earth to heaven above,

Their eyes fixed on the light of holiness.

The god of modern life

A childlike god, more weak and petulant

Than Nero, clothed in gold and palaces

But destitute inside, with hatred where

Religious souls have love, and joy and peace.

So, throw them to the lions, let us love

Our selves, and those on our side alone,

As Germans did in nineteen forty three,

And so did we, in Dresden and Japan.

The empire is collapsing from inside,

And Mary is the mother we betray,

By our disobedience we wound,

Again, the Body of her Son, again.

Posted on by Rahul Gupta

Seasonal Interlude for an Arthurian epic: from Autumn


RAHUL GUPTA holds a PhD from the University of York for a thesis on Old English and Norse poetry and the 19th-20th century mediævalist alliterative revival. His poems, prose, and translations have been published in Agenda, Acumen, Eborakon, Equinox, Molly Bloom, Spectral Realms, and Wiðowinde, among other journals, and online by British Intelligence, and The Society of Classical Poets. His main enterprise is a reinterpretation of the Arthurian legends retold as an epic in ‘the most accomplished, imaginative and technically-correct alliterative verse in Modern English since Tolkien’ (Tom Shippey), from which two excerpts have appeared hitherto, in The Long Poem Magazine, Issue 15, May 2016, and, ‘one of the truly great mythic works of our time’ (John Matthews) in The Temenos Academy Review, Issue 21, 2018. Forthcoming publications include a volume of metrically-imitative verse-translations from Old English and Norse, seeking faithfully to retain the style and versification of the originals whilst being accurate and performable aloud, from Reaktion Books

* * *


[…] Zigzagging tines, zed-shaped lightning’s

pronged weapon probes  the primy soil:      

and we follow the flash, foining groundward

in his points’ pathway, to pierce the turf.

Let the earth open. We enter within.            Follow the lightning into the earth

Here levels below  living daylights

an under-earthen, otherworldly

landscape layered  below the surface

nests beneath us.

                          This unknown domain,

her roofs writhing  with roots of trees,

is the nameless netherdepth, benighted regions

of an occult kingdom:                                                   Katabasis: the Underworld

                           necropolis

of catacombs;

                           sarcophagi

decayed in crypts,

                           caves inhuming

putrid matter;                                                                                                              

                           sepulturings

enwombed in warrens,

                           winding myriad                                                         Tombs

charnel-chambers,

                           chimneys linking    

fœtid fogous,

                           foul souterrains,         

deep-delved dungeons:

                           dusky vaultage

—heaped-up deathsheads—

                            —hoards of longbones—

of grave-galleries;

                           groping steeply,

tombpassages twist                                       

                          through turnagains                                                                       

to undercrofts,

                          while oubliettes

fold fathoms downwards,

                          to Filth’s Mansion.

Pell-mell we plunge:

                          panoramic

horizons range

                         as we reach deeper:

like tumbledown,

                         topsy-turvy

sunken cities,

                         a sewerscape

of terraced wards,

                         tiers and platforms,                                                       Sewerage

doors downfallen,                              

                         to dark culverts

with grille-gratings, 

                         green slime-curtained;

canted causeways

                         on the chasms’ brink:

skewed screwthreading

                         escaliers

leaning, looming;

                           labyrinthine:

the abyss beckons,

                           the bowels of the Earth.

It yawns beyond; a yearning maw.

Here tribes of rats  get trapped by cave-ins,

wriggling rodents  whose runs are thwarted:

dead-ends their doom; dens are shrinking,

their nests narrowing  as numbers grow

in blind alleys  and blocked cisterns   

to a mangy mass  of mating bodies.

Like their neighbour vermin, knotting reptiles

—keystones crushing— they kitten yet;

till the chamber chokes  to chink and cranny

with tangled tails.   Teeth start to gnaw.

From the maze of tombs, the morgue-ullage

bleeds to these bilges; their black vomits

emulge and merge, commingled blend

of what seeps from cellars, with sordors leaching

to earthy entrails. For from all the jakes—

from countless catchments, through clogged spillways,

dreckcrusted drains, downspout scuppers,   

from every addlepool  and each latrine,

ripe reredorter, reasty midden,        

siegehouse, cesspit —of our sunlit world,

the gong-farmings  of garderobe soil,

loose cack of lasks, and laystall-slops,

helter-skelter, the whole system’s

sickly surfeit  of sewage-waste,

in a swilling swelchie, is swallowed down    

through intestine-tunnels, and tewel-pipes

from the upper echelons  to the enclaves beneath:

engulfed by gulches. The gurge of sludge

empties ordures  to the uttermost sump

where lurks waiting, in a lake of slime,

a prodigious dungheap.                                                                          Excrements

                                     Dirts steam. Dritt of foxes,   

                                     deer-turds. Merd and fewmet,

                                     scat, spraint; fiants, scumbered

                                     skite of otter-crottels;

                                     brock-muck. Brown waggyings

                                     brew, mix: sharn of vixen,

                                     critters’ crap, hare-buttons,

                                     crudded spoor, boars’ lesses           

in a cradling crucible.

                                 The crawling lees  

amalgamate, transmute fusing:

the realm of rottenness is rich with life.  

From clouds to clods, cleaving lightning

wracks with raptures  rainsodden loam,   

and by split seconds  the span between             

the high Heavens and humble Earth                                           

is bridged in brightness: embracing partners  

space sprung apart  espouse again.

Once twins entwined, that twain sundered:

the husband halved  from the whole forebear;                  

now sibling-father, and sister-wife                                              Autumn Equinox

marry for a moment, to mate powers                                                         

high, dry and hot —with the humid deep.

Attraction triggers  the trident-bolt,

the warm wedding  to wet and cold,

the air to fire; earth to water:                                                                 

as when Burn-the-Wind, at his blade-forging,        

that the redshort rod  be wrought to temper            

steeps it in wetness —the steel is slaked                       

amid sputtering fumes  sparks set alight

in quenching oils, to quell its ardour

(and the venoms unveil  viper-chevroned,

woven-welded, worm’s-tongue markings)

—so the glowing glaive, in glutting thrusts         

shooting downward, ensheathes his length.

Ground engulfs him. In her gravid lap

the charge is channelled; for change kindles

where his liquid lightnings  enliven dust.         Lightning fecundates the earth

Behold the happenings  of the hidden places;

witness wonders —from the worms’ vantage.

Shocks shaking her, he sheds darting,

fork-formed currents, forces spending

virile virtue.

                     Pervading the clays

are pores pooling  with pregnant fluids.                                 

Through dropsied ducts, drenched syrinx-glands

in coral clusters, course her issues,

unctions oozing, by ebbs and swells:

what subtle liquors  seep and filter,

yeast-yielding brines, yolky syrups

and saps surging, sifted lispings

in fistule-fissures? Fecund venters                                  

congest with juices  like the jellied slutch

that showers downward  from shooting stars

estranged to earth; sticky chrisms

spill through spiracles; from sponge-bladders,

limbeck-tinctures; elixirs stilling

hoarded honeydews, as harvests culled

from bread of bees, brood-comb drizzlings    

—moist motherlode  milch with nectars.         

The stagnant gulfs  stretch out for leagues

under fen-fastness, fog-bound marshes,

mould-mildewed tarns, and misty fells:

like troves of ore, treasure-laden

rills running through  the rankling dung;             

mine-wealthy malm. The Moon shines down,

her beams bathing  foreboding depths,

the lodes ripening  in lunar rays

and the mire is rife: minims thriving,

krill-creaturely  kinds of plankton,

embryonic  animalcules

at their feast of filth, feed and batten;

its sweats swelter: the swamp-mosses

hum with humours, heats are brooding

in queachy quags, bequickening 

eggs underground. An urgent drive,

for a spell, spurs them. Spores are stirring

awake to sprout  in their weird springtide;

pollen pullulates, to the pulse of the Moon:

cells in seedbeds.  These seminal motes,

cocooned kernels, like chrysalids

shog in their swaddlings: shoot spicules forth,

chaffhusks chinking  as chits are hatching   

from bulging pods, with bat-squeakings,         

in throbbing throes. Threadlets burgeon

to knosplike nebs, whose nippled spires

unfurl feelers  with fanning strands

and barbs burrow  from the umbilical stalk;    

spikes spawn outwards, spider talons

sneaking snakewise.

                                Snail-horn probings

now creep, recoil; then crawl anew,

reaching runners, ramifying

twig-antennæ, that tillow again:

look how the likeness  of the levin-flash

imprints and repeats  in the pattern figured,

as izzard emblems, by the angled forking

of vein-branches, against the varves’ blackness,

pairing, parting; puny scions                                        

like marbling maggots, the murky clods  

riddled with roothairs, wriggling vivers;

weevils delving  worm-farm layers                             

and rifted vugs.    Ravelled suckers                                           

flex flossing wide, in flower-whorling

topdownward trees, their tufted plumes

of glairy gauzes, like gossamer skeins

of squirming thongs.

                                 Squirreltail, thistledown,

filigree fibres  frond their tassels,

twisting, twining; the twirling bines

will splay and split, then splice oscules,  

reticulate   tentacular

chenille nervures.   Thus the net-weaving   

germs engender  a giant ganglion,                

mercurial cobweb, catscradlewise;

node knits to lobe, as a loom shuttles          

a weft-texture, the wiry members

tendril-tissued: a teeming polyp,

quarl of quicksilver. By quetch and spasm

the molten mass  is mapped in darkness,

leviathan-vast.

                          Vivifying,

it inhales and heaves: a heart panting

or brain beating, or as breathing lungs

work in entrails; and wavering sobs

retch restlessly. With rippling surges    

the sprawling globe  spreads yet farther

by ceaseless seethings, circulating

lymphs and ichors; till in labour-pangs   

its ballooning shape  dilates warping.

The morphing mesh  transmogrifies

and with thrilling shudders  it thrusts aloft,

climbs in corkscrews up  to the crust overhead:

fat fruitbodies,  forcing through turves.

From shadowed taths, shapes come pricking,

grope above the grass. Growths are stirring,

bald and gibbous; bulbs are swollen,

puffball-like orbs, whose pimpled membranes

are groined with gills, glabrous-wattled

blanched blubberflesh, bloated organs,

limbs lazarlike; leprous-hided,

sepulchral-pale, they poke upward

from cadaverous depths —dead men’s fingers;

bearded bellyache;

                                 bug agarick, 

webbedpate, skullcap;

                                 witches’ button,

the lewd stinkhorn

                                 and livid earthshank;

skewbald hoodwink,

                                 scurfy funnel;

dwarvish dwalecup,

                                 dwimmer-goblet,

clubfoot-candle;

                                 carl-on-horseback,

charnel-bonnet;

                                 chilly waxglove,

sallowbracket,

                                 sickly milkgall.

Squame-warted squabs  squeeze in sending

stems striking out. Staves like truncheons

unsheathe their shafts, to show helmets,

raise round targes  with rimmed umbos:

espy these spears —a spectral levy

of midnight-mustering  homunculi,

wan weaponedmen, in worm-eaten

carrion-coloured  accoutrements

of clammy coifs  and clinging veils,

by rank on rank, or in rancid circles,

lifts its lances, locks the shieldwall:

earthen armies. From under the ground

—the reek of decay —rotting scarecrows—

they advance in onslaught, an invading horde,

wraiths risen again, arrayed for battle

in dim dreamings  dawn breaks shivering

their feinted front; falter, melt blurring                                 

to stipes like straw …the stuff of shadows

that dwindle to dust. The day broadens

till wilting culms, and caps withering,

return as toadstools.                                                                    Autumn toadstools

                                It is the time of Samhain’s

Cross-Quarter feast, calends of Winter

and a season’s end […]                                                                              


* * *

Posted on by Derek Turner

Stuff and nonsense

The Culture of My Stuff

Adam Crothers, Carcanet, 2020, 84 pps, £10.99

DEREK TURNER finds a celebrated poet’s latest collection dazzling but lightweight

This slender assemblage comes weighted with prestige – Adam Crothers’ prize-winning history (Shine/Strong and Seamus Heaney Centre in 2017), and endorsements of his latest offering by equally well-regarded contemporaries. But any potential ponderousness is undercut even before opening. These are “political nonsense rhymes”, says the back cover. It is “a joybomb of wit, play, sass and Heideggerian thinginess”, Caoilinn Hughes enthuses – “linguistic pirouetting”, smiles Susannah Dickey – while for Thomas McCarthy, Crowther’s unmistakable Ulsterness has been given “a metallic spray-job in some garage near the English fens” (Crothers lives in Cambridge).

“Sass” has probably never been applied to anything truly substantial, and “linguistic pirouetting” sounds ominously like riddling for riddling’s sake. The terms are therefore unfortunately applicable to this corpus, notwithstanding many excellent qualities. McCarthy’s motoring metaphor may get closest of all, because these poems feel full of restless discontent – and below their pearlescent pigments you can see a running-to-rust cultural chassis. Crothers’ work glisters with novel imagery, unlikely rhymes, and humorous self-awareness, but all these painterly effects take priority over the bits of the vehicle that need to touch the ground.

The poems feel oddly evanescent, although they mask an ostensibly rational materialist philosophy. “Stuff” and “culture” in this worldview are almost-equivalents, as if culture derives ultimately from possessions. Clothes mostly make the man according to this outlook, culture is contextual and life transactional, and poetry is more about musicality than meaningfulness. The most irreducible ideas, identities, and issues are seen through a reductive prism, as if Brexit, colonialism, nationalism, Protestantism, the Troubles, Trump, the ‘male gaze’ and other conventional talking points are mostly traceable to the murky operations of markets, and Western moral bankruptcy. To go back to the back cover, Crothers is “unable to transcend the consumerist violence of the world”.

This is a glittering sports car being driven at speed across broken country; you admire, and sometimes wince, as you watch. And the poet may half-know, in ‘Cernunnos’ lamenting the 

vocabularies of being away. 
Vocabularies of an absent god.

Elsewhere, 

Hell is other people having one hell of a year 
Heaven is a half rhyme. God is queer

Is he avaunting the Void with his vast cleverness?

It feels difficult to care about archly-evoked STDs –

“Well excuse me while I feng-shui the universe 
To accommodate your double-parked aura! 
There’s something impolite behind your arras”.

It is tempting to flick past the rhyming dictionary-reminiscent

“dead mirrorballs throwing shades like it’s panties 
Over my ruckus, I can scarcely hear Dante”

or the improbable pairings of blink, skink, mink, kink, stink and plinks in ‘Parrhasius’.

Yet there are fine moments when the playfulness is put away, as in ‘Muntjac’, a cold camera-trap snap of ultra-alertness –

“The night’s stick
Snaps beneath a beautiful frigid hoof. 
Faith, frighted, yields what little ground was gained.”

It feels like genuine tenderness in ‘Goldfinch’ –

“Of the two finches glimpsed in the garden 
I can filch no vocab to farewell the gone one”

But then the showing off comes surging back, like the wit-for-wit’s-sake ‘Deriding a horse’ –

“Slag nag. It’s nigh ridiculous that you’re 
The gal in gallop and the can’t in canter 
The sad in saddle-sores on the Infanta 
Persisting in your grand vainglory. Lor”

To quote his ‘Nugget’, such touches make the reader want to “Make like the sheepdog and get the flock out of there”.

And this is a shame, because behind all the flourishes there is feeling, beyond the artifice a sense of a likeable man astutely alive in our too often nonsensical world.

Posted on by Peter B. Gemma

Is there a future for ‘Trumpism’?

PETER B. GEMMA says ‘Trumpism’ was always more about attitude than ideas

The future of “Trumpism,” (geez, I hate that term on so many levels as you will find out), is really a two-part question: American politics with or without Donald Trump. The quick answer is of course, President Donald Trump (he still is as I write; and, no, after January I will not be saying “Biden? He’s not my President”, as the Clintonites have done for four years) will long have an impact on politics.

This writer has never had a legitimate job; political campaigns and issue advocacy is all I know. I read every word of political junk mail, hold my breath when campaign commercials come on, and I ingest the writings of commentators, no matter what the axe they may be grinding. One of my favorites is Andrew Sullivan, the British-born American author, blogger, and former editor of The New Republic. He is a left-wing pundit full of common sense. In his essay, “Trump Is Gone. Trumpism Just Arrived,”[1] Sullivan says it best:

His impact, however, is undeniable. Neoconservatism is over; globalization as some kind of conservative principle is over; a conservatism that allows for or looks away from unrestrained mass immigration is over. What was cemented in place this week is a new GOP, not unlike the new Tories in the UK. They’re nationalist, culturally conservative, geared toward the losers of capitalism as well as its winners, and mildly protectionist and isolationist. It is a natural response to the unintended consequences of neoliberalism’s success under a conservative banner. And it speaks in a language that working class Americans understand, devoid of the woke neologisms of the educated elite. It seems to me that this formula is a far more settled and electorally potent coalition than what we now see among the deeply divided Democrats.

Barry Goldwater on the campaign trail

A quick glance back: I do not have time to tell the story of 1964, when the conservative icon Barry Goldwater was defeated by Lyndon Johnson in a landslide, and whose most ardent supporters rallied to the cry, “26,000,000 Americans can’t be wrong!” They went on to create the Reagan era. Goldwater’s movement ain’t got nothin’ on what the Trump loyalists could do if they believe 74,000,000 Americans can’t be wrong.

Of course, it’s not that easy an equation, given the political/philosophical/social mish-mash of followers Trump attracted and the current wailing and gnashing of teeth about a ‘stolen’ election, but you get the drift: if we take our loses, learn some lessons, we can lurch forward.

Before we look at what might be next in politics, it’s time to address the what the current election fuss is all about. Did Trump really lose? After all, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to call into question Biden’s winning margin in swing states. In the final months of the campaign, the ground rules of the election changed in a way that helped Democrats and stymied Republicans. In Pennsylvania, where ballots received after the election were counted (not kosher in any previous election), 63% of the mail-in ballot requests came from Democrats, and 25% from Republicans. In North Carolina, 46 % of mail-in ballots were from Democrats, and just 20% were from Republicans. In a contest with an historic turnout, President-elect Joe Biden apparently topped President Donald Trump by nearly seven million votes, and 74 votes in the Electoral College, but his victory really was stitched together with narrow margins in a handful of states with . As National Public Radio pointed out,

just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College. Of course, Trump is no stranger to narrow victories. He won the 2016 election thanks to just under 80,000 combined votes in three of six key states [2]

Does the American democratic election process work? Yes. Is there a factor of fraud and honest mistakes in every count? Yes. Is a stolen election easy to prove? Not very often, and most likely in local races. Will the entire 2020 election results be overthrown? Nope.

The election-was-stolen-and-all-is-lost hysteria among some conservatives reminds this writer of the Obama birth certificate hoopla. Sure, there may have been some reasons to doubt Barack Hussein Obama was born in the United States, thus making him ineligible to serve, but time marched on. There certainly wasn’t enough solid legal evidence, so reality had to be faced. Once conservatives got out of the mode of ‘he’s not my President’ and hunkered down for guerilla warfare against the Democrats, Donald Trump sensed there was a movement to lead and he triumphed.

“Donald Trump sensed there was a movement to lead…”

What the hell happened?

Again, I turn to Andrew Sullivan:

This was far from the Biden landslide I had been dreaming about a few weeks back. It was rather the moment that the American people surgically removed an unhinged leader and re-endorsed the gist of his politics. It was the moment that Trump’s core message was seared into one of our major political parties for the foreseeable future, and realigned American politics.

Trump was deliberately bellicose and belligerent, eliciting cheers from his supporters for his chutzpah and gasps from everyone else, including swing voters.

NBC political analysts described the election happened this way:

Heading into the election, Democrats dreamed it would go something like Star Wars, with rebel forces blowing up the Death Star and celebrating in the streets as a blue wave swept them into power in Washington and state capitals across the country, but President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory ended up looking more like the horror movie Alien, with the last bedraggled survivor kicking the monster out the airlock and then drifting off to an uncertain fate in deep dark space. And wherever they ended up, there would probably be another alien…the results were brutal down the ballot for Democrats in ways that could haunt them for years [3]

So, what really happened? Trump lost. He pushed the envelope of civility and consistency off the edge. As conservative commentator Tucker Carlson tells it,

Donald Trump is a talker, a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he’s a full-blown BS artist

The appearance of boldness and defiance was a two-edged sword, with one side, explainable as a self-made New York tough guy, but the other was a bit sharper: inconsistent, incompetent, and uncaring.

Trump did instigate a (nascent) movement, which is hard to assess this early, but something is shaking the ground. In an amazing showing, Trump supporters squared off against powerful special interests, from the media to Wall Street moguls, and they are still standing. About 98% of political contributions from internet companies this cycle went to Democrats, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The CEOs of Asana, Twilio, and Netflix were among the biggest contributors, and they all targeted Democratic groups and candidates.

One interesting sidebar: the media’s censorship of negative stories about Joe Biden may have cost Trump the election, according to a poll published by the Media Research Center (MRC). Among those surveyed, one in six Biden voters said they would not have voted for the president-elect if they had been aware of one or more of negative news stories presented to them, the poll found. MRC’s poll, conducted by The Polling Company, asked voters about eight news stories that “the liberal news media had failed to cover properly,” a press release from MRC stated. “A shift of this magnitude would have changed the outcome in all six of the swing states won by Joe Biden,” the MRC determined.[4]

New York Post columnist Karol Marcowicz noted,

The big takeaway from the Trump years for conservatives should be that the era of politeness when dealing with an impossibly biased, and agenda-driven, legacy media has ended and should never return. Republicans in general, and conservatives in particular, had come to expect that they would never be treated fairly by the news media. To the legacy media, Republicans fell into two categories: Hitler or worse than Hitler. Republicans considered avoidance better than confrontation. Donald Trump didn’t. Supporters made Trump’s willingness to fight a key refrain. He does not take things in stride. He punches back. Even for conservatives who opposed him, such as me, it was fun to watch. He called out everything and everyone [5]

The Democrats were caught by surprise in November. After four long years of demonizing Donald Trump (and he made it soooo easy), they reached deep into their pockets to fund a blue wave: states were targeted to flip local legislatures; overturning the Republican majority in the Senate was a glorious crusade, and strengthening the edge Democrats held in the Congress was an easy win. Democrats ran the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, outraising Trump by about 60%. However …

  • In key U.S. Senate races, Democrats outspent Republicans: in Maine, it was $70 million to $24 million, but they lost by nine points; Republican majority leader Senator Mitch McConnell was re-elected in a landslide despite falling $40 million short of what his opponent raised; Republicans won the Alaska Senate seat although the Democrats spent twice as much money; and in North Carolina, the Democrat vs. Republican spending ratio was nearly three-to-one but they were defeated. The two Senate seats in Georgia are still in play in a run-off, however, historically Republicans are favored there.
  • Democrats now have the narrowest margin in the House of Representatives since World War II – not a single Republican incumbent, all tightly tied by their opponents to President Trump, was defeated. With their dramatic gains this year, the House is, by historical political measure, headed for a party flip in 2022.
  • The blue wave of 2018 left Democrats just a few seats away from a majority in a dozen state chambers. They lost across the board, with Republicans actually flipping control of two state legislatures in states that Biden won. Republicans will have control next year of 20 state governments that will collectively draw 188 new congressional districts, while the Democrats will control 73 districts; the number of Republican governors increased to a 27-23 margin.

The governing implications for Joe Biden and the Democrats are stark: getting any sort of partisan measure through the House will require near-unanimity inside their party, forcing negotiations with various factions of lawmakers resulting in fewer aspirational “messaging” bills and radical legislation. Meanwhile, an emboldened Republican minority will look to wreak havoc and magnify internal disputes ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Trump lost, but did Trumpism win?

I don’t really know, but some people think so. Here’s Andrew Sullivan’s take:

This mass secret vote revealed that the New York Times’ woke narrative of America – the centuries-long suffocating oppression of minorities and women by cis white straight men – is simply a niche elite belief, invented in a bubble academy, and imposed by bullying, shaming and if possible, firing dissenters. Some of us who refused to cower can gain real satisfaction from knowing we were not mad, not evil, not bigots, and that a huge swathe of our fellow citizens agrees

J.D. Scholten, a promising but losing Democratic congressional candidate in Iowa, put it this way: “There’s something culturally that is working for Republicans and it’s definitely not for Democrats,” noting that his campaign message faulting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus didn’t resonate with voters. He called the election a “Trump tidal wave” in rural areas, places where Democrats had made some progress in the state in the 2018 midterm election: “We got smoked. There’s no sugarcoating it.”[6]

A Democrat campaign manager for a local candidate in Pennsylvania said,

There’s a significant difference between a referendum on a clown show, which is what we had at the top of the ticket, and embracing the values of the Democratic ticket…People bought into Joe Biden to stop the insanity in the White House. They did not suddenly become Democrats

So, the Democrats lost, Republicans did far better than expected, but did Trumpism as a movement win?

Peering through the smoke that follows the 2020 election battle, there seems to be a new coalition forging so perhaps it is true that there is a Trump movement, but it looks like people, not an “ism.”

Biden and Trump represent starkly different Americas, according to the Associated Press VoteCast survey of more than 110,000 voters in all 50 states. Trump voters in the survey were overwhelmingly white—about 86% nationally—compared with 62% of Biden voters. Only a fourth of Biden supporters come from small towns or rural areas. Nearly half of Trump voters live in those areas. More white women voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 (55%) compared to the 52% who voted for him in 2016, according to a New York Times exit poll. Trump solidified his base; he even pulled out more voters in New York City, where he cut his home ties and moved to Florida, than he did four years ago.

Biden was the beneficiary of a anyone-but-Trump constituency. Among Trump voters, 90% say they voted for the president, while just eight percent said they were voting against Biden. Among Democrats, only 56% said they were voting for Biden. Twenty-nine percent revealed they were voting against Trump, while a surprisingly high 15% were not sure.[7]

Andrew Sullivan dug into other statistics:

For the past five years, Democrats have been telling us that Trump and his supporters were white supremacists, that he was indeed the “First White President,” that all minorities were under assault by the modern day equivalent of the KKK. And yet, the GOP got the highest proportion of the minority vote since 1960!

Sullivan goes on to use another exclamation point:

Twenty-eight percent of the gay, lesbian and transgender population also went for Trump. The gay vote for Trump may have doubled! White women still voted for Trump by 55%. Among white women with no college education, arguably those most vulnerable to the predations of men [like Trump] gave him 60% support.

Sullivan could use another exclamation point: Trump increased support from Black voters by 50%, the largest share of that constituency any Republican has garnered in a half century! (He also carried a majority of the Native American vote.) The Democrats’ rejection among white, working-class voters (not poor people), particularly in rural areas and small towns, helped lead to their disappointments and a demographic description of a Trump movement.

Democrats have largely abandoned the working and middle class. Trump won three-quarters of the white working-class vote, down only slightly from 2016. He did best with those who work with their hands, in factories, the logistics industry and energy, notes a recent study by CityLab. Some 10,000 small businesses have closed because of Draconian edicts overwhelmingly put in place by Democrats. The residual effect, politically, has just begun.

Let me be clear at this point: Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. The Democrats identified, motivated, and got out a record-breaking number of supporters, albeit on what seems to be an anti-Trump message. Indeed, Biden (according to exit polls) still won nearly three-quarters of nonwhite voters, a majority of union members, and a majority of those making under $100,000.

In politics and public policy debates, change happens mainly on the margin. Small riders – issue ornaments – to big bills, can make or break whole legislative agendas. Slight shifts in demographics and small inroads into key constituencies can change the outcome of an election and help define a movement. 

A postcard from the Spanish-American War, when Americans helped Cubans throw off Spanish rule

Currently, the face of Trumpism is not quite in focus. Donald Trump lost the presidency but showed Republicans a way to win the culture wars with working-class Hispanics by not talking to them as Hispanics. Trump earned 28% of Latino votes in 2016 and approximately 32% in 2020. Despite four years of being defined as a racist for his rhetoric and immigration policies, Trump improved his margins in 78 of the nation’s 100 majority-Hispanic counties.

“We can’t even fathom that there are a lot of Mexicans who love Donald Trump,” said Chuck Rocha, a Texas-raised Democratic strategist who runs Nuestro PAC, a super PAC focused on Latino outreach. “Biden won, and that’s great, but everything underneath Biden was a huge catastrophe.” Congressman Henry Cuellar (D-TX) explained the phenomenon this way: “What Trump did is understand the basic values of Hispanics.”

As Biden forces ran the usual Spanish-language ads, Donald Trump, Jr. visited a Hispanic Pentecostal church to campaign for his father – far more visible. A 2017 Pew Research study concluded,

Most Latinos see religion as a moral compass to guide their own political thinking, and they expect the same of their political leader [and] most Latinos view the pulpit as an appropriate place to address social and political issues. Latinos who are evangelicals are twice as likely as those who are Catholics to identify with the Republican Party [8]

The President launched “Evangelicals for Trump” in January by visiting El Rey Jesús Global, a megachurch in Miami led by Pastor Guillermo Maldonado.

Miami-Dade is Florida’s largest county with the largest Latino population. Trump lost there by almost 30 %age points in 2016. He lost it by just seven points in November. Florida Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who was defeated in her re-election bid, said the Democratic Party “thinks racial identity is how we vote.”

For years, Democrats expressed confidence that the country’s increasingly diverse, less-white electorate would give them an edge long-term over Republicans. Identity politics of the Democrats, “what’s in it for us,” lost. Trump’s version “it’s us versus them,” won.

“What’s in it for us” even took a beating in California where there is a majority-minority population: voters defeated an attempt to revoke a 1996 binding referendum that banned the use of race, national origin, or sex by state universities and other agencies. The left has spent almost a quarter-century trying to reverse that policy, but its latest attempt lost handily despite a 14-to-one margin in campaign spending.

There was a discernible (even remarkable) shift on the margins according to election results data, and the media elite are noticing. Axios CEO Jim VandeHei conceded,

The media remains fairly clueless about the America that exists outside of the big cities, where most political writers and editors live. The coverage missed badly the surge in Trump voters in places obvious (rural America) and less obvious (Hispanic-heavy border towns in Texas)

He chides his fellow elites too:

Let’s be honest: Many of us under-appreciated the appeal of Trump’s anti-socialism message and the backlash against the defund-the-police rhetoric on the left. The media (and many Democrats) are clueless about the needs, wants and trends of Hispanic voters. Top Latinos warned about overlooking and misreading the fastest-growing population in America, but most didn’t listen. Hispanics will shape huge chunks of America’s political future

The future of something called Trumpism is in the hands of grass roots Trump supporters, and they may have momentum as fissures between traditional liberal Democrats and far-left progressives are cracking. Writer and left-wing activist Lauren Martinchek notes,

There is no Donald Trump the boogeyman for them [mainstream Democrats] to hide behind anymore. Whether they like it or not, especially with Trump out of the way, the left is not through with the Democratic party. While the liberals go back to brunch, we’ll gladly be getting ready for primaries. We don’t have the time, nor the patience to sit here and listen while loyal liberal voters inevitably tell us to pipe down because midterms are on the way. You had 2020. We’ll take it from here [9]

The Democrats seem likely to give Trump (as a shadow President who doesn’t know how to whisper) the opportunity to represent a large portion of the American middle and working classes over the next four years. He will embolden his supporters to be active and, frankly, a pain in the ass for Democrats and Republicans. The Biden agenda will be tweaked, stymied, compromised, and come under fire by the left and right in Congress.[10] David Shor, a Democratic polling and data expert who advised liberal political action committees this cycle, observed,

It is mathematically almost impossible for our current coalition to wield electoral power…There’s a lot of people in the party who are uncomfortable with the implications of the idea that we really have to adopt a maximalist attempt to appeal to (white) working-class voters

These conditions look very promising for a Trumpism movement. Save for one thing: Donald Trump.

The real question is, what is Trumpism?

If you string together all the data and observations above, the answer looks like there is a movement afoot, a new coalition of voters that have the political elites worried. However, movements, especially those led by charismatic leaders, come and go.

Congressman Ron Paul’s Republican presidential crusades of 1992 and 1996 raised buckets of money, attracted thousands to rallies, and scored far better than pollsters predicted. Without Ron Paul as the active figurehead, they have become one influence within the Republican Party (I was a paid consultant for the Paul campaign in those races). Senator Bernie Sanders, Paul’s mirror image in the Democrat Party, started a movement via his campaigns of 2016 and 2020 which is having great impact on the political process – that movement may last beyond Sanders himself as new socialist firebrands arise, namely Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It’s hard to define Trump’s following as a movement because there is no ideological definition of “Trumpism.” Trump wrote red-ink annual budgets. He’s no fiscal conservative but he converted the formerly tightwad Republicans into supporting more national debt. He is a progressive when it comes to gay rights and inclusion, something that doesn’t mix well with his ardent pro-life and Evangelical base. Trump tends to shy away from international military excursions, angst for the heart and soul of traditional Republican war hawks and their moneyed arms industry friends. What unites the wide variety of constituencies that was hammered together over the past four years is Donald Trump himself. His machismo attitude, anti-establishment rhetoric, and something for everyone agenda (ill-defined populism) added up to a remarkable political statement in 2020, albeit he lost the presidency. At any given time, Trump was a moderate, conservative, populist, nationalist, or almost any combination thereof.

The famous ‘King-Emperor’ meme

Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, whose names one can associate with a particular world vision, the thought of Donald Trump brings his style to mind: authoritarian, pugnacious, and contrarian, which in turn can be applied to positions on guns, immigration, foreign trade, etc. In fact, the Trump style, can at any time give emphasis to look nationalist, populist, or traditionally Republican in appearance. That inconsistency actually turned into a magnet because of Donald Trump playing Donald Trump; the glue to his particular coalition is in his blood.

Joel Kotkin, Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University: noted,

Trump’s challenge to the establishmentarian worldview will resonate, even after the election. His willingness to stand up to China’s trade policies violated the interests of the corporate elite, tech, Hollywood, and the mainstream media, all of whom almost without exception backed his opponent

Donald Trump is an anti-establishment personality, but does not represent a philosophy or an ideology, the why of Trumpism. It isn’t even about the how Trumpism works, since Donald Trump’s way of business and government is chaotic.

I’m afraid the essence of Trumpism is Donald Trump. Most of his issues have been on the agenda of conservatives and Republicans for generations: a robust economy via low taxes, minimal government regulation; very shy of international entanglements, always uphold law and order. Those platforms made political conservatives moderately successful in recent years, with some emphasis or exemptions. Different shades of traditional issues, often itself shaded by political figureheads, actually define populist, nationalist, socialist, etc. What brought Republicans into the White House was the very personality of Donald Trump. His narrow loss in 2020 was remarkable in that the issues he originally campaigned on – seasoned by the way he actually served as President (and as perceived by the media) – resulted in 12 million more supporters (significant considering a small segment of Republicans had walked away.) They didn’t flock to the polls because we needed a strong China policy, or easier/cheaper ways to produce oil, or even the promise of a wall between Mexico and America, it was because Donald Trump was promising those things which brought out 74,000,000 voters.

As Pat Buchanan observed,

The American electorate failed to perform its designated role in the establishment’s morality play. Nor was it repudiated by the people if, by Trumpism, one means ‘America First’ nationalism, securing our borders, using tariffs to bring back our manufacturing base, bidding goodbye to globalism, staying out of unnecessary wars and swearing off ideological crusades [11] 

For better or worse, because of Donald Trump, there will have to be a personality attached to a platform so it can be interpreted as populist, nationalist, conservative, and moderate as needed (Joe Biden was the anti-personality personality attached to a neo-socialist platform doing the same thing). If not Donald Trump, then it will have to be a candidate whose technique and can give a shine of vibrant hues to the party platform. Trumpism without Trump will have to be a different “ism,” because the real legacy of Donald Trump isn’t a movement but a style.

[1] https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/trump-is-gone-trumpism-just-arrived-886?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMjY1MzM1NiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTgwNzU2MjQsIl8iOiJLcHZ5KyIsImlhdCI6MTYwNDY5MjkwOSwiZXhwIjoxNjA0Njk2NTA5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNjEzNzEiLCJzdWIiOiJwb3N0LXJlYWN0aW9uIn0.Q9Bk8TA9gYzVDURfGispo_RJS3fHe0dk8ARC08pX8kI&fbclid=IwAR2SFU–uwMdcWQKDT3uQr4HA9Noi-Mxo56IQ8XdZ0jfGWfliEAk0lEjqiE

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/12/02/940689086/narrow-wins-in-these-key-states-powered-biden-to-the-presidency

[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/huge-catastrophe-democrats-grapple-congressional-state-election-losses-n1248529

[4] https://dailycaller.com/2020/11/24/media-censoring-negative-joe-biden-news-cost-donald-trump-election-mrc-poll/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2360&pnespid=1OUzr.1EDAuNq3C.fd.dXHaG2bV_2iQ16vVkjhkM&fbclid=IwAR05JlsCqb2S7Z9cxo9MtJWevzOu9g67gmpWqycREqOH_32y8A–7DPqRn8

[5] www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/trumpisms-next-act

[6] “2020 Election Lesson: Trump’s Coalition Proved Durable,” byJoshua Jamerson, Julie Bykowicz, andChad Day, Wall Street Journal, November 4, 2020 

[7] www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2020/only_56_of_biden_voters_say_they_were_voting_for_biden

[8] https://www.pewforum.org/2007/04/25/changing-faiths-latinos-and-the-transformation-of-american-religion-2/

[9] https://medium.com/discourse/november-3rd-was-a-rejection-of-the-democratic-party-abcf543624bf

[10] Politically, what’s ahead does not frighten this writer. The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in a short statement to Congress, explained why a divided American government, with the three branches split among differing parties and ideologies, works best for the Republic: things move slowly, ensuring no radical transformation, alteration, or reversal that ultimately will not change the basic framework set out by the Founding Fathers (www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/antoninscaliaamericanexceptionalism.htm)

[11] https://buchanan.org/blog/trumpism-lives-on-142330

Posted on by Alexander Adams · 1 Comment

From iconoclasm to ruins

All paintings by the author
ALEXANDER ADAMS surveys the story of deliberate destruction

We are familiar with the folly and – from the Baroque period onward – the purposefully constructed ruin used to enhance the pathos of a place, most especially a view of a country estate. This would be a view that could be controlled, protected and secluded, reserved for the delectation of initiates, guests, devotees and – crudely – the owners of the land. For if wildness can be fabricated as easily as order, then ersatz history can also be generated to meet the expectations of the cultivated observer. The frisson of melancholy, the stimulation of imagination and the contentment of viewing destruction from a position of comfort are experiences the ruin can provide. Whether or not that ruin is ‘real’ is a matter of degree. After all, a building as a habitable residence and as a blasted ruin are separated by less than a human lifespan and can be produced through merely absence of funds or care. It can be cultivated by purposeful neglect as well as it can be forged by purposeful intent.  

Ruins as an aesthetic

The Romantic relic is generated through defacement plus time, one encountered in a time of tranquillity by a traveller, for it is the curious traveller or pilgrim who fully sees the artefacts in a way that inhabitants of the region cannot. Consider Piranesi’s views of Rome. Among the ruins – greatly enlarged by the artist – the Romans of the day continue their quotidian lives heedless of the grandeur their squalid lives animate. They cannibalise palaces and bath houses to build their meagre abodes. These Romans are portrayed in a way to contrast them with the nobility, purpose and polity of their Roman ancestors. Where the elder Romans were capable of epic achievements unmatched, the latter-day Romans can only rob and scavenge their ancestors’ ruins. Thus, the Romans of Piranesi’s day were little better than parasites or termites eroding their habitat to eek out their paltry existences. In Piranesi’s Rome, Man (brought low from his high estate) is no more or less than a mean function of Nature, like wind, rain or the roots of plants, destined to topple even the sturdiest of towers. Piranesi’s Romans are little different from animals which graze under the pinnacles of an abandoned cathedral spire. It is surely their very indifference which makes them animals; it is the traveller, pilgrim and connoisseur (one who can afford and appreciate the prints of an artist such as Piranesi) who is the moral being because he responds to art and comprehends history, thus elevating himself above the animals of the field and wood.

Note that tranquillity is prerequisite for the appreciation of nature and the ruin. Not only is measured contemplation in a time turbulence or movement impossible, but for a ruin to have stately gravity, erosion must be halted (or slowed) to a state where it is not perceptible to the mortal. For a ruin to have a timeless quality, time cannot be seen to be changing its subject visibly in “human time”. A sand castle being washed away by the waves is not noble. However, if the castle were large enough (or, conversely, the spectator small enough) and the waves slowed to a nearly imperceptible speed, then nobility would be achieved. Bears fighting is awe-inspiring; sparrows fighting is comic. Again, if those sparrows were large enough and fought more slowly, then they would inspire awe. The essential material conditions of sand castles and sparrows do not preclude grandeur; it is the framing of these beings that determines their emotional impact upon the viewer. It is our perception – not our comprehension or the material attributes of that which we contemplate – which imbues a subject with emotional weight and determines the amount of significance we attribute to it.

What separates the Romantic ruin from evidence of atrocity? How does shock and anger shade into estimable melancholy and detached contemplation? Time is surely one factor. When I painted the ruins of Berlin photographed in 1945, I was fascinated by their visual correlation to ruined abbeys and castles and yet the historical immediacy impinged upon my understanding of them. Captured photographically in 1945, they were too raw, too fresh, too soused in newly spilled blood to be Romantic. Did, I wondered, my translations of these images into paint take away their sting? When I painted from photographs of battlefields, I was unsure as to whether I was just playing in the mud of Flanders, turning soil, fetid water and shattered tree trunks into brush strokes that were dainty and earnest, slashed with élan or arbitrarily revised. Who was to say that I was not more selfish, cavalier and flippant than any Georgian poet or Victorian historian, considering my (comparably) much greater appreciation of the atrocities connected to these battle fields compared to any comprehension they might have had about the subjects of their contemplation?

Ignorance numbs. To the uninitiated, the crofters’ cottages of the Scottish Highlands have a tragic timelessness. Yet once one understands that crofters were sometimes forcibly evicted from their inherited homesteads, these buildings seem more a marker of political and socio-economic forces than simple tides of time. Lady Butler could take as her subject the Irish crofter departing her home for the final time as a contemporary subject, pointed in its political commentary. Over one century later, her painting and the ruined cottage carry emotional charges, if one has the basic information that allows the subject to become legible. The information needs to be recorded and imparted through conscious will.

Sometimes the landscape remembers for us. In dry summers, when water demand is high, the levels of a reservoir in mountainous North Wales sink low and, for a few days, the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn are revealed. The stone walls of houses and chapels are upright and dry under the hot sun, standing over pools of drying mud. Former residents can see the lost streets of their home village, lost when the valley was flooded in 1965 to provide the expanding thirsty conurbations of north-east England with potable water. Disgruntled Welsh nationalists paint anti-English slogans on the walls in white paint. No one paints on the slag heaps of the Rhondda Valley despoiled by miners; instead, their artificial outlines are abraded by foliage and erosion.

Sometimes we ourselves become ghosts – walking ruins. When a Cockney visits the back streets of Stepney to be surrounded by Bangladeshis and Somalis, is he any different from a Canarse Indian viewing the first palisades of Fort Amsterdam erected on the tip of Manhattan island? It is the visitor returning to his homeland who is the relic, the last fragment of the past washed up on a shore made newly unfamiliar. It is he who is out of time, like the Flying Dutchman drifting the oceans. He is the ruin, looked at by native eyes as a curiosity of history, a temporal aberration. In time, his mortal remains will mimic the ruin. His bones will imitate the exposed beams and the vacant eye sockets of his skull will be the glassless windows of the abandoned house. 

Decay is demonstrative of the passage of time. Time is difficult to measure visually, especially in a momentary encounter or a static record (a work of art or photograph), so visual evidence of decay – staining, erosion, cracking, weathering, lichen – forms the tangible mark of the passage of time. As for statues, we incorporate insults into their meaning. The hammer marks of statue defilers become the patina of our antiquities, absorbed into the meaning of the statue read backwards. A form of teleology, if you like. The statue was made to be defiled, lost, unearthed, traded and placed in an art museum for our momentary diversion. Art + time = pathos.

Buildings as their own memorials

This idea of decay spawning pathos is connected to the idea of a building as its own memorial. The building’s full potential is only realised in its ravaged, ruined form, when it can symbolise of the loss of a civilisation, religion or people. Only once it has served its first stage of utility can it enter its second stage of utility – as a former building.

When Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler discussed the grand architectural projects of the Third Reich, they referred to their projected buildings’ afterlife as ruins. Strange as it may seem for a regime which expressed a desire to last a thousand years (matching that of Rome), the planners of the regime had half an eye on the debris of their country as a failed civilisation, which was to manifest itself as ruins at which travellers would marvel. Thus, one component of the functionality of Nazi-created boulevards, memorials, triumphal arches, concert halls and ministries was to awe not only the inhabitants of Germania (as Berlin was to be called) but the inhabitants of the former Germania. For Speer and Hitler, the glories of Rome and Greece were a template for imperial greatness and architectural perfection. It therefore follows that for Nazi Germania to be the salutary example of cultural achievement it was intended to be, it had to be encountered in a defeated, fragmentary and partially erased by the people who would replace the German titans of old. The wonder and melancholy produced in contemplation of the ruin was a suitable spur to dreaming heroic figures of later ages who would strive to emulate their lost ancestors. A sensation of loss, temporal distance and incomplete comprehension were integral to the Romantic response to the ruin and for the architects of Nazi Germany.

It was this aspect that Anselm Kiefer admitted in his richly patinated giant paintings of Nazi buildings brought to ruin. The irony was that by the time Kiefer began his paintings in the late 1970s, the Nazi buildings had to be ruined in his imagination because the more significant Nazi buildings – especially the Neue Reichskanzlei – had been utterly erased. Kiefer had to consult publicity photographs of the buildings in pristine condition before he could summon the apocalyptic aftermath in his imagination. Generally, nothing so ambiguous or evocative as a state of ruin is permitted to Nazi buildings. They are either in use or completely erased. Exceptions are: coastal defences (abandoned, unusable and on liminal land), the Berlin and Vienna Flakturm (hugely expensive to dismantle) and the concentration and death camps (in a state of suspended animation, semi-preserved as historical reminders).     

Not one trace

Modern iconoclasts have no intention of allowing anything as material as ruins to survive. They call for the destruction of material they deem offensive, to be marked by open space or replaced with new icons of the religion of social justice. The warriors of social justice take an old-fashioned absolutist view of cultural material. Produced by the exploitation of ‘black bodies’, facilitated by ‘white colonialism’, set in service of Christianisation of foreign lands, the relics of the past are infused with the toxins of social injustice at an atomic level. The utterly unparalleled evil of white, European, colonialist, Christian, patriarchal systems of barbarism which sustained society and produced its monuments transferred its evil to the very matter of its manifestation.

The statue must be toppled, the plinth must be dismantled, the plaque must be removed, the street name must be erased, the books recording the subject’s deeds must be deaccessioned from every public library. Once the subject is eradicated, his ghost can take any form his detractors wish, unimpeded by material evidence. Just as the graves of holy men were opened during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to allow the smashing of bones, so today’s iconoclasts pursue their own forms of ritual shaming. Not only was the Bristol statue of Edward Colston toppled and submerged in June 2020, stained glass windows dedicated to him were dismantled, his name was removed from the concert hall and from the school founded in his name. The society commemorating his beneficence was dissolved. He was unpersoned during an orgy of revisionist righteousness, designed to allow Bristolians to forget, to rest easy now their historical debt had been paid.  

Perhaps these new zealots intuit from their atavistic instincts that when material remains exist they can accrue mystery, significance and power in the minds of men. Colston’s statue may be permitted to live on in a museum, but only in its damaged state, to be surrounded by demeaning contextualisation intended to perpetuate the public humiliation. It is a trophy. Perhaps in future, no evidence of the supposed miscreants of history will remain except as trophies in displays intended to subvert lasting glory into endless infamy in stocks of the public space. Damnatio memoriae, as the Romans would have recognised. There will be no ruins to linger among and no fallen colossi to contemplate. Will the masked rioters of Europe mimic the masked iconoclasts of ISIS in Nineveh by reducing statues to stones, stones to pebbles, stopping only when the no trace of the subject remains identifiable?

The fury of today’s destroyers comes from the fact that the sins they condemn (colonialism, racism, capitalism, ecological exploitation) are diffused into every particle of their life. Pennies that flow through their bank accounts are residues of slavery. Houses they live in contain bricks made by the exploited. In their pockets, they have iPhones with components of cobalt and cadmium, mined by slaves in Africa. Their clothes are made in conditions they themselves have called ‘sweatshop’. Their pension providers invest in tobacco, munitions, genetically modified crops, oil drilling, polluting airlines, ‘big pharma’ and all manner of enterprises which have yet to be condemned by the pure. The very substance of the rioters’ lives cries out with injustice. So, they target scapegoats. They deflect and they project. Snagged in a trap of irresolvable contradictions, they lash out and their fury is strategically directed by politicians, educators, lobbyists and agitators. The Christian destroys the pagan idol; the Muslim destroys the infidel’s false image; the warrior for social justice destroys the statue of his ancestor. Each seeks to expiate guilt and protect the next generation from encountering the false authority. Some leave ruins, others leave none.

Posted on by Greg Jinkerson

Worlds before Narnia – C S Lewis’s Heavens

GREG JINKERSON reminds us of C S Lewis’s Space Trilogy

Beyond his still-popular works of Christian apologetics, C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) may be most familiar as creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, the classic children series published in the 1950s, and since filmed several times. But long before Aslan and the Pevensies debuted in the first Narnia story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Lewis was the demiurge of other fantastic worlds formed with adult readers in mind.

His first published novel was the Bunyanesque bildungsroman The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), where the pilgrim John encounters people like Mr. Enlightenment and Mother Kirk, and Lewis gives an impression of how such abstractions shaped his early intellectual development and later Christian faith. In between the Pilgrim and the Lion, Lewis devoted a deal of the WWII years to writing his Space Trilogy, about a man drawn into a cosmic moral conflict that comes to a head on earth. The series is a more mature expression of the allegorical seeds planted in his first novel, and an anticipation of many themes from Narnia – the combat between good and evil animating human characters and their angelic counterparts, miraculous trips and oracular bulletins from distant lands, and “unattained ideals…in the history of Man.”1

As in his Chronicles, Lewis spins a fairy tale replete with haunted houses, necromancy, enchanted groves and bewitched familiars. The interplanetary saga begins in Out of the Silent Planet (1938) where the hero Elwin Ransom – a philologist and a character Lewis once called “a fancy portrait of a man I know, but not of me,”2 – is abducted to Mars by a megalomaniacal physicist, Weston, and his sidekick Devine. (Incidentally, Ransom’s history shows that Lewis inserted plenty of his own experiences into the don, along with several traits of his Oxford friend and fellow author J. R. R. Tolkien.) Ransom’s adventures continue in Perelandra (1943) set on Lewis’ conception of the planet Venus, and winds up back on earth in That Hideous Strength (1945).

As the first book opens, Ransom has embarked alone on a long walking tour of the English countryside with a backpack – reminiscent of Christian with his heavy burden as seen by the Dreamer in The Pilgrim’s Progress. With a sabbatical before him and few obligations beyond his pleasures, he has failed to notify anyone of his plans or whereabouts, and isn’t expected home by anyone for many months. This anonymity makes him a ripe Everyman for the adventures ahead.

One night, finding that the inn where he had planned to stay is no longer lodging odd pedestrians, he knocks at the door of a secluded cottage in hopes of a bed. Overhearing violent shouts, Ransom stumbles onto the scene of an attempted kidnapping, where two men are struggling to subdue a young boy. Ransom intervenes and rescues the boy, becoming an unwitting substitute in the partners’ abduction scheme:

“The three combatants fell suddenly apart, the boy blubbering. ‘May I ask,’ said the thicker and taller of the two men, ‘who the devil you may be and what you are doing here?’… ‘My name is Ransom, if that is what you mean. And…’ ‘By Jove,’ said the slender man, ‘not Ransom who used to be at Wedenshaw?’ ‘I was at school at Wedenshaw,’ said Ransom. ‘I thought I knew you as soon as you spoke,’ said the slender man. ‘I’m Devine.”3

The first speaker, Weston, is Ransom’s arch enemy throughout the series, an ingenious physicist who immediately calls upon the devil; Devine, in his more easygoing approach to mischief, calls upon Jove. The former plans to use his spacecraft to colonize the galaxy in a quest to preserve the human race; the latter wants to plunder planets for their riches. The friends are a devilish pair, but Ransom’s weariness and his familiarity with Devine are enough to lure him into sheltering with them.

After being drugged, Ransom awakes in a spaceship and is first terrified and later exhilarated to realize his captors are carrying him to Mars, where they have already done reconnaissance on a previous voyage. Although they believe themselves to be bringing Ransom there as a sacrifice to the rulers of that planet, we find “the stars in their courses were fighting against Weston.”4 The allusion to the Book of Judges is a sign that Weston’s efforts are the inadvertent means of Ransom’s apotheosis – in spite of himself, Weston is delivering his enemy into a position of honour he himself covets.

Each book marks a stage in Ransom’s understanding of the Heavens – Lewis’ preferred term for outer space – and of the influence of extra-terrestrial creatures, many of whom become his friends. He meets for example angels, or eldila as they are known outside earth. The eldila are somewhat local to each planet and are ruled by archangels, or Oyeresu. The Oyarsa of Malacandra (Mars to earthlings) teaches Ransom that the solar system is an open field of angelic communication with just one Bermuda Triangle issuing no messages: the silent planet Thulcandra (Earth). In fact, the eldila of our planet have become sinister creatures. Upon meeting the Oyarsa, Ransom asks,

“Then you knew of our journey before we left Thulcandra?’

‘No. Thulcandra is the world we do not know. It alone is outside the heaven, and no message comes from it.’

Ransom was silent, but Oyarsa answered his unspoken questions.

It was not always so. Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world — he was brighter and greater than I — and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent.5

In this accounting of Lucifer, Lewis invokes the medieval cosmology wherein “daemons are…creatures of a middle nature between gods and men – like Milton’s ‘Middle spirits’”6, and throws new light on the Fall of earthly life. “Through these intermediaries, and through them alone, we mortals have any intercourse with the gods.”7 Having lost contact with Earth, Oyarsa sent for a human ambassador to visit Malacandra and effect a rapprochement.

Ransom also encounters the native species of Malacandra: the seal-like hrossa, including a Friday to Ransom’s Crusoe named Hyoi – the amphibious pfifltriggi, artisans of the planet – and sorns, the mandarins of Malacandra. His odyssey even affords a glimpse of “the original of the Cyclops, a giant in a cave and a shepherd.”8 While on the planet, Ransom uses his philological training to master their universal language (which he terms Old Solar). All told, what had begun as a tour of England stretches light years afield before circling back to a thrilling and hectic voyage home.

Ransom’s gleanings in Malacandra are, naturally, not merely academic. By the time of Perelandra, Ransom has been communicating for several years with the Oyarsa about a new mission: stopping the Fall and its attendant curse from being inflicted upon Venus. Weston’s defeat on Mars has hardly discouraged his urge to rule new worlds, and he sets his sights on Perelandra as a consolation.

This second journey to a neighbouring planet has an uplifting effect upon Ransom, bringing him hitherto unknown sensations and even open new senses. His first breakfast on Perelandra is nothing short of psychedelic:

“The smells in the forest were beyond all that he had ever conceived. To say that they made him feel hungry and thirsty would be misleading; almost, they created a new kind of hunger and thirst, a longing that seemed to flow over from the body into the soul and which was a heaven to feel.”9

On Perelandra, and elsewhere in the heavens, Ransom’s body and soul meld in a peaceful anticipation of what might come; his desires awaken no fear about whether they will be fulfilled, for they are intrinsically pleasant. Indeed, fruit is a kind of superfluity:

“He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight…It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant.”10  

This is more a sacrament than a meal, and binds Ransom beatifically in a kind of symbiotic nourishment with the vegetation. The unspoiled environment of Perelandra yields up a world eminently edible and edifying.

Ransom also encounters the Venusian Eve, Tinidril, whom he must protect from Weston’s attempt to involve her in a second Fall on Perelandra. This Ransom successfully averts, and his beatific vision is fulfilled when Tinidril is safely united with the king of Perelandra.

In That Hideous Strength, Ransom joins the angelic ranks back on earth for a climactic battle in an English university town against a deranged cabal of academic and scientific elites in league with their own Satanic allies. One of these is Lord Feverstone, a nom de guerre for Devine from the first adventure. The final volume’s primary theme, which Lewis lays out persuasively in his essay “The Abolition of Man” as a companion to the novel, is a caution against a naïve programme of inhumane central planning which he feared would accompany advanced Scientism in world governments.

Ransom again plays a heroic part in the action, but this time he shares the stage with new allies—the sociologist Mark Studdock and his wife Jane, along with a reincarnation of the Arthurian Merlin and a menagerie of benevolent animals. Despite the worst efforts of the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) to impose a technocratic police state upon England, Ransom’s forces of good and the whole host of heaven fight and stop them.

After their victory, one of Ransom’s cohort makes a speech about what Ransom learned during his time on the prelapsarian Perelandra about the history of England:

“It all began,” he said,

when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it – it will do as well as another. And then gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting…Something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven’t you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers: the home of Sidney – and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.11

Although certain critics have found the series to verge on the didactic – the science fiction author Brian Aldiss said as much in a friendly way12, and Lewis’ own Oxford colleague, the biologist J.B.S. Haldane said it in a far more strident mode in a review of That Hideous Strength13 – Lewis for his part disagreed. In discussing the plot of Perelandra, and Aldiss’ suggestion that Lewis had set out to write it in order to make a moral point, Lewis gave an emphatic disavowal while laying out his approach to story making:

Yes everyone thinks that. They are quite wrong…the story of this averted fall came in very conveniently. Of course it wouldn’t have been that particular story if I wasn’t interested in those particular ideas on other grounds. But that isn’t what I started from. I’ve never started from a message or a moral…the story itself should force its moral upon [the writer]. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.14

Notes

  1. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, Scribner, New York, 1938; p. 75
  2. Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories by C.S. Lewis, edited with a Preface by Walter Hooper, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1966; in “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” p. 78
  3. Out of the Silent Planet, p. 14
  4. Ibid., p. 127
  5. Ibid., pp. 119-120
  6. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature by C.S. Lewis, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1964; p. 40
  7. Ibid., pp. 40-41
  8. Perelandra by C.S. Lewis, Scribner, New York, 1944; p. 40
  9. Ibid., p. 37
  10. Ibid. p. 37
  11. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis, Macmillan Publishing Co. New York, 1946, pp.368-369
  12. “Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories” in Unreal Estates, p. 87
  13. Ibid. in “A Reply to Professor Haldane,” p. 74, where Lewis mentions Haldane’s complaint that Lewis’ characters “are like slugs in an experimental cage who get a cabbage if they turn right and an electric shock if they turn left”
  14. Ibid. in “Unreal Estates”, p. 87
Posted on by Peter King

Home learning

PETER KING says that houses are not machines, but ‘organisms’ animated by us

I was lying in bed one morning, with no plans other than to roll over. It was too early to get out of bed, and I had nothing to get up early for. As planned, at 7.00am the heating system clicked into life with its distinctive rumble and low hum. Usually, this is a comforting noise, suggesting that things are working as they should. Except that they did not continue to work as they should on this particular morning. The low hum was replaced by a clang as if someone had dropped their tools on the landing, and then a loud bang. There was still a humming but louder and more insistent and with an ominous edge to it. There was also a smell of burning. The heating pump had burnt out after more than 20 years of consistent use. We turned the system off and arranged for an engineer to call to replace the pump, which duly happened the following morning. The repair was straightforward and took barely an hour. However, what had become clear to me was that there were things in our house that we could not control and could not maintain ourselves. There are any number of complex machines in our house that we rely on, that we expect to work reliably and constantly.

Le Corbusier, theorist of the house as machine

Naturally when one considers the idea of machines in this context one’s mind goes to Le Corbusier’s statement that ‘A house is a machine for living in’. This is a notion that I have always found abhorrent, with its emphasis on both uniformity and conformity.

Quite simply, we just do not see our house like that. When we consider the nature of the specific place where we live what stands out is its distinction. It is definitively different from those around it, even if the external appearance is very nearly indistinguishable. We never mistake our neighbour’s house for our own regardless of how similar it might look. A dwelling is always particular to those using it. Its use is always specific and not interchangeable. Our dwelling is not there simply to sustain us – although it must do that – but it acts too as a repository for our life experience and as a store of memory. While on a utilitarian level, any dwelling of a certain level of amenity would suffice, in practice we want something specific and we make it so.

Our dwelling is then a place that contains machines, but it is not a machine itself. We might see it as an assembly of machines, but again it is not merely this. We have to add to this assembly our memories, relationships (past and current), habits, eccentricities, and so on. These are the things that we use our dwelling for. They are the essence of what dwelling is and what the machines are there to serve.

A machine is something that can transmit force. It is powered in some way. But in what way is our house ‘powered’? There is no obvious power source (as opposed to what powers the machines within it). Our house does not move. It appears to be in stasis and as such it might be the very opposite of a machine.

But I want to suggest that dwelling does have a motive power. But it is not a quantifiable one. We can explore this by positing an alternative metaphor, namely that of the organism. We can define an organism in a number of ways. We can see it as a living being, as a distinct thing. But we can also see an organism as a system consisting of interdependent parts. As a living being an organism is contiguous and complete. But it is made up of a number of interdependent elements all with their prescribed function. This makes it sound like a machine, but there is an important difference. Unlike a machine, an organism is something whose motive force comes from within and not without. It is animated from the inside and does not depend on an external power source. So an organism, like a machine, can be seen as a complex or network of things. It too has a material structure with defined parts. But what animates the organism comes from within and is already part of us.

Like the machines in our house some parts of us must be in continuous use. We cannot turn them off and remain a viable being. We can appear to be largely idle, when we are at rest or asleep, but some of our core functions, such as digestion, respiration, heart function, must continue on. These are involuntary, automatic and outside of our conscious control. They operate without our direct involvement. The same applies to our unconscious mind. We cannot control our dreams. We cannot stop them from bursting into our heads, confusing and confounding us, perhaps even in frightening us. There are, so to speak, programs always running in the background, which we cannot control and which we would struggle to inhibit.

It is in this way that we can see our house as an organism, as having a number of systems that appear to work independently and outside of our direct control. It might be argued that we should only take this metaphor so far. Unlike our breathing, we can turn the systems in our house off. We can turn up the heating if we are cold or increase the shower temperature. This is certainly true, and we should be careful in not overusing our metaphors. But we also need to add that, while we can turn machines off or alter their use, we still need them. There is a cost in turning them off and it may be fatal, just as if some of our core bodily functions cease to work. A metaphor need not be exact to be helpful to us.

Where the metaphor is helpful is with relation to the issue of power. What is it that powers an organism? As I have suggested, it is this that differentiates an organism from a machine, and it is this facet that makes the organism a better metaphor for dwelling that the machine.

One way of looking at this issue, is the idea of animation. While a dead body of a loved one looks familiar, it is clear that there is something really significant missing: it is familiar, but it is not the same as the person we knew and loved. In some way the body appears to be empty. There is then something that appears to animate us. This can be seen as a life force that turns us from simple matter to a living being. We might be able to measure this life force, in indirect ways through pulse, brain wave patterns, respiration and so on, but this is not the force itself. It is not what gives us life, what gives us a mind. This is what distinguishes us most from a machine. It is also what distinguishes dwelling from the machine. A dwelling comes alive become it is inhabited by something that appears to give it volition and purpose.

An inanimate object can only do as it is bid. It can either work in the prescribed manner or not at all. It always does the best it can. It can do no other. It has no will and nor is it prone to mood swings and tantrums. It may appear temperamental, but this will be perfectly explicable in mechanical terms. A machine will work until it is turned off or breaks. The inanimate is implacable and cannot be reasoned with. There is no contingency, no variety or diversity in its operation. An object is functionally transparent.

Martin Heidegger, who believed we ‘humanised’ objects by using them

As Martin Heidegger has suggested, what animates the object – what gives it its spirit – is our use of it. In his book, Being and Time, Heidegger refers to the idea of objects as equipment. We turn it from an object to a tool, into something that is not only ours but, for as long as we use it well, part of us. In his famous example Heidegger talks about a carpenter using a hammer. This is an old and now familiar tool, and the carpenter is undertaking an action – hammering in a nail – that he had done countless times with this tool. Heidegger states that the hammer becomes transparent to the carpenter’s consciousness. It, as it were, becomes part of him, an extension of his will. It is, to use Heidegger’s jargon, ready to hand. But were the hammer to break it would become unready to hand and appear to the carpenter as present to hand. In other words, it becomes visible as an entity distinct in itself.

The jargon here may be clumsy – at least in English translation – but what Heidegger points to is that we use objects as extensions of ourselves incorporating them into our motives and aspirations, such that we literally do not notice them. And this is indeed how we act with all those things we use every day. We find we have driven home from the office without really noticing the route we’ve taken, because we do it every day. We don’t focus on the chair we are sitting on while we are eating, and we do not notice the machines working away in the background keeping us warm and providing us with hot water and light.

Indeed, our lives would not be recognisable if we had to focus specifically on every object we were using rather than on our objectives. Much of what we have around us are means – things for us to use – rather than ends. They are present to do a job for us, but in such as manner as not to be noticed. Many of the machines in our house have been devised precisely so we do not have to engage directly with them. They are made to work instead of us, and often to work in a way that is hidden from us. They are programmed to turn on and off and are placed away from us, so we do not have direct and regular contact with them.

In this sense, it might appear that these objects lack meaning in that we do not directly animate them, and certainly it is the case that we relate to them differently. They remain, as it were, strangers to us. However, these machines are in constant use and they perform crucially important tasks such as heating, light and supplying constant hot water (which is why they are preprogramed and automatic). Their meaning is necessarily implicit. They are the necessary background or framework on which our conscious lives depend. When these machines break, like the central heating pump, we are brought up short and made to think about the complexity of dwelling. The object is unready and most definitely present to us.

We can no longer ignore all those things hidden behind doors, walls and kept in inaccessible parts of the dwelling. But just as the heart and lungs are integral to us, so are these machines to our house. That we do not have to think about them is precisely the point. We are dependent on them, but this dependency does not have to made explicit. They remain tools just as much as those objects we active pick up. We use them and this use makes them opaque.

A machine can only be animated by our use of it. This is not to give it life as such, but to share our life with it, to make it part of it for as long as we need it, and it works as we wish it to. We take the machine and use it – and only this gives it meaning.

Posted on by Mark G. Brennan

This sporting life – from football to (web) surfing

MARK G. BRENNAN remembers a strange but deeply significant job interview

My lacklustre grades, inflated ego, and halfhearted work ethic combined to make me unemployable when I graduated from college in 1986. But Price Waterhouse’s dire labour shortage during the economic rebound after the early ‘80s recession forced them to consider undesirables like me. Jack McKinnon, a stolid partner from Price Waterhouse’s Boston office, came to my school to rustle up prospective employees in the fall of 1985. For some baffling reason, Price Waterhouse had selected my mediocre resume from a pool of more qualified applicants for an on-campus interview. As I sat down in the cramped room to redress my (dis)qualifications, and beg for a job, McKinnon crumpled up my resume and exclaimed how excited he was to finally meet me. I sat there perplexed. Me?

McKinnon skipped the perfunctory quiz on accounting arcana and Price Waterhouse trivia. Instead, he grilled me on that weekend’s upcoming football game between my school, Holy Cross – where my athletic prowess on the field rivaled my academic incompetence in the classroom – and his, our archrival Boston College. A purebred BC Eagle despite his lack of feathers or a hooked beak, McKinnon proudly told me had attended almost every Boston College home game since his mid-1950s graduation. Desperate for a job, I kept trying to sell my paltry financial skills while deflecting his gaze from my Scarlet Letter grade point average and blank resume. Waving off my subterfuge, McKinnon kept bringing the conversation back to Holy Cross’s game plan for Saturday.

Rick Carter, celebrated 1980s coach of Holy Cross football team

Catastrophic visions of financial distress had loomed in my mind as graduation approached. I feared lifelong unemployment were I to blow this opportunity, my sole on-campus interview. I respectfully pled, “Jack, I’m happy to discuss the game. But I need a job and this is my only chance. Can we please discuss the possibility of me working at Price Waterhouse?” Our dwindling 30-minute time limit started to count against both our agendas. Every minute I subjected him to my meek supplications was a minute less for him to get the inside scoop on the upcoming clash of rivals. He impatiently snapped, “I will call the New York office right now to recommend they hire you. Now, back to Saturday’s game”. What was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me – employment at the most prestigious accounting firm despite my lack of qualifications – was an even rarer opportunity for him – discussing that weekend’s upcoming match with one of its participants, an aspiring accountant no less.

McKinnon eventually called Price Waterhouse’s New York office. I got the job. My first year there I earned $22,500, decent money for a recent college graduate in Bonfire of the Vanities New York. $22,500 went a lot farther in 1986, and not just because of inflation. With Communism’s collapse still a few years in the future, Russian plutocrats had yet to bid up Manhattan real estate and coarsen its already brusque culture. My post-collegiate expenses fell into two buckets, rent and “weekends”, the practical and the otiose. My weekend expense line contained several subcategories: draft beer, tequila shots, and pizza, as well as greasy food, Gatorade, and aspirin for hangovers. My fixed lease determined my rent payments. So I had to scrimp on my “weekends” to finance my escape hatch from Price Waterhouse, graduate school.

Skip ahead to 2020’s pandemic lockdown. I deleted the “weekends” category from my personal income statement about 20 years ago. When I turned 35 I had a welcome epiphany. Two hours of drunken bliss didn’t compensate for two days of hungover misery. Goodbye booze, hello books. Since March I have rarely left the house. But my expenses again fall into just two categories, the practical and the otiose: real estate taxes and books. I’m lucky. I don’t have a mortgage even though I still don’t own my house. If that last remark makes no sense to you then try this experiment: Stop paying your real estate taxes and then tell me who owns your house. So aside from forking over protection money to the village tax collector, my only other pandemic outlay has been for my avocation, reading.

When I’m not imitating a college professor as I teach online from my dining room table or writing articles that you mistakenly stumble upon like this one, I serve as Books Editor for the monthly magazine Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. My responsibilities include selecting books for review, identifying reviewers whose expertise will provide unique insight, and hounding those same experts when they miss their deadlines. Aside from that last task, no job could better sate my incurable bibliophilia. Unfortunately, my dream of daily book deliveries from publishers eager to market their latest imprints will never come true due to the financial exigencies of 21st century publishing.

Nevertheless, publishers eagerly ship me single copies upon request and my personal finances provide for shopping sprees on Amazon. My wife sees my spending priorities differently. Nary a day goes by without her remarking,

You’ve worn the same pair of pants for three months straight and your wallet has now worn a hole through the back pocket. Why don’t you spend money on a new pair of khakis instead of another shipment of books?

True, during the pandemic I have dressed like a Depression Era hobo. Zoom’s limited viewing frame has empowered this disturbing habit. Perhaps my wife should just be thankful I don’t ask her for spare change when we pass in the hallway. Nonetheless, her sartorial pleas have had as much effect on my insatiable book buying as my snide comments about her overstuffed closets have had on her ceaseless clothing purchases. Luckily for our marriage, she only buys electronic books now. She rules the closet. I rule the bookshelves. And we agreed to our separate realms without plagiarizing the 9th century’s Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum or consulting a matrimonial lawyer.

Book shopping sucks when you do it from your sofa. I only spend two days per week in New York City – and both those days locked in my apartment thanks to my immuno-compromised status. I no longer visit The Strand, the United States’ best bookstore. Hyperbole you say? Then I guess you didn’t know The Penn Book Center in Philadelphia closed. Besides: my essay, my opinion. Go whine in the comments section below. 

New York’s famous Strand Bookstore

Anyway, I have not had the pleasure of browsing The Strand’s dusty shelves for nine heartbreaking months. Late stage withdrawal has set in. I no longer serendipitously happen upon books lying among the store’s legendary “18 miles of books”. Instead, I now suffer with Amazon’s inane “You Might Also Like” function, the way a recovering heroin addict suffers with a lollipop in place of methadone.

Aside from giving me bad book selections, Amazon’s artificially intelligent (read: moronic) algorithm fosters bad scholarship and promotes historical fallacies. Test it yourself. Click on my doctoral advisor Jonathan Steinberg’s biography of Bismarck. Lo and behold, the Amazon computer program tells Bismarck fans “You Might Also Like” to learn about the discredited, ahistorical nonsense that links the Iron Chancellor inextricably to Hitler. No historian has drawn a straighter line from Imperial Germany to the Nazi horrors, in all its Sonderwegisch glory, than the STEM brain trust typing away like monkeys in Amazon’s IT department.

And if you like your incorrect history raw, right off the Amazon website, then “Add to Your Cart” Telford Taylor’s The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir. If not, then diehard Bismarck fans can toggle over one book to the right where Amazon has “In Stock” Flip the Script: Lessons Learned on the Road to the Championship by Louisiana State University’s head football coach Ed Orgeron. The great men of history: Bismarck and Orgeron, with a spicing of Telford. And if you still can’t make up your mind which book to buy, Amazon’s “FREE Shipping” might coax you to purchase all three.

Maybe I should send Orgeron’s tales of football success to Jack McKinnon as a 35 year-late thank you gift. Perhaps I should include Steinberg’s Bismarck since Alexa, Amazon’s ghoulish spokesputer, tells me these books are “Frequently bought together”. I never thought I would miss The Strand’s tattooed, condescending staff. I shuddered every time I asked an information desk worker to direct me to a book. He/she/zie would adjust his/her/hir nose rings and ear gauges before deigning to type my politically incorrect query into the store’s computer. So thank you Amazon. You have taught me that there are in fact punishments worse than a 26-year-old gender studies graduate student’s caustic sneer when I ask which shelf holds Charles Murray’s latest work.

While I can wait to reunite with The Strand’s woke staff, I fear the pandemic can’t. My accounting career never took off for various boring reasons. But I can read a balance sheet and an economic environment. And neither of them look good in The Strand’s case. New York City has lost its pre-pandemic zest. “To Let” signs paper the windows of every other retail space. Each day brings more restaurant closings. Cabs have become impossible to find. Drivers now figure they lose less money sitting at home than burning a tank of gas in pursuit of nonexistent fares. Depression swallows me as I imagine my book buying future. My laptop will take the place of New York’s best bookstore. Instead of The Strand’s in-house Antifa brigade hissing at me, Amazon’s saccharine-voiced Alexa will politely ask, “I’m sorry. Do you really want to read Charles Murray?” And my wife will remind me my pants have a huge hole in the rear that would otherwise embarrass a normal person.

What to do?  Maybe I should look up Jack McKinnon, who must now be in his mid-80s. As an alumnus of Holy Cross, I’m pretty sure Boston College graduates don’t qualify for entry through the Pearly Gates. But Saint Peter should make an exception for Jack and admit him to that eternal accounting firm in the sky. If I could reach Jack I imagine he might tell me he noticed my unhealthy obsession with the practical during our brief encounter in that stuffy room late in 1985. He might remind me that the best part of my life, the otiose part, was passing me by, just as I fixated on the practical.

I can picture Jack telling me over Zoom,

The last football game of your life, the last athletic event you would ever be part of, was just a few days away. And all you cared about was getting a job so you could sit in a fluorescently-lit office, 60 hours a week, and watch your muscles atrophy as you added up numbers no one would ever look at. I kept pushing you to enjoy the last fleeting moments of your youth. I bragged about reliving my college days through my near perfect attendance over three decades at BC games. But you kept pushing back. Well, I hope it all worked out for you. If nothing else, I pray you understand the otiose determines how well one lives his life, not the practical. You certainly didn’t understand that when I met you. Read great books. Worry less about where you buy them. And one last thing. You have a huge hole in your pants.