Weltanschaung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Author: Anthony Garner

  • Van Eyck – The Arnolfini Portrait

    Van Eyck – The Arnolfini Portrait

    Jan van Eyck painted what has become known as the Arnolfini Portrait in 1434.  The facts are well enough known.  As are the scholarly debates and interpretations surrounding this beautiful piece of art.

    I went to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square today to try to understand why I like the painting so much.  I think I caught some glimpses.

    I was wondering on my way there whether my liking was more apparent than real; whether perhaps because the painting is so very well known I had simply assumed I liked it because it appears everyone else does.

    I first saw it face to face a few years back in another visit to the National Gallery and out of all the paintings I saw that day this one stuck firmly in my mind as a favourite.  Why?

    The sheer luminosity of the colours struck me particularly today, part of the artist’s technique I gather. The colours literally shone out at me 600 years after the painting’s creation.

    And then the richness and beauty and realism of the scene.  I could have been one of the figures reflected in the mirror above the Arnolfinis, so perfectly does this couple come alive.

    By richness I have in mind quality and beauty rather than monetary worth. While it is clear that the couple were well healed, I find money itself (particularly the love of it) a grotesque and vulgar distraction.

    Excess reminds me of the smiling face of beloved entreprenoooooors like the delightful Philip Green, whose pensioners fared so well in the collapse of British Home stores.  Or those cuddly Russian oligarchs and oil sheiks.  Gold Rolls Royces, zebra skin wall coverings, women with brittle hair, whitened teeth and embarrassing false breasts.

    Which is not to say that I can not get a warm glow from time to time out of what money can buy.

    The fur on the lined cloak is literally strokable when you stand in front of the portrait – even with my nose close to the painting it seemed more animal fur than oil (however politically incorrect that may now sound).  And the wife’s gown – difficult indeed to appreciate the texture on this web page re-production but to the naked eye, standing in that noble gallery, this feat of art is a wonder to behold. Every fold and crevice is so real and vibrant you can lean in and touch it. Figuratively speaking of course – I am sure I would have ended up in the local nick had I leant in much further.

    Just look at that brass chandelier. What a magnificent ornament.

    And yet there is more. To me the couple themselves are far from glamorous – they certainly do not seem to have been airbrushed in the time honoured fashion of today’s actresses and pop divas.  Mr Anolfini may be a rich merchant but he is certainly not a handsome one – it struck me today that he is more like Gollum from Lord of The Rings than I am comfortable with.  I had to take a step back at that point, half expecting him to put on the One Ring To Rule Them all.

    And the pregnant wife is no oil painting.  Well she is of course…but you know what I mean. Not a classic beauty by the standards of any age. The hubby’s headgear is not a shtreimel, surely?

    But cheap jokes aside, my love of the painting stands. Increased if anything by a greater familiarity with the detail after today’s close inspection.

    From the strange wooden  pixie-clogs to the apples, cherry blossom and beautifully lit furnishings, this painting transports me in time to a room in medieval Bruges  600 years ago.  A beautiful and exquisitely constructed time machine.

  • The Schoolyard Thug

    The Schoolyard Thug

    He is an odd character the bully, a difficult one to work out sometimes. When combined with bumptiousness, lack of education, near illiteracy and an over inflated ego the puzzle deepens.

    What drives this self important, self anointed titan?  Underneath the overconfident exterior there lies all manner of vulnerability.  He is a figure to be pitied perhaps rather than derided.

    As ever it must, presumably, be a joint product of nature and nurture which combines to produce such a preposterous figure.  The endless name dropping is a sign of insecurity, an effort to boost an inflated but at the same time empty and needy ego.

    While things are going his way the bully may seem jovial and congenial; cross him, deny him what he wants to take from you and a petulant, foolish child emerges.

    There is nothing wrong in being not very bright. We are all born with certain characteristics and intelligence or its lack is simply one of those. The bully will attempt to hide his achilles heal  with bravado. He can not and will not bow to reasoned argument – he will have his way, it is his right. He will baffle with meaningless words anyone who stands in the way of his desires.

    Or rather he will try. When it comes to a dispute with an adult bully you need a psychologist on your side not a lawyer or accountant. Because it does not matter to the bully what a contract says; the law is not relevant to the bully.  What matters to the bully is his will, his way.  And he will pay his advisors to spout his nonsense for him even if thereby making clowns of them too.

    It becomes therefore a battle of will.  In the playground a thump on the nose will usually ensure the bully never bothers you again and regrettably in adult life the bully has to be treated in the same fashion.

    As an adult you will hopefully have eschewed physical violence.  Hopefully it no longer forms a part of your world view, if it ever did.

    As an adult you must still wave an iron fist in the face of the schoolyard thug, but that fist must be a metaphorical one.  The bully has cajoled and cowed countless others who have stood in his path: shopkeepers, garage owners, restaurant proprietors, estate agents and credit card employees to name but a few. He may attempt harm to their business and livelihood if such mere mortals dare to offer him opposition.  He may even succeed in a few cases.

    So you wave a metaphorical mailed fist in his face and eventually he realises that your life, your business and your property will be stoutly defended. He is forced to move on to his next victim.

  • The Beauty of Performance

    The Beauty of Performance

    Beauty comes in so many forms and is so utterly transformative wherever it is encountered.   Most recently I have been struck by the serene beauty of the skillful elegance and nonchalant, seemingly effortless performance of a music scholar who plays the piano for a choir in which I sing.

    The pianist studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was organ scholar and graduated with a starred first class degree in Music. Previously he was a chorister at King’s and music scholar at Eton College.

    I sang in a choir as a young treble for some years but foolishly never studied music formally.  I gave up aged 14 when music seemed to an arrogant young kid to belong to a pseudo intellectual realm to which he did not belong .

    For the past eight years I have been trying to re-capture what skills I may once have possessed but in my case nothing has ever been effortless.

    I have spent endless hours in practice and study, learning a choral piece inside out until it is indelibly etched on my mind and performance becomes if not automatic, then at least to some extent fluid.

    Each week I am struck anew by the performance of our accompanist.  Sometimes when I arrive he will be playing some complex piece entirely from his imagination. His hands will move but his eyes remain fixed somewhere in the middle distance, pondering who knows what as his fingers automatically translate into sound whatever glorious harmonies are in his mind.

    In choral pieces there are usually introductions for the orchestra or piano before the voice parts start and usually the accompanying instrumental music will continue for a while when the voice parts have finished.

    And it is at the end that I most often notice the ethereal skill of our accompanist.  We have struggled, to the best of our ability, through the complex vocal bars of a section of Dvorak’s Stabat Mater.

    Our eyes turn to the young scholar who plays the remaining bars. With a twinkle on his face and scarcely looking at the score, he dazzles us with his skill.  With a gentle flourish the piece ends as he quietly plays the final chord and the sound slowly ebbs away.

  • Catharsis in Writing

    Catharsis in Writing

    The act of self expression in writing seems to provide relief from strong or long repressed emotions – a catharsis.  Whether anybody reads what you have written or not, to formalise in writing your innermost thoughts, your worldview, your grievances, your joys and your sadness brings an incredible freedom, a sense of deep release.

    It seems perhaps that an internal mental expression is not sufficient; a silent inner realisation, however profound, does not provide the same strong cathartic effect as the crafting of the written word, the sentence, the paragraph.

    Perhaps it is because we have to take so much care with the written word; do we really mean this or that? Is that really how we feel? Perhaps it is because the use of language is the only thing which makes thought possible above the banal levels we need for bodily survival.  Language forms an integral part of true consciousness it seems: qualia can no doubt be felt without language but how much more poignant and meaningful to be able to define, express, codify and categorise in actual words what it feels like to be sad or joyful, to experience the deep red glow of a sunset.

    So I think perhaps language is essential for depth in feelings and written language seems to solidify, to realise the internal emotion.

    Does it matter who you are writing for? Perhaps not. Does it matter whether you are read? Perhaps not. It would be unwise indeed to put truly dark thoughts onto paper and into the public domain – but happily I do not have any. Therefore I feel free to write what I choose and to express myself as I see fit.

    In an afternoon well spent yesterday with a cerebral and cultured friend, we discussed the ideal life and wondered what we should have done with our lives while we sat in the late spring sunshine, on deck chairs, in a beautiful and quiet garden.

    Could we have avoided the hustle and ghastliness of our respective careers in law and finance? The grim, difficult and determined people we had to suffer to earn our daily bread.

    He said that to write would have been the way out.  But how few are those blessed with the good fortune of being paid for the endeavour!

    Happily later in life you can benefit from the catharsis of writing without having to count on film rights and tea shirt sales.  I may not have the imagination to write of demons but expressing my own seems good enough.  I don’t need the success of Harry Potter to achieve catharsis nor do I desire the riches of Midas.

  • Hypocrisy

    Hypocrisy

    Are we all hypocrites or is there the odd saintly exception?  The dear old Dalai Wotsit or blessed Mother T perhaps?

    Without hesitation I own up to being a difficult, miserable old humbug full of cant, hypocrisy and intolerance. I know it’s wrong and in general terms I try and deal with it.  But somehow life just gets the better of me.

    It’s not that I actively wish anyone any harm, it’s just that I want to be left alone and have come to loathe almost any “normal” interaction with people other than the most superficial.  I like lots of people but it tends to be those I do not have to have much to do with. Our postman for instance is great. The taxman not so great.

    My pet loathings include

    • dishonest and oily “biznismen”
    • salesmen ( a particularly noxious sub category of the above)
    • overt god bothering
    • committees of busybodies
    • politicians

    Oh dear, it isn’t that I hate people, it’s just that most people irritate me and I am sure I them.  As a child I wanted to spend my life pursuing some lonely craft in some quiet place. As an adult I have often wanted to be a secular hermit and would have moved to a remote and deserted Scottish island if (a) the weather wasn’t so terrible; and (b) my bossy little wife hadn’t objected.  I probably ought to have been an inventor – a scientist of some sort like Professor Potts in Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.  Living somewhere quiet and rural, with my inventing shed and outdoor lavatory, like the good professor and his family.

    In any event, the City of London and those of Zurich, Tokyo and Hong Kong were, in very clear retrospect, not the ideal choice.  Nor was a career in finance a clever decision.

    So how should a hypocrite redeem himself (or herself…or in these days of multiple gender awareness, “itself”)?

    The only truthful answer I can give is that we should hide ourselves away from others lest we do them verbal damage. I am sure they dislike my company as much as I theirs and it really isn’t anybody’s fault!

     

  • Euthanasia

    Euthanasia

    Every human has the right to take his or her own life and the means to do so painlessly and swiftly should be made easily and openly available.

    Modern medicine, powerful as it may be, has a long way to go before we can be repaired.  The all too common end for many of us is months or years of suffering with incurable disease.  The horror of pain is often accompanied by immobility, loss of cognitive facilities, incontinence and great indignity.  No coup de grace is allowed until the very last moment when the patient is unable to take water or food.

    The whole question is surrounded by taboo, ignorance, superstition, religious claptrap and humbug.  Pure unenlightened barbarism.  A disgrace and an insult to the intelligence.

    The fear that assisted suicide may be abused and used for murder is remote and absurd. Murder will take place anyway. Many a fully qualified doctor has been known to commit murder (and not as a mercy killing). Guns are freely available even in countries where such weapons are illegal and in any event the avenues and opportunities for the dedicated murder abound.  This is no excuse.

    And as for the religious nutcases- grow up, we live in the 21st century and if your non existent deity hadn’t made such mess of creation we would not be in this fix anyway.

    So yes, I am cross and anxious and fearful. I have seen a mother take ten years to die from dementia, while her cognisance and then her body slowly stopped working, until at the very last she became a croaking husk unable to take food or water. What kind of end is that?

    I have seen relatives and friends suffer the indignity of connection to machinery to pass bodily wastes while months pass by in a semi vegetative state.

    I do not want to end my life with a whimper. I do not wish to be an embarrassing burden on anyone around me especially to those to whom I have been a husband or father.

    I have a right not to endure such disgusting indignity and will exercise that right when the time comes. I shall end my life when, how and as I choose.  So should you.

    The law is an ass.

  • With Hindsight….

    With Hindsight….

    What possible use is hindsight when the past is behind us and unchangeable?

    The failed relationships, the missed opportunities, the petty cruelties and jealousies. The things we could have done so much better 20 years down the road and the things we botched up so badly at the time.

    Regret is a wholly useless emotion in many respects. As self destructive as any of our less attractive states of mind but perhaps less harmful to those around us. Anger, envy, spitefulness and cruelty can do real harm now to others whereas regret with hindsight can only affect our own selves.

    And yet hindsight does have its uses. Taken to heart, considered, thought out and acted upon it can and should affect both the present and the future even if the past is forbidden to us.

    It is pointless to wax maudlin but at least we can try to stop making the same mistakes time and time again.  We can learn from the past; from our own personal past as well as that of our nation or world.

    Was it the United Nations which was founded on the principal of “never again”? It may not have met with huge success since its formation in 1945 but at least the attempt was made.

    At least humanity looked back on the terror on the terror of the Second World War and vowed to improve international relations. With hindsight could it have been prevented?  Well as we know hindsight does not work like that. But at least with the benefit of hindsight we can do better today and again tomorrow.

    So yes, we must look back. We must own up to our mistakes. We can not change our past but  hopefully we can change our future.

    At least, in the absence of strict determinism.

  • A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design

    A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design

    Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s book “A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design” is certainly worth reading although I think to be honest I was expecting too much of it.

    I enjoyed the first few chapters a great deal but became rather bored and bogged down when the author hit his specialist subject – the atomic world and below.

    I general terms I certainly get the gist of it and have done for some years. At heart, at the very small end of the scale everything is made of the same minute building blocks and the universe is incredibly simple, beautiful and symmetric.

    Where I became a little bored was in the description of all the various sub atomic particles. Any layman is likely to have a very hard time indeed with the minutiae of the subject and may come away, like I did, wondering whether it is necessary to try and grasp every spin, gluon, quark and particle zoo specimen.

    Perhaps for the layman a science book written by a philosopher may make more sense. I have read countless books on physics for the layman by authors from Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, David Deutsch and on.

    The Deutsch approach suits me far better. And in particular his book The Fabric of Reality which I have read several times.

    To me at least broad brush concepts are what I am seeking not detailed explanations (even if in simplified terms) of subjects I will never managed to grasp in their entirety.

    Deutsch is a physicist but with a wonderful way with philosophical concepts.  His life long ambition has been to know everything and he managed to convey his enthusiasm and knowledge of “everything” in a way which made intuitive sense to me.

    I am glad I read Frank Wilczek’s book but it was more about “where every sparrow fell” in the sub atomic-world than a treatise which made me feel I had accomplished a broad grasp of reality.

    Mea Culpa.

  • Why I do not read the News

    Why I do not read the News

    I do not read the news because it is repetitive, dispiriting, boring and irrelevant.

    Ecclesiastes 1:9
    What has been will be again,  what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.

    This quote is profound to my mind and sums up the very reason I have never, ever been interested in current affairs or politics.

    According to an article in Wikipedia “The subjects of Ecclesiastes are the pain and frustration engendered by observing and meditating on the distortions and inequities pervading the world, the uselessness of human deeds, and the limitations of wisdom and righteousness.”

    Well said whoever wrote those words.

    Here is an abbreviated list of world news headlines from the BBC  for today:

    • NY’s top lawyer quits amid assault claims.
    • Belgian singer dies days after comeback.
    • Pope Rihanna dazzles at Met Gala 2018.
    • Revolutionary leader win Armenia PM vote.
    • Melania Trump faces new plagiarism row.

    Here is what I would rather read about, although I will have to look beyond the media to find anything of interest or relevance:

    • How to improve human behaviour.
    • How to abolish poverty, hunger and disease.
    • How to increase happiness.
    • How to further knowledge.
    • How to transcend the limits of human consciousness.
    • Cheerful news as to the progress by anyone in any of the above!

    And then there are a few who by luck or design have managed to jump off the hamster wheel of mundanity and have the good fortune and luxury to seek answers.

    Who is it then that reads newspapers and watches CNN? It can’t be those struggling for basic physical survival.  It must be the unconscious ones.

    Some of the unconscious ones must have good motives for what they do.  Some politicians must (one hopes) be genuinely interested in the good of others.  Some businessmen must be genuinely interested in improving mankind’s lot by producing fairly priced goods or services.

    There is a good argument to be made that the unconscious improve all our lives by their very busy unconsciousness.

    By pursuing their dreams of world domination in business or politics perhaps such people create the wealth necessary for research and development.

    And yet I have a nagging thought at the back of my mind that all is not well with the world.  That a better order is possible, that loftier goals should be sought.

  • To Regret or to Reset

    To Regret or to Reset

    To regret is a useless emotion; it is a wallowing in despair and self pity.  Better by far to change, to achieve, to move forward, to put right.

    Easy perhaps for the comfortable, the well healed, the well adjusted.  Less so for the poor, the sick, the wretched.  The billions who live in squalor and wretchedness.

    It is a sad and “wicked” world in many ways but I am not entirely convinced that is anybody’s fault in particular.  We are all victims of our inheritance and our environment.

    Did Adolf Hitler have to murder 6,000,000 Jews? Well he certainly did not do it all on his own. And thus for all violence: it does not happen in isolation, it has cause and effect, it is part of us all, the responsibility of us all.  We must all regret it but equally we should all seek better.

    There is great regret in my life in an overall sense as well as a personal sense.  It is a world of great contrast: good and bad, beauty and intense ugliness, joy and despair.  I have not done my bit. I have not done enough.

    I could have done better, achieved more, made the world a happier place, seen greater fulfillment.

    Or perhaps not.  Intuitively the buddhist concept of endless re-birth strikes a chord.  Life after life we strive to get it right, live better until at last we are released from the cycle, from the giant hamster wheel that is existence.

    But regret, while you still have breath, is a wasteful extravagance, a futile and destructive luxury.  Even if you only live one lifetime it is never too late to put it right, to change, to achieve, to soar, to redeem.

    Even writing is a redemption of sorts. A catharsis. An admission of guilt and in a sense regret but an effort also to put right. To spread meaning perhaps.