John Dunn

Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve

Friday, 20 May 2022 at 22:08

Roy Campbell by Augustus John

Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve

Dr John Dunn 2022.

I continue my break with the website as I do a little travelling in northern France. However, it is a time to catch up with my reading of Roy Campbell’s great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War and more, as I add a few more extracts from the gigantic work.

The following lines continue those just published on the blog of this website. Previous extracts can be found in ‘Thought pieces’. In the next few days or so, I will add notes and explanations.

John Dunn ©

For I foretold La Mancha’s Knight would prance
With Charlie like a cockroach on his lance
Which I was called Romantic to believe:
Around the Fates to play at pitch and toss
Like kittens with the skein of Atropos
My devil-daring prophesies had leave;
So happy were the Fates at last to weave
A prophesy that wasn’t pusillanimous,
And when they saw my program, were unanimous
I’d come a tedious chapter to relieve:
So merry hummed the wheel and clashed the shears
Was never such a miracle for years
Materialists and wowsers to aggrieve:
For when our cause was scarce a handsbreath grown
And theirs in blood and arson towered alone
And Absolute from Portugal to France,
With flawless certitude I flung defiance
At all our pundits, bards, and men of Science,
Who’ve always viewed my gasconades askance,
Since well they know, those paladins of failure!

Oily sleeze

Thursday, 19 May 2022 at 20:27

Roy Campbell 1901-1957

I now add notes and commentary to the extract posted yesterday (see below) from Roy Campbell’s Flowering Rifle, his great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War and much much more.

Oily sleeze

Dr John Dunn 2022.

Robert Southey was the political radical turned poet laureate. He epitomised the unscrupulous Bolshevizing (Bolshevik and Yiddisher being as one to Campbell) i.e. courting of establishment favour by the leftist lackeys whom Campbell suffered in his own Bloomsbury years.

Henna-tressed is about being as radical as your hair-do; in other words, Campbell's critique of shallow, showy and fashionable establishment leftism.

To water down the vodka is to water down your apparent Bolshevism, i.e. install insipid and shallow politics.

Baksheesh,a form of bribery common to Asia, is symbolic of Britain’s culture of conformism in which lick-spittle cronyism is the way to win honour, as a film of oily sleeze covers everything.

One might act like the Bloomsbury Set “radicals” Campbell derides, but only if you could say noto life, wish you hadn't been born and renounce all that's worth believing in.

In contrast, Campbell argues that honour must be won with honour.

Tupper is a reference to Martin Farquhar Tupper, composer of moralising verse that passed for poetry. Given the context, there may be a secondary reference to sheep tupping.

But no defrocked scoutmaster (here standing for Bloomsbury perversion) would get away with moralising doggerel to win the honours he (Campbell) has upon his chest.

With some weary resignation, Campbell accepts frankly that he will never be recognised for his true worth as a poet, because it would take the impossible; i.e. British poets would have to reject the foredoomed causes espoused by the leftist political establishment.

John Dunn ©

And when I Bolshevize for Royal Favour
Among her modern Southeys, henna-tressed,
By watering down the Vodka like the rest,
May my right hand lose cunning, flinch, and waver,
Salaaming there for baksheesh with their best,
Who’ll call you honest, daring, fearless, bold,
For blacking boots and doing what you’re told,
If only you unclench that “no” to life
And wish your Father hadn’t took a wife,
If only you renounce all Faith and Vision
Foresentencing your manhood to derision.
For King’s Gold Medals when I strive to please
Their winning will require a sterner test,
No defrocked Scoutmaster could Tupper these
That jingle with the Cross upon my chest:
When Britain and her poets stand for causes
That aren’t foredoomed by foul subhuman crime
They’ll change their present sanctions to applauses
And own me for the prophet of my time,
Since the whole trouble with the other chaps is
Whatever cause they flunkey for collapses
However well it flourished at the time:

Extract from Flowering Rifle

Wednesday, 18 May 2022 at 20:12

Extract from Flowering Rifle

Dr John Dunn 2022.

I'm taking a break from writing, the website and my other run-of-the-mill activities, choosing instead to do a little travelling.

So, whilst out on the road, I'll catch up with my reading of Roy Campbell's great epic poem about the Spanish Civil War, Flowering Rifle.

I'll certainly be adding a few lines to the 'Thought piece' reading, see here.I'll work on an explanation of the lines added from the poem sometime later. For now here is another extract for your delectation and education.

John Dunn ©

And when I Bolshevize for Royal Favour
Among her modern Southeys, henna-tressed,
By watering down the Vodka like the rest,
May my right hand lose cunning, flinch, and waver,
Salaaming there for baksheesh with their best,
Who’ll call you honest, daring, fearless, bold,
For blacking boots and doing what you’re told,
If only you unclench that “no” to life
And wish your Father hadn’t took a wife,
If only you renounce all Faith and Vision
Foresentencing your manhood to derision.
For King’s Gold Medals when I strive to please
Their winning will require a sterner test,
No defrocked Scoutmaster could Tupper these
That jingle with the Cross upon my chest:
When Britain and her poets stand for causes
That aren’t foredoomed by foul subhuman crime
They’ll change their present sanctions to applauses
And own me for the prophet of my time,
Since the whole trouble with the other chaps is
Whatever cause they flunkey for collapses
However well it flourished at the time:

What went before; but a small sample

Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 21:27

Anton Bruckner: a precursor

What went before; but a small sample

Dr John Dunn 2022.

A small blog transferred to the Archive, but an important one, and one that could do with further development and expansion. It gives a taste of the precursors.

It is about the catalysts to the awakening, variously this might be described as the beginning, or my awakening.

But these alone were not the light, but rather witnesses to the light. They contributed to bringing about what was to come, but as glimmers they were portents of the future.

Portents yes, important yes, but before the beginning, which is the critical point. In my own mythological terms each existed in the realm of Ananke, the cosmos of 1 =0. (see One nothing)

Precursors

“They were precursors to the light, not the light, but each bore witness of that light.”

John Dunn ©

Devoid of Love

Monday, 16 May 2022 at 19:54

Blake's Urizen. 'And Urizen cast the net of debt over all.'

Devoid of Love

Dr John Dunn 2022.

The fall into the objectified world needs a symbolic expression; that expression was the fallen angel, the fall of Satan.

Satan fell and dragged the people of the world along with him into the sub-human existence of Beulah. Beulah? Symbolic of dumb contentment.

This is the symbolism explored in the first of two blogs to be archived today, Devoid of Love. In the second archived blog, Contentment, the distinction between symbol and reality becomes blurred. There are those who lead the dumb masses into blind contentment. There are those whose only longing is ‘just to be happy’. Are there children of the fallen angel? Well there are those who hide amongst the innocents and feed off the innocents.

Devoid of Love

“Satan fell into the objectivised world, to become god of this world, and Adam and Eve and their issue worshipped Satan as the god Urizen, the demiurge, a distant Jehovah, the 'self-deluded and anxious' shaper of pre-existent matter.”

“And the children of Satan led men and women into Beulah with the promise of happiness to come, into the land of false innocence,that is innocence devoid of Love, from which arises the constant and nauseating refrain… ‘we just want to be happy…, we just want to be happy…’”

Contentment

“The children of Satan led the innocents out of themselves with the promise of happiness to come …into Beulah. “We just want to be happy…, we just want to be happy…”, the innocents droned on and on.”

“And the children of Satan led them into debt, and with this came the objectivisation of past and future; the future extracted from the present and the cost of the past born by the present.”

To be...

Sunday, 15 May 2022 at 21:40

To be...

Dr John Dunn 2022.

Find below extracts from a group of related blogs that I have recently transferred to the Archive.

They are related by their concern with;

. what was before being?
. how being came to be
. what is being

This building of the archive is all about pulling writings together for future publication. I am at the early stages, however patterns have long been forming. The challenge is getting theses across to the reader.

One nothing

However, would not that state, that everlasting equilibrium, be a single nothingness, an all-embracing oneness?

We have the paradox of one equaling nothing.

You might say that before the beginning there was not nothing, but rather there was one.

Beginning, always

How do we get from no-thing to some-thing?

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos.

Before the beginning there was nothing and 0 = 1.

With the beginning the infinite space of nothing was bounded.

Forthe one has no past but is created in the eternity of the present, behind which there is no past and in front of which there is no future.

There is only beginning, always.

Living thought as Logos

In the light of my current thinking, here is my own translation of John 1 - 5.

1In the beginning is the living thought, and the living thought is with God, and the living thought is God. 2 He is with God in the beginning. 3Through him all things are made; without him nothing is made that is made. 4 In him is life, and that life is the light of all mankind. 5 Thelight shines in the darkness, and the darkness is not overcoming it.

Beginning, always 2

The sons of Adam are born into a fallen state, i.e. the reflected and objectivised world.

Satan tempted Christ to come over to the objectivised world, where power might be exerted over a temporal realm. The rejection of Satan is the rejection of death and an acceptance of the beginning, always.

This time as as a personalised narrative

Satan tempted Christ to his realm, where power might be exerted over a temporal world; you know, stones into bread, defying gravity, ruling over nations. Christ’s rejection of Satan was an assertion of the point Imade above, that there’s nothing outside my thinking, that is, nothing but death.

Being: what is it?

The adoration followed the birth of Love; for to love is to worship. Being is active thinking, the Logos and Love. To be is to worship.

© John Dunn.

Questionable

Saturday, 14 May 2022 at 21:05

Johann Angelus Silesius, 1624 - 1677

Questionable

Dr John Dunn 2022.

Pulling material together to be shaped somehow into a work for future publication has entailed the saving of the following two blogs from January this year.

They are about our relationship with the Logos. What is the Logos?

I quote from my ‘Thought piece’, The Mythology. “Love: variously Logos, God, the Word, the Cosmic Jesus, living thought, creativity.”

God, or Logos, is Love. Is Love therefore, where immanence is to be found? Is Love where transcendence is to be found?

I suppose the critical point about these transferred blogs is that they leave questions for further rumination.

I note in both blogs that Silesius ruminated in the 1600s and concluded that transcendence and immanence were to be found within, to the point where he could say - “I know that without me no God can live; were I brought to naught, he would of necessity have to give up the ghost.”

Unattainable transcendence

So where is the concrete reality?

It can only be in active thought.

But active thought cannot be expressed other than as a thought objectified, i.e. made abstract.

What is thought before the fall, i.e. the fall into abstraction?

Is immanence with the Logos an attempted expression of active thought?

Where the immanence?

The objectified Christ was murdered, the saving Christ was resurrected.

The objectified Christ was crucified, the resurrected Christ lives on as living thought, active thought; a mystery beyond understanding, but revealed as living thought.

But active thought cannot be expressed other than as a thought objectified, i.e. made abstract.

What is thought before the Fall, i.e. the fall into abstraction?

Is immanence with the Logos an attempted expression of active thought?

And where is immanence lived? In Love?

© John Dunn.