Bang - I'm dead, and you're alive!

Little bit of Auden that resonates. Love that face! Want one like that when I grow up.Nothing to do with the crazy idea Big Bang idea below, though...

Only now when he has come
In walking distance of his tomb,
He at last discovers who
He had always been to whom
He so often was untrue.


CRACK-BRAINED THEORY

Had an interesting idea while walking the dogs round the neolithic burial mound this morning.
Accepting the Big Bang theory to be true - maybe it can be linked up with Deism - the notion that God set the universe in motion, then walked away and left it to its own devices.
What if the Big Bang was a sort of cataclysmic suicide note?
What if God, tired of it all, (whatever 'it all' was) decided to bring the universe into existence and then - at the exact same moment - cause himself to cease to exist?
Would explain the apparent aimlessness of stuff.
Maybe in the 'seeds' of the universe he included the possibility, even probability, of life. Maybe He hoped, or even knew, that sometime, billions of years later, his farewell note would finally be deciphered?

Don't suppose this theory appeals much to Catholics. Does seem unlikely. But then, what doesn't?

Popper

Karl Popper's Birthday tomorrow. He's 108, or would have been. An intellectual giant of the last century. Hugely underrated, partly for a silly reason - his name, Popper. Sounds like a child's toy or, nowadays, a night-club drug.
If only he'd been called Wittgenstein. The Open Society should be enforced reading for everyone over the age of 16 in the world.
Yea, right.

Couple of quotes:

The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato. Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

If you have not read 'The Open Society,' and are daunted by its size, just read the last chapter, 'Has History Any Meaning?' Then, unless I am sadly mistaken, you will want to read the whole thing.

With Friends Like These...

Warning: This Tord spits.

Don't know if I am still having communication problems with 'Catholicism Pure and Simple' or not. (A more maladroitly-named blog is hard to imagine.)
Each morning about 20 emails still arrive - all more or less saying the same thing in different order - and giving very little indication that my message to 'include me out' has got through.

It isn't very important, except that I will feel guilty if someone is unknowingly toiling to get my page on there straightened out, unaware that Toad has hopped off.
As you can see from this post, I am still occupied with the whole odd business.

'Cath' is a classic example of Narrowcasting - the big thing on the web. No matter how narrow your interest, there will be a handful of the like-minded out there with whom one can bond.
Generally, it is harmless - folk, say, with a shared passion for Victorian British postage stamps, or Ferret breeding, or Agatha Christie first editions. But it can also be vicious - imbeciles who link up to earnestly pray for the early death of Obama.(That last is true. Saw it on Facebook.)

'Cath' is in the first camp. It is, at times, preposterously complacent and pàtronising, but it means no real harm.

Someone tried patronising my wife on there the other day. She (figuratively) wrapped her rosary round her fist like a knuckle duster, and delivered a stinging poke to the guilty noggin.

The A-Team there was also condescending to me. Kindly and sympathetically suggesting, that as a non-believer, I was somehow not an entire human being. My senses were less acute than theirs. Not my fault, but there we are, we will pray for you.

For a while, I felt that it was my mission to gently suggest that there is another way of looking at the world, the way of the likes of Montaigne, Hume, Voltaire, Popper, Russell, etc. The way of reason.
But no. All misguided.
Voltaire was poo-pooed for bringing about the French Revolution, for example.
One might as well beat up on Beethoven for bringing about Boogie-Woogie.

Toad was amusing, but not to be taken seriously. Quite right, too. Now that I'm not watching with my beady toad eye, the gallant little gang can form a snug, smug, self-congratulatory circle of mutual, mental, masturbatory admiration. ''Loved your offering on 'the Little Flower of Luton' Cecil!'' ''Nowhere near as teary-eyed making as yours on 'The Ecstasy of Saint Winnifred the Wonderful of Wimbledon,' Claude!''

Well, I warned them I was nasty. They just smiled. 'Dear old Toad..'

MEANINGS

The Deposition, by Roger Van Der Weyden, circa 1435

I've spent a long time looking at this painting in The Prado over the years. Undoubtedly one of the world's greatest, and a case could be made for being the world's most moving. All the action takes place in a sort of painted 'niche' about six feet deep, from front to back. Christ's arms echo the shape of a crossbow, because the Guild of Crossbowmen, or something similar, commissioned the work. Early 'image branding.' The little reproduction here cannot come near to doing it justice. The original is 8.5 feet wide and the figures are almost life-size.

It really has little or nothing to do with today's topic, unless you take an existential view of the world. I suppose I do.
Anyway, on Friday, I was in our little church on duty, giving pilgrims 'sellos' and keeping the place open for them. Ten minutes away from closing time, at 2pm, a woman pilgrim came in looking a bit disturbed and asked if she could go into the church. She did so.
Five minutes or so later, she came back out to me with tears streaming down her face. She had spoken to her mother, by phone, about half an hour before, for the first time in six months. The mother's news was very grim. Two operations for cancer within the last few weeks and the prospects for recovery bleak.
Bad enough. But it gets worse. The pilgrim, Elizabeth, from Budapest, told me she also has cancer, the same sort as her mother, and her chances of survival are equally low. That, she said, is why she is doing The Camino now. While she still can.I told her she should come back to our house and rest and stop for a while. She wanted to keep on walking, but I managed to persuade her to come over.
We gave her lunch and she ended up staying the night. She slept a long time and said the visit had done her good, 'thank God for sending me to your house,' etc. My wife and Kim are wise and good listeners. Pilgrims often want to talk a lot. But then, others are virtually mute.
What does it all mean? Everything and nothing, I suppose. Religious-minded people would see some significance in it all. I don't.

Getting all cross

By Grunewald.

Well, it will be no surprise for many of my readers(!) that I am finished with 'Catholicism Pure and Simple.' Toad brought low by a mouse. Never mind. Better on my own blog probably. No big boys around.

I am a bit miffed because I had posted a piece yesterday about images of the Crucifixion, which seemed to me, worthy of discussion. And this morning I had a further thought on the matter. The first thought was, briefly, how do people, Catholics in particular, (naturally for it is a Catholic blog,) reconcile personal modesty (often excessive modesty, in my opinion) with the image of the near-naked Christ, that, in other circumstances, that they might well decry as more or less pornographic?

The second, (and more interesting, I think) thought is, did The Romans bother to cover up the genitals of their victims under similar circumstances? Somehow, one doubts that they would. I suppose historians would know. If Abu Ghraib is anything to go by, torturers make a point of stripping their victims naked to humiliate them, probably always have done.
If the Romans did crucify people naked, what is the justification for covering Christ up, even partially? If the idea is to show in totally realistic detail (and some Spanish dead Christs go to remarkable lengths for realism, including real hair)why not show him naked?
I suspect if such images were hung on classroom walls, there might be a bit of an outcry, even from those who advocate keeping the existing crucifixes in schools.

But, as Montaigne wisely says, what do I know?

THE SILVER SCREEN

Here is a mercifully short and exquisite fillum starring myself, made in Palençia in the Bullfight Bar. A brief movie career, but glorious.

Indeed, films are the subject of today's offering. Recently my dear wife bought me sixteen movies on Cd's made by Ealing Studios. I lived many years in Ealing and knew the studios, and the pub across the road from them, The Red Lion, well.
The films involved all date from the forties to the sixties, before the BBC took over the studios.

So far, I have watched four - Nicolas Nickleby, Hue and Cry, The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob.
'Nickleby' is not bad - the others are awful. Worse than I either remembered or expected. I should have known.

Not that I don't enormously enjoy watching them - many use location shots of various parts of London, which is very nostalgic for me.

I should have known that they would be bad, because Wittgenstein, who liked to relax during the nineteen-forties by going to 'the pictures' declared - as an unassailable truth - the the British were incapable of ever making a watchable movie.
He favoured American Westerns and musical comedies. His favourite 'star' was Carmen Miranda.
Well, he was a philosopher.

Looking at these laborious, dim-witted efforts, one can see his point. Still, I have to say that during this time, David Lean and Hitchcock were making some excellent works of art.

But not in my back yard.

DOUBTS and DIGRESSIONS

Bertrand Russell. Nothing to do with the blog, just he has such a wonderful face.

Much ado, these days, about blogs and stuff.

As some of you may know, I had been 'commenting' for a month or so on a Daily Telegraph site by Damian Thompson, about Catholicism. I was often vaguely aware of all sorts of weird undercurrents there, none of which concerned me.

Anyway, a new blog was started. As of 7.05 pm today, it is called 'Catholicism Pure and Simple.' (It might well have a new name by the time I post this.)
I know, I know. I have already made the point that Catholicism is neither of those things. 'Pure' could be argued (unconvincingly) perhaps, 'Simple' never.
But I digress. They are all nice people and I wish them well.

Already, however, the new blog is riven by schisms. (Isn't that a great phrase? Worth a repeat - RIVEN BY SCHISMS - doubt if I'll ever write that again in my life. Hope not,anyway.)

Again, I digress. The thing is, a couple of their stalwarts have quit to start up at least yet one more blog. On top of that, I, and my wife (but that is another digression) have succeeded in upsetting a 'commentator' on Blog Two (CPAS) so deeply that they have quit in a huff.

In view of all this schism rivening, and bearing in mind that what I wrote seemed, to me no more than reasonable and low-key comment on a totally preposterous idea, I am wondering whether I should just stop. Go back to Damian. Or just stop it all. Take up dog walking, grooming and excrement-gathering professionally.
When I upset somebody unintentionally, it makes me unhappy. I like to upset people intentionally.

A double-length walk with the faithful canine crew tomorrow might clear the mind.
Used to work for Kant(even without dogs).

Reb has bought me 16 old Ealing Comedies. But I have digressed enough for one day. Tomorrow, perhaps...