Archive for the 'Religion' Category

In defence of secularism

Published
by
peter
on 2010-09-02
in History, Politics and Religion
. 0 Comments

Edmund Adamus, director of pastoral affairs at the Roman Catholic diocese of Westminster, London, is apparently upset at modern, liberal secular society, claiming (inter alia) that:

Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes, culturally speaking – more than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution.”

This is absurd and tendentious nonsense.  It was secularists – atheists, agnostics, non-believers, liberals, and anti-bigots – who led the campaign in Britain for Catholic emancipation, the right to vote, and the right to sit in Parliament, granted in 1829.   It was secularists who achieved the right for Jews to sit in Parliament from 1858 and the right to vote in 1867, something that the same political party currently ruling Britain stymied for a quarter century.  (The bill emancipating Jews passed the House of Commons in 1833, but was repeatedly blocked in the House of Lords by Conservative peers and bishops.  What reasonable person with knowledge of this history could belong to such a party?)  It was secularists, not the religious, who led the campaign which ended the deaths of women in illegal back-street abortions and gave equal rights to people regardless of their gender or colour or sexual orientation.  It was even  secularists who passed a law in 2001 – yes, 2001!  – that finally allowed Catholic priests and former priests to sit in the British Parliament.    If not for secularism and the progressive extension of political and social rights to all citizens, regardless of their religion or race or gender, Edmund Adamus would not even have the freedom of speech to voice his obnoxious opinions. 

Few things make me angry.  Religious bigotry and racial prejudice are among them.  So too is this stupidity of religious conservatives, unable to see where there own self-interests lie.     Their interests are best served by a secular society and state which guarantees equal rights to all, not special rights to some on the basis of their religious beliefs or their gender or any other biological or social construct.  Britain is still not entirely there yet, with the outrageous fact of unelected, unrepresentative, and unaccountable Church of England Bishops still sitting in the House of Lords (and thus voting on legislation that impacts us all), and the country’s immoral denial of religious freedom for the Head of State and his or her immediate family.    But the great progress in extending freedom to all that has been made these last 200 years is due to secularism and secularists, not to religious bigotry or medieval obscurantism.  Adamus should be ashamed.

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On growing up Catholic

Published
by
peter
on 2010-08-28
in Religion
. 0 Comments

The Australian Labor Party split in two three times during the 20th century:  over military conscription during WW I, over economic policies during the Great Depression, and over entryism by Catholic anti-communists in 1954.   A Catholic-dominated splinter party from that last split, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), now looks likely to be represented in the Australian Federal Parliament again after 36 years absence, by winning the last Senate seat from Victoria in last week’s election.   I therefore thought it interesting to collect the views of several lapsed Catholics on their education.

Here is Germaine Greer, educated in Melbourne by Catholic nuns of the Presentation Order, in an essay in the collection, There’s Something About a Convent Girl (Edited by Jackie Bennet  & Rosemary Forgan.  London, UK; Virago, 1991):

I am still a Catholic, I just don’t believe in God. I am an atheist Catholic – there are a lot of them around. One thing lapsed Catholics do not do is go in for an “inferior” religion with less in the way of tradition and intellectual content.”

And Catholic-raised Terry Eagleton on reason in religious education:

[Richard] Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in belief.”

British author David Almond, in an interview with Sarah Crown, quoted on his Catholic upbringing in Newcastle, UK:

Readers and critics have labelled Almond’s novels modern fairytales. But for Almond himself, “the pressing thing is the realism. Skellig had to be in a real garage. Kit sleeps in a real mine. The Fire-Eaters, while it has a miraculous element to it, takes place in a real coastal town, and features a real fire-eater – he was based on this character we used to see on the Quayside in Newcastle when I was a kid. Once you’ve got that solid, touchable world you can do anything. Maybe that’s something else to do with being brought up as a Catholic: you’re taught to think about the other world, but you grow up in this one, and you realise there couldn’t be anything better. So you find the miraculousness in reality.”

Irish writer John McGahern, in a 1993 essay, “The Church and its Spire”, on his upbringing in 1950s Eire:

I was born into Catholicism as I might have been born into Buddhism or Protestantism or any of the other isms or sects, and brought up as a Roman Catholic in the infancy of this small state when the Church had almost total power: it was the dominating force in my whole upbringing, education and early working life.

I have nothing but gratitude for the spiritual remnants of that upbringing, the sense of our origins beyond the bounds of sense, an awareness of mystery and wonderment, grace and sacrament, and the absolute equality of all women and men underneath the sun of heaven. That is all that now remains. Belief, as such, has long gone.”

I think this sense of the absolute equality of all arises from the universalist ambitions of Catholicism (all people are called to embrace it and be saved), which it shares with Islam.  Those forms of Protestantism which focus on an elect, the people whom God has decided will be saved (even, according to believers in predestinationism, so chosen before their birth), do not share this bias for absolute equality.    Of course, within the Church itself, with its priesthood currently restricted to men, and then only some men, the tradition of equality is dishonoured more than honoured.  And the universalism of Catholicism, coupled with its global presence, mean that a welcoming community and familiar rituals can be found by adherents most anywhere they go (again like Islam).   Perhaps only participation in a global martial arts community, such as karate or aikido, offers anything similar.

And since Catholics hold that it is the-people-as-the-Church that receive grace and are saved, not people as individuals, there is a bias toward community and social cohesion that runs counter to the prevailing individualistic ethos of capitalism.  

Note:  The image shows one of the many woodcarvings in the Catholic Church at Serima Mission, near Masvingo, Zimbabwe.

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What is music for?

Published
by
peter
on 2010-08-28
in Minimalism, Music and Religion
. 0 Comments

What is music for?  What purposes do its performers achieve, or intend to achieve?  What purposes do its listeners use it for?  Why do composers or song-writers write it?

These seem to me fundamental questions in any discusssion about (say) the public funding of music performances and music education, or (say) the apparent lack of knowledge that some people in Britain have about some types of music, or (say) how to increase audiences for particular types of music.   But no-one seems to debate these questions, or even to raise them.  As a result, there seems to be little awareness that aims and purposes may vary, both across cultures, and over time.   (I am reminded of Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art which understands art as the creation of objects liable to be perceived by their audience as objects with intentionality, that is, objects carrying some purpose.)

The philosopher John Austin once said that every science begins with a classification.  In that spirit, I have tried to list some purposes and functions which I have understood to be intended for music by composers, performers and/or listeners (in no particular order):
  • To entertain, to give pleasure. The pleasure may arise from the sounds themselves (eg, elements such as the sound qualities, the melodies, the harmonies, the overtones, the timbres, the beat, the rhythms, the combinations or interplay of the various elements), or the performance of the music (the skills of the performers may provide pleasure), or the construction of the music (eg, repetition or novelty, contrapuntalism or other stuctural features, the composition or improvisation techniques evident to a listener), or allusions to other sounds and music.  
  • To express some emotion or mood in the composer/writer, or in the performer.
  • To evoke some emotion or mood in the listener.  The sturm-und-drang movement in the mid-18th century, for example, led symphony writers to imitate thunderstorms and other effects, often seeking to frighten or surprise listeners.
  • To express solidarity and communality, whether by performers or by listeners.  See, for instance, Mark Evan Bonds’ great book on how Beethoven’s symphonies were perceived by their audience as expressions of and occasions for communality.  John Miller Chernoff’s observation that African people express their opinion of a musical performance by joining in (themselves performing, singing, beating time, or dancing) is an example of this particular aesthetic of music.
  • To inspire listeners to action, as, for example, with the music of the 19th century nationalists such as Verdi, Chopin, Dvorak, Smetana, Sibelius, Hill, etc.   Such nationalist aesthetics may be very powerful:  The white minority regime in South Africa, for example, banned the singing of the hymn, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (“God Bless Africa”), because of its association with the movement for majority rule. (The hymn is now the national anthem of South Africa.)   Similarly, although Japan’s illegal military occupation of Korea ended in 1945 and both countries are now democracies, Japanese pop music is still banned in the ROK (South Korea).
  • To induce altered mental states in listeners, for example, as an aid to entering a trance or to prepare them for some other spiritual experience.
  • To think.  Contrapuntal music, in the North German tradition that reached its peak in the middle of the 18th century, used fugal writing as a way of articulating the possible mathematical manipulations (eg, overlay, delay, inversion, reversion) of the theme.  Similarly, the tradition of western art music from the mid 18th century through to the present day has focused on the articulation of the musical consequences of a theme or motif.   Beethoven, who was never very good at melody-making, was perhaps the best composer ever at development, with Mendelssohn a close second.  Chopin, by contrast, was good with melodies, but not at complex development.   The development of musical material during improvised performances of modern jazz, of Indian ragas, or of Balinese gamelan scales are further examples.   Likewise, much minimalist music forces performer and listener to pay careful mental attention to aspects of music ignored in the dominant uptown tradition, such as rhythm and metre, and how these vary.
  • To pray.   Much western religious music is expressed in a form of supplication or worship to a deity.
  • To channel messages from the spirit world, as Zimbabwean mbira players are aiming to do when playing.
  • To provide an unobtrusive background to other events, as Muzak seeks to do, and as much film music appears to be seeking to do.
  • To pass the time.

These goals may overlap.  For instance, music may entertain by providing an opportunity for musical thinking. A listener to music may gain intellectual pleasure by discerning and re-creating the thinking that the composer undertook when writing a piece, or that was undertaken by a performer engaged in an improvisation.  Such pleasure at thinking, in my experience, is similar to the pleasures which people gain by doing crosswords or doing Sudoku puzzles; it may also be a form of mathmind.

References:
Mark Evan Bonds [2006]:  Music as Thought:  Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven.  Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press.
John Miller Chernoff [1979]:  African Rhythm and African Sensibility:  Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms.  Chicago, IL, USA:  University of Chicago Press.
Kyle Gann [2006]: Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice.  University of California Press.
Alfred Gell [1998]: Art and Agency:  An Anthropological Theory.  Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. 

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In defence of futures thinking

Published
by
peter
on 2010-08-18
in Argumentation, Computer Science, Decision theory, Forecasting, Marketing strategy, Planning, Prophecy, Religion and Uncertainty
. Closed

Norm at Normblog has a post defending theology as a legitimate area of academic inquiry, after an attack on theology by Oliver Kamm.  (Since OK’s post is behind a paywall, I have not read it, so my comments here may be awry with respect to that post.)  Norm argues, very correctly, that it is legitimate for theology, considered as a branch of philosophy to, inter alia, reflect on the properties of entities whose existence has not yet been proven.  In strong support of Norm, let me add:  Not just in philosophy!

In business strategy, good decision-making requires consideration of the consequences of potential actions, which in turn requires the consideration of the potential actions of other actors and stakeholders in response to the first set of actions.  These actors may include entities whose existence is not yet known or even suspected, for example, future competitors to a product whose launch creates a new product category.   Why, there’s even a whole branch of strategy analysis, devoted to scenario planning, a discipline that began in the military analysis of alternative post-nuclear worlds, and whose very essence involves the creation of imagined futures (for forecasting and prognosis) and/or imagined pasts (for diagnosis and analysis).   Every good air-crash investigation, medical diagnosis, and police homicide investigation, for instance, involves the creation of imagined alternative pasts, and often the creation of imaginary entities in those imagined pasts, whose fictional attributes we may explore at length.   Arguably, in one widespread view of the philosophy of mathematics, pure mathematicians do nothing but explore the attributes of entities without material existence.

And not just in business, medicine, the military, and the professions.   In computer software engineering, no new software system development is complete without due and rigorous consideration of the likely actions of users or other actors with and on the system, for example.   Users and actors here include those who are the intended target users of the system, as well as malevolent or whimsical or poorly-behaved or bug-ridden others, both human and virtual, not all of whom may even exist when the system is first developed or put into production.      If creative articulation and manipulation of imaginary futures (possible or impossible) is to be outlawed, not only would we have no literary fiction or much poetry, we’d also have few working software systems either.




Need God be complex?

Published
by
peter
on 2010-08-14
in Computer Science and Religion
. Closed

Philosopher Gary Gutting attacks the logic of the argument of Richard Dawkins for atheism, here.   Gutting formulates Dawkins’ main argument for atheism as the following chain of reasoning:

1. There is need for an explanation of the apparent design of the universe.

2. The universe is highly complex.

3. An intelligent designer of the universe would be even more highly complex.

4. A complex designer would itself require an explanation.

5. Therefore, an intelligent designer will not provide an explanation of the universe’s complexity.

6. On the other hand, the (individually) simple processes of natural selection can explain the apparent design of the universe.

7. Therefore, an intelligent designer (God) almost certainly does not exist.”

Gutting argues that Claim #7 does not following from Propositions #1 through #6.  But this stated chain of reasoning falls well before reaching claim #7.  Claim #3 does not follow from Claims #1 and #2.    Complex phenomena may emerge from simpler components, as is seen (for example) in the apparently-coordinated, but actually-uncoordinated, behaviours of insects and (simple-rule-following, non-communicating) swarm robots, or in the patterns that emerge in some cellular automata, as in John Conway’s Game of Life.  One could easily imagine a creator who established some simple ground-rules (eg, the laws of thermodynamics and the rules of biological evolution) and a starting position for the universe (eg, the Big Bang), and just let the process evolve or adapt over the course of time, without further divine intervention, subject only to the given rules.  Such a creator need not, Him-, Her- or It-self, be very complex at all, and certainly could be less complex than the universe that resulted in the fullness of time.

This phenomenon is known to most software engineers working on large systems, writing software that exhibits behaviours more complex than they are able to explain or understand subsequently, and even more complex than they intended to create.  The recent Flash Crash of stock prices on 6 May 2010 may be the result of such emergent complexity, unintended (and as yet unexplained) by the system designers, programmers and financial market regulators who operate the world’s stock markets.   Even common computer operating systems are beyond the ability of one person to entirely comprehend, let alone design:  Windows XP has an estimated 40 million source lines of code (SLOC), for example, while Debian 4.0 has an estimated 283 million SLOC.   These are among the most complex human artefacts yet created.  Indeed, the phenomenon is so prevalent in software development that the British Government sponsored research into the topic (see, for example, Bullock and Cliff  2004).

It also seems to me that Claim #4 needs some justification, since it is not obviously true.   Most scientists, for instance, seem perfectly happy accepting certain claims as not requiring any explanation or even any inquiry.  These claims differ from one discipline to another, and typically change over time.  Moreover, uncontested claims in one discipline often form the basis, when contested, of another discipline:  marketing, for example, starts from the contestation of  the foundational notions of commodities, of perfect competition, and of infinite consumer mental processing capabilities that remain uncontested (at least until recently) in mainstream economics; computer science, in another example, contests the assumption of the existence of non-constructive entities taken for granted in mainstream (non-intuitionistic) pure mathematics; parts of the study of uncertainty in artificial ntelligence contest the Law of Excluded Middle taken for granted in probability theory and in mathematical statistics.

Gutting also criticises Dawkins for the lack of sophistication of his philosophical arguments:

Religious believers often accuse argumentative atheists such as Dawkins of being excessively rationalistic, demanding standards of logical and evidential rigor that aren’t appropriate in matters of faith. My criticism is just the opposite. Dawkins does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires.

The basic problem is that meeting such standards requires coming to terms with the best available analyses and arguments. This need not mean being capable of contributing to the cutting-edge discussions of contemporary philosophers, but it does require following these discussions and applying them to one’s own intellectual problems. Dawkins simply does not do this. He rightly criticizes religious critics of evolution for not being adequately informed about the science they are calling into question. But the same criticism applies to his own treatment of philosophical issues.”

I am reminded of Terry Eagleton’s criticism that Dawkins had read insufficient theology, in this spirited review of Dawkins’ book.  Eagleton begins:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

Finally, Gutting repeats something mentioned before on this blog:

There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being . . “

If we broadened this group of people to “sensible people who report some kind of direct awareness of non-material realms and divine entities”, then, inter alia, the majority of African, Indian and Chinese people and the first peoples of North America and Australia would fall in this category.

References:

Seth Bullock and Dave Cliff [2004]: Complexity and Emergent Behaviour in Information and Communications Systems.  Report for the UK Foresight Programme on Intelligent Infrastructure Systems, Office of Science and Technology, Government of the UK.  Available here.   Programme Information here.

Richard Dawkins [2006]: The God Delusion.  Bantam Press.

Terry Eagleton [2006]: Lunging, flailing, mispunching.   London Review of Books, 28 (20):  32-34.  2006-10-19.

Gary Gutting [2010]:  On Dawkins’s atheism:  a response.  New York Times, 2010-08-11.

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Beliefs and actions redux (& redux & redux . . .)

Published
by
peter
on 2010-05-13
in Anthropology and Religion
. Closed

Over at Normblog, Norm begins a post with the words:

“Here’s another in that series: religious beliefs vindicated by being redefined to mean something different from what people used to think they meant. We’ve had religion not being about beliefs so much as about practices;  . . .”

Well, actually, not quite.   Nothing has been redefined, and most people did not previously think the way asserted here.  Unless, of course, by “people” Norm means merely, “educated Westerners since the Enlightenment”.   But that group constitutes a small (and often blinkered) minority of the world’s human population.  For  most of the world’s people,  for most of human history, religion has indeed been mostly about practices and not about beliefs.   I am thinking of Taoism, Buddhism (particularly Zen), large parts of Hinduism, and the mystical strands of Judaism (eg, the Kabbala), of Christianity (eg, the Name-Worshipping of Russian Orthodox believers) , and of Islam (eg, Sufism).   In the tradition of The People of The Book (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), one hears and accepts The Good News and then engages in religious actions such as worship, prayer, and meditation.  In the Eastern tradition, by contrast, it is the repeated doing of certain religious actions (Yoga, Zen sesshin) which may lead to Enlightenment, not the  other way around.   I have argued this before, for example here and here.

That beliefs should or do always precede actions is a peculiarly western and peculiarly modern notion, part of the prevailing paradigm of post-Reformation Western thought.    That this fact is hard for many modern westerners to grasp is evidence of the strength of the prevailing paradigm on our thought.  However, the strength of a paradigm on the mind’s of our best and brightest is not itself evidence of the paradigm’s necessity, nor its uniqueness, nor its truth, nor even its comparative usefulness.




The sources of silence

Published
by
peter
on 2010-03-06
in Music and Religion
. Closed

I listed here many of the teachers and thinkers whose influence I have felt.   In his wonderful new book on John Cage’s 4′ 33”, the indefatigable Kyle Gann says this (pages 71-72):

The meme that Cage was more of a music philosopher than a composer has become commonplace, most of all, it seems, among people who don’t like his music and are in need of a way to justify his celebrity.  Cage was not a philosopher in any sense that the philosophy profession would recognize, but he was very much a composer who drew inspiration for his music from philosophical ideas.  The list of artists, writers, and thinkers he names in justification of his musical trajectory is a long one:  Meister Eckhart, Huang-Po, Kwang-Tse, Erik Satie, Henry David Thoreau, Gertrude Stein, Arnold Schoenberg, John Cage Sr., Marcel Duchamp, Sri Ramakrishna, Daisetz Sukuki, Joseph Campbell, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Alan Watts, Antonin Artaud, Robert Rauschenberg, Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Norman O. Brown, Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Gita Sarabhai, and Christian Wolff, among others.”

I was reminded of James Pritchett’s intention, when writing his book on Cage’s music, as much as possible to read everything that John Cage had himself read, and in the order he had done so.

References:

Kyle Gann [2010]: No Such Thing as Silence.  John Cage’s 4′ 33”.  New Haven, CT, USA:  Yale University Press. 

James Pritchett [1993]:  The Music of John Cage.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press.

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Revisionist history

Published
by
peter
on 2010-02-23
in History and Religion
. Closed

The Australian Department of Defence has been accused of ignoring the religious beliefs of Australian soldiers killed in World War I currently being re-buried, by assuming they were all Christians.   This assumption is a very odd one for the DoD to make, given that the first Australian-born commander of Australian troops, General Sir John Monash, in command of all Australian forces by the end of that war, promoted to General in the field, and knighted on the battlefield (the first such elevation by a British monarch in 200 years), was Jewish.  I think the DoD needs to make a change in its burial policy and officially apologize to the affected families.




Vale: George Leonard

Published
by
peter
on 2010-02-14
in Obituaries and Religion
. Closed

Belatedly, I have just learnt of the death last month of George Leonard (1923-2010), writer, journalist, and aikidoka.  He took up aikido in middle age, a journey he wrote about movingly (see reference below), and ended up co-founding Aikido of Tamalpais.  His writings on life, the universe and everything have been very influential in my thinking about life, as I acknowledge here. 

The New York Times has an obit here and Quantum Tantra a tribute here.

Reference:

George Leonard [1985]: On getting a black belt at age fifty-two. pp. 78-98 in:  Richard Strozzi Heckler (Editor) [1985]: Aikido and the New Warriors.  Berkeley, CA, USA:  North Atlantic Books.   This volume also contains a reprint of Leonard’s fine account of Heckler’s aikido black belt examination, “This isn’t Richard” (pp. 198-205).

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Poem: Joseph’s Amazement

Published
by
peter
on 2009-12-24
in Poetry and Religion
. Closed

Following Michael Dransfield’s poem about conflicted love, I remembered a seasonally-appropriate poem written four centuries before:  Robert Southwell’s Joseph’s Amazement, which imagines the torment and self-questioning Mary’s husband would have felt to discover that Mary was pregnant.  Southwell moves between first and third persons to describe Joseph’s anguish, which he does not resolve, instead ending in a similar place of uncertain quandary to Dransfield.  Perhaps this lack of resolution is another reason Southwell’s poetry sounds so modern, and so fresh.

Joseph’s Amazement

When Christ, by growth, disclosed his descent
Into the pure receipt of Mary’s breast
Poor Joseph, stranger yet to God’s intent,
With doubts of jealous thoughts was sore oppressed 
And, wrought with diverse fits of fear and love,
He neither can her free nor faulty prove.

Now sense, the wakeful spy of jealous mind,
By strong conjectures deemeth her defiled,
But love, in doom of things best loved blind,
Thinks rather sense deceived than her with child
Yet proofs so pregnant were that no pretence
Could cloak a thing so dear and plain to sense.

Then Joseph, daunted with a deadly wound,
Let loose the reins to undeserved grief.
His heart did throb, his eyes in tears were drowned,
His life a loss, death seemed his best relief.
The pleasing relish of his former love
In gallish thoughts to bitter taste doth prove.

One foot he often setteth forth of door
But t’other’s loath uncertain ways to tread.
He takes his fardel for his needful store,
He casts his Inn where first he means to bed.
But still ere he can frame his feet to go,
Love winneth time till all conclude in no.

Sometime, grief adding force, he doth depart.
He will, against his will, keep on his pace.
But straight remorse so racks his ruing heart,
That hasting thoughts yield to a pausing space;
Then mighty reasons press him to remain.
She whom he flies doth win him home again.

But when his thought, by sight of his abode,
Presents the sign of mis-esteemed shame,
Repenting every step that back he trod,
Tears drown the guides; the tongue, the feet doth blame.
Thus warring with himself a field he fights,
Where every wound upon the giver lights.

“And was my love,” quoth he, “so lightly prized?
Or was our sacred league so soon forgot?
Could vows be void, could virtues be despised?
Could such a spouse be stained with such a spot?”
O wretched Joseph that hast lived so long,
Of faithful love to reap so grievous wrong.

Could such a worm breed in so sweet a wood?
Could in so chaste demeanour lurk untruth?
Could vice lie hid where virtue’s image stood?
Where hoary sageness graced tender youth?
Where can affiance rest to rest secure?
In virtue’s fairest seat faith is not sure.

All proofs did promise hope, a pledge of grace,
Whose good might have repaid the deepest ill.
Sweet signs of purest thoughts in saintly face
Assured the eye of her unstained will.
Yet in this seeming lustre seem to lie
Such crimes for which the law condemns to die.

But Joseph’s word shall never work her woe:
“I wish her leave to live, not doom to die.
Though fortune mine, yet am I not her foe,
She to herself less loving is than I.
The most I will, the lest I can, is this,
Sith none may salve, to shun that is amiss.

Exile my home, the wilds shall be my walk,
Complaints my joy, my music mourning lays,
With pensive griefs in silence will I talk;
Sad thoughts shall be my guides in sorrow’s ways.
This course best suits the care of cureless mind,
That seeks to lose what most it joyed to find.

Like stocked tree whose branches all do fade,
Whose leaves do fall, and perished fruit decay,
Like herb that grows in cold and barren shade,
Where darkness drives all quick’ning heat away,
So must I die, cut from my root of joy,
And thrown in darkest shades of deep annoy.

But who can fly from that his heart doth feel?
What change of place can change implanted pain?
Removing moves no hardness from the steel.
Sick hearts that shift no fits, shift rooms in vain.
Where thought can see, what helps the closed eye?
Where heart pursues, what gains the foot to fly?

Yet still I tread a maze of doubtful end.
I go, I come, she draws, she drives away,
She wounds, she heals, she doth both mar and mend,
She makes me seek and shun, depart and stay.
She is a friend to love, a foe to loathe,
And in suspense I hang between them both.”

Notes and Reference:

A fardel is a package.  Affiance is a binding marriage pledge.  I have modernized the spelling and added punctuation.   Previous poems by Robert Southwell are here and here.

Robert Southwell [2007]: Collected Poems. Edited by Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney. Manchester, UK: Fyfield Books, pp. 19-21.




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