maîtres artisans

I always hated smoking, since the time I was a kid, partly because cigarettes are noxious and perhaps even more so because I watched two uncles suffer (one fatally) from the effects of cigarettes. Aside from an occassional cigar, most of my adult life has been as distant from tobacco as I could manage. There was always one exception - the sweet smell of pipe tobacco, which is like incense in the nostrils of God.

Two American classic blenders still at work:

Peretti and Wilke, both in Massachusetts.

https://ljperetti.com/product-category/l-j-peretti-tobacco-cat/

https://www.wilkepipetobacco.com/history

Where to start? Where to end?

Prayer to St. Michael

 

O great and holy Michael, Archangel of God, standing at the head of the angels before the everlasting Trinity, O advocate and preserver of mankind, who – with your hosts – has broken in heaven the head of the daystar, Satan, the exceedingly proud one, and who always puts to shame his evil and cunning servants on earth, we run to you with faith and pray to you with love: be an unbreakable shield and firm bastion for the Holy Church and for our nation, protecting them with your lightning sword. Be for us a guardian angel, a wise counselor and helper of our land bringing to it from the throne of the Eternal Ruling King and Lord our God enlightenment and strength, joy, peace and comfort. Be for us the chief captain and fellow-fighter of our honorable country, crowning it with glory and victory over unjust adversaries, that all who oppose us may know that God and His holy angels stand ready to defend us. Be the physician and healer of those wounded. Be the pillar and defender of those children of the Church of God that are in captivity. And forsake not, O Archangel of God, with your help and protection, those of us who today glorify your holy name. For, behold, though we are great sinners, yet we desire not to perish in our iniquities but to turn to the Lord and be made by Him to live for good works. Illuminate our minds with the light of the Countenance of God that shines without ceasing on the lightning-like forehead, that we may understand that the will of God concerning us is good and perfect and knows all that is right for us to do, and even that which is right to omit and overlook. Strengthen by the grace of the Lord, our weak and feeble purpose, that made firm in the commandments of the Lord we may cease to wallow in earthly thoughts drawn by the lusts of the flesh as senseless children through the perishable beauties of the world. Above all these things, ask from on high for us the true spirit of repentance, true sorrow and contrition for our sins before God, that we may spend the remaining number of our days in this temporal life, not in the satisfying of our feelings and in the bondage to our passions, but in the blotting out of the evil we have done by tears of faith and heartfelt compunction, by works of charity, chastity, and holy acts of loving mercy. When the hour of our end and of our liberation from the earthly bonds of our own bodies draws near, O Archangel of God, leave us not without defense against the earthly spirits of evil who try to hinder the entry of man into the heavenly places. Preserved by you, may we, without hindrance, reach those all-glorious dwelling-places of Paradise where there is neither sorrow nor sighing but only life without end. May we be made worthy to behold the Face of our all-gracious Lord and Master, and falling at His feet with tears may we cry out in joy and tender feeling: Glory to You, our most tender, dear Redeemer, who, because of Your great love for us, your unworthy servants and handmaidens, have been pleased to send Your angels in the service of our salvation! For all the powers of heaven praise You, and we give glory, honor and thanksgiving to You, Father , Son and Holy Spirit, now and ever and forever. Amen.

Pineville Plan

 Photo from the Pineville Inn in Bucks County, PA, which served as a meeting place for Gen. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Here was drafted the plan to cross the Delaware and launch the daring attack on Hessian troops. 

Its a wild place to sit in many respects, not least as it raises the observation that Americans are oddly alienated not just from the culture, but the details of their history. Washington and Hamilton are now portrayed as mild and democratic "founding fathers" of our present order. That perspective from the standpoint of our fourth Republic is borderline mad, as each of the Republics have been a radically new form of government that arose under the specific sociological and economic conditions of its era. But none so unusual to today than the first.

Washington himself is best understood as a warlord who took Cinncinatus as his template (as his contemporaries often noted). And I think we fail to note how he looked at war - Washington was noted for pushing for government payment for scalpers. He waged war not just on the British and their proxies but also on American reticent over whiskey taxes. Those Americans, by the way, burnt down homes and tarred and feathered government officials over the taxes. Look up what that entails....

As for Hamilton: an elitist nationalist who called democracy a "disease" and "great beast". He would have deplored nothing so much as MAGA-ism, but also the bizarre managerial liberalism that is hegemonic in the West.

Some observations over lunch, which wasn't half bad...

Superstition

The most captivating superstitions are the specific mythologies that inform any contemporary world-view - they are always wrong, usually look ridiculous in retrospect, and are the hardest to identify and view for what they are. What little insight we can gain into the actual, really human condition is rooted in the language of poetry - analogic and metaphoric - rather than syllogism; those insights are often obscured by the rigidity of dominant thought-forms. Do we know where myth ends and truth begins? Of course not: anyone who tells you they do is either a liar or under extraordinary self-delusion. I'll give you a very honest opinion: I don't think there is a time in history that has been so thoroughly dominated by groundless and ignorant opinions marching under the banner of certainty and absolutism as we have before us now. Whatever creative, imaginative, and probing flashes of insight or even brilliance we've had as a collective species about ourselves in the past, we seem to be locked in a deep and abiding period of regression marked by furious self-congratulation and mostly pointless activities. But as Thomas Carlyle noted, "Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight."

Eis Polla Eti Despota

 

Spermatikos Logos

Homer, Thucydides, Aristotle, Plato and Plutarch

Searle gone

Fun fact: with zero qualifications other than interest and some undergrad courses in philosophy and intellectual history (shout out to some stellar professors for stimulating my interest including Ellen Kennedy, Charles Kahn and Alan Kors), I applied to do my doctorate under Searle at Berkeley. Apparently my enthusiasm was insufficient grounds for induction and I was not accepted. Such is life. I did however find Searle's work stimulating for decades after and often raise the Chinese Room argument with colleagues in the AI space.

Memory eternal.

Maine Rodents

 

Porcupines everywhere "down east."

stikhar iz rossii

 

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

This present moment

 I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These framents I have shored against my ruins

MacIntyre, Memory Eternal

 There are a handful of living thinkers that have made me re-think fundamental presuppositions that I held consciously (or not) for some time in my early life. Each, in his own way, a genius - but in particular a genius in re-shaping the conceptualization of an intellectual space for me. Until yesterday they were in no particular order, Noam Chomsky, David Bentley Hart, John Milbank, Michael Hudson, Alain de Benoist and Alasdair MacIntyre. We recently lost Rene Girard. Now MacIntyre is no longer with us. His precise analytics, pulling insights from thinkers ranging from Aristotle to Marx, was rarely matched in the contemporary world. The hammer blow that After Virtue was to so many of my assumptions and beliefs is hard to describe - my entire view of the modern project, especially around ethics, was undone. But it was also his wisdom about the human animal and what really mattered in terms of being a human being that set him apart.

A sad day for humanity.

To the servant of God, Alasdair, Vichnaya Pamyat': may your memory be eternal!