Serene Falcon

Eagles fly alone, but sheep flock together

April 27th, 2007 at 4:20 am

In 1846, the Polish exiles of Paris fomented a rebellion in and around Galicia against two of the tripartite powers who held Poland in thrall. The Prussians merely arrested the exiles’ envoy, and that sufficed around Poznan; for Austria, though, who possessed Galicia, events could have taken an unpleasant turn, had it not been for the fact that the intellectuals in Paris had underestimated the sturdy good sense of the simple Polish peasantry…

On 17th February, however, the local commander at Tarnow in western Galicia was told by a group of Polish peasants that they had been urged to rise up and massacre all Germans and Jews and sack their shops in the towns. Although at first as disinclined to believe them as his superiors in Vienna, he became convinced of the truth of this tale when the peasants returned to him on the following day. He found it relatively simple to show them it was their duty to uphold the existing order, advice which many interpreted as an invitation to butcher any members of the Polish landowning class suspected of disloyalty to the Monarchy. There were scenes of bloodshed and destruction around Tarnow — and further east, around Lemberg — for two or three days; and it is probable that some 1,500 to 2000 Polish landowners perished at the hands of the peasants.

Alan Palmer : Metternich

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Progress to the Grave

April 22nd, 2007tools at 4:01 am

This last point should make it clear that uncontrolled immigration is not the only factor in the suicidal trend I have been describing. Even if there were no immigration at all, America would still be experiencing what can only be called a terrifying social and moral decline. Concerns over mediocrity are hardly a new thing in this country, but surely the attack on the intellect, the decay of family and individual character that have occurred over the past 25 years are phenomena of an entirely different order, posing a very real threat to the freedoms and the high level of civilization this country has enjoyed. The combination of both factors — progressive degeneracy and divisiveness of the existing society on one hand and perpetual mass immigration on the other — must be fatal. History offers many examples of nations that have recovered from overwhelming catastrophe; Ancient Israel recovered more than once from spiritual decadence and conquest; Europe recovered from the death of a third of its population in the Black Plague; the French recovered from the ravages of the French Revolution. Renewal was possible in such cases not least because the national identity of those peoples, and the spiritual spark of their civilizations, remained intact. But if America continues “the slide into apathy, hedonism and moral chaos,” as Christopher Lasch has called it, and at the same time its present population is replaced by a chaotic mix of peoples from radically diverse, non-European cultures, then there will be no basis for continuation or renewal. Like ancient Greece after the classical Hellenes had dwindled away and the land was repopulated by Slavonic and Turkic peoples, America will have become literally a different country. There will be no American Renaissance — except perhaps as some faceless subdivision of the global shopping mall.

Lawrence Auster : The Path To National Suicide ( 1991 )

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Trop d’Audace

April 21st, 2007

…Now, in this aspect, as well as in a good many others, the Assembly is the people; satisfied that it is in danger, it makes laws as the former make their insurrections, and protects itself by strokes of legislation as the former protects itself by blows with pikes. Failing to take hold of the motor spring by which it might direct the government machine, it distrusts all the old and all the new wheels. The old ones seem to it an obstacle, and, instead of utilizing them, it breaks them one by one — parliaments, provincial states, religious orders, the church, the nobles, and royalty. The new ones are suspicious, and instead of harmonizing them, it puts them out of gear in advance — the executive power, administrative powers, judicial powers, the police, the gendarmerie, and the army. Thanks to these precautions it is impossible for any of them to be turned against itself; but, also, thanks to these precautions, none of them can perform their functions.

Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine : Les Origines de la France contemporaine — ( La révolution: l’anarchie. Vol I )

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My Heart, When First The Black-Bird Sings

April 19th, 2007 at 10:38 pm

My heart, when first the blackbird sings,
My heart drinks in the song:
Cool pleasure fills my bosom through
And spreads each nerve along.

My bosom eddies quietly,
My heart is stirred and cool
As when a wind-moved briar sweeps
A stone into a pool

But unto thee, when thee I meet,
My pulses thicken fast,
As when the maddened lake grows black
And ruffles in the blast.

Robert Louis Stevenson : My Heart, When First The Black-Bird Sings

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Ending of the Day

April 17th, 2007tools at 11:41 pm

Over all the hilltops
Silence,
Among all the treetops
You feel hardly
A breath moving.
The birds fall silent in the woods.
Simply wait ! Soon
You too will be silent.

Goethe : The Second Poem the Night-Walker Wrote

Trans: Robert Bly

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh’
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest Du auch.

Wanderers Nachtlied

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As I Lay A-Thinkynge

April 14th, 2007

As I laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
Merrie sang the Birde as she sat upon the spraye;
There came a noble Knyghte,
With his hauberke shynynge brighte,
And his gallant heart was lyghte,
Free and gaye;
As I lay a-thynkynge, he rode upon his waye.

As I lay a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
Sadly sang the Birde as she sat upon the tree!
There seem’d a crimson plain,
Where a gallant Knyghte laye slayne,
And a steed with broken rein
Ran free,
As I laye a-thynkynge, most pitiful to see !

As I laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
Merrie sang the Birde as she sat upon the boughe;
A lovely Mayde came bye,
And a gentil youth was nyghe,
And he breathed many a syghe
And a vowe;
As I laye a-thynkynge, her hearte was gladsome now.

As I laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
Sadly sang the Birde as she sat upon the thorne;
No more a Youth was there,
But a Maiden rent her haire,
And cried in sadde despaire,
‘That I was borne !’
As I laye a-thynkynge, she perished forlorne.

As I laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
Sweetly sang the Birde as she sat upon the briar;
There came a lovely childe,
And his face was meek and mild,
Yet joyously he smiled
On his sire;
As I laye a-thynkynge, a Cherub mote admire.

But I laye a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge, a-thynkynge,
And sadly sang the Birde as it perch’d upon a bier;
That joyous smile was gone,
And the face was white and wan,
As the downe upon the Swan
Doth appear,
As I laye a-thynkynge — oh ! bitter flow’d the tear !

As I laye a-thynkynge, the golden sun was sinking,
O merrie sang that Birde as it glitter’d on her breast
With a thousand gorgeous dyes,
While soaring to the skies,
‘Mid the stars she seem’d to rise,
As to her nest;
As I laye a-thynkynge, her meaning was exprest: —
‘Follow, follow me away,
It boots not to delay,’–
‘Twas so she seem’d to saye,
‘HERE IS REST !’

The Last Lines of Thomas Ingoldsby

R. H. Barham : The Ingoldsby Legends

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Universal Love

April 12th, 2007 at 7:05 pm

Now if you start with identifying divine with divinely ordained, and identify the Divinity with the bare fact of existence, then all things are certainly portions of the Divinity, and, in so far, divine. But if all things are in this sense divine, then divine ceases to be a quality which evokes any sense of preference; then divine is no longer an expression commensurate with esteem, still less legitimately productive of emotional satisfaction; if all things are divine, why then some may be divine and honourable and others divine and dishonourable. There is something akin in this anarchic theology to the juggling with the word value of Karl Marx and his followers. It is the acceptance of the emotional quality of a word after emptying out the meaning which had produced it. Good, noble, divine; a hierarchy of words denoting such qualities as we think especially desirable; denoting fuller possession of that which we esteem most in ourselves, be it strength or beauty, moral or intellectual helpfulness; words which awaken in our mind the sense of approval, of respect, and finally of reverence and wonder. Perform a little sleight-of-hand, and shuffle divinity with God, God with Nature, Nature with Being, and you contrive to awaken that emotion of rareness, superiority, wonderfulness, in connection with… with what ? O irony of self-delusion ! with everything equally.

Vernon Lee : Gospels of Anarchy and Other Contemporary Studies

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Pit of Despair

April 12th, 2007tools at 3:26 am

The pit of despair, or vertical chamber, was a device used in experiments conducted on rhesus macaque monkeys during the 1970s by American comparative psychologist Harry Harlow and his students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The aim of the research was to produce an animal model of human clinical depression.

The vertical chamber was little more than a stainless-steel trough with sides that sloped to a rounded bottom. A 3/8 in. wire mesh floor 1 in. above the bottom of the chamber allowed waste material to drop through the drain and out of holes drilled in the stainless-steel. The chamber was equipped with a food box and a water-bottle holder, and was covered with a pyramid top — … — designed to discourage incarcerated subjects from hanging from the upper part of the chamber.

Harlow placed baby monkeys in the chamber alone for up to six weeks. Within a few days, they stopped moving about and remained huddled in a corner. The monkeys were found to be psychotic when removed from the chamber, and most did not recover.

It gets worse…

After 30 days, the “total isolates,” as they were called, were found to be “enormously disturbed”: two of them refused to eat and starved themselves to death. After being isolated for a year, the monkeys were found initially to barely move, didn’t explore or play, and were incapable of having sexual relations. When put with other monkeys for a daily play session, they were badly bullied by the other monkeys.

In order to find out how the isolates would parent, Harlow devised what he called a “rape rack,” to which the female isolates were tied in the position taken by a normal female monkey in order to be impregnated. Artificial insemination had not been developed at that time. He found that, just as they were incapable of having sexual relations, they were also unable to parent their offspring, either abusing or neglecting them. “Not even in our most devious dreams could we have designed a surrogate as evil as these real monkey mothers were,” he wrote. Having no social experience themselves, they were incapable of appropriate social interaction. One mother held her baby’s face to the floor and chewed off his feet and fingers. Another crushed her baby’s head. Most of them simply ignored their offspring.

Etc….

Wikipedia Pit of Despair

‘…In action how like an angel !…’

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So, An Octave Struck The Answer

April 12th, 2007

Robert Browning : A Toccata of Galuppi’s

Historic Camel Photographs

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Going West

April 8th, 2007 at 9:08 pm

This is the night when I must die,
And great Orion walketh high
In silent glory overhead:
He’ll set just after I am dead.

A week this night, I’m in my grave:
Orion walketh o’er the wave:
Down in the dark damp earth I lie,
While he doth march in majesty.

A few weeks hence and spring will come;
The earth will bright array put on
Of daisy and of primrose bright,
And everything which loves the light.

And some one to my child will say,
“You’ll soon forget that you could play
Beethoven; let us hear a strain
From that slow movement once again.”

And so she’ll play that melody,
While I among the worms do lie;
Dead to them all, for ever dead;
The churchyard clay dense overhead.

I once did think there might be mine
One friendship perfect and divine;
Alas! that dream dissolved in tears
Before I’d counted twenty years.

For I was ever commonplace;
Of genius never had a trace;
My thoughts the world have never fed,
Mere echoes of the book last read.

Those whom I knew I cannot blame:
If they are cold, I am the same:
How could they ever show to me
More than a common courtesy ?

There is no deed which I have done;
There is no love which I have won,
To make them for a moment grieve
That I this night their earth must leave.

Thus, moaning at the break of day,
A man upon his deathbed lay;
A moment more and all was still;
The Morning Star came o’er the hill.

But when the dawn lay on his face,
It kindled an immortal grace;
As if in death that Life were shown
Which lives not in the great alone.

Orion sank down in the west
Just as he sank into his rest;
I closed in solitude his eyes,
And watched him till the sun’s uprise.

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‘Mundus Vult Decipi’

April 1st, 2007tools at 11:00 pm

A famous socialist who was also a close if not acute observer of men and events, Henry Mayers Hyndham, wrote: “Why Mr Gladstone, who changed his opinions whenever it suited his convenience, after turning from the extremest Toryism to advanced Liberalism, should have been credited with the highest political morality, while Disraeli, who, having once chosen his party, stuck to it all his life without the faintest shadow of turning, was regarded as a man of few scruples, I am at a loss to understand.” The explanation is simple. Apart from the fact that Englishmen instinctively distrust anyone and anything alien to themselves, Gladstone was the mouthpiece of his race and period. Everything that is impulsive, irrational, incoherent, and hysterical in the English people found expression in that Englishman, who also contained within himself the peculiar qualities of an age that exhibited self-righteousness, moral indignation, democratic enthusiasm and religious emotionalism; everything in short that Disraeli could not endure.

Hesketh Pearson : Dizzy

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Metaphysics in the Rain

March 28th, 2007

So on 3rd September Napoleon with his suite, his powdered postilions, and the train of waggons which had so encumbered the movements of his army, drove into captivity, bound for the palace of Wilhelmshöhe above Cassel. His troops, marching through pouring rain to the makeshift internment camp which the Germans had improvised for them in the loop of the Meuse above Iges — le camp de la misère as they called it after a week of starvation under pelting rain — watched his departure with indifference punctuated by abuse. Both Moltke and Bismarck watched the carriage drive away. Moltke wondered, a little tortuously, whether Napoleon might not have devised the whole operation to secure his untroubled retreat from his responsibilities. Bismarck merely remarked reflectively, “There is a dynasty on its way out.”
Then both returned to the gigantic problems which their victory had set them to solve.

Michael Howard : The Franco-Prussian War

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Barbarossa

March 20th, 2007 at 3:55 am

The ancient Barbarossa, the Kaiser Frederick old,
In subterranean castle ensorcelled state doth hold.

Dead was the Kaiser never, he lives in mystic sleep.
Long has he slumbered lonely in that enchanted keep.

The glory of the Empire with him has passed away;
But Emperor and Empire shall have one wakening-day.

The throne is all of ivory where sits the Kaiser dread,
Of porphyry the table whereon he leans his head.

Like fire not flax the beard is, that thick and long has grown
Right through the propping table that is of marble stone.

He nods as if a-dreaming, half-closed his eye of fire.
After long space of silence he beckons to a squire.

To him in sleep he mutters, “Around the castle-hill
See if the ravens flutter, and soar in circles still.

“And if the ancient ravens still circle far and near,
So must I sleep enchanted another hundred year.”

Friedrich Rückert

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Something Else

March 17th, 2007tools at 11:28 pm

Without fully straightening up, Kondrashov shuffled furtively over to a corner, pulled out a small canvas nailed to a stretcher and brought it over, holding its back towards Nerzhin.

‘Do you know who Parsifal was ?’ he enquired hoarsely.

‘Wasn’t he something to do with Lohengrin ?’

‘His father. The guardian of the Holy Grail.’

‘There’s an opera by Wagner about it, isn’t there ?’

‘The moment which I have shown here isn’t in Wagner nor in von Eschenbach either. It is an idea of my own. It is what a man might experience when he suddenly glimpses the image of perfection.’

Kondrashov closed his eyes, compressed his lips and bit them. He was preparing himself. Nerzhin wondered why the picture he was about to see was so small. The artist opened his eyes:

‘This is only a sketch. A sketch for the greatest moment of my life. I shall probably never paint it. It is the moment when Parsifal first sees the castle… of the Holy… Grail !’

He turned round to put the sketch on an easel in front of Nerzhin, staring at it all the while. He raised the back of his hand to his eyes as though shielding them from the light coming from the picture. As he stepped further and further back the better to take in his vision of it he tripped on the top step of the staircase and nearly fell. In shape the picture was twice as high as it was long. It showed a wedge-shaped ravine dividing two mountain crags. Above them both to right and left, could just be seen the outermost trees of a forest — a dense primeval forest. Some creeping ferns, some ugly, menacing prehensile thickets clung to the very edge, and even to the overhanging face of the rock. Above and to the left a pale grey horse was coming out of the forest, ridden by a man in helmet and cape. Unafraid of the abyss the horse had raised its foreleg before taking the final step, prepared at its rider’s command to gather itself and jump over — a leap that was well within its power. But the rider was not looking at the chasm that faced the horse. Dazed, wondering, he was looking into the middle distance, where the upper reaches of the sky were suffused with an orange-gold radiance which might have been from the sun or from something else even more brilliant hidden from view by a castle. Its walls and turrets growing out of the ledges of the mountainside, visible also from below through the gap between the crags, between the ferns and trees, rising to a needle-point at the top of the picture — indistinct in outline, as though woven from gently shimmering clouds, yet still vaguely discernible in all the details of its unearthly perfection, enveloped in a shining and lilac-coloured aureole — stood the castle of the Holy Grail.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn : The First Circle

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Time Stops in the Certitude of Self-Regard

March 15th, 2007

Strangely enough, some aspects of Victorian Britain afford an interesting foretaste of the Soviet situation. Britain was the first country in the world to grapple with the social and political changes that accompanied industrialisation and the simultaneous arrival of mass literacy. Pobedonostev had his counterparts in London earlier in the century, who reiterated the famous notion Peacock put into the mouth of a character in Nightmare Abbey: "How can we be cheerful when we are surrounded by a reading public, that is growing too wise for its betters.' A large section of the confident British middle classes in the Victorian era saw history 'as a kind of Hegelian dialectic stopping providentially and inevitably with themselves, projecting their own society infinitely into the future'. * The wide diffences that in most ways separated their ideology from that of Marx and Stalin seem to be unexpectedly bridged here. The middle classes propagated their view of the world in an attempt to make the working classes over in their own image. Like the Bolshevik party, they claimed to be progressive. Like the Bolsheviks also, they at first put forward their doctrines as a science, which was unchangeable as the conclusions of Newton. Passionately convinced that 'political economy' was the only method of running society, some of them tried to force a knowledge of this doctrine on the lower orders. Thus James Phillips Kay could write that the 'ascertained truths of political science' should be taught to working men, together with 'correct political information'.

Roger Pethybridge : The Social Prelude to Stalinism

[ Of course, Marx was a fellow-Victorian and Stalin was heir to the 19th century; yet the eternal verities still hold, and each generation believes it is the Heir of Ages… ]

* R. K. Webb

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