Our Strange Reversion to a Shame-based Culture

Despite many faults and flaws, we have spent four centuries, roughly, in the West overcoming a shame-based communitarian mediaeval culture – and we are now busy reintroducing it!! And this one hasn’t got the greatness of the old shame based cultures like the Greek or the Japanese, but banal,banal,banal!

We are reintroducing it with political correctness, with the mediaevalisation of the dominant culture of science, with the massive and irreversible trend of bureaucratisation and protocol/procedure dependency, which neither Adam Smith nor Marx (nor Oscar Wilde, see below) anticipated, and with, let it be acknowledged, democracy itself, through its dependence on the Press and the Media, which Oscar Wilde called the Fourth Estate, and of which he wrote, in ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’:

http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/wilde_soul.html

“In old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and wrong, and demoralising. Somebody – was it Burke? – called journalism the fourth estate. That was true at the time, no doubt. But at the present moment it really is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism. In America the President reigns for four years, and Journalism governs for ever and ever. Fortunately, in America journalism has carried its authority to the grossest and most brutal extreme. As a natural consequence it has begun to create a spirit of revolt. People are amused by it, or disgusted by it, according to their temperaments. But it is no longer the real force it was. It is not seriously treated. In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality, is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned. In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers. It is no exaggeration to talk of compulsion. There are possibly some journalists who take a real pleasure in publishing horrible things, or who, being poor, look to scandals as forming a sort of permanent basis for an income. But there are other journalists, I feel certain, men of education and cultivation, who really dislike publishing these things, who know that it is wrong to do so, and only do it because the unhealthy conditions under which their occupation is carried on oblige them to supply the pubic with what the public wants, and to compete with other journalists in making that supply as full and satisfying to the gross popular appetite as possible. It is a very degrading position for any body of educated men to be placed in, and I have no doubt that most of them feel it acutely.”

This is not to say I think any alternative to democracy would now be better – I suspect all modern societies are caught in this, whether democracies or autocracies.

We desparately need to think how we can seed something different, without reverting irresistably to Fascism.

Remembering my father

My father would have been 130 years old today.

Born February 2nd 1880, he lived till March 20th 1967. He gave and gives me a psychic link to the nineteenth century. He was in the first motorised vehicle, a Benz motorcar, which drove to Stonehenge, in 1895, year of The Importance of Being Earnest and then the Oscar Wilde trial. He and his first wife were ‘turned down’ by the Bloomsbury set, having been ‘interviewed’ by Clive and Vanessa Bell (my father’s mother was from the Bell family, and Clive Bell was my father’s cousin – the name Heward was introduced as a first name by the Bells -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Bell ),

on the grounds that they were too sporty, too interested in tennis, cricket, and suchlike things!

So the natural 19th century part of me – drawn to the great creative minds who grew up in the 19th century and who flourished in their heyday in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, who I encountered in their twilight, Leavis, Klemperer, John Wisdom, Donald McKinnon, CD Broad, HH Price, and my  much loved supervisor, Brian Lake – comes in the end from my father.  I recognise an element of this in my friendship with James Grotstein, as indicated in my paper on his book, and again, further developed, in my book:

http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/GrotsteinPaper.pdf

In many ways, as Proust understood so well, I ‘become’ my father as I grow older. For instance, his greatest musical love was Brahms, and whilst I do not regard Brahms as the greatest of all composers, he is of the great ones for me, and there are times when I hardly play anything but Brahms.  My religious agnosticism, tinged with an openness to reverence for spirituality which comes from my mother, perhaps in the end comes from my father. I feel it in my body. Do we ever adopt any beliefs on rational grounds I wonder? How can we know in any case? Nietzschean questions!

I am probably in many ways essentially more ’50s’ than ’60s’, therefore. Much hangs on that in relation to my views in philosophy and psychotherapy – but I shall leave that for another time.

Derrida on inner sociality (Enough Shakespeariana for the moment)

Oliver Kamm says I am not a genuine Shakespearian – others think there is too much Shakespeare around here!

Should I write about Arsenal?

Perhaps the less said the better about that, after Sunday’s efforts….

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/philmcnulty/2010/02/arsenals_day_of_indignity_and.html

The thing about a Blog which takes on life in its author’s mind is that it actually is a place to think out loud and gradually one gains a sense of it as a metaphorical ‘place’. This did not happen for me whilst it was still only confined to Therapy issues. I found my thinking about philosophy was looking for a place, which was not simply confined to the members of the courses I run, so I modified the title here to allow for that. Then the latest drive of Kamm’s began with a flick at De Vere on January 25th

http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2010/01/an-apology-to-my-readers.html

and so Shakespeare came into the frame.

A blog brings out the reality of what Derrida is talking about in his theory of the primacy of writing; a writer is her or his own ‘first reader’. And it has to take on a life of its own to do that. One has to establish a sense of ones ‘authorial identity’, however modest that may be. So one has, in the Derridean sense, to create oneself as text. [This is of course the Kantian dimension of Derrida!] Writing about Freud on the Mystic Writing Pad

http://home.uchicago.edu/~awinter/mystic.pdf

Derrida ['Writing and Difference' pp. 226-7] says

http://is.gd/7xbHG

“If there were only perception, pure permeability to breaching, there would be no breaches. We would be written, but nothing would be recorded; no writing would be produced, retained, repeated as legibility. But pure perception does not exist; we are written only as we write, by the agency within us which always already keeps watch over perception, be it internal or external. The ’subject’ of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society, the world. Within that scene, on that stage, the punctual simplicity of the classical subject is not to be found. In order to describe the structure it is not enough to recall that one always writes for someone; and the oppositions sender-receiver, code-message, etc., remain extremely coarse instruments. We would search ‘the public’ in vain for the first reader: i.e., the first author of a work. And the ’sociology of literature’ is blind to the war and the ruses perpetrated by the author who reads and by the first reader who dictates, for at stake here is the origin of the work itself. The sociality of writing as drama requires an entirely different discipline.”

All this is profoundly relevant to the whole question of the pseudonym of course! And, within psychotherapy, systemic approaches have a great deal to say on all of this. Object Relations is internal systemic psychotherapy! Its not an accident that Derrida ends his paper appealing to Melanie Klein and the inner world of the child.

I have a link here to Robert Elliott’s blog, mainly to track his involvement with the world of Regulation of Therapy, for I find his thinking too much immersed in the technical world of therapy approaches to feel free enough for me. Yet here

http://pe-eft.blogspot.com/2010/01/entry-400-epiphany-2010.html

he is celebrating his 400th post, of a blog which began September 2006,with its shifts of audiences and so on! And I can feel for that.

This is what I mean, what Derrida means, by the intrinsic sociality of the author.

Being a Shakespearian

Oliver Kamm prompts me to some reflections on being a Shakespearian….

http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2010/01/great-historical-questions-to-which-the-answer-is-no-2.html

Oliver Kamm’s post of 29th January:

“Mr Wilkinson, you miss my point: we do not share a profound passion for Shakespeare, we have nothing in common, and the manufactured terms “Stratfordian” and “Oxfordian” are false in implying some equivalent competing theories. The cranks who argue that only a man of noble birth can have written Shakespeare reduce his work, as in the quotation I’ve given, to mapping them to pedestrian details in an inglorious biography. They evince not artistic appreciation but ugly snobbery. These worthless volumes that have streamed from minor publishers and vanity presses over the past 150 years are an affront to historical inquiry and an intellectual disgrace.

I hope I’ve made myself clear.”

Well, leaving on one side my arguments with Oliver, who after all does give us air time, those of us who are identified with the cause of vindicating the one we believe to be the true author, I was mulling over why, this morning, I found the feeling of despondency and disturbance in connection with Shakespeare, and Oxford’s life, so powerful. Now, old issues and conflicts in the therapy world are currently disturbing me. And I became once aware that Shakespeare’s work is set right in the core of devastating issues about survival and conflict, and that, if the Oxfordian theory is true, it comes out of devastating issues about survival and conflict, it squirts out, as it were, right from the jugular of those issues. When we enter a Shakespeare play, whether or not adequately performed, it draws us immediately into an atmosphere of darkness. And how he knows how to evoke those atmospheres!

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

BERNARDO

Who’s there?

FRANCISCO

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

BERNARDO

Long live the king!

FRANCISCO

Bernardo?

BERNARDO

He.

FRANCISCO

You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO

‘Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

FRANCISCO

For this relief much thanks: ’tis bitter cold,

And I am sick at heart.

BERNARDO

Have you had quiet guard?

FRANCISCO

Not a mouse stirring.

BERNARDO

Well, good night.

If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus,

The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.

FRANCISCO

I think I hear them. Stand, ho! Who’s there?

Enter HORATIO and MARCELLUS

HORATIO

Friends to this ground.

MARCELLUS

And liegemen to the Dane.

FRANCISCO

Give you good night.

MARCELLUS

O, farewell, honest soldier:

Who hath relieved you?

FRANCISCO

Bernardo has my place.

Give you good night.

Exit

MARCELLUS

Holla! Bernardo!

BERNARDO

Say,

What, is Horatio there?

HORATIO

A piece of him.

BERNARDO

Welcome, Horatio: welcome, good Marcellus.

MARCELLUS

What, has this thing appear’d again to-night?

BERNARDO

I have seen nothing.

MARCELLUS

Horatio says ’tis but our fantasy,

And will not let belief take hold of him

Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:

Therefore I have entreated him along

With us to watch the minutes of this night;

That if again this apparition come,

He may approve our eyes and speak to it.

HORATIO

Tush, tush, ’twill not appear.

BERNARDO

Sit down awhile;

And let us once again assail your ears,

That are so fortified against our story

What we have two nights seen.

HORATIO

Well, sit we down,

And let us hear Bernardo speak of this.

BERNARDO

Last night of all,

When yond same star that’s westward from the pole

Had made his course to illume that part of heaven

Where now it burns, Marcellus and myself,

The bell then beating one,–

Enter Ghost

MARCELLUS

Peace, break thee off; look, where it comes again!

BERNARDO

In the same figure, like the king that’s dead.

MARCELLUS

Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.

BERNARDO

Looks it not like the king? mark it, Horatio.

HORATIO

Most like: it harrows me with fear and wonder.

BERNARDO

It would be spoke to.

MARCELLUS

Question it, Horatio.

HORATIO

What art thou that usurp’st this time of night,

Together with that fair and warlike form

In which the majesty of buried Denmark

Did sometimes march? by heaven I charge thee, speak!

MARCELLUS

It is offended.

BERNARDO

See, it stalks away!

HORATIO

Stay! speak, speak! I charge thee, speak!

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.1.html

And suddenly, almost instantly, we are right in it, in the midst of terror!  It is totally deadpan – recognisable and ordinary, which is why it grips us! – and so it gets us by the throat, instantly!

Thomas De Quincey wrote a masterly essay on this, in relation to the Knocking on the Gate in Macbeth:

http://www.ellopos.net/notebook/quincey.htm

FROM my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else, which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of this out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge of the perspective, to draw in the rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of that science; as, for instance, to represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approximation to it. Yet why? For he has actually seen the effect every day of his life. The reason is- that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not appear a horizontal line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular, less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together. Accordingly, he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and fails, of course, to produce the effect demanded. Here, then, is one instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes, as it were; for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but (what is monstrous!) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that he has seen (and therefore quoad his consciousness has not seen) that which he has seen every day of his life.

But to return from this digression, my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect. But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his debut on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, ‘There has been absolutely nothing doing since his time, or nothing that’s worth speaking of.’ But this is wrong; for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered, that in the first of these murders (that of the Marrs), the same incident (of a knocking at the door) soon after the work of extermination was complete, did actually occur, which the genius of Shakespeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakespeare’s suggestion, as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling, in opposition to my understanding; and I again set myself to study the problem; at length I solved it to my own satisfaction, and my solution is this. Murder, in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind (though different in degree) amongst all living creatures: this instinct, therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of ‘the poor beetle that we tread on’, exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with him (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,- not a sympathy of pity or approbation*). In the murdered person, all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him ‘with its petrific mace’. But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion- jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred- which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakespeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,- yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, ‘the gracious Duncan,’ and adequately to expound ‘the deep damnation of his taking off’, this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, i.e. the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man- was gone, vanished, extinct, and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the dialogues and soliloquies themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader’s attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle is that in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully in the silence and desertion of the streets, and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man- if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is ‘unsexed;’ Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder must be insulated- cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs- locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested- laid asleep- tranced- racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

O mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers; like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert- but that, the farther we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!

* It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word, in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word pity; and hence, instead of saying ’sympathy with another, many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of ’sympathy for another.

The Mercurial Shakespeare

I realised, when I had finished the last post, that I had unwittingly but unerringly been drawn to that mercurial character which Keats recognised in the ‘chamelion’ poet concept, which is also the heart of the hermetic art of psychotherapy, and, for the most part, is precisely the elusive, quicksilver quality of Shakespeare which people do not want to recognise.

It is partly caught by FR Leavis in the following passages:

“The inherited habit [of mind] is exemplified by the editor’s footnote, in my old Arden Antony and Cleopatra, to the following passage (Act III, sc. ii) – for obvious reasons I quote more than the footnote immediately points to:

Antony

The April’s in her eyes: it is love’s spring,

And these the showers to bring it on. Be cheerful.

Octavia

Sir, look well to my husband’s house: and –

Caesar

Octavia?

Octavia

I’ll tell you in your ear.

Antony

Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can

Her heart inform her tongue – the swan’s down-feather

That stands upon the swell at full of tide,

And neither way inclines.

The Arden footnote, which regards Antony’s last utterance, runs:

‘It is not clear whether Octavia’s heart is the swan’s down-feather, swayed neither way on the full tide of emotion at parting with her brother to accompany her husband, or whether it is the inaction of heart and tongue, on the same occasion, which is elliptically compared to that of the feather.’

‘It is not clear’ – it ought to be clear; that is the implication.  The implied criterion, ‘clarity’, entails an ‘either/or’; does the image mean this or that? The reductive absurdity of the conception of language behind the criterion thus brought up is surely plain. It wouldn’t be enough to say the image has both meanings: no one really reading Shakespeare would ask to which it is, or to what, that ‘the swan’s down-feather’ is meant to apply metaphorically, because it would be so plain that the relevant meaning – the communication in which the the image plays its part – is created by the utterance as a totality, and is not a matter of separate local meaings put together more or less felicitiously. The force and  precision with which Shakespeare’s English imparts its meaning here depend on the impossibility of choosing one of the scholar’s alternatives as right and the clear inapplicability of the question he puts.

If I were intent on developing the theme of ‘imagery’ I might say that ‘the swan’s down-feather’ gives us an image of weight – or lightness (lack of weight) – but I have already made the offer of such a comment absurd. For it is plain that the effective ‘as if’ value depends on our simultaneous sense of the massive swell of the tidal water, and that the effect of both depends on our being made by that word ‘swell’ to feel the ‘full of tide’ as a swell of emotion in ourselves. There is in fact a complex play of diverse and shifting analogy such as one might – for there is no dividing line – find oneself discussing under the head of ‘imagery’, ‘imagery’  conceived of as that which makes the difference between mere discursive thought and what we require of art. But we find ourselves, without any sense of a break, observing that movement plays an essential part in the analogical potency of the passage, and we could hardly be happy in bringing that under ‘imagery’. The part played by movement insists on our noticing it in the opening of the speech, and in the closing clause:

Her tongue will not obey her heart, nor can

Her heart inform her tongue

and, after the self-contained ‘standing’ poise of the penultimate line, the lapse into

And neither way inclines.

‘Movement’ here, we note, is determined by the meaning which it serves and completes.”

This is the Shakespearean element which is determined by his fundamental relation to OVID, not to Virgil. It is the non-monumental element. The monumental element always stands in relation to it. The Herakleitian/Parmenidean dialectic of process versus permanence is always at work.

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/troilus_cressida.3.3.html

Who was Edward de Vere, Shakespeare Authorship candidate?

The Shakespeare Authorship question continues to fascinate me. It already hijacked the largest chapter (4) of my book:

http://www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=25803

When in 1989 I first discovered that the authorship issue was alive, previously having dismissed prospective candidates like Bacon and Marlowe as simply incongruent with the whole range and tenour of the works, – despite that this left me with the gaping hole and enigma of the utterly unknown quantity of the Stratford man, – which was when I discovered Charlton Ogburn’s book on Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford

http://hewardwilkinson.co.uk/ShakespearePaper.doc,

although my heart leapt with excitement at discovering at last a real human being as the author, I did not feel any certainty at that time regarding that attribution. I am nearer to it now – but there are possible discoveries which could still overthrow my belief. It remains a hypothesis circumstantially established and, as Jimmy Pitt in PG Wodehouse’s A Gentleman of Leisure remarks, this circumstantial evidence business is the devil, isn’t it?

This also gives it a force of fascination for speculative and imaginative exploration. I can indulge that a little here, whereas when I am arguing on a pro-Stratfordian Blog such as Oliver Kamm’s,

http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2009/09/great-historical-questions-to-which-the-answer-is-no.html

http://timesonline.typepad.com/oliver_kamm/2010/01/an-apology-to-my-readers.html

I am having to deal with the extreme caricaturing of those unwilling to dialogue with or seek to understand their opponents’ positions. One of the elements in a good deal of psychotherapy which makes it important to me is the willingness to enter into and seek to understand belief-states and life-positions different from our own, which also Keats saw as the quality of the ‘chameleon poet’, for which Shakespeare was his paradigm (Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27th, 1818):

“As to the poetical Character itself (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself – it has no self – it is every thing and nothing – It has no character – it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated – It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other Body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity – he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? Might I not at that very instant have been cogitating on the Characters of Saturn and Ops? It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature – how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins so to press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated – not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children: I know not whether I make myself wholly understood: I hope enough so to let you see that no despondence is to be placed on what I said that day.”

Anyway, to get to the point, and it is one of those points which one holds in ones mind excitedly till one begins to try to write it down, is that, whereas in The Muse as Therapist I was, as it were, viewing Edward de Vere through the eyes of Shakespeare, particularly through Hamlet and King Lear, I think the reverse is beginning to happen, I am viewing Shakespeare through the eyes of de Vere. What does that mean? What is the excitement of that? Even if we know a bit more about Edward de Vere as a writer and creative force than we do about William Shakespeare of Stratford, it is still only a little, and there are huge holes in it. But there is enough to get something of a foothold.

We get a sense of a mercurial, masterful, sometimes extremely narcissistic, selfish darkly sinister demonic human being, in some ways, who nevertheless was not incapable of penitence, a man with more than a touch of madness about him, as we would expect in the author of Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, and Macbeth. Someone who, even though Nina Green is in the process of showing that his inheritance was cannibalised systematically by Queen Elizabeth, aided and abetted by the Earl of Leicester,

http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/oxfordsbio.html

was nevertheless to a massive degree a wastrel and a squanderer, an ‘unthrift’ as he is unkindly called by the tenacious money-maker Walter Scott in Kenilworth, someone much more like Falstaff than Shylock!

We get a sense of his mercurial fascinating, hateful, contemptible, elusive, yet still hypnotic and compelling character in Gabriel Harvey’s Speculum Tuscanismi where his Italianate style also is ridiculed!

http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/harvey101.htm

Since Galateo came in, and Tuscanism gan usurp,
Vanity above all: villainy next her, stateliness Empress
No man but minion, stout, lout, plain, swain, quoth a Lording:
No words but valorous, no works but womanish only.
For life Magnificoes, not a beck but glorious in show,
In deed most frivolous, not a look but Tuscanish always.
His cringing side neck, eyes glancing, fisnamy smirking,
With forefinger kiss, and brave embrace to the footward.
Large bellied Cod-pieced doublet, uncod-pieced half hose,
Straight to the dock like a shirt, and close to the britch like a diveling.
A little Apish flat couched fast to the pate like an oyster,
French camarick ruffs, deep with a whiteness starched to the purpose.
Every one A per se A, his terms and braveries in print,
Delicate in speech, quaint in array: conceited in all points,
In Courtly guiles a passing singular odd man,
For Gallants a brave Mirror, a Primrose of Honour,
A Diamond for nonce, a fellow peerless in England.
Not the like discourser for Tongue, and head to be found out,
Not the like resolute man for great and serious affairs,
Not the like Lynx to spy out secrets and privities of States,
Eyed like to Argus, eared like to Midas, nos’d like to Naso,
Wing’d like to Mercury, fittst of a thousand for to be employ’d,
This, nay more than this, doth practice of Italy in one year.
None do I name, but some do I know, that a piece of a twelve month
Hath so perfited outly and inly both body, both soul,
That none for sense and senses half matchable with them.
A vulture’s smelling, Ape’s tasting, sight of an eagle,
A spider’s touching, Hart’s hearing, might of a Lion.
Compounds of wisdom, wit, prowess, bounty, behavior,
All gallant virtues, all qualities of body and soul.
O thrice ten hundred thousand times blessed and happy,
Blessed and happy travail, Travailer most blessed and happy.

Tell me in good sooth, doth it not too evidently appear
that this English poet wanted but a good pattern before his eyes,
as it might be some delicate and choice elegant Poesy
of good Master Sidney’s or Master Dyer’s
(our very Castor and Pollux for such and many greater matters)
when this trim gear was in the matching?

The qualities of Shakespeare which correspond to his mercurial character are many. Queen Mab, who so fascinated Berlioz in Romeo and Juliet

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight,
O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
O’er ladies ‘ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o’er a courtier’s nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And sometime comes she with a tithe-pig’s tail
Tickling a parson’s nose as a’ lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another benefice:
Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck,
And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she–

ROMEO

Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk’st of nothing.

MERCUTIO

True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

Again, the marvellous character of Bottom’s dream in Midsummer Nights Dream, with its stream of Pauline reminscences – but it is this elusive dancing mercurial element I am trying to evoke:

BOTTOM

[Awaking] When my cue comes, call me, and I will
answer: my next is, ‘Most fair Pyramus.’ Heigh-ho!
Peter Quince! Flute, the bellows-mender! Snout,
the tinker! Starveling! God’s my life, stolen
hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare
vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go
about to expound this dream. Methought I was–there
is no man can tell what. Methought I was,–and
methought I had,–but man is but a patched fool, if
he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of
this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream,
because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the
latter end of a play, before the duke:
peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall
sing it at her death.

The great drama of persuasion, Julius Caesar, embodies these qualities in both Cassius and Mark Antony. Here now is Cassius seducing Brutus:

CASSIUS

I know that virtue to be in you, Brutus,
As well as I do know your outward favour.
Well, honour is the subject of my story.
I cannot tell what you and other men
Think of this life; but, for my single self,
I had as lief not be as live to be
In awe of such a thing as I myself.
I was born free as Caesar; so were you:
We both have fed as well, and we can both
Endure the winter’s cold as well as he:
For once, upon a raw and gusty day,
The troubled Tiber chafing with her shores,
Caesar said to me ‘Darest thou, Cassius, now
Leap in with me into this angry flood,
And swim to yonder point?’ Upon the word,
Accoutred as I was, I plunged in
And bade him follow; so indeed he did.
The torrent roar’d, and we did buffet it
With lusty sinews, throwing it aside
And stemming it with hearts of controversy;
But ere we could arrive the point proposed,
Caesar cried ‘Help me, Cassius, or I sink!’
I, as Aeneas, our great ancestor,
Did from the flames of Troy upon his shoulder
The old Anchises bear, so from the waves of Tiber
Did I the tired Caesar. And this man
Is now become a god, and Cassius is
A wretched creature and must bend his body,
If Caesar carelessly but nod on him.
He had a fever when he was in Spain,
And when the fit was on him, I did mark
How he did shake: ’tis true, this god did shake;
His coward lips did from their colour fly,
And that same eye whose bend doth awe the world
Did lose his lustre: I did hear him groan:
Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans
Mark him and write his speeches in their books,
Alas, it cried ‘Give me some drink, Titinius,’
As a sick girl. Ye gods, it doth amaze me
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world
And bear the palm alone.
Shout. Flourish

BRUTUS

Another general shout!
I do believe that these applauses are
For some new honours that are heap’d on Caesar.

CASSIUS

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Brutus and Caesar: what should be in that ‘Caesar’?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ‘em,
Brutus will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed,
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When went there by an age, since the great flood,
But it was famed with more than with one man?
When could they say till now, that talk’d of Rome,
That her wide walls encompass’d but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed and room enough,
When there is in it but one only man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say,
There was a Brutus once that would have brook’d
The eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.

Well I can go on – but I just wanted to convey that somewhat hysterical imaginative-creative quality which is always there in Shakespeare, and which is equally there in the splenetic diatribe of Gabriel Harvey. Yet in Shakespeare always authority also.

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.LV.html

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lover’s eyes.

But then, in parallel, we have this, from the commendatory verses at the beginning of Spenser’s The Fairie Queene:

TO looke vpon a worke of rare deuise
The which a workman setteth out to view,
And not to yield it the deserued prise,
That vnto such a workmanship is dew,
Doth either proue the iudgement to be naught
Or els doth shew a mind with enuy fraught.

To labour to commend a peece of worke,
Which no man goes about to discommend,
Would raise a iealous doubt that there did lurke
Some secret doubt, whereto the prayse did tend.
For when men know the goodnes of the wyne,
Tis needlesse for the hoast to haue a sygne.

Thus then to shew my iudgement to be such
As can discern of colours blacke, and white,
As alls to free my minde from enuies tuch,
That neuer giues to any man his right,
I here pronounce this workmanship is such,
As that no pen can set it forth too much.

And thus I hang a garland at the dore,
Not for to shew the goodnes of the ware:
But such hath beene the custome heretofore,
And customes very hardly broken are.
And when your tast shall tell you this is trew,
Then looke you giue your hoast his vtmost dew.

This is by ‘Ignoto’ the unknown one.  It moves mazily within the narcissistic predicament with the same subtle skill as the author of the Sonnets. And this is matched in tone by Spenser’s own poem to Oxford, which evokes the narcissism without shame!

REceiue most Noble Lord in gentle gree,
The vnripe fruit of an vnready wit:
Which by thy countenaunce doth craue to bee
Defended from foule Enuies poisnous bit.
Which so to doe may thee right well befit,
Sith th’antique glory of thine auncestry
Vnder a shady vele is therein writ,
And eke thine owne long liuing memory,
Succeeding them in true nobility:
And also for the loue, which thou doest beare
To th’Heliconian ymps, and they to thee,
They vnto thee, and thou to them most deare:
Deare as thou art unto thy selfe, so loue
That loues & honours thee, as doth behoue.

And here I shall break off for now!

Our core categories unchanged since the Greeks

Philosophy is a very very thin crust coating over the magma of life just beneath the surface. It keeps solidifying in the same forms. Amazing that we are still arguing and conceptualising with the categories of Plato and Aristotle in all contexts after over 2000 years! We cannot think outside them.
Reading Aristotle has given me a new way in to Strawson’s Individuals – and vice versa!
http://is.gd/7bnfR
In Strawson’s language we are still in thrall of the ultimate revisionary metaphysics – those of Plato and Aristotle. We only think they are descriptive and not revisionary precisely because we remain in their thrall! Strawson’s position is deeply a-historical.

If I believe different from you I am a different being from you!

The puzzle about belief is that if I differ from you fundamentally in belief it makes us in a sense different persons. The grounds of our beliefs will be different and will have a circular relation with the beliefs themselves. Because I cannot challenge your grounds from my grounds, without circularity, you and I have literally different worlds. Wittgenstein says something like this in the Tractatus, though I do not think it does not alter ‘the facts’ as well – indeed it is the entanglement of ‘the facts’ with our life-and-being stance that is the mystery:

6.43 If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts – not what can be expressed by means of language. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.

So I can only communicate with you in superficials; in fundamentals we literally do not communicate. In practice we struggle with this at the limits of our awareness and find ways to partly connect somehow, which also accounts in part for how desparately we cling to the foundations of commonsense and the public world, of which Hume writes so poignantly:

Having thus given an account of all the systems both popular and philosophical, with regard to external existences, I cannot forbear giving vent to a certain sentiment, which arises upon reviewing those systems. I begun this subject with premising, that we ought to have an implicit faith in our senses, and that this wou’d be the conclusion, I shou’d draw from the whole of my reasoning. But to be ingenuous, I feel myself at present of a quite contrary sentiment, and am more inclin’d to repose no faith at all in my senses, or rather imagination, than to place in it such an implicit confidence. I cannot conceive bow such trivial qualities of the fancy, conducted by such false suppositions, can ever lead to any solid and rational system. They are the coherence and constancy of our perceptions, which produce the opinion of their continu’d existence; tho’ these qualities of perceptions have no perceivable connexion with such an existence. The constancy of our ]perceptions has the most considerable effect, and yet is attended with the greatest difficulties. ‘Tis a gross illusion to suppose, that our resembling perceptions are numerically the same; and ’tis this illusion, which leads us into the opinion, that these perceptions are uninterrupted, and are still existent, even when they are not present to the senses. This is the case with our popular system. And as to our philosophical one, ’tis liable to the same difficulties; and is over-and-above loaded with this absurdity, that it at once denies and establishes the vulgar supposition. Philosophers deny our resembling perceptions to be identically the same, and uninterrupted; and yet have so great a propensity to believe them such, that they arbitrarily invent a new set of perceptions, to which they attribute these qualities. I say, a new set of perceptions: For we may well suppose in general, but ’tis impossible for us distinctly to conceive, objects to be in their nature any thing but exactly the same with perceptions. What then can we look for from this confusion of groundless and extraordinary opinions but error and falshood? And how can we justify to ourselves any belief we repose in them?

This sceptical doubt, both with respect to reason and the senses, is a malady, which can never be radically cur’d, but must return upon us every moment, however we may chace it away, and sometimes may seem entirely free from it. ‘Tis impossible upon any system to defend either our understanding or senses; and we but expose them farther when we endeavour to justify them in that manner. As the sceptical doubt arises naturally from a profound and intense reflection on those subjects, it always encreases, the farther we carry our reflections, whether in opposition or conformity to it. Carelessness and in-attention alone can afford us any remedy. For this reason I rely entirely upon them; and take it for granted, whatever may be the reader’s opinion at this present moment, that an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an external and internal world; and going upon that supposition, I intend to examine some general systems both ancient and modern, which have been propos’d of both, before I proceed to a more particular enquiry concerning our impressions. This will not, perhaps, in the end be found foreign to our present purpose.

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hume%20Treatise/hume%20treatise1.htm#PART IV.

Philosophical Dimensions

Having set in motion philosophy courses for Psychotherapists and related Professionals in both UK and Ireland, I am expanding this blog to include my on-going reflections on philosophy and everything else. So I have changed the title also.

I am going to try to do this by pretty random reflections without feeling obliged to give the full background every time.

Perhaps I should at this point include an insert from Petrarch’s letter to posterity whose irony may give edge to my own endeavours!

FRANCESCO PETRARCH: TO POSTERITY

Greetings. It is possible that some word of me may have come to you, though even this is doubtful, since an insignificant and obscure name will scarcely penetrate far in either time or space. If, however, you should have heard of me, you may desire to know what manner of man I was, or what was the outcome of my labours, especially those of which some description or, at any rate, the bare titles may have reached you.

To begin with myself, then, the utterances of men concerning me will differ widely, since in passing judgment almost everyone is influenced not so much by truth as by preference, and good and evil report alike know no bounds. I was, in truth, a poor mortal like yourself, neither very exalted in my origin, nor, on the other hand, of the most humble birth, but belonging, as Augustus Caesar says of himself, to an ancient family. As to my disposition, I was not naturally perverse or wanting in modesty, however the contagion of evil associations may have corrupted me. My youth was gone before I realised it; I was carried away by the strength of manhood; but a riper age brought me to my senses and taught me by experience the truth I had long before read in books, that youth and pleasure are vanity-nay, that the Author of all ages and times permits us miserable mortals, puffed up with emptiness, thus to wander about, until finally, coming to a tardy consciousness of our sins, we shall learn to know ourselves. In my prime I was blessed with a quick and active body, although not exceptionally strong; and while I do not lay claim to remarkable personal beauty, I was comely enough in my best days. I was possessed of a clear complexion, between light and dark, lively eyes, and for long years a keen vision, which however deserted me, contrary to my hopes, after I reached my sixtieth birthday, and forced me, to my great annoyance, to resort to glasses. Although I had previously enjoyed perfect health, old age brought with it the usual array of discomforts………

Heward

Widening the Mapping Process in Psychotherapy

I have been silent a good while, during the time in much effort has been developed by the Humanistic and Integrative Section of UKCP (and many others also) to widening the mapping process of psychotherapy competencies being undertaken by Skills for Health.

There are signs that this is beginning to bear fruit, in the current post on Robert Elliott’s blog, which reflects, from his point of view, recent events in the Humanistic Person-Centred Experiential Expert Reference Group. (It is linked in the links to this blog.) Naturally we who have been engaged in getting different positions recognised would react differently and I dont propose to argue this here.

But I just wanted to note that our work is beginning to have some impact.