Annuntianda et Contemplanda

A Few Notices

I: The contest to produce the best zeugma generated a great many submissions. Some were quite clever, some were less so, some failed adequately to render a transitive verb equivocal in meaning, two or three substituted an antanaclasis for a zeugma, and so on. A couple readers supplied additional examples from literary sources to complement the one from The Pickwick Papers, the best of which came from Mark Twain: “I’d rather decline three drinks than one German noun.” After a prolonged debate with my three fellow judges (Rhadamanthys, Minos, and Aiakos, otherwise known as Me, Myself, and I) I reached a decision, reluctantly rejecting a number of worthy competitors. The winner of the contest for Best Zeugma 2024 is Mark Twain. The gift basket of assorted fruits, Belgian chocolates, and aged bourbons has already been dispatched. My thanks to everyone who participated.

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II: I and my son Patrick have been working together on a new translation of the Daodejing (or Tao Te Ching if one wants to go all Wade-Giles on the issue). I produced the initial draft, but as my son began to take my dictation he soon reverted to his rôle as collaborator, in the good sense of that word (you may recall we have written in tandem in the past). Not only did he make constant and generally wise contributions to the English version; he feverishly consulted the original Chinese text, an ideogram at a time, to see where an alternative reading might be more plausible. This became a fascinating process of intertwining visions and revisions. We shall edit the text again as time allows, but we have the book roughly complete. The most interesting and prolonged discussions and revisions concerned chapter 60. There it is asserted that a nation governed according to the eternal Dao is one in which the people are protected from the shén (神) of the guǐ (鬼). The former term can be rendered as ‘power’, but tends specifically to mean a kind of spiritual sway, magic, or numinous influence; the latter can mean many things, such as ‘ghosts’ (especially in the sense of ancestral spirits), ‘evil spirits’, even ‘demons’. We both disapprove of those fastidiously ‘rationalizing’ translations that, embarrassed by any trace of ‘folk religion’ in the text, render guǐ as some inoffensively abstract term such as ‘evil’ or ‘misfortune’. We also are unsatisfied, however, with those that use words like ‘spirits’ or ‘spiritual beings’, as we are certain the reference is to a very particular kind of dangerous preternatural agency. But what kind? I began with ‘demons’, which seemed fair enough, but Patrick and I soon came to the conclusion that a sounder reading is ‘ghosts’, and he persuaded me that this means ghosts in the sense of the unquiet spirits of ancestors. This, as it happens, is in keeping with the classic and all but unreadable translation by James Legge, which renders the word as manes (which I rediscovered on consulting an online edition). At once, the chapter seemed to make sense in a new way, and specifically as another salvo in the philosophical battle of words between Daoism and Confucianism. Whereas the latter keeps the manes appeased and beneficent through the punctilious observance of the prescribed rituals, the former disdains ritual as an especially degenerate expression of virtues long since abandoned—the “mere empty shell of genuine loyalty and faith”, which “comes just before the descent into chaos” (chapter 38). Hence, all that is needed to secure the blessing and avert the bane of the ancestor ghosts is true adherence to the real Way of Heaven, which is the Way of nature rather than of ceremony. Such are the insights that a felicitous collaboration can generate.

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III: Before my recent medical concerns rendered the future uncertain, I had hoped we—the family, that is—might have the choice of removing to England if the slobbering ochre imbecile should be raised again to the presidency atop the swelling tide of the new American fascism. (My wife is a British subject still, or whatever they call themselves now, and that is a possible avenue for me at least to shed my US citizenship.) Alas, that is not at present an option, and things are not looking particularly rosy on the political front. No matter how many of the man’s former staff and administration warn of his dictatorial enthusiasms or admiration for Hitler, and no matter how overwhelming the flood of evidence of his fathomless foulness and sub-vegetative intellect becomes, and no matter how often he encourages and applauds violence, and no matter how openly he declares his wishes to use the US military against the country’s citizens and justice system against his critics, and no matter how much diseased racist rhetoric spills out in the interminable irruence of gibberish that constitutes his public screeds, millions of Americans will be voting for him and for the end of the republic this cycle. In a nation of 320 million citizens, it would be shameful to find as many as 500 willing to make the man president a second time; the English language has no word for how far beyond the merely shameful we have traveled. At least, though, we can have done with the pretense that the MAGA movement is not primarily a racist one; anyone willing to tolerate the ‘pure blood’ rhetoric and Führer-adoration of this utterly revolting caricature of a human being is, if only in the deep places of the heart, someone essentially in agreement with him on all such matters.

(It seems to me that the lure of autocracy is in the autocrat’s capacity to sell his followers the idea that he is a mere eidolon of their will, and that his actions will simply be an extension of their desires rather than his whims made law.-Patrick)

(I agree.-DBH)

Anyway, England calls, if only in a hoarse post-Brexit croak, but at present I cannot obey her summons. Maybe America will surprise me by electing Kamala Harris (who, flawed candidate that she is, could become a decently intelligent chief executive), but the obscenity of the Electoral College seems to make that an ever more unlikely conclusion to the tale. Perhaps, if we had ever established a democracy on this soil, the worst future could be averted. Westminster parliamentary democracy remains the soundest of all the unsound systems of representative government; the system we have is, by comparison, a spasmodic parody.

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IV: I am also considering producing a translation of the Gospel of Thomas, as a sort of appendix to my New Testament translation. I would not do so, however, as a labor of advocacy. I am of the school that sees the document as having been composed in its original Greek form later than the canonical gospels, and in its Coptic recension as late as the early 4^thcentury. Moreover, with only a few exceptions, I find its logia unappealing, and I find its portrait of Christ in general rather repellant. I also regard it as essentially a marginal text, illuminating a small section of late antique Christianity. That it was suppressed in the monastic world of Egypt is evident from the simple fact that it was concealed at Nag Hammadi; but there would have been no need to remove it from the laity, as it certainly had no presence outside the ascetic world, and surely no allure for normal Christians. My interest in the text is purely historical, and I hope to translate it in a way that makes its original milieu evident and its larger spiritual perspective clear. I have not worked in Coptic in recent years, however, so a little brushing up would not go amiss. I shall keep you all apprised as the project takes shape, and may cast the occasional logion on the waters to see how it comes back to me. I shall also see how eager Patrick is to pick up a little Coptic for himself (though I could have phrased that better).