July 2025
subjected thus
8 July 2025, around 4.41.
Here as later there is reason to suspect that no conclusions were ever drawn from Omniscience: Yahweh did not consult his total knowledge and was accordingly surprised by the result. One can observe the same phenomenon in human beings, wherever in fact people cannot deny themselves the pleasure of their emotions. It must be admitted that a fit of rage or a sulk has its secret attractions. Were that not so, most people would long since have acquired a little wisdom.
Jung is at his best when he is not wearing the mask of the intellectual. I think it’s because he is less concerned in more informal writing with making an argument, brick by brick, than by following intuitive threads. His essay on ‘Syncronicity’, for example, loses steam almost immediately after the initial anecdotal presentation of the concept, with the charming recursion of fish and fish imagery (the tables on astrological signs and probability are impressive if you like tables, but unpersuasive if you actually read them, not least because it seems like even Jung, as author, doesn’t care about the material he is presenting). William James’s writings on psychical research are an interesting contrast; he clearly does not ‘believe’ in the validity of the phenomena he is discussing, but he as equally clearly thinks such phenomena are worth investigating, if only to lay the ghosts to rest, as it were.
Answer to Job shows Jung in his best light; thoughtful, emotionally open, and curious to the point of playfulness without succumbing to silliness. He provides a close reading of the story of Job (and, incidentally, Revelation), in which Job comes across as the grown-up in the room (to use a phrase which I dislike, but seems to fit the situation). The irrationalities of Yahweh’s character are treated with an empathy that many would find hard to muster. It is perhaps essential reading for anyone interested in religion, (in)justice, tricksters, and being human in the world.
affective reading
14 July 2025, around 12.20.
…the mere occurrence of certain motions in the body can stimulate it to have all manner of thoughts which have no likeness to the movements in question. This is especially true of the confused thoughts we call sensations or feelings. For we see that spoken or written words excite all sorts of thoughts and emotions in our minds. With the same paper, pen and ink, if the tip of the pen is pushed across the paper in a certain way it will form letters which excite in the mind of the reader thoughts of battles, storms and violence, and emotions of indignation and sorrow; but if the movements of the pen are just slightly different they will produce quite different thoughts of tranquillity, peace and pleasure, and quite opposite emotions of love and joy. It may be objected that speech or writing does not immediately excite in the mind any emotions, or images of things apart from the words themselves; it merely occasions various acts of understanding which afterwards results in the soul’s constructing within itself the images of various things. But what then will be said of the sensations of pain and pleasure? A sword strikes our body and cuts it; but the ensuing pain is completely different from the local motion of the sword or of the body that is cut – as different as colour or sound or smell or taste.
ebb and flow
16 July 2025, around 13.28.
But in history as it actually happens there are no mere phenomena of decay: every decline is also a rise, and it is only the historian’s personal failures of knowledge or sympathy—partly due to mere ignorance, partly to the preoccupations of his own practical life—that prevent him from seeing this double character, at once creative and destructive, of any historical process whatever.
imposition
21 July 2025, around 14.58.
But there are acts of a different kind to this when the outer crust gets broken by the inner self breaking through at a moment of tension and you get what may be called a free act. Such acts are of rare occurrence. It is only at moments of tension and crisis that we choose in defiance of what is generally called a motive. Thus understood our free acts are exceptional.
The path to the waterfall is short and well travelled. The areas around the path are also worn down, pressed by many feet in search of adventure, closer access to the river, or an escape from whatever people happen to be there. In most places, the usual layer of duff is completely absent, which gives the area a strangely well-groomed appearance. It is possible, however – without too much difficulty – to take pictures that seem to promise a remote and untrammeled nature, a true wilderness. Despite the occasional drainage pipes, the rough-hewn bridges worn smooth with their guide rails, and the small boulders maneuvered to support and mark the path, such pictures are not entirely false; they wander the precarious limen between tame and feral and wild. On a hot summer day, the cool of the river and the shade of the trees seem primordial, but they are one lightning strike, one careless match from conflagration and desolation – and of course renewal. Or perhaps it would be better to say the creation of something different.
As works of imagination, the historian’s work and the novelist’s do not differ. Where they do differ is that the historian’s picture is meant to be true. The novelist has a single task only: to construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense. The historian has a double task: he has both to do this, and to construct a picture of things as they really were of events that really happened.
This was on my mind as I considered two rather different books that I read lately – Ariane Koch’s peculiar novel Overstaying and Yiyun Li’s short memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. They are very different books, with very different intentions, and it is perhaps unfair to compare them. Indeed, I have no real reason to compare them save for the hapless propinquity of the reading experiences and the fact that they both seemed to spark a desire to say or think something more than the usual brief note. In reading both books, it was impossible to ignore that they were written for effect; both were intended to bring about in the mind of the reader some perturbations of intellect that might, in turn, activate the emotions.1
One is a novel and one is a memoir; thus one could say that one is ‘history’ and thus aims to ‘true’ – but as Collingwood notes, the method is the same. Are they coherent? No. Neither is coherent, but for both that seems a matter of effect, because the only way to inhabit an incoherent situation properly is through incoherence. Overstaying is particularly incoherent, so much so that it is not clear why it is such a baggy mess for such a short book.2 The ‘visitor’, whether person, pet, psychosis, ambition, or monster, does not take a coherent shape, it remains a vague lurker from the realm of shadow, with its paintbrush fingers, shifting proportions, ability to wear the narrator’s clothing, and fascination with vacuum nozzles. Although it is, as a novel, something Koch has made, it seems strangely remote, inherited, passed through and occupied out of inattention (much like the house in the story). Koch’s narrator is seeking, it seems, an escape from stasis (‘I am dancing in a very small radius; in fact, the dancing is barely visible from the outside, one might just as well call it standing’, p. 104) and at the end seems to be on a bus to nowhere (or anywhere). My thoughts wavered at the end, too, caught between ‘better you than me’ and ‘jeez, grow up already’.
Li’s memoir is more successful, more effective and more affecting, and I cannot quite decide if that’s because the reader is led to believe (given the genre) that it is ‘true’, or if it is more artful. Certainly the subject is more awful (‘And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies’, 13%), and it, too, seems written from anywhere (nowhere), a place Li calls ‘the abyss’. In writing from the abyss, however, Li builds a sense of someone holding themselves very, very still, because any motion at all brings awareness of pain. That stillness seems to vibrate, it radiates, is radiant, and becomes painful to the viewer, to the reader, while also illuminating. In a later chapter in which Li describes the inadequacies of self-interested consolation, the tension snaps and the words are angry and impatient. This does not, however, spark an answering impatience; rather, it conveys the senseless hurt of powerlessness, of burning oneself through inattention, of a lightning strike from a seemingly clear sky. ‘There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books however, offer the approximation of it’ (74%).
- Please forgive me, I have been reading Descartes and so am tempted to tear down all definitions and rebuild them from scratch. It seems to me that the wheel ought to be round, but further experimentation may be necessary.[↩]
- Goblin-mode prose.[↩]
Adversaria (28)
31 July 2025, around 4.02.
‘Irritability, bad moods, and outbursts of affect are the classic symptoms of chronic virtuousness’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 87)
‘I have known some angry people I have encountered many people’s anger, but I have rarely found angry people illuminating or inspiring. Too often their anger—a feeling, a reaction, an interpretation—is presented as fact, or, worse, truth’ —Yiyun Li (Things in Nature Merely Grow, 29%)
‘…digression is never the same as distraction. Its twists and turns are unified in their aim, which is to help us understand the one complete action that is the subject of the work to which they belong” —Daniel Mendelsohn (Three Rings, 23%)
‘Can we be sure that stating truly is a different class of assessment from arguing soundly, advising well, judging fairly, and blaming justifiably?’ —J.L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words, p. 142)
‘Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values’ —C.G. Jung (Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, p. 33)
‘One learns to be patient, one learns to make concessions, one learns to redefine one’s visions and ambitions, and one learns to stop being a perfectionist. A garden is good training for life, too’ —Yiyun Li (Things in Nature Merely Grow, 45%)