Coke on Littleton

Talmud page layout

 

Love theme from Spartacus - Yusuf Lateef

 

Text-Book of Seamanship, 1891

https://maritime.org/doc/luce/index.php


EXT-BOOK
OF
SEAMANSHIP

THE EQUIPPING AND HANDLING OF
VESSELS
UNDER SAIL OR STEAM.

FOR THE USE OF THE
UNITED STATES NAVAL ACADEMY.

BY
COMMODORE S. B. LUCE, U. S. NAVY.

REVISED AND ENLARGED BY
LIEUTENANT AARON WARD, U. S. NAVY.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS DRAWN BY
LIEUTENANT S. SEABURY, U. S. NAVY.

New York:
VAN NOSTRAND COMPANY,
23 MURRAY STREET & 27 WARREN STREET.
-
1891.

Copyright, 1834, by D. Von Nostrand

SMITH & MCDOUGAL,
ELECTROTYPERS

PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION.

THIS work, originally compiled in haste to meet the immediate wants of the Naval Academy, and revised at different periods under the pressure of other duties, has not merited the place it has so long occupied as a text-book.

Of this the compiler has been fully conscious. Its deficiencies were so numerous and so obvious and the circumstances under which it was prepared so well known that apologies seemed altogether superfluous.

It was for long years supposed, moreover, that some more competent hand would have undertaken an entirely new work.

Finding this expectation not realized, Lieutenant Aaron Ward has kindly consented to undertake the task of revision. He has performed his work intelligently and well, leaving out what was obsolete, introducing much new material, rearranging the subjects, and bringing the text down to the present time.

He has been ably assisted by Lieutenant Samuel Seabury, who has contributed some four hundred new illustrations and revised the old ones.

S. B. LUCE,
Commodore, U. S. N.


TRAINING SQUADRON,
NEWPORT, R. I., Feb. 1883.

REVISER'S NOTE.

GRATEFUL acknowledgments are due to those whose contributions to the text have enhanced the value of this work.

Commander F. V. McNair has permitted the use of his pamphlet on Seamanship Drills.

The chapter on the Laws of Storms is taken principally from the lecture of Lieutenant-Commander Thomas Nelson, Vol. V, Proceedings U. S. Naval Institute.

Chapter XIX. is practically a reprint of Lieutenant D. Delehanty's pamphlet: "Cadet Midshipman's Manual."

Chapter XXXV. has been prepared from notes furnished by Lieutenant-Commander Z. L. Tanner, together with data from the lectures of Constructor R. H. White, R. N., and from the professional pamphlets of the German Admiralty on steamers and screw propulsion.

The suggestions made by Boatswain Robert Anderson, U. S. N., have been of special importance. Getting a lower yard on board, sending down a lower yard inside of rigging, rigging derricks, and carrying out anchors between two cutters in shoal water, are described from actual work performed under his direction.

To Commander Taylor, Lieutenants Berry, Nazro, and Holman, U. S. N., and to many other officers, sincere thanks are tendered for their assistance and suggestions in the revision of the proofs.

AARON WARD,
Lieutenant, U. S. N.


CONTENTS.




CHAPTER PAGES
I. -THE SHIP-DEFINITIONS 1-10
II. -THE COMPASS-THE LEAD-THE LOG 11-20
III. -ROPE 21-30
IV. -KNOTTING AND SPLICING 31-62
V. -BLOCKS 63-69
VI. -TACKLES 70-79
VII. -MASTING-THE RUDDER 80-95
VIII. -STANDING RIGGING 96-109
IX. -RIGGING SHIP 110-155
X. -SAILS 156-172
XI. -PURCHASING WEIGHTS 173-189
XII. -STOWAGE 190-198
XIII. -BOATS 199-229
XIV. -GROUND TACKLE 230-260
XV. -STEAM CAPSTANS 261-267
XVI. -MOORING 268-278
XVII. -CARRYING OUT ANCHORS 279-288
XVIII. -ORGANIZATION 289-307
XIX. -DUTIES OF MIDSHIPMEN 308-322
XX. -PORT DRILLS AND EVOLUTIONS 323-359
XXI. -RULES OF THE ROAD 360-379
XXII. -GETTING UNDER WAY UNDER SAIL 380-394
XXIII. -MAKING AND TAKING IN SAIL 395-411
XXIV. -WORKING TO WINDWARD 412-431
XXV. -WIND BAFFLING 432-439
XXVI. -HEAVING TO 440-448
XXVII. -REEFING 449-456
XXVIII. -LAWS OF STORMS 457-470
XXIX. -IN A GALE 471-481
XXX. -PARTING RIGGING 482-491





vi

CHAPTER PAGES
XXXI. -LOSING SPARS 492-501
XXXII. -SHIFTING SAILS AND SPARS 502-516
XXXIII. -COMING TO ANCHOR 517-526
XXXIV. -HANDLING FORE-AND-AFTERS 527-536
XXXV. -HANDLING VESSELS UNDER STEAM 537-575
XXXVI. -GETTING ON SHORE-LEAKING 576-587
XXXVII. -THE LIFE-SAVING SERVICE 588-597




APPENDIX.


PAGES
A. -ROPE-MAKING-TABLE OF DIMENSIONS OF ROPE 598-603
B. -CUTTING AND FITTING BLOCK STRAPS 604-605
C. -TURNING IN OLD-FASHIONED DEADEYES-RULES FOR SIZE OF SHROUDS 606-609
D. -STAYING MASTS BY-USE OF BATTENS 609-610
E. -TABLES OF FLAX AND COTTON CANVAS 610-611
F. -MANAGEMENT OF OPEN BOATS IN SURF 611-613
G. -ROUTINE-PREPARING SHIP FOR SEA 614-618
H. -TARRING DOWN-SCRAPING SPARS-PAINTING SHIP 618-620
I. -IN A TIDEWAY UNDER SAIL 620-622
K. -TENDING SHIP AT SINGLE ANCHOR-FIRE BOOMS 622-626
L. -TURNING EXPERIMENT-METHODS OF DETERMINING TACTICAL DIAMETERS 627-644
M. -TANNER SOUNDING MACHINE 645-646
N. -SHIP PAPERS 646-647
O. -SERVICE BUGLE CALLS 648-659
INDEX 660-672

Small-Body Database Lookup

 https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/tools/sbdb_lookup.html#/?sstr=314159

Sekino Junichiro Night In Kyoto 1980

 

Symbols and Signs

In a Japanese Garden (1892)

BEOWULF: THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS BY J. R. R. TOLKIEN

New Largest Prime

 

Battle of Trafalgar - Oct 21 1805

Nelson's Trafalgar coat. The coat he wore when he was shot. A Vice-Admiral's undress coat. There's a bullet hole on the left shoulder, blood stains on the tails, & a blood left sleeve, which is probably that of Nelson's secretary, John Scott, killed earlier in the action.

Japanese carrier Akagi on December 7th 1941 :

 

Bernstein on Mahler

 

Measures Short of War: The George F. Kennan Lectures at the National War College 1946-47

No. 68. Every man chiefly happy or miserable at home. The opinion of servants not to be despised. 10Nov 1750

No. 68. Every man chiefly happy or miserable at home. The opinion of servants not to be despised.

10 Nov 1750


Posted by Samuel Johnson in The Rambler



Vivendum recte est, cum propter plurima, tum his
Præcipæ causis, ut linguas mancipiorum
Contemnas. Nam lingua mali pars pessima servi.
Juv. ix. 118.

Let us live well: were it alone for this
The baneful tongues of servants to despise
Slander, that worst of poisons, ever finds
An easy entrance to ignoble minds.
Hervey.

The younger Pliny has very justly observed, that of actions that deserve our attention, the most splendid are not always the greatest. Fame, and wonder, and applause, are not excited but by external and adventitious circumstances, often distinct and separate from virtue and heroism. Eminence of station, greatness of effect, and all the favours of fortune, must concur to place excellence in publick view; but fortitude, diligence, and patience, divested of their show, glide unobserved through the crowd of life, and suffer and act, though with the same vigour and constancy, yet without pity and without praise.

This remark may be extended to all parts of life. Nothing is to be estimated by its effect upon common eyes and common ears. A thousand miseries make silent and invisible inroads on mankind, and the heart feels innumerable throbs, which never break into complaint. Perhaps, likewise, our pleasures are for the most part equally secret, and most are borne up by some private satisfaction, some internal consciousness, some latent hope, some peculiar prospect, which they never communicate, but reserve for solitary hours, and clandestine meditation.

The main of life is, indeed, composed of small incidents and petty occurrences; of wishes for objects not remote, and grief for disappointments of no fatal consequence; of insect vexations which sting us and fly away, impertinences which buzz awhile about us, and are heard no more; of meteorous pleasures which dance before us and are dissipated; of compliments which glide off the soul like other musick, and are forgotten by him that gave, and him that received them.

Such is the general heap out of which every man is to cull his own condition: for, as the chemists tell us, that all bodies are resolvable into the same elements, and that the boundless variety of things arises from the different proportions of very few ingredients; so a few pains and a few pleasures are all the materials of human life, and of these the proportions are partly allotted by Providence, and partly left to the arrangement of reason and of choice.

As these are well or ill disposed, man is for the most part happy or miserable. For very few are involved in great events, or have their thread of life entwisted with the chain of causes on which armies or nations are suspended; and even those who seem wholly busied in publick affairs, and elevated above low cares, or trivial pleasures, pass the chief part of their time in familiar and domestick scenes; from these they came into publick life, to these they are every hour recalled by passions not to be suppressed; in these they have the reward of their toils, and to these at last they retire.

The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours, which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate; those soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises, which he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution.

It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honour and fictitious benevolence.

Every man must have found some whose lives, in every house but their own, was a continual series of hypocrisy, and who concealed under fair appearances bad qualities, which, whenever they thought themselves out of the reach of censure, broke out from their restraint, like winds imprisoned in their caverns, and whom every one had reason to love, but they whose love a wise man is chiefly solicitous to procure. And there are others who, without any show of general goodness, and without the attractions by which popularity is conciliated, are received among their own families as bestowers of happiness, and reverenced as instructors, guardians, and benefactors.

The most authentick witnesses of any man’s character are those who know him in his own family, and see him without any restraint or rule of conduct, but such as he voluntarily prescribes to himself. If a man carries virtue with him into his private apartments, and takes no advantage of unlimited power or probable secrecy; if we trace him through the round of his time, and find that his character, with those allowances which mortal frailty must always want, is uniform and regular, we have all the evidence of his sincerity that one man can have with regard to another: and, indeed, as hypocrisy cannot be its own reward, we may, without hesitation, determine that his heart is pure.

The highest panegyrick, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants. For, however vanity or insolence may look down with contempt on the suffrage of men undignified by wealth, and unenlightened by education, it very seldom happens that they commend or blame without justice. Vice and virtue are easily distinguished. Oppression, according to Harrington’s aphorism, will be felt by those that cannot see it; and, perhaps, it falls out very often that, in moral questions, the philosophers in the gown, and in the livery, differ not so much in their sentiments, as in their language, and have equal power of discerning right, though they cannot point it out to others with equal address.

There are very few faults to be committed in solitude, or without some agents, partners, confederates, or witnesses; and, therefore, the servant must commonly know the secrets of a master, who has any secrets to entrust; and failings, merely personal, are so frequently exposed by that security which pride and folly generally produce, and so inquisitively watched by that desire of reducing the inequalities of condition, which the lower orders of the world will always feel, that the testimony of a menial domestick can seldom be considered as defective for want of knowledge. And though its impartiality may be sometimes suspected, it is at least as credible as that of equals, where rivalry instigates censure, or friendship dictates palliations.

The danger of betraying our weakness to our servants, and the impossibility of concealing it from them, may be justly considered as one motive to a regular and irreproachable life. For no condition is more hateful or despicable, than his who has put himself in the power of his servant; in the power of him whom, perhaps, he has first corrupted by making him subservient to his vices, and whose fidelity he therefore cannot enforce by any precepts of honesty or reason. It is seldom known that authority thus acquired, is possessed without insolence, or that the master is not forced to confess by his tameness or forbearance, that he has enslaved himself by some foolish confidence. And his crime is equally punished, whatever part he takes of the choice to which he is reduced; and he is from that fatal hour, in which he sacrificed his dignity to his passions, in perpetual dread of insolence or defamation; of a controuler at home, or an accuser abroad. He is condemned to purchase, by continual bribes, that secrecy which bribes never secured, and which, after a long course of submission, promises, and anxieties, he will find violated in a fit of rage, or in a frolick of drunkenness.

To dread no eye, and to suspect no tongue, is the great prerogative of innocence; an exemption granted only to invariable virtue. But guilt has always its horrours and solicitudes; and to make it yet more shameful and detestable, it is doomed often to stand in awe of those, to whom nothing could give influence or weight, but their power of betraying.

A landmark ruling

Bruno Schulz's "Republic of Dreams"

Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History

(often referred to as…)
Theses on the Philosophy of History

I
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.


II
‘One of the most remarkable characteristics of human nature,’ writes Lotze, ‘is, alongside so much selfishness in specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future.’ Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existence has assigned us. The kind of happiness that could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselves to us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.


III
A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l'ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day.

IV




Seek for food and clothing first, then
the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.

Hegel, 1807

The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

V
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. ‘The truth will not run away from us’: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)

VI
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

VII



Consider the darkness and the great cold
In this vale which resounds with mystery.


Brecht, The Threepenny Opera

To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulanges recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of characterising the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness. Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: ‘Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.’* The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

* ‘Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.’

VIII
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

IX
My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.


Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.

Gerherd Scholem,
‘Gruss vom Angelus’
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.




X

The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disintangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.

XI

The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working, class so much as the notion that it was moving, with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Program * already bears traces of this confusion, defining labor as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘…the man who possesses no other property than his labor power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners…’ However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The savior of modern times is called work. The …improvement… of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’ This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at, their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.

*The Gotha Congress of 1875 'United the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The program, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’

XII




We need history, but not the way a spoiled
loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.

Nietzsche, Of the Use and Abuse of History

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,* has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.

* Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of World War I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German Socialist party, later absorbed by the Communist party.

XIII


Every day our cause becomes clearer
and people get smarter.


Wilhelm Dietzgen, Die Religion der Sozialdemokratie

Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogenous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.

XIV

Origin is the goal.


Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen, Vol. 1
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. [Jetztzeit].* Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

* Benjamin says ‘Jetztzeit’ and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans.

XV

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do no measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:

Who would have believed it!
we are told that new Joshuasat the foot of every tower,
as though irritated with
time itself, fired at the dials
in order to stop the day.
Qui le croirait! on dit,
qu’irrités contre l’heure
De nouveaux Josués
au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur les cadrans
pour arrêter le jour. *

XVI
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

XVII

Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogoneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it cristallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encountes it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled*; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.

*The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.

XVIII

‘In relation to the history of organic life on earth,’ writes a modem biologist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.’ The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.


A.

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, though events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

B

The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter.

The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis.

Skyrim Rivers

 

J.H Prynne

by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella

This piece first appeared in the Bloodaxe Books catalogue advertising the Collected Poems of J.H.Prynne (1999), and on John Kinsella's Internet homepage. Jacket thanks Bloodaxe Books and John Kinsella for permission to reprint.








Long respected as a teacher at Cambridge University and librarian at Gonville and Caius College, J.H. Prynne is possibly the most significant English poet of the late twentieth century. A lyrical experimentalist, his work has mesmerised and attracted readers from around the world for three decades. It has brought some to Cambridge in pursuit of new and unread texts, it has inspired students to develop their own ways of investigating the processes of poetry, to question the prescribed ways of reading, and led translators such as the late and brilliant Bernard Dubourg to dedicate themselves to exploring the nuances and variations in language and potentials of "meaning" that lie in its structures.
Prynne's is a unique poetry. While being of a tradition that stretches back through Wordsworth, it is linguistically innovative and strongly influenced by poetic languages outside the traditional English poem - be they those of Ed Dorn or Charles Olson, contemporary Chinese poetry, or the theories of Martin Heidegger. Prynne's work is often referred to in semi-mystical terms as a result of its being difficult to get hold of. As Prynne has avoided mainstream publishing it has been assumed that he rejects the "general" readership, that his is a language of an informed and "alternative" clique. But it is the indifference of the mainstream publisher to "the work" itself that has been a problem for Prynne, and not the idea of availability. Actually, quite to the contrary, the affordable volume that can be read by anyone with an interest in what is going on in the poem would appeal to Prynne. What Prynne would reject is the easy path to comprehension.
A poem requires work, and it is the reading process that preserves the poem's integrity. N.H. Reeve and Richard Kerridge, in their lively study of the poetry of J.H. Prynne, Nearly Too Much (Liverpool University Press, 1995), write of the 'indeterminacy' and the 'avoidance of totality and closure' in Prynne's poetry and we might cite this as reason for the poet's rejection of his earlier, more "traditional"/linear material (not included in Poems).
J.H. Prynne is an intensely private person. The immediate assumption is that he is also an extremely private poet. This often comes of a poet whose explorations of the minute are so focussed. But these minute observations explode into something large and substantial and prone to exponential growth. This collection of poems (the Collected Poems)has been a long time in coming. At its core is the Poems volume published in 1982 by Agneau 2, long since out of print. But there have been over half-a-dozen other works since then published by small presses in small print runs. This new volume is entirely up-to-date, taking in the pun-rich and highly codified For the Monogram, published in 1997 by Equipage. Rightly particular about the presentation of poetry - the integrity of text, the frame and field of the page, the context in which presentation and consequently reception take place - Prynne has been patient in collating another "collected" volume.









Shifted

Prynne's work has shifted key several times in the last three and a half decades, but one of the advantages of the new Poems is the opportunity it allows for gauging continuities of theme and method. Prynne's is a poetry that has always been concerned with much more than the way the individual self understands its relation to the social and natural environments; right at the centre of the reading experience it offers is an encounter with the languages and findings of various disciplines that coincide in demonstrating how the self is formed by processes that often lie beyond the grasp of individual perception and cognition. These might locate humankind in relation to geological time scales or to the infinitesimal events of neurochemistry, to the migration patterns of other species or to the systems logic of information technology. Such an array of different kinds of knowledge and discourse could never be reduced to the scope of the familiar, speaking voice without submitting to an illusion of control and conscious orientation.






Prynne's poetry rather prompts a critical awareness of how the impulse to translate the strange into familiar terms can be seen as a form of denial, as a refusal to face up to the moral and political impasse of contemporary selfhood. In the social reality of our own era, translations like this can often be ethically disastrous, when they co-opt the terms of one special language and set of relations into another; one clear example, which is extremely prominent in Prynne's writing, involves the contamination of social politics by the criteria of economic transactions. Syntactically and semantically, the language of the poems reaches beyond the grasp of conventional modes and measures, in order to register the lateral pressures and sometimes buckling impact of incongruous vocabularies, competing idioms and conflicting programmes. There is no point of view being transcribed here, rather the constant inscribing of conditions which both generate and limit the individual point of view.


Deflections

The curve of Prynne's career has seen a steady intensifying of this kind of challenge to the reader. After the rationalistic meditations of a first volume that he has decided not to reprint, the oeuvre has been marked by strongly motivated deflections of established reading methods. In The White Stones and Kitchen Poems, the fluency and balance of the philosophical monologist are belied by crowding intimations of a whole series of relativising contexts for the occasion of utterance. The English landscape is seen in relation to the withdrawal of the glaciers, its patterns of settlement judged in relation to the customs of nomadic tribes. In Brass, the reader is jolted, more rudely and exhilaratingly, from one unruly format to another, and is forced to cope with constant adjustments of tempo and tone, stretching from invective to elegy, not simply within the volume as a whole, but often within each text. Linearity and narrative, if not dispensed with altogether, become increasingly redundant, and in the adoption of the poetic sequence as the most frequent vehicle for Prynne's concerns, the emphasis on recurrent figures and sound patterns begins to tip the balance in favour of "vertical" rather than "horizontal" priorities in interpretation. This tendency is established in the "diurnal" sequences of the 1970s (Fire Lizard, A Night Square, Into the Day) and developed and complicated throughout the following two decades.
In the 1980s, much of Prynne's work seemed to be organised chiefly around the monitoring of thresholds, of the lines that mark the limit of personal agency, beyond which a more extensive condition of being might be intimated or subliminally glimpsed (for example in The Oval Window). Often these thresholds are located around the body, at the various points of entry and exit where the processes of absorbing information from the world or of sending it out into the world, must start and finish. The crucial question, of where and when personal agency can truly be said to come to life, is posed most revealingly in situations where the body is in trouble, in circumstances of estrangement or pain, and consequently much of the research encoded in the poems focuses on the extremities of what one text refers to as 'wound response'. This strand in Prynne's writing is most evident in volumes like Down Where Changed and Word Order.


Signifying

In the three most recent texts, published during the 1990s (Not-You, Her Weasels Wild Returning, For the Monogram) Prynne's experimentalism has reached the point where even the most seemingly innocuous parts of speech (e.g. prepositions) are prevented from carrying out their usual functions. In this, he is a writer who has carefully denied himself the comfort of an avant-garde house-style, despite the readiness of critics to identify him with the techniques of the so-called 'Cambridge School'. The ghettoizing of Prynne's reputation has resulted from his decision to publish only with small presses and to engage in public debate almost entirely through the pages of little magazines. Prynne's rather singular involvement with small avant-garde groupings is also an historical choice of artistic traditions, an antithetical gesture of defiance in a culture whose endorsements of the anti-modernist establishment have alienated many of the most serious practitioners of innovative writing.
Unsurprisingly, some of Prynne's most significant affiliations are with American and continental writers and thinkers; Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Martin Heidegger and Paul Celan must be included in the list of those who make their presence felt at different stages of his work. And most recently, a commitment to exploring the signifying systems of Chinese poetry has introduced the most profound implications for contemporary reading practices.


You can read "Rich in Vitamin C" by J.H. Prynne in Issue # 6 of Jacket, with a commentary by John Kinsella.

James Merrill - "A la Recherche du temps perdu: Impressionism in Literature”

Fly with the wind

 

Henri Bergson

When I started reading Bergson’s works, I immediately took to his philosophy and writing style, although there are places where his argument is not easy to follow and some of the subtler nuances of his thought get lost in translation. Despite this, it was like reaching an oasis of wisdom after fruitless wanderings in arid deserts claiming the noble name of ‘philosophy’, which are in some cases branches of grammar, linguistics or casuistry – modern secular versions of counting angels on pin-heads.

Henri Bergson was born in Paris in 1859 and died there in 1941. His mother was Anglo-Irish and his father Polish and an accomplished musician. Bergson uses musical analogies and writes with gallic panache and imagination, drawing freely from the metaphysician and artist in himself. One can see why his style, imagery and free usage of terms such as ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ did not appeal to the logical positivists.

In 1891 he married Louise Neuburger, a cousin of Marcel Proust, who was greatly influenced by Bergson’s theories on time and memory. Quite early in his professional teaching career, Bergson had one of those life-changing eureka moments. Until then he had been “Wholly imbued with mechanistic theories”, as he himself put it some years later in a letter to his friend, the American philosopher, William James. Bergson’s main critique of the mechanistic view centred on the perception of time: “It was the analysis of the notion of time, as that enters into mechanics and physics, which overturned all my ideas. I saw, to my great astonishment, that scientific time does not endure. This led me to change my point of view completely” (Encyc. Brit. article on Bergson)

His doctoral thesis was on Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Here Bergson distinguished between time as we actually experience it, lived time – which he called ‘real duration’ (durée réelle) – and the mechanistic time of science. This, he argued, is based on a misperception: it consists of superimposing spatial concepts onto time, which then becomes a distorted version of the real thing. So time is perceived via a succession of separate, discrete, spatial constructs – just like seeing a film. We think we’re seeing a continuous flow of movement, but in reality what we’re seeing is a succession of fixed frames or stills. To claim that one can measure real duration by counting separate spatial constructs is an illusion: “We give a mechanical explanation of a fact and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself”, he wrote.

His next major work, Matter and Memory (1896), was an essay on the relation between mind and body. In his preface, Bergson affirms the reality of mind and the reality of matter and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of memory, which he saw as the intersection or convergence of mind and matter. He regarded the brain as an organ of choice, with a practical role. Its main function is to filter mental images, allowing through to consciousness those impressions, thoughts or ideas that are of practical biological value. (Time and Free Will, p.181)

He spent five years researching all the psychological, medical and other literature then available on memory. He focussed in particular on the condition known as aphasia – loss of the ability to use language. The aphasiac understands what people are saying, knows what he or she wants to say, suffers no paralysis of the speech organs, and yet is unable to speak. This, Bergson argued, shows that it is not memory as such that is lost, but the bodily mechanism that is needed to express it. From this observation he concluded that memory, and so mind, makes use of the physical brain to carry out its own purposes.

Clearly there is vastly more in a given occasion of consciousness than in the corresponding brain state. This is surely a perfectly natural, normal, everyday part of human experience – a common-sense, empirical fact of life. We don’t really experience life as a succession of separate conscious states, progressing along an imaginary line. Instead, we feel time as a continuous flow, with no clearly demarcated beginnings and ends. We should not therefore confuse an abstract, arbitrary notion of practical convenience with the underlying truth that is continuously confirmed by our own experience.

Bergson uses one of his musical analogies to make the point: “As the symphony overflows the movements which scan it, so the mental/spiritual life overflows the cerebral/intellectual life. The brain keeps consciousness, feeling and thought tensely strained on life, and consequently makes them capable of efficacious action. The brain is the organ of attention to life.” (l’Energie Spirituelle 1910, p.47)

In his best known work, Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson made it clear that he accepted evolution as a scientifically established fact. He was born the year The Origin of Species was published and Creative Evolution adds a vital missing dimension to Darwinian theory. He believed that the failure to take into account the real time underlying the whole process results in the failure to appreciate the uniqueness of life. Bergson proposed that the evolutionary process should be seen as the expression of an enduring life force (élan vital), that is continually developing. Evolution has at its very heart this life force or vital impulse.

In An Introduction to Metaphysics (1912), Bergson expands on the central role of intuition. The true purpose of knowledge is to know things deeply, to touch the inner essence of things via a form of empathy: “A true empiricism”, he wrote, “is that which proposes to get as near to the original itself as possible, to search deeply into its life, and so, by a kind of intellectual auscultation, to feel the throbbings of its soul.”

Auscultation is listening to the internal organs through a stethoscope. Just as the physician does this to find out what is happening within the patient’s body, so the metaphysician practises a mental equivalent of auscultation to apprehend the inner essence of things.

Bergson also served on French diplomatic missions and from 1921-26 acted as president of the committee on international cooperation of the League of Nations. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1927 and in 1932 published his last major work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. On the one hand, there’s the closed society based on conformity to rules and moral codes, interpreted in a strict, legalistic, literal way. On the other hand, there’s the open society, which expresses creativity, imagination and spirituality via the arts, music, poetry, philosophy and mystical experience. The source of the former is the intellect and the source of the latter is intuition.

In The Two Sources Bergson seemed to subscribe to a more traditional Christian theological notion of God. He acknowledged that his reflections had in fact brought him closer to the Roman Catholic position, which he saw as the fulfillment of his Judaic faith. But he never actually became a Catholic: “I would have become a convert”, he wrote, “had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted”. Only weeks before his death in 1941 and despite being seriously ill, Bergson insisted on registering as a Jew, even though he had been offered exemption by the Vichy government.
Why Vitalism is Vital

With the ascendancy of the mechanistic outlook throughout most of the twentieth century, ‘vitalism’ became a dirty word in scientific circles. For a biologist to be accused of vitalist tendencies was equivalent to a charge of heresy. When Rupert Sheldrake’s book A New Science of Life came out in 1981, the editor of a leading scientific journal used language more appropriate to the time of the Inquisition, in calling for it to be burnt.

The mechanistic view alone is singularly ill-equipped to understand the immense variety and depth of human experience, to say nothing of the more subtle aspects of the phenomenon of consciousness. Whenever any given outlook – scientific, philosophical, political, economic or religious – becomes closed and dogmatic, it sooner or later has to undergo its own creative evolution and become more open to new ideas and insights. The fact that a mechanistic approach is essential for many aspects of scientific research does not mean that everything in life can be accounted for in reductionist, nothing-but mechanistic terms.

From the 1960’s onwards, some scientists became increasingly aware that something vital was missing from the prevailing worldview. In his book The Living Stream, for example, the eminent marine biologist, Professor Sir Alister Hardy FRS, stressed the importance of non-material aspects of evolution. The subtitle reads: A Restatement of Evolution Theory and its Relation to the Spirit of Man. In order to investigate methodically this aspect of human experience, Hardy set up a research unit, originally at Oxford. It is now at the University of Wales at Lampeter and is named after its founder (The Alister Hardy Research Centre).

It was William James who had originally pioneered this work over a century ago and not much was done in this field until the Hardy unit was set up in 1969.

Bergson believed that mental and spiritual aspects of human experience were greatly neglected as a result of focussing so single-mindedly on the physical and material. He once speculated on how things might have developed had modern science devoted more attention to exploring the non-material realm. He believed that we would by now have had a psychology of which today we can form no idea, any more than before Galileo people could have imagined what our physics would be like. A biology quite different to ours would also have emerged: “A vitalist biology which would have sought, behind the sensible forms of living beings, the inward invisible force of which the sensible forms are the manifestations. On this force we have today taken no hold precisely because our science of mind is in its infancy ...” He went on to say: “Together with this vitalist biology there would have arisen a medical practice which would have sought to remedy directly the insufficiencies of the vital force: it would have aimed at the cause and not the effects, at the centre instead of at the periphery ...”

Over the past twenty or thirty years, there has been an ever-increasing growth in demand for many varieties of alternative healing, some of which are becoming part of medical practice, the development of psychosomatic medicine and many different therapies. Quite apart from the efficacy of any given remedy or therapeutic technique, this growth represents a widespread revolt against reductionist, materialist, mechanistic fundamentalism.

Terms such as ‘life force’ and ‘vital energy’ are now back in general usage. Recent advances in the new physics and cosmology have also led to a radical reappraisal of old ways of thinking about time and causality, subject/object, observer/observed.

Bergson is sometimes claimed to have anticipated features of relativity theory. He wrote a paper on ‘Duration and Simultaneity with regard to Einstein’s Theory’ (1921). In the public debate between the two, it was generally held that Einstein ‘won’. But there aren’t really winners or losers in any debate about time.

The way we perceive time is surely a core perception, which affects all other perceptions. It determines our philosophy of life, matters of war and peace, how we perceive work and the amount of quality time we devote to the people and things that really matter.

Despite the recovery of a more vitalistic outlook in attitudes towards physical and mental wellbeing, the main underlying perception of our modern, urban-industrial society remains mechanistic and soulless. Over the years, the dominant western worldview has become de-vitalised and devalued, especially in politics and economics. Let’s suppose things had developed in a more balanced, Bergsonian way over the sixty years or more since his death: reason and intuition, intellect and imagination, matter and mind, the physical and the spiritual. Perhaps we would have learned from this a greater respect for all expressions of the life force, including our own species.

To extend Bergson’s speculations, let’s imagine that the present green awakening and concern over the environment had started to get under way sixty years ago – I mean really take off, not just lone voices in the wilderness, such as Rachel Carson. By now we would have had an environmentally-friendly form of global politics that we can barely imagine. Had such a re-valuation of our natural habitat and its human, plant and animal inhabitants taken place half a century ago, our planet would probably be in much better shape today, allowing us to pass it on in a healthy state to our descendants. Political and economic priorities would by now have changed radically and war would be seen as an absolute last resort. There can be no place in a genuinely ethical foreign policy for the doctrine that might is right. There could therefore be no question of any nation, however powerful, embarking on pre-emptive wars against any other nation.

With a more vitalistic perception, the intrinsic value of others and of humanity as a whole would by now have become something so written into our lives that it would be that much harder to demonise those we disliked. In order to exploit and abuse others and make war against them, you first have to devalue them. Seeing them as of no greater value than devitalized machines is one way of doing this.

Writing in The Independent (14 May 04), Terence Blacker observed that the fascination of cruelty is now so pervasive that we hardly notice it’s there. He believes there is a direct line from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq to millions of home computers across the western world. Pictures not at all dissimilar to the shocking images from Abu Ghraib are available as a form of home entertainment. “If you tap the words ‘torture’, ‘rape’ or ‘slave’ into a search engine,” wrote Blacker, “You will not be led to human rights organizations or academic reports, but to thousand upon thousand of websites specialising in recreational sadism. All this is mind-bogglingly profitable, because it taps into the age’s most compelling vices and weaknesses: cruelty, voyeurism, boredom. The problem is consumers are never satisfied by what they’re offered.”

The production line mindset defines the consumer as a buying machine with an insatiable appetite, whose tastes, fads and fashions can be manipulated, via advertising, with artificially contrived, largely unnecessary and usually environmentally destructive, wants. When one buying machine finally breaks down (when a customer dies), it is replaced by a new one, already well groomed in the dark arts of consumption. Underlying the consumerist juggernaut is the mechanistic view of time, the great fear of boredom that goes with it and the compulsion to fill up every waking moment with more and more graphic images, leaving less and less time for the things that really matter.

Our deeper needs are vitally real – not at all the same thing as contrived wants. One of our deepest needs is to find and express that vital creative spark that lies somewhere in all of us. If we saw ourselves as potentially creative artists of one kind or another, if this was the main view of ourselves and each other, we would spend more time creating our own images, writing our own stories, rediscovering our own myths. The artist is not a special kind of person. Every person is a special kind of artist.

In a society that put greater emphasis on creation than production, boredom would not even be an issue. Instead of fearing time and thinking of it as an endless space that has to be filled in, we would value it more and make sure we had time to express our own particular form of creativity, time to dream, time to do nothing in particular, to have a fallow period, time to sit silently, or walk mindfully.

In The Rebel (l’Homme Révolté, first published in 1951), Albert Camus observed that the society based on production is only productive, not creative. We’ve grown so used to living in a society ruled by production that we can barely even imagine one ruled by creation. Bergson enables us to envisage a society based more on creativity than the soulless, mechanistic, produce consume model. His philosophy offers a more integrated view of life, where science, technology, art, economics, politics and spirituality can all work together.

You do not need to subscribe to any kind of religious faith, or belief in the supernatural, to stand in awe at the creative beauty of the evolutionary life force in all its incredibly varied and wonderful manifestations. This sense of wonder comes as naturally to a person of scientific inclination as it does to an artistic or spiritually-minded person. Bergson’s philosophy has the effect of opening doors in the mind, enabling us to think more deeply about the nature of time and how we, in our western culture, perceive it – or rather, misperceive it. Above all, his philosophy provides a basis for a more creative, revalued and revitalized general outlook.

what if dinosaurs survived the extinction... Refrynn