Chips and Shavings

The Problem of Poverty is so vast, complex, and many-sided, that its practical solution must be the work of generations for we have found its causation to be co-extensive with that of civilization itself. In the lathe of destiny, the vast amorphous mass of humanity has been slowly and painfully fashioned into a form that even now but dimly foreshadows some Divine ideal. But what of the chips and the shavings, the heaped-up refuse of ages, the myriads of broken hearts and ruined lives into whose very soul the graving iron has entered? Cast forth as refuse, they were condemned to live under those terrible laws which, while they developed their brethren into forms of strength and beauty, chained them down to an accelerating degeneration from age to age. It is manifestly worse than useless to approach such a problem as this as if it were merely one of the questions of the day. It is the mother of them all. From its teeming womb they sprang, and there, like the yelping brood of Sin, they kennel. In tracing its causes, with a view to palliation and cure, we must enter the domains of Physiology, Pscychology, Morality, Religion, and Politics.

In every age, man’s insight into his own nature is the measure of his power to interpret history. The historian can but read into the canvas of the past his own synthesis of the results of contemporary analysis. If, then, History is but Psychology writ large, what clue can she furnish to guide us through the labyrinth of complexities?

…

Luxury, like a canker, emasculates and enslaves the rich; want, ignorance, and vice, brutalize and make desparate the poor; till at length, what was denied to their prayers is conceded to their threats and the fear of revolution. The world, and especially England, whose traditions we have carried with us, has gone on complacently contemplating the increase of her trade and the progress of her upper-story civilisation, regardless of the pandemonium below.

Quotation: The Problem of Poverty in New Zealand, part II by Professor Duncan Macgregor. New Zealand Magazine. 1876.

Duncan Macgregor (1843-1906) was appointed to the inaugural chair of Moral and Mental Philosophy, Otago University in 1871. The potted biography at the New Zealand Dictionary of National Biography makes interesting reading.

Imbalance

Sometimes, gulls misjudge things. Here the post is just a tiny bit too small for the gull's feet.

Ooops, a wing stretched out for balance didn't seem to help and the only solution was to abandon the post.

Memento Ergo Sum

Cogito ergo sum. I close my eyes and go back sixteen years. Mother Marie-Therese writes it on the blackboard. Her arm is bare to the elbow: the sleeve of her habit is rolled up to avoid chalk dust. ‘I think therefore I am,’ she says. Where the Latin was just something to translate, the English jumps and my hand is up (unlike me, that) and when Mother sees me I ask wouldn’t it have been more correct for him to have said, Memento ergo sum?
‘Memento?’ With that winter frost smile of hers.
‘Yes, Mother. I remember, therefore I am.’
She sends her smile searching among the other girls in the class. But no one has a comment. As for Reverend Mother’s smile, it could mean, ‘A silly girl has misunderstood Descartes,’ or ‘See how we have engaged the attention of Mary Dunne.’
‘And why would you say that?’ she asks me.
‘Because’ (I am fifteen) ‘we are what we remember.’

…

I am, always have been, a fool who rushes in, a blurter-out of awkward truths, a speaker-up at parties who, the morning-after, filled with guilt, vows that never again, no matter what, but who, faced at the very next encounter with someone whose opinions strike me as unfair, rushes in again blurting out, breaking all vows.

Quotation: I Am Mary Dunne by Brian Moore. Penguin 2012 (1968)

Time Past

In the old days they would have given me a gold watch. I never understood why. Was it to remind the one who is being retired that his time is past? Instead of a watch I have been presented with a videotape of the ceremonies. My life here has ended. My day is done.

…

When we are young we assume that, in age, we will be able to look back and remember our lives. But just as we forget the details of a story a few months after hearing it, so do the years hang like old clothes, forgotten in the wardrobe of our minds. Did I wear that? What was I then?

Quotation: No Other Life by Brian Moore. Penguin 2011 (1993).

A Painful New Affliction

… I have been in a tizzy since reading his accusations. I wasn’t exactly in great shape when his letter arrived. Like many elderly men, I have to swallow all sorts of pills. I take Inderal and quinidine for hypertension and cardiac disorders, and I am also, for a variety of psychological reasons, deeply distressed and for the moment with ego defenceless.

…

Edad con Sus Disgracias is the title Goya gave to the etching of an old man who struggles to rise from the chamber pot, his pants dropped to his ankles. ‘Together with most weak hams,’ as Hamlet wickedly says to Plonius, being merciless about old men. To the disorders aforementioned I must add teeth with cracked roots, periodontia requiring antibiotics that gave me the runs and resulted in a hemorrhoid the size of a walnut, plus creeping arthritis of the hands. Winter is gloomy and wet in British Columbia, and when I awoke one morning in this land of exile from which I face extradition, I discovered that something had gone wrong with the middle finger of the right hand. The hinge had stopped working and the finger was curled like a snail – a painful new affliction.

Actually this image, from the Museo del Prado, is entitled Comer mucho (To Eat a Lot) was part of an album of sketches made between 1824-1828. The catalogue entry reads 'A heavy man, perhaps a tonsured friar, is poised above a toilet, either rising or, more likely, about to descend to relieve himself after having consumed a large meal. In the shadowy background, a second man observes the operation with a smile or smirk.' It is close enough to the image described above to warrant inclusion here.

Quotation From: Saul Bellow Him With His Foot in His Mouth Penguin 2011 [originally published 1984].

Visceral Opinion

Shags seem to spend a lot of time drying off their wings. This one was right in the middle of the University campus on a hot sunny day. There were plenty of people about, above the deeply channelled Water of Leith.

Until something clearly spooked it. Like all critters it made its visceral opinion known before flying off.

The Past is History

What is the future, after all, but a structure of hopes and expectations? Its residence is in the mind; it has no reality.

Of course, you might reply that the past is likewise a fiction.

The past is history, and what is history but a story made of air that we tell ourselves? Nevertheless, there is something miraculous about the past that the future lacks. What is miraculous about the past is that we have succeeded – God knows how – in making thousands and millions of individual fictions, fictions created by individual human beings, lock well enough into one another to give us what looks like a common past, a shared story.

The future is different. We do not possess a shared story of a future. The creation of the past seems to exhaust our collective creative energies. Compared with our fiction of the past, our fiction of the future is a sketchy, bloodless affair, as visions of heaven tend to be. Of heaven and even of hell.

She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying. Ideas like these must have had some grip on her when years ago she wrote them down, but after so many repetitions they have taken on a worn, unconvincing air. On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief. Things can be true, she now thinks, even if one does not believe in them, and conversely. Belief may be no more, in the end, than a source of energy, like a battery which one clips into an idea to make it run. As happens when one writes: believing whatever has to be believed in order to get the job done.

Quotation: Elizabeth Costello by J.M.Coetzee. Vintage. 2004