Month: May 2019

MY TOP SHELF – 24 – THE TRIAL

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MY TOP SHELF

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

24

THE TRIAL

Franz Kafka

Franklin Library, 1977; full grey morocco; gilt titles and humped spine; moiré endpapers in black with black ribbon; gilt edged paper in text; translated by W and E Muir; and illustrated by Phero Thomas.

Someone must have traduced Joseph K, for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.

How do you feel when your bank bounces a cheque – usually in favour of your secretary or your landlord or, even better, your golf club – and you get a computer generated letter – long after the affront has been administered to the payee of the cheque – and which does not name any actual person in the bank but which bears an anonymous squiggle over the printed title ‘Team Leader, Dishonour Team’?  Just think of that – your bank has a whole team dedicated to dishonouring you and the rest of its customers.  Does the team get to march to a tune?  Do they have their own guernsey?

Or, you get another computer driven letter that contains the name of no real person. It is almost entirely incomprehensible, but it is alleging that you owe your government a large amount of money for tax.   You correspond with computers and you cannot get any sense from them.  You sense that they do not know what the law is and that they do not care about you.  But the one thing you do understand is that they say that the law stands behind their assessment and says that it is right and that you have the onus of proving them wrong.  Are not really bad criminals better treated by the law?

Or you live in a regime where you get fined for driving offences that are detected by computers and notified to you by computers and which carry points which are tallied by computers until you get enough to lose your licence – by computers.  Computers then notify you that you have scored enough points to have lost your licence and that accordingly you are not allowed to drive.  You seek to challenge that decision – if decision it is – and the bureaucracy showers incomprehensible paper all over you.  It refers to an ‘Infringements Court’.  Do people really believe that there is such a court?  In the meantime the law is that you have been deprived of your licence and therefore your livelihood by a process untouched by a human hand, much less by judicial hands.

These instances of contemporary absurdity – of how we are losing our way and our rights – are called Kafkaesque.  Franz Kafka was a German speaking Czech Jew who trained in law but who engaged in office work to support his writing.  His best known work is The Trial.  It is set in an indeterminate time and place and it follows the course of an absurdly unreal legal process brought against its hero who is named Joseph K.  It begins with the text set out above and it does not relent.

The events of the day somehow lead K to be attracted to another tenant, Fraulein Burstner.  ‘K … rushed out, seized her, and kissed her first on the lips, then all over the face, like some thirsty animal lapping greedily at a spring of long-sought fresh water ….  He wanted to call Fraulein Burstner by her first name, but he did not know what it was.’  There is a recurring streak of anonymity and unreality.

When he gets to see the court, he enters a door directed by a young woman with sparkling black eyes who is washing children’s clothes in a tub.  He felt like he was going into a meeting hall.  When he got before the crowd he said:  ‘Whether I am late or not, I am here now.’  This was met with a burst of applause.  K thought that ‘these people are easy to win over’.  K tells the Examining Magistrate that ‘I do not say that your procedure is contemptible, but I should like to present that epithet to you for your private consumption’.

There are nightmare elements throughout.  The uncle of Joseph K refers him to an old lawyer.  The lawyer is ill but agrees to see Joseph. The lawyer is looked after by a nurse called Leni who is attracted to men generally, and accused men in particular.  Leni immediately propositions K, and not without effect.  The lawyer knows more about K’s case than K, because he is a lawyer who moves in legal circles and has discussed this case with his colleagues.  In this system, the accused is never told the charge.  Sometimes they try to guess what it might be by looking at the course of the interrogations.  ‘In such circumstances the Defence was naturally in a very ticklish and difficult position.  Yet that, too, was intentional.  For the Defence was not actually countenanced by the Law.’  (The third question put to Galileo on his second visit to the Inquisition was: ‘Why do you think you are here?’)

There are ranks of lawyers.  At the bottom are pettifogging lawyers.  They are all over the place.  At the top are the truly great lawyers.  No one has ever met one of those.  The most important part of the role of the lawyer was counsel’s personal connection with officials of the court.  No client ever dismissed a lawyer – such a thing was not done.  An accused man, once having briefed a lawyer, must stick to him whatever happened.  It is rather like marriage, but more binding.

Joseph K is so preoccupied with the process – which in no way resembles what those in the common law would call a trial – that his work at the bank is affected and a deputy manager is moving in to poach his clients.  K has to keep customers waiting, and he sometimes gets some satisfaction from the fact that others have to be kept waiting.  It is a way of stressing the hierarchical nature of the world of Joseph K.  (When will our computers be programmed to be sweeter to those with money?)

Titorelli is a painter with influence.  He asks the question that criminal lawyers generally avoid:  ‘Are you innocent?’  When he gets an affirmative answer, Titorelli says, ‘I have to fight against countless subtleties in which the Court indulges and in the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up.’  K asked the painter how he came into contact with the judges.  ‘That was quite simple ….I inherited the connection.  My father was the court painter before me.  It’s a hereditary post.  New painters are of no use for it…..For every judge insists on being painted as the great old judges were painted, and no one can do that but me.’  Titorelli thinks therefore that he is unassailable.  He assures K that ‘as you are completely innocent, this is the line I shall take’. But then the painter goes on to give K the bad news:  ‘I have never encountered one case of definite acquittal.’  The best that K can hope for is ‘ostensible acquittal, or postponement’.  ‘Ostensible acquittal’ is a masterpiece of evasion. In such cases it is just as possible for the acquitted man to go straight home from the court and find officers already there waiting to arrest him again.  The very fruitful meeting with the painter ends with the painter selling K a few paintings.

The lawyer says that he has discussed K’s case with a judge who does not think much of.  K:  ‘But for all they know, the proceedings have not yet even commenced.’  ‘At a certain stage of the proceedings there was an old tradition that a bell must be rung.’  It was perfectly possible that K’s case has not reached that stage even yet.

The last chapter is called ‘The End.’  It begins:

On the evening before K’s thirty-first birthday –   it was about nine o’clock, the time when a hush falls on the streets – two men came to his lodging.  They were in frock coats, pallid and plump, with top hats which were apparently irremovable.  After some exchange of formalities regarding precedence at the front door, they repeated the same ceremony more elaborately before K’s door.

Later K says to himself: ‘Tenth-rate old actors they send for me ….They want to finish me off cheaply ….What theatre are you playing at?’  He was repelled by the painful cleanliness of their faces.  They are mechanical and anonymous as the warders who came to arrest K.  They take him to a quarry and his last words are: ‘Like a dog!’

The end is unseemly, but not nearly as unseemly as the millions of ends inflicted by the secret police of Hitler or Stalin in ways and circumstances that Franz Kafka could never have dreamed of.

Orlando Figges informs us that on 28 July 1938, two young girls, Nelly and Angelina, were arrested without notice with their mother, Zinaida, by two NKVD operatives.  Their father had been arrested nine months before, and not seen since.  The girls were told that they would not see their mother again and would be sent to different children’s homes.  When they left, the girls could see the NKVD beating up their mother.  Unlike Joseph K., Zinaida was told of the charge against her.  She was charged with failing to denounce her husband.  The State said its subjects owed more allegiance to it than to their husbands or wives.  She was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp – the Akmolinsk Labour Camp for Wives of Traitors to the Motherland.  She was nursing a baby at the time.  Could the singular mind of Franz Kafka have comprehended such denials of the essence of our humanity?

Kafka wrote at a time when people spoke of the death of God, meaning peoples’ loss of faith in God.  What we now see is not a voluntary loss of faith, but a mandatory placing of faith.  After Einstein, physics passed beyond the understanding of all but a few.  Most of us have to take the physical world on faith.  It is like Darwin – and that ask is too big for some.  It is the same now the way computers control so many parts of our lives.  They add to our sense of loss of independence, to our sense of helplessness.

This novel is very different to the novels of the great George Orwell warning us of the loss of humanity under totalitarian regimes.  The Trial is more like an opera or a tone poem.  It is very twentieth century.  Think of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck or Lulu, or The Makropoulos Case of Janacek, or The Chairs of Ionesco.

The Trial delivers slashing insight into the frailty of the human condition.  As it happens, the nightmare vision of this artist may not be realized again under dictators like Stalin and Hitler, but more simply by the accretion of the processes that we have now mastered, as a result of which the trial system keeps getting longer and longer, lawyers keep getting more and more expensive, and the law itself just gets more and more incomprehensible, and the descent in each is completely assured and computer-assisted.  Did Kafka the lawyer see this, or is it merely implicit in the vision of Kafka the artist?  You will recall that great lawyers were like acquittals – they had never been seen.

As is commonly the case with great artists, the vision of Franz Kafka was eerily prophetic.

Passing Bull 196 – Anecdotal evidence

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This phrase is common, but I am not sure what it means.  What evidence is not anecdotal?  I see something happen and I report it.  This anecdote becomes part of the account of the life or lives of those involved.  A biography is just a collection of anecdotes.  History is just a collection of biographies.  By what alchemy of certification, statistics, graphs, corroboration or repetition does the evidence cease to be anecdotal?  If you were walking around a volcano, and a local said that he had seen signs of imminent eruption, would you dismiss this evidence as anecdotal?

Bloopers

Count Fedor Tolstoy was related to the great novelist.

Born in 1782, he joined the…Life Guards where he soon made a reputation for himself as a fire-eater duellist – he was said to have killed eleven men in duels in the course of his life – and card-sharp.  In 1803, he was a member of an embassy to Japan taken by Admiral Krusenstiern on his circumnavigation of the world.  Tolstoy made himself so obnoxious on board that Krusenstiern abandoned him on one of the Aleutian Islands – together with a pet female ape, which he may later have eaten.  (Pushkin, T J Binyon, Harper Collins, 2002, 96).

It can happen in the best of families, but either way, the ape was hard done by.

Here and there – Is Hamlet a tragedy?

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At a recent course on Shakespeare at Madingley Hall, Cambridge – on All’s Well, Measure for Measure, A Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – the tutor in his introduction said that Hamlet was a victim of circumstances.  This led me to reflect that Hamlet was the only hero of the big four tragedies who did not morally collapse before his death.  Macbeth was the victim of ambition, and a young wife who could not go the distance.  Othello was made vulnerable to insult and suspicion by slapping the Venetian Establishment in the face by marrying above his station and outside his race.  (He is so obviously open to manipulation that I can no longer watch the play – or the opera.)  By no later than line 141 of Act 1 Scene 1 in King Lear, we know that the weakness and heat of this choleric old man will lead to his unmanning and betrayal and to death and disaster.  (‘Come not between the Dragon and his wrath.’  You might think that’s ripe, but it is just the start.)  But we see no such disintegration in Hamlet.  Is Hamlet then a tragic figure, the hero of a tragedy?

What does that word ‘tragedy’ mean?

Drama dealing with serious themes, ending in the suffering or death of one or more of the principal characters…The tragic hero should be of high worth or standing, but not perfect: a tragic flaw, weakness or transgression…or an excess of arrogant ambition…leads to downfall.  The effect of the inevitable disaster (catastrophe) on the spectators is the purgation or cleansing (catharsis) of the emotion of pity and terror through what they have seen.  (The Oxford Companion to the English Language.)

In the still magisterial Shakespearian Tragedy, A C Bradley said:

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait…is fatal to him.  To meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give.  He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin….In Hamlet, there is a painful consciousness that duty is being neglected….

We are, then, looking for a flaw in our hero that may prove to be fatal.  (‘Tragic trait’ does look a bit circular.)

What was Hamlet’s fatal flaw?  He is accused of delay and indecision.  Bradley turned this into a ‘neglect of duty’- the injunction by the ghost to revenge the murder of Hamlet’s father.  These allegations are frequently linked to the suggestion that Hamlet is rendered incapable of action because he thinks too much.  (This is a little curious.  When Caesar says Cassio spends too much time considering ‘the deeds of men’, he is giving the most withering assessment of the smiling assassin in our letters: Julius Caesar, 1,2, 198-213).

Is it fair to suggest such a flaw in Hamlet?  In my view, the suggestion is as unfounded as it is unfair.

First, it is wrong to say that Hamlet delayed.  The ghost could hardly have expected his son to race off to Gertrude and the alleged murderer writhing drunkenly and in flagrante in ‘the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed.’  (We may be forgiven for having difficulty seeing Derek Jacobi writhing with Julie Christie in any case at all.)  Even taking the ghost at face value, Hamlet had to seek corroboration and to count the numbers. This playwright was after all the most consummate political analyst the world has known. Sulky young Hamlet could not simply ask the court of Denmark to accept that a young son justifiably upset by his mother’s want of decorum was justified in killing the king – that adds the count of treason to that of murder – because he had the word of his father’s ghost that uncle had murdered dad.*

The second point is the more substantive.  To the extent that Hamlet hesitated to obey his father’s ghost, it was because the ghost was asking him to commit murder.  Murder is a crime both at law and morally.  It does not cease to be a crime simply because it is carried out to avenge a killing.  On the contrary, that motive makes the crime morally worse.

The first object of our law was to end the vicious cycle of revenge.  On the second and third pages of the biblical The Common Law of Oliver Wendell Holmes, we find:

It is commonly known that the early forms of legal procedure were grounded in vengeance.  Modern writers have thought that the Roman law started from the blood feud, and all the authorities agree that the German law began in that way.

(‘German law’ includes that brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons and therefore our law.)

What the ghost was asking Hamlet to do was to commit the crime of murder and by so doing take Denmark back about one thousand years to the Dark Age and to another cycle of vengeance and endless civil unrest.  That is why, as Tony Tanner pointed out, Hamlet is so different from the Oresteia. The intervening two millennia had witnessed the birth and acceptance in Europe of Christianity. Hamlet pauses for a simple reason – he has a conscience, a word that keeps cropping up in this would-be revenge play.

That being so, the wonder is not that Hamlet hesitated, but that he even thought about murdering his uncle for revenge.  And, as we know, he never executed the command of the ghost.  He finally kills Claudius for killing his mother and himself.

Let us test our conclusion in three ways.

First, we know from his swift and merciless despatch of the very unlovely Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Hamlet has no trouble in killing people where the homicide is morally justifiable – which it is in self-defence. (‘Why, man, they did make love to this employment./ They are not near my conscience.’  5, 2, 56-57.)  Here was no neurotic intellectual incapable of decisive, lethal action.  (You may recall that that hypocritical young hot-head, Laertes, expressly renounces ‘conscience and grace’ and dares damnation: 4, 5, 132-136.  Whoever expected Hamlet to act like that?)  Nor was Hamlet slow to accept a duel with Laertes.

Next, look at the models that the author of the play offers his hero for those who act strongly to exact revenge. I might seek to summarize what I have said before on this.

Pyrrhus was the son of Achilles. He murdered the King of Troy, old Priam, to avenge the death of his father. Hamlet was so fond of this story that he knew a lot of it by heart. There was one speech from this play that Hamlet ‘chiefly loved’ (2.2.456). He recites about a dozen lines about ‘Priam’s slaughter’ and then hands over to the Player King. Achilles may or may not have been a homicidal maniac, but he was certainly a manic homicide. Hamlet had nothing – nothing at all – in common with either of them.  They are not just worlds apart, but millennia apart.

The second model available to Hamlet may have been slightly more appealing, and for us more threatening. Fortinbras (a derivative of ‘strong-arm’) leads a Norwegian army against the Poles over a worthless bit of dirt. This sends Hamlet into a whirl of romantic bulldust. He refers to this ‘delicate and tender prince … with divine ambition puffed’ (4.4.48-9). (‘Divine ambition’ is, I suggest, a contradiction in terms.) Hamlet then switches over to a sickening paean to war:

… Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honor’s at the stake … (4.4.53-6)

Men were being commanded to go to their death over a useless piece of earth because ‘honor’ was at stake. Hamlet steadies himself and then romances that twenty thousand men ‘face imminent death for … a fantasy and trick of fame’ (4.4.61). If that kind of thinking ever had any attraction – and it could never have had any place in the thinking of a true follower of the Sermon on the Mount – it went west at Gallipoli, on the Western Front, and in Vietnam, and in Iraq.

No, Hamlet could not get help from either of these two heroes to resolve his moral quandary.

Finally, let us look at the heroes of two tragedies, Macbeth and Othello.  Both are obviously flawed, and as a result both commit murder.  For that we condemn them. Are we to condemn Hamlet because he does the opposite and refuses to commit murder?  You will recall that Bradley spoke of ‘something [that] is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give’.  That is precisely the case with Hamlet – he is simply not able to commit murder to revenge his father’s death.  That incapacity is anything but a flaw – just as the incapacity of Lay Macbeth to extinguish her humanity is anything but a flaw.

Hamlet is not, then, a tragedy in the accepted sense.  I agree that he was not a victim of himself.  That is why, I think, Hamlet plays more like a spy thriller of John Le Carré than a tragedy of Euripides.

Does any of this matter?  Of course not.  Labels are the demons of pin-striped minds.  William Shakespeare made a good living out of entertaining people like you and me.  It’s just that he did it in ways that still leave us smitten with awe.  (Emerson said that when he read Shakespeare, he actually shaded his eyes.)  And it also just happens that Hamlet is I think the most popular play that he or anyone else has ever put on our stage.  And may God bless him for that!

*Going to bed with the man who murdered your husband was politically sensitive when Hamlet was first put on.  Protestants charged Mary Queen of Scots with doing just that, and, as ever, she was not her own best witness.

Here and there – The meaning of affront –and the real face of Avis

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The Road to Serfdom held some attraction for many university students in my time.  It looked at what George Orwell called Big Brother and what Ken Kesey called the Combine.   Hayek said that we were just heading for the status of serfs.  But, with time, the book sounded too doctrinaire for people not given to dogma, and it was preached by people whose company we may not have enjoyed – Andrew Bolt territory.

The following note that I sent my daughters while travelling in Scotland – on a round the world trip – will show just how far down that road to serfdom we have travelled.

It was a good short flight on time from Cardiff to Glasgow. I got clobbered with 40 pounds for each bag which a very capable agent assured me had been covered, but I know how predatory these small airlines are.

I finally made my way to the Avis desk to pick up my car. I had corresponded with  them about the booking – at some length.   All I wanted  was a good clear way for me to get on the A82 to the highlands.  I was getting on with Ann like a house on fire – comparing accents and so on.  She is finally about to hand over the keys, and then says, dead-pan: ‘Mr Gibson.  I’m sorry but I cannot let you have this car.  You have been banned’ – or words to that effect. 

I don’t know that I have felt anything like this before.  Among other things, I had just travelled around Wales for two days in an Avis car.  There was no reason.  Just a sign on the computer.  I saw her pointing to it with colleagues.  I suggested she call for a manager – but I instinctively felt that no one in a yellow jacket would override the computer.  While waiting for the manager, I shopped around.  Hertz said they had no car available.  Thrifty said they answered to the same computer. 

Finally, I got a very nice people at Europcar and their system did not disqualify  me.  They were very efficient and capable and their manager, a fine lady of Glasgow,  felt empowered to authorise my hire.  She was  a genuinely decent lady; the young man on the desk, Roddy, plays loch in rugby.   He was terrific.   My first credit card bounced – probably because Avis had not taken off the Cardiff deposit.  Thank God, the computer allowed the second.  In the name of God, I had spent time the night before in Cardiff to make sure ample funds were available on each credit card.

Well, I have a very adequate VW Polo that has got me here in comfort, and I will restructure my trip to take the car back to Glasgow.  That inconvenience is relatively slight.  Could I have been banged up in a Glasgow boozer for days?

But I cannot even begin to tell you how unsettling this has been. 

I think we are going to the dogs – as my old man used to say.

It is very unsettling.

What Orwell and Kesey described was the sense of powerlessness of the victims of the State entities that they described.  Orwell’s hero is crushed into total submission.  Kesey’s hero is despatched to eternity as an act of kindness.  One word for the result is ‘unmanned.’

That is how you feel when you deal with someone employed by a big corporation that rules its own like a very firm government.  If you are into labels, try fascist.  And it all gets so much worse when the whole corporation has handed over the keys to what might have been called  its soul to a machine in the sky – a deus ex machina – called a computer.  And no one – no one – is authorised to query, challenge much less override the computer.  The hand-over of power – the surrender – is complete.  And so is the victory of Big Brother and the Combine.  And we are left unmanned.

But the powerlessness of Ann was only part of the story.  Indeed, in at least one sense, Ann and I shared a powerlessness.  One of the primary aims of a vicious ruler is to make the subjects complicit in the viciousness.  That way, the minions get locked in.  Just look at how Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Franco went about stitching up their underlings (and reflect on the obsession of Donald Trump with personal loyalty of the kind that Hitler extracted, even from previously decent officers of the army).

Ann is, I fear, becoming complicit.  Possibly the most frightening part of this episode came when I was sitting down in something resembling shock, and Ann was standing and  looking down at me, and then Ann – yes, that  nice, kind Ann with the Glaswegian accent – gave me a look of suspicion.  For a moment, I could have been looking at an East German guard on Checkpoint Charlie.  ‘Are you sure there is nothing in your past with Avis, Geoffrey?’  Or words to that effect – words that Robespierre could have drooled over at the height of the Terror.  Suspicion is a primary tool of trade of the terrorist.  Robespierre said ‘Feel my fear’ and ‘Who among us is beyond suspicion?’  And Ann is being reduced to that level.

What the gods of the machine want to do with us is to strip us of our humanity.  And we are all now becoming complicit by handing the keys to ourselves to our mobile phones.  I was appalled in both Manhattan and Wales to see nearly everyone on the street looking at their phones. People at the Frick could not put them down.  (What about a selfie with my old mate Rembers, Digger?)  The plague has even reached us here in the Highlands.  At Ballaculish, I ran into a very handsome couple from Vancouver who looked like they might be on a honeymoon – if people still do those things.  Then I saw them in the bar – each immersed in his or her own phone.

In the name of God, what kind of world is this?  This device does not just murder minds and manners – it annihilates any sense of grace altogether.  All that bull about bringing people together from super brats like Zuckerberg is all just part of one grand lie.

The medical profession has astonished me with the care and professional attention with which it is treating a cancer that a few years ago would certainly have killed me.  I have just experienced another instance of professional care and plain human kindness deep in the Highlands.  What I must now do is to respond by fighting another form of cancer that does not terminate life but certainly terminates decency.

To return to Avis.   They promised to lend me a car in return for my promise to pay them.  That is a called a contract in our law – and the law of the US.  I travelled and made arrangements in reliance on that contract.  I am travelling around the world, and the visit to the Highlands was the principal reason for the whole trip.  Then Avis said ‘We made that promise, but we reserve the right to renege on any basis at all – including the colour of your skin or the way you wear a head scarf.’  What do we care if you are degraded and humiliated in public and if the last visit to the land of your ancestors is ruined?  Our only God is Mammon.  You – poor fellow – just fall under the heading of collateral damage.  Just look at the business model of our President.

Then there is the problem of a cartel operating to interfere with contractual relations.   At heart we are dealing with a wrong that our law does not distinctly recognise as one of outrage.  But, as Sir Frederick Pollock pointed out many years ago, our law has long permitted juries to deal with the arrogance of the haughty by the measure of the damages that they, on behalf of their country, award to the victim.  Putting to one side my personal circumstances, I find it hard to imagine a better case to test the limits of this wrong at law.

I do not know why Avis reneged.  They could not or would not tell me.  That inflames the wrong.  These people are like Richard III – they murder while they smile.  As the lady from Europe Car said, it may have been a parking ticket from ten years ago.

I have a recollection of hiring a car in Oxford about ten years ago for a fly fishing lesson.  I cannot recall the hirer, but I have a kind of recollection of correspondence that was (1) false (2) insulting and (3) extortionate – criminally so.  If it was that kind of thing on the mind of the computer, Avis is adding infamy to criminality.  Whatever incident the computer had in mind – it may just be wrong – it must look to be as mean and petty and spiteful as you could imagine.  But it does not matter – whatever it was, it cannot justify this frightful breach of promise.  We made our laws to shield the innocent,  not the arrogant.

About forty years ago, Aunty (our ABC) made rude remarks about a very important Royal Commission team.  These wronged lawyers then sued for libel.  And in cold blood they entered judgment by default.  When I moved to set aside the judgment, the late Neil McPhee, QC sought to hold on to the judgment by saying that we – the ABC – had no defence.  I well remember the relish with which Neil looked at me across the bar table and said ‘The only possible defence is truth and if Mr Gibson does make that plea, this court room would not be big enough to hold the damages.’

I think it may be time to offer that option to Mr Avis and his imperative computer.

Here and there – Tim Storrier

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THE ART OF THE OUTSIDER

Catherine Lumby

Craftsman House, 2000; fully illustrated; here with slip case.

About twenty or more years ago, I attended the opening of a swank art gallery in that swish part of Armadale in Melbourne that treats of antiques.  The person who was advertised to open the gallery was one of its featured artists, Tim Storrier.  When I got to the gallery I passed a room with an open door and four or five people in it.  I did not know what Storrier looked like but I felt instinctively it was a well-dressed man a few years younger than me who looked like a well presented squatter – in the old country, a squire of the county.  Although apparently content within himself, he did not look all that thrilled to be where he was and doing what was asked of him.  Somehow, I got the impression that you might be wiped off like a dirty bum if you put a foot out of line.  One might even get the kind of put-down that one might get at ‘School.’  Well, the artist commenced his remarks with words to this effect: ‘Asking an artist to open an art gallery is a little like asking a cow to open an abattoir.’  I laughed out loud in part because this observation was in accord with mine of the speaker.  But, I have to say that the owners of the gallery did not appear to share the hilarity.  Indeed, they looked a bit queasy.  But Storrier went on to make a speech that held my full interest – so much so, that I was sorry I was not in a position to take notes.  For the most part, talking about art is about as useful as dancing about architecture.  Catherine Lumby, in this sensible and illuminating work, makes it plain that Storrier shares that view.  So, his remarks were full of sense and devoid of bullshit.

You might say something similar about the art of Tim Storrier.  When I was in the better part of the market – with someone else’s money – an enthusiast at Australian Galleries said that this artist was absorbed in the ‘elemental.’  He was dead right about that – fire, water, pyramids, serpents, and the firmament, as often as not in an outback so barren that it is threatening.

I am lucky to have two pieces by this artist.  One is a photo of a burning pyramid in what looks like a desert at about dawn or dusk.  It was made in 1981 and is entitled ‘Toward an innuendo of impermanence.’  (That kind of title would have appealed to Shelly in his Ozymandias mode.)  Against what I might call stiff competition, that cibachrome, as it is called, attracts a lot of attention.  It is commandingly elemental.  The second is a lithograph of a minutely executed drawing of a saddle.  It is called ‘Saddle, 1987.’  The first cost $450 in 1998 and the second cost $700 in 2007 (both without buyer’s commission).  I probably would not get anything like that for either in this market, but that is not the reason I acquired them – or any other art I have bought.  What I can say is that if we put one side the art of aboriginals, before I put my hand in my pocket to buy a work of art I like to know that the artist can draw.  This saddle leaves that in no doubt at all for this artist.  He is not just a natural; he is trained in what I might here call ‘high technique.’

Storrier may approach the market in Australia in much the same way as Barry Kosky approaches putting Wagner on in Germany: ‘The way I look at it, if you’re not virulently criticized by at least fifty per cent of the people, then you’re not doing very much at all.’

Given our wariness of bullshit on this subject, I shall leave it at two citations.  In his Foreword, the late Edmund Capon said:

There is a wonderful quality of honesty at work in his paintings, haunted as they are by the space and strange emotional quiet that is evoked in pictures with low horizons and vast skies.

Driving off into the virtual obscurity of the outback, setting up camp with his tables, chairs, sunshade, easel, paints and brushes, Storrier places the smallest of canvasses on the easel and then proceeds to survey all that space before him through a pair of binoculars…..His pictures are beautifully composed and executed: there is nothing brusque, temporary or arbitrary about his work…..Such images, of instinct and memory that sometimes border on the nostalgic, are fraught with the dangers of the cliché, but ultimately, the strength of conviction, the personality of memory and experience, and the subtleties of technique triumph.  Storrier is a cautious artist – he has to be in tackling such subjects.

John Olsen said:

First thoughts could have been influences of Drysdale or even Nolan, but this was not so.  There was rigour and exactness in his draftsmanship that allowed no vagueness of edge or blurry metaphors…..For Storrier, the Australian landscape is a stage set where all the players have gone home; where ‘camps’ or deliberately planned situations, named surveyors’ camps, are adorned with flat handmade saddles; where tools of craft hang symbolically from them…..Storrier remains privately shy and socially uncomfortable.  He is one of the most secretive and enigmatic artists working in Australia today – a man of unpredictable intentions and directions, and one of the most original.

Boyd, Nolan, Smart and Williams have changed the way I see my country.  I am not sure that Storrier has done that, although the night sky can cause a tremor, but he has changed the way I look at painting and drawing.  And Olsen was surely right when he said that Storrier is an original.  Possibly for that reason, the two works of his that I have are the only two that are specifically identified in my will.

MY TOP SHELF – Chapter 23

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

[These are serialised extracts of all the fifty books referred to in a book published in 2015 called ‘The Top Shelf, or What Used to be Called a Liberal Education’.  The extracts are as originally published, and they come in the same order.]

23

CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON

Immanuel Kant (1781)

Macmillan Co Ltd, London, 1963; translated Norman Kemp Smith; Papermac; rebound in half biscuit morocco with soft burgundy boards.

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.

Immanuel Kant was born in Konigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1724.  He was the fourth of nine children of a poor harness-maker.  His parents were simple Prussians – and devout Pietists, a reformist group within the Lutheran Church, sometimes compared, not always politely, to the Jesuits.  Kant was fortunate to be sent, although poor, to a school that would have given him a better education than many countries in the West now offer to their poor children.  But Kant was to be scarred for life by the teachers whom he regarded as religious fanatics.

The whole life of Kant was governed by duty.  One Prussian Pietist saw what duty might mean at the age of thirteen.  A friend of his mother was jilted in love.  She fell sick with a deadly high fever.  Kant’s mother nursed her friend.  The friend refused her medicine.  To encourage her, Kant’s mother took a spoonful herself.  As she did so, she realised that her friend had already used the spoon.  She died the same day of smallpox – in the words of Kant, ‘a sacrifice to friendship’.  She was buried ‘silently’ and ‘poor’, possibly in the manner shown in the film Amadeus for the burial of Mozart.

Kant entered the University of Konigsberg at sixteen and graduated six years later.  He took work as a private tutor.  When aged thirty one, he obtained a post at the University.  He gave public lectures.  He became known as de Schöne Magister, the Elegant Teacher.  Konigsberg was then a substantial city of 50,000.  It was a sea-port with trading interests and it therefore had a cosmopolitan flavour.  Kant was constrained to lecture over a wide area, including geography, but from the time he became a professor, his interest was in philosophy.  It looks like Kant never stepped out of Konigsberg.

His lectures were very popular.  He gave them at 7.00 a.m.  It was said that you had to be there at 6.00 a.m. to be sure of getting a place.  One of his students said of the lectures that Kant had an intense way of stating the issue to be discussed.

Kant was indifferent to music and painting – how unlike Wittgenstein! – but he loved poetry and satire, a form which he indulged in his own writings.  His published works are astonishingly substantial.  He must be the most prolific and industrious philosopher since Aristotle.  His major work, The Critique of Pure Reasoning, was not published until he was fifty seven.  Most of it is too dense for the average reader, but it is shot through with practical insights.  He later wrote The Critique of Practical Reason, The Critique of Judgment and The Groundwork of The Metaphysics of Morals.  The last work contains his ethical theory, and may be the most accessible to the general reader.  Kant is probably the most uplifting of writers on ethics for the uninitiated.

In Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant launched an all-out assault on those who want to intellectualize God and faith.  Kant was well and truly warned off by the Prussian establishment.  Throughout his life Kant managed to avoid attending any ceremony at the University that may have involved religious ceremony.

Toward the end the mighty mind of Immanuel Kant fell into decline. This is how the English philosopher Roger Scruton describes his ending:

He faded into insensibility, and passed from his blameless life on 12 February 1804, unaccompanied by his former intellectual powers.  He was attended at his grave by people from all over Germany, and by the whole of Konigsberg, being acknowledged even in his senility as the greatest glory of that town.  His grave crumbled away and was restored in 1881.  His remains were moved in 1924 to a solemn neoclassical portico attached to the cathedral.  In 1950 unknown vandals broke open the sarcophagus and left it empty.  By that time Konigsberg had ceased to be a centre of learning, had been absorbed, following its brutal destruction by the Red Army, into the Soviet Union, and had been renamed in honour of one of the few of Stalin’s henchmen to die of natural causes.  A bronze tablet remains fixed to the wall of the castle, overlooking the dead and wasted city, bearing these words from the concluding section of the ‘The Critique of Practical Reason’:  ‘Two things fill the heart with ever renewed and increasing awe and reverence, the more and the more steadily we mediate upon them: the starry firmament above and the moral law within’.

It is good to see that the tradition of clear, crisp writing, in English philosophy is not dead.

You might think that the religious writings of Kant constitute one long protest.  He was brought up, but he did not remain, a Protestant (as was the case with Hume and Gibbon).  He was brought up as a Lutheran Pietist and it shows, both in his life and in his writing.  The Pietists saw themselves not as subscribing to doctrine, but as being in a living relationship with God.  They had a ‘born again’ feeling.  They were against their religion being taken over by intellectuals.  You see both tendencies alive and well in the US – the second with alarming consequences.  They also tended to be egalitarian. The priesthood was their community of believers.  All this comes through in Kant, the most intellectual man in Europe.

The thinking of Kant would affect the Christian churches of Europe in at least three ways.  First, Kant set about demolishing the logical arguments for the existence of God.  Moses Mendelssohn, a friend and colleague, said that the criticism of Kant were ‘world-crushing’.  But Kant did hold that the concept of God is natural to human reason.  Just what that concept may involve is another matter.

Secondly, Kant developed a system of ethics or morals from the ground up, so to speak, and without invoking religion or the supernatural in the process.  His teaching on ethics was and is available to most people.  Some in the church may have felt threatened by a moral code that did not require God.  But Kant went one step further.  He did not stop with saying that morality does not rest on religion; he went on and said that religious faith is founded on morality.  The whole point of his arguments on morality is to establish that morality, which is independent of religious belief, nonetheless does lead us to religious belief.  Such a contention would, of course, leave plenty of room to manoeuvre on the content of the religion.

Thirdly, Kant has a lot to say about the practice of religion, and it was mainly this that got him into trouble.  Like the old Hebrews with God, Kant refused to refer to Jesus of Nazareth by name, but like Spinoza before him, Kant accepted the teaching of Jesus and incorporated it into his own and was hostile to people who sought to come between that teaching and the rest of mankind.

Kant may have been a bit of a pill to have lunch with – even if he did ensure that a wine decanter was in reach of every guest.  But his mind was one of Europe’s great engine rooms.  It is sad that provincialism and specialization mean that he is hardly taught now at English universities because no one since has got within a bull’s roar of producing insights across the scale like Kant ,and Kant might be just the kind of man to make the word ‘intellectual’ sound decent to Anglo-Saxon ears.  He fought the fight for religious faith and he did more than anyone else to give people an ethical code that did not require underpinning by faith.  He never set out to hurt anyone, and he left the world better than he found it.  It is not just Prussia or Europe that should revere the name of Immanuel Kant.

Passing Bull 195 – Defiling the dead

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

People who play around with geniuses like Shakespeare or Mozart overestimate their ability and worth to an extent that might make even Donald Trump blush.  They also defile the work and the art of the dead.  Their haughty conceit is staggering.  We may have been able to get over Glenda Jackson playing the lead role in Sam Gold’s King Lear on Broadway – although ‘humility’ does not come easily to your lips with that lady – but she was not the only one in the part of a male, and the three daughters had three very distinctive accents.

The New Yorker is not amused.  According to Hilton Als, this director has form.  He sent out an actress with muscular dystrophy to play a key role in The Glass Menagerie.  This, said Mr Als, takes the audience hostage – if you condemned the casting, you could be splattered with all kinds of abuse.  It’s a bit like that South African runner who looks like a bloke and who runs like one but who competes as a woman.  If you take the side of the badly beaten women, you get canned for intolerance – for a want of sympathy for ‘gender fluidity.’  Balls.  I just don’t want my night out at the theatre to be ruined by some arrogant puppeteer who is out to make a political point and to bignote himself – or herself – or itself.

What about Lear?

In a way, it’s impossible to review Gold’s staging of ‘King Lear,’ because, in the arrogance of its conception, it turns up its nose at the plebeian notion of simply providing the audience with what it wants: Shakespeare’s words, that accumulation of more intelligence and insight about humanity than it seems possible for one mind to have produced….I grew increasingly consumed by questions about what was happening onstage and why.

Precisely.  And that’s before you get to the poetry.

If I said that I could improve on Einstein’s theory of relativity, I would fairly be dismissed as mad.  But these swaggerers behind the stages of theatre and opera do not have that out.  We should assess these directors like we assess judges and AFL umpires – if we hardy know that they are there, they have done well.  If their interference with proceedings catches our attention and annoys us, they have botched it – big time – and they should be given time off in the sticks to repent and reform.

Bloopers

So far, the special investigator probe and report by Robert Mueller are a significant victory for Donald Trump.

This is because the Democrats and other Trump critics have so wildly overplayed their hands and because Mueller, too, has not conducted himself well.

Of course there is in the full Mueller report stuff that shows Trump is unpleasant, but there is nothing on which Mueller can recommend any charges at all.

Greg Sheridan, The Weekend Australian, 20-21 April, 2019

As bullshit goes, this is in the category that Kant may have called transcendental.  Every word drips with wrongness.  Among other things, what would a person who (1) is not a lawyer or copper and (2) has not read the report know?  We have thought that Mr Sheridan may have had some intelligence, but we have long known that he has zero judgment.  Mueller is everything that trump is not.  Who but a lunatic could compare Trump favourably to Mueller?

This rubbish shows how we in this country have completely failed to develop a press that might fairly be called ‘conservative.’  No conservative properly so called could regard the aberration of populism called Donald Trump as anything but a disaster for the U S and the world.  When Mr Sheridan refers to ‘stuff that shows Trump is unpleasant’, he shows that he is craven as well as inane.

And Mr Sheridan has a new toy – ‘bloviation’.  It will not be long before that little chap with the silly beard gets on to it.  Wikipedia says:

Bloviation is a style of empty, pompous political speech particularly associated with Ohio due to the term’s popularization by United States President Warren G. Harding, who, himself a master of the technique, described it as ‘the art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing’.

Well now, for a political commentator in the Murdoch press to accuse someone of bloviation must be an instance of what psychologists call projection.