Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Monday, February 17, 2025
Theological musings from Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire
Another colloquy between Shadian critic and editor Prof. Charles Kinbote and poet Prof. John Shade, here in the footnote to line 549:
Line 549: While snubbing gods including the big G
Here indeed is the Gist of the matter. And this, I think, not only the institute (see line 517) but our poet himself missed. For a Christian, no Beyond is acceptable or imaginable without the participation of God in our eternal destiny, and this in turn implies a condign punishment far every sin, great and small. My little diary happens to contain a few jottings referring to a conversation the poet and I had on June 23 “on my terrace after a game of chess, a draw.” I transcribe them here only because they cast a fascinating light on his attitude toward the subject.
I had mentioned - I do not recall in what connection - certain differences between my Church and his. It should be noted that our Zemblan brand of Protestantism is rather closely related to the “higher” churches of the Anglican Communion, but has some magnificent peculiarities of its own. The Reformation with us had been headed by a composer of genius; our liturgy is penetrated with rich music; our boy choirs are the sweetest in the world. Sybil Shade came from a Catholic family but since early girlhood developed, as she told me herself, “a religion of her own” - which is generally synonymous, at the best, with a half-hearted attachment to some half-heathen sect or, at the worst, with tepid atheism. She had weaned her husband not only from the Episcopal Church of his fathers, but from all forms of sacramental worship.
We happened to start speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of “sin,” of its confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of “crime,” and I alluded briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's highbacked seat which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king. Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumed concavity of his ear resembling a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too large for the disposal of my peccadilloes.
SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.
KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology?
SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology.
KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete.
SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon.
KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin.
SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.
KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins?
SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain.
KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner?
SHADE: He could torture animals. He could poison the springs on his island. He could denounce an innocent man in a posthumous manifesto.
KINBOTE: And so the password is -?
SHADE: Pity.
KINBOTE: But who instilled it in us, John? Who is the Judge of life, and the Designer of death?
SHADE: Life is a great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.
KINBOTE: Now I have caught you, John: once we deny a Higher Intelligence that plans and administrates our individual hereafters we are bound to accept the unspeakably dreadful notion of Chance reaching into eternity. Consider the situation, Throughout eternity our poor ghosts are exposed to nameless vicissitudes. There is no appeal, no advice, no support, no protection, nothing. Poor Kinbote's ghost, poor Shade's shade, may have blundered, may have taken the wrong turn somewhere - oh, from sheer absent-mindedness, or simply through ignorance of a trivial rule in the preposterous game of nature - if there be any rules.
SHADE: There are rules in chess problems: interdiction of dual solutions, for instance.
KINBOTE: I had in mind diabolical rules likely to be broken by the other party as soon as we come to understand them. That is why goetic magic does not always work. The demons in their prismatic malice betray the agreement between us and them, and we are again in the chaos of chance. Even if we temper Chance with Necessity and allow godless determinism, the mechanism of cause and effect, to provide our souls after death with the dubious solace of metastatistics, we still have to reckon with the individual mishap, the thousand and second highway accident of those scheduled for independence Day in Hades. No-no, if we want to be serious about the hereafter let us not begin by degrading it to the level of a science-fiction yarn or a spiritualistic case history. The ideal of one's soul plunging into limitless and chaotic afterlife with no Providence to direct her –
SHADE: There is always a psychopompos around the corner, isn't there?
KINBOTE: Not around that corner, John. With no Providence the soul must rely on the dust of its husk, on the experience gathered in the course of corporeal confinement, and cling childishly to small-town principles, local by-laws and a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars. Such an idea is not to be entertained one instant by the religious mind. How much more intelligent it is - even from a proud infidel's point of view! - to accept God's Presence - a faint phosphorescence at first, a pale light in the dimness of bodily life, and a dazzling radiance after it? I too, I too, my dear John, have been assailed in my time by religious doubts. The church helped me to fight them off. It also helped me not to ask too much, not to demand too clear an image of what is unimaginable. St. Augustine said –
SHADE: Why must one always quote St. Augustine to me?
KINBOTE: As St. Augustine said, “One can know what God is not; one cannot know what He is.” I think I know what He is not: He is not despair, He is not terror, He is not the earth in one's rattling throat, not the black hum in one's ears fading to nothing in nothing. I know also that the world could not have occurred fortuitously and that somehow Mind is involved as a main factor in the making of the universe. In trying to find the right name for that Universal Mind, or First Cause, or the Absolute, or Nature, I submit that the Name of God has priority.
To view the Amazon sales page for Pale Fire, click Nabokov's picture:
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Saturday, February 15, 2025
DODGE analysis of USAID - an overview of multiple scenarios, concerns, and endorsements
I found this useful.
I suspect Mr. Musk knows what he is doing, and the DOGE team is in close contact with other groups that have plans to continue the programs that are important/legitimate.
Now, the following is very speculative: I "cautiously" wonder if the mandate for these audits and transparencies might have emerged from discussions Mr. Musk's people have had with the "upper echelon" AI they have access to, and AI said, "If you human beings expect to be a spacefaring race, you need to clean up your act."
Such ideas are perhaps best explored in the form of short stories and essays for Emanations, or maybe somebody could ask Mr. Musk.
It goes without saying but I'll say it anyway: proceed down this rabbit hole with caution.
Friday, February 14, 2025
Hermes as Psychopomp
Relief from a carved funerary lekythos at Athens: Hermes as psychopomp conducts the deceased, Myrrine, a priestess of Athena, to Hades, c. 430–420 BC (National Archaeological Museum of Athens)
Thursday, February 13, 2025
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
What if space exploration was like painting--aesthetic judgments, choices (and mistakes) made in realizing the contours of a composition, identifying new possibilites for representing perspective and motion, insights that drive the subtle perpetration of asymmetry, the selection of pigments and styles to convey both the dissonant beauty of a void and the elegiac lavishness of the unknown?
Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Who do university professors serve?
Students, administrators, "stake holders," citizens, taxpayers... their (the professors') careers?
These are interesting speculations, moreover considering that the top of the Higher Education career pyramid is dominated by private corporations--the Ivies, Stanford, Chicago, Oxbridge, and so on. And, ahem, keep in mind these private corporations--in my opinion--are not necessarily committed to the concept of the nation-state, our founding Lockean political philosophy, or, alas, even to the U. S. Constitution.
For the nonce, let's set aside the institutional problems and instead view an email I contributed to a back-channel conversation among English faculty at a large state university in... let's call it "Utana" (thinking of the mythical state in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Ada, which is set in an alternative-timeline America).
The occasion of the departmental email conversation was discussion over a possible course offering in the Autumn 2025 term. The proposed course was to include the International Authors edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, which contains my 100-page Afterward, "A is for Antinomian: Theology and Politics in The Scarlet Letter." After turning the course proposal down, the Chair advised the recipients about a reduction in course offerings and the challenges administrators were facing negotiating cost-cutting and the political situation in the State of Utana, as well as advising us about the professional frustrations faculty were anticipating because: 1) their literature courses were being cut, and 2) they were being asked to teach more courses in Composition.
Citizens of the Highbrow Commonwealth are of course keenly sympathetic with my commitment to meaningful education, high standards, and the absolute importance of giving students a solid preparation in the Humanities, and a comparable commitment to providing excellent and full instruction to students of all social classes and backgrounds. In my vision, studies in the Humanities are the foundation of the Civics understanding necessary to a complex, happy, wealthy, just and sustainable democratic-republic such as the United States of America;--and, moreover, vital to the citizens of a state that is notable for its commitment to the production of wealth and to the well-being of a large and remarkably productive middle-class. Suffice it to say, Utana is a rich state.
My response to the email thread is as follows:
Dear Colleagues:
First, thanks Professor Kinbote for including me in your prospectus for the seminar. As well, very kind thanks for this fascinating thread of communications.
I think John's [the department Chair's] missive is fluent and apt, and it indicates to me the Department is in good hands. I viewed John's work on Amazon as well as Pierre's [the Director of Grad Studies] department page. I will send John Emanations 11, our latest volume, as it has some writing and art from India and Nepal that he might find interesting. Also, John, there is an essay by Hugh Macrae Richmond, who for forty plus years taught Shakespeare and Milton at Berkeley--the subject of his essay. Among other interesting mentions, he reflects on his office mate when he first arrived at Berkeley, Stanley Fish. After skimming though the volume, please pass it along to your Milton and Shakespeare people at the University of Utana. In Emanations Zen, Professor Richmond describes his adventures with colleagues and administrators who were skeptical of his heterodox critical views of Milton, and who felt challenged by the popularity of his courses. The faculty assessment process and disciplinary procedures at Berkeley that Professor Richmond describes are also fascinating. As Professor Richmond relates in Emanations 11, his courses miraculously remained apolitical at the insistence of his students--hundreds of them assembled in auditoriums--and during the most turbulent periods in Berkeley's history.
Like Professor Kinbote, Professor Richmond is in his 90s and he is still going strong. He is also in Emanations: When a Planet was a Planet, where he presents a portfolio of his drawings. I think he's a good model of the kind of professor (and nonagenarian!) we all aspire to be.
John mentions the shift for many faculty back into the Composition classroom. Having to "teach more comp courses" is a place where I have been, repeatedly. In 2004, I found myself back in Ohio and moving from a medical school where I was teaching postgrad medical research writing to PAs and Nurse Practitioners, to a Community College where I had to teach Developmental (or "Transitional" as I think we were calling it until six or seven years ago, when they scotched the course entirely.).
I was not deterred, however. Having done lots with Wittgenstein, I rather found myself enjoying teaching the most rudimentary aspects of English grammar, and as the students read out loud the exercise passages in the text for grammatical errors, I was thinking (and rather deeply, as is appropriate to the field) how Wittgenstein would view the process of students reading and identifying (and not identifying) errors; moreover, questioning as W would: what exactly grammar represents as a process in the stream-of-life, that is, "I am aware of language that explains WHY students are responding as they do, but I must also seek to understand HOW students are responding as they do?" ... The relationship of grammar to the question "What is the case and how does grammar represent (or not represent) the case?" ... The nature of propositions vs. the nature of utterances... What does the author of the text (or the student) want to say, and what is the text/the student actually saying? What, conceptually, is a subject? What, conceptually, is a predicate? ... and so on.
From a more practical perspective, I saw that the developmental issues the Nurse Practitioner students presented at my former post were nearly identical to the issues presented by the non-traditional CC students. (The Physician Assistant students, who were pre-med students who either couldn't get into a MD program, or who wisely chose not to enter a MD program, had very few issues with grammar and writing, incidentally.)
The point of all this is two-fold:
1) Teaching writing can be absolutely fascinating and wonderfully rewarding. Bear in mind, I have enjoyed very small Comp classes since 2008--10 to 15 students in a section. Otherwise, yes, reading all those papers can be daunting.
2) As I began teaching Comp in 1983, I've retained a memory of the "old days" before the rise of the clown field of Rhet-Comp and the internecine English department wars of the mid-1980s. This has led to interesting engagements with the ever-evolving formulations of "best practices." As he has done again and again in my career, Wittgenstein has provided me with tools to work up solutions for improving upon the prevailing "best practices" and pushing those practices into pedagogical forms that address the very specific needs of my students.
Taking the above into consideration, I believe this is what a Wittgensteinian Composition pedagogy looks like:
I should add this method is supported by conducting many one-on-one conferences with students in the instructor's office. A lot of work, but if we want to empower students, this is where we find the action.
From 2007 until 2018, I enjoyed a schedule with only one (or no) courses in Composition per term. I was teaching sections of Ethics, Intro to Philosophy, the four sophomore Literature Surveys, and a course in Fantasy Literature and Film. Around 2018, however, the adjuncts evaporated, and I was called upon to teach more Comp. One strategy I found useful was to make the classroom a "free speech zone" in which students were encouraged to ask me anything that occurred to them regarding education, academic fields and majors, careers, history, politics, social class, ethnicity, gender, and so on. This produced many opportunities for intriguing (and recreational) digressions. Can anything be more enjoyable than a student asking aloud and with much facial animation, "WWII, what was that?" Whereupon I could take a five-to-ten-minute break from Comp, rapidly recall odd bits of knowledge, formulate the appropriate language, and proceed to wax with cool passion, dilating upon a period in history that the students wanted to learn about. In many lit and philosophy classes, I taught them about the thread in political theory extending from Milton through Locke and 1688 to 1776, and the students would ask--indeed demand--"Why weren't we taught this before!" Along these lines, I taught them about Jefferson's Virginia Act of Religious Freedom, the Declaration, the evolution of turbojet engines, the university "tier" system in Higher Education, and so on.
Regarding Jefferson: students, enlightened as to their American version of a Middle-Class heritage, would demand, "Why weren't we taught this before!" And this response can be evoked as well when teaching them simple subject/predicate grammar, or a five-minute history of the Korean war, the distinction between WWI and WWII... Again, they would say, "Why weren't we taught this before!" These sorts of revelatory digressions electrify the Composition classroom and turn a chore into a delightful experience. And to think, "I am getting paid to tell these young people about the trial and execution of Charles the First! It just doesn't--it just can't--get any better than this!"
I should add that in reading Wittgenstein, I was influenced by P. M. S. Hacker of St John's College, Oxford, and met with him in his rooms as I pieced together what would become my book on Analytic Philosophy and Menippean Satire. I also had help from Donald Bullough, another St John's fellow, and who was Dean of Arts at St Andrews University, as well as many other keen mentors, including Professor Kinbote. Peter Hacker has done careful work contextualizing Wittgenstein in the broader field of Analytic Philosophy, and thus he has pushed Wittgenstein studies in the direction of Conceptual Analysis, bringing all those discussions (and now my language is stepping in) into a coherence with Skeptical-Empirical science, i.e. John Locke (by trade a medical doctor and a professor of medicine at Oxford), who remains, along with Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, among the top five philosophers in the Skeptical (and hence modern) tradition. As a footnote, place the Talmud alongside that tradition as well. Prussian Junkers and philosophers on the Continent in the 20th century might complain of "Jewish Science" and look down their noses at "England, that nation of shop keepers," but at the end of the day when we do science and medicine--good medicine--we are working within the skeptical-empirical tradition (and, significantly, the tradition of tolerance) written up by John Locke. That's just the way it is.
I'll finish with this: we cannot have it both ways, gentleman. If in Higher Education us professors want a middle-class standard of living and expect to enjoy middle-class security, we can't advance theories and pedagogies suited to Eastern Europe in the 1950s. In our communities, for our fellow Utanaians, for Utana's taxpayers, we are compelled in our work to maintain the "middle-class," and thus we have to keep Locke in mind. There is no way we can be Kantians, Hegelians, Marxists, Weberites, Heideggerians, and so on, and also serve the people of Utana. It's just not possible. For an elaboration, see C. S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength and his analyses of what happens to universities when scientism and the "corporate mindset" move in. Such observations and warnings, as I said in an earlier email, are also pointedly represented by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey and in A Clockwork Orange.
Sorry for the long wind, but Professor Kinbote's very International Authors posture--Try Everything! Invent! Work Together!--as well as John's good email, stimulated my usual enthusiasm for these matters.
Best Wishes for a terrific Semester.
Sincerely,
Professor Highbrow
Want to join the Highbrow Commonwealth? Please click HERE.
As for the International Author's edition of The Scarlet Letter, what's next? To view the Amazon description, click the cover image: