[amazon-product]0393333566[/amazon-product]…when, a few months ago now, something about the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy made me think of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I thought I was just reaching for a convenient allusion… especially regarding Islam I was working mainly off a belief in freedom reinforced by readings on Locke and the American Founding, other than that off a life’s impressions, picked up as much from the margins of books about other things or from random personal experiences as from any intensive study… I rested on Blake’s “every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth”… while the idea of responding to 9/11 ten years later with an ecumenically oriented house of worship seemed like a “marriage” that Blake might approve of…
…and then came the arguing, and arguing, and the reading – general background, the many articles we’ve RecBrow’d, and books like The Evolution of God, Destiny Disrupted, also Talking to Terrorists… after a while you’re working from such different assumptions and taboo perspectives – for instance, that maybe it’s counterproductive in the extreme to talk of Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorist” and “Iranian proxies,” of Israel as “the Jewish state,” maybe even of “winning” (until re-defined) in Iraq and Afghanistan – it begins to seem like a waste of time even to speak up, at least in conservative circles, as you will not be understood…
…am now on to God’s Crucible… terrific lively almost Gibbonesque but very modern history of early Islam and Medieval Europe – how Europe became “Europe”… wish I’d read it before all of this Islam discussion had started, though if it hadn’t been for the Islam discussion I might never have gotten to it… taking up Islam for a history buff means encountering some great work that has been done over the last 10 years, it means re-acquaintance with familiar tales from an unfamiliar perspective (how the West’s win was), and it means having this vast, complex, violent, colorful, generously if not always comprehensively chronicled history opened up for you… for a Westerner it’s like reading an epically imaginative “alternative” and “speculative” history that just happens to be located in the past and to matter…
In a for me ideal world or anyway one where I’d made happier career decisions, maybe I’d go on a campaign, write careful reviews, attempt systematic discussions – and I’d have time to pick up on fiction, too… The Sandbox isn’t bad for a first book… very dark noirish view of America-in-Iraq, a little too incredibly cliche leftwing nihilistic anti-military in the end but still worth reading… and Conspirata was an involving and well-observed Fall of the Republic novel from beginning to end… and Spies of the Balkans is the masterful Alan Furst at his most relaxed, some of the darkest hours of the Nazi onslaught offered in effect as light escapism – the most touching scene for me may have been the one where the heroic Greek policeman/spy has to separate from his beloved mountain sheepdog… vague resonance of the ancients abandoning Athens ahead of the Persian invaders, their abandoned pets swimming out into the sea and drowning while trying to reach them…
…but doing things like writing appreciative reviews and systematic critiques that don’t have any immediate purpose… there’s only so much time in the world for that kind of thing when you need to make a living… flaming and japing unjustified certainties and laughable self-contradictions may not be a political project, tends more to be a philosophical where not a vain or ill-mannered one (or taken those ways), and making the impolite/impolitic political is more than a full-time job…
…this dialectic is the stuff of On Tyranny and I’d struggle try to tell you why I think it’s worth contemplating – urge you to read the dialogue of the poet and the tyrant (try it, it’s not long – especially if you skip all of the footnotes interrupting the e-text)… I’d try to explain how, perhaps, the holy sinful synthesis of politics and philosophy that Strauss and Kojève cannot perform, they enact in a lifelong friendship, counter-filling for each other a deficit, in a way that neither could think into his work, as revealed in the letters appended to their debate … philosophy-against-politics and politics-as-philosophy meeting maybe (I do think so) at the same point where Wilson (via Pestritto) and the Founders (via Wood) would also meet… not quite nowhere… where the left and the right and East and West and religion and agnosticism and atheism and Heaven and Hell also meet…
…but frankly the title of the prior post was ironic because what I really have to do is get to work on work… I’ve written and posted and thought myself out of real existing conservatism and possibly real existing politics altogether… so probably won’t be writing any essayistic posts for a while… may not have time for more than occasional observations, or responses on whatever you all happen to bring up…
Hokey smokes Bullwinkle!