“To have nought is ours, not to confesse That we have nought”.

Herbert, “The Holdfast”

Christianity harbours within it a persistent strain of pyrrhonism. It is a most attractive feature.

I liked Japan from the moment I landed, and wrote in a notebook, shortly after arrival, on the 30 September 1989:

I think I have found the Elephant’s Graveyard… where all the myths of the West come to die… and be re-born.

A field of knowledge is a co-operative venture. The job of slow-witted and patient plodders is to explore blind alleys so thoroughly that brilliant talents may economize their time. The consequence of this is that great men are not often the first to uncover wonderful things. A grunting labourer chipping away with his mattock will have been there before him.

Causes bear down on man, and pass through him. – Our contribution is not creation but refraction.

An authentically powerful idea, evolutionary theory perhaps, strikes the mind with a particular beauty, namely that it changes the sign, the direction, the onward significance of everything without damaging the internal relational structure of what is already known, as when a fitted glove is turned inside out so that right hand becomes left.

That there is a fundamental distinction in the intellectual praxis of rationalists and empiricists I am inclined to doubt; though there is this superficial difference, that rationalists attempt to make a virtue of their empirical deficiencies.

Because of its coarse-grained and bludgeon-like referential character, music is not and cannot ever be an effective way of rendering public and available for discussion anything other than a tiny subset of all concepts, and for a randomly nominated concept it is all but useless. In this it differs from its near neighbour, mathematics, which achieves immense fine-grained linguistic power by abstracting until nothing is left but quantity and the pattern of relations between quantities. Some music leans fractionally in this direction, achieving little, and loses its wide appeal as it does so.

The effects of music resemble those of a narcotic substance, which creates an affect by the direct and crude means of direct impact on the functioning of the brain and central nervous system. In comparison the rearrangements made by a set of words are slight and precise. The emotional scale of music is constricted to a very few major elements, like pulled faces from the Art of Coarse Acting, “Joy”, “Grief”, “Anger”,  the strength of which is consistently misrepresented by musical apologists for significance. Verbal expression, on the other hand, may adjust our responses by means of a scale that gives every evidence of being, as far as we are concerned, infinitely graduated. It’s subtlety when compared to music should not be mistaken for weakness.

Of course, the narcotic effects of music can be beneficial, and they may give relief. Many also use simple chemical substances, from caffeine and alcohol onwards, often in combination with music as it happens, a telling point, and may even prefer such substances because the user remains substantially in control, whereas with music the performer is in full control of the dosage. Overheard music, which can be grievously aggravating, is similar to a surreptitiously administered drug.

Without conceptual content or characteristics (and it matters little here whether you think of this art as a container or a face) music cannot be intellectually profound, a rich and resourceful method of managing the world, though it is undoubtedly effectual. Music does not communicate complex thought or insight, and cannot possibly do so. It creates strong and miscellaneous reactions in the hearer, but in so far as these are communicated they are simple, and commonplace. The composition of music is undoubtedly demanding, but none of this intellectual distinction is transferred as communicated thought. Successful use of the medium is evidence of considerable intellectual faculties, but if the composer has anything subtle to say it will only be present in the musical composition in the crudest possible form, if it is present at all.

And yet no art stands higher in the estimation of intellectuals, and no art has a wider and deeper hold on the behaviour of the global population. – There is no land without music. Adulation of crudely patterned noise is one of the principal and enduring sentimentalities to be found in human culture.

The worship of heroes is so recurrent a human activity that we must suppose that some common ground across time and population explains this behaviour. But what? Why should one individual take so great an interest in the standing of another. Are they deluded, hypnotised by propaganda? Perhaps not.

Literary criticism is a minor example of this tendency, but a well documented one, and might lead us to a general account. Much scholarship and commentary is obviously directed to deciding one way or another whether an author deserves high regard, verging on worship, and  in spite of the ostensible importance of the readerly experience, critics seem relatively uninterested in the quality or qualities of a work except as evidence determining or at least justifying the rank assigned to the producer. The work, which one might suppose to be the focus, is regarded only as testimony of genius, and once produced in evidence becomes practically irrelevant, except, curiously, that the evidence needs regular reproduction, with new and indeed original readings being absolutely required, as if fresh miracles must be generated on a regular basis, a bizarre state of affairs. A miracle stands for all time, surely?

Indeed, that suspiciously insistent need to secure novel evidence of value suggests a solution to the general conundrum of hero worship. – The god is as dispensable as the text. Margaret is not grieving over Golden Grove unleaving. The reverberation of the Hosanna returns to the singer. The honour that we seek for text, for author, for hero is intended for our own adornment. We have no heroes but ourselves. How could one ever have doubted it?

History in the strict sense is very short in evolutionary terms, and as a consequence all the texts to which we have access are product of organisms little different if at all from ourselves. This consistency over a period of time which seems to us long, since it is a large multiple of an average human life span, has led to or strongly reinforced the belief that some part of ourselves stands above temporal accident and biological form or their interaction. To dualists, this is the soul; those inclined to physicalism call it human nature. However, Heraclitus is right, panta rei, and both are errors.

This misprision could fade if the species persists long enough to hold records covering a period long enough for evolutionary change to occur. Where at present we may empathize with an author without very much difficulty, merely running their ideas in our heads to produce a rough, ready, and effective appreciation of their position, readers in the future may be reviewing the statements of ancestors with markedly different physical structures, brain configurations, and even breeding programs. Even assuming a continuous tradition of scholarship between these two organisms, the difficulties standing in the way of understanding will be enormous, perhaps much resembling those standing between us and the other apes.

When the attractions of a narrative writer such as Hemingway have been disposed of, there always remains the quality of the prose. I can hear a defender bringing up it's a gem like clarity and so on, it's minute observation, it's delicate reporting of dissociated facts which are exquisitely blended into an organic whole, and so forth. To this we reply simply that if you value such things, then the physical world provides them in a form which is both more entrancing and rewarding.

 “I too hate poetry”, said Marianne Moore, and views of this kind are inevitable for all those who have some understanding of the inner workings of the arts as well as subjective experience of the consequences of that machinery. When one knows the score, suspicion is the proper attitude.

Abstraction is a conceptual tool and useful, but to privilege it beyond the experience of the senses, itself only a selection, is to so narrow the front of our engagement with the world that only tedium can result. – Visual abstractions, paintings, are proper decorations for surfaces which would otherwise be dull, though a window is in most cases preferable, and literature is the futile decoration of a psychological better filled with our own responses.

But of course, I admit, that there are times when we are so imprisoned that a poem may, or a novel even and especially, provide a welcome escape. But this is a last and therapeutic resort.