Mediation
Notes from Nina: Week of May 20th, 2024
As it was Pentecost last Sunday, I’ve been thinking about mediation. In 1972’s The Go-Between God, perhaps the most dedicated tract on the Holy Spirit, John V. Taylor notes that the meaning of the word “numinous” comes from the Latin nuo, to nod or beckon. The truly numinous experience, he writes, “is not marked only by primitive awe in the face of the unknown or overwhelming, but occurs when something as ordinary as a sleeping child, as simple and objective as a flower, suddenly commands attention.” There is an encounter with otherness and the ground upon which all experience takes place. The ordinary is revealed, in its ordinariness, as extraordinary, as outside of us, as something which did not come from us.
In a tangential way, reflecting on that which disappears as the ground upon which everything appears, reminded me of being in the Brownies. Brownies are junior Girl Guides, and in the 1980s, we wore brown dresses with leather belts, a metal clip, a yellow scarf and a Brownie badge. Brownies are, in English and Scottish folklore, little fair creatures that live in domestic spaces and barns, and alternately tidy or, if feeling naughty, disarray things. If you feed them, they’ll do domestic chores and mend things. They disappear in the morning so you’re never sure what work they did. We were encouraged, as Brownies, to do things for others without being asked, and without drawing attention to it. It’s quite funny to imagine a youth movement for girls promoting anything so archaic these days, when everything is geared towards self-promotion, but I have an abiding affection for that which mediates, and it remains true that helping others is the best way to overcome bleak thoughts.
We often hear of a mysterious third thing as the other option between two unappealing choices; I think of the Holy Spirit in this way, as the vanishing mediator between subjects that would otherwise remain static and disassociated, as that which unifies by withdrawing. A bird against the blue sky.
Latest pieces in Compact
The week began with Petr Dulák on the EU’s shifting attitude towards Poland: “the protection of the rule of law should be left to the Poles themselves. The repeated alternations in power amply testify to the strength of their democracy and the vigilance of the Polish people—a test that the Brussels mandarins certainly wouldn’t pass.”
Lelia Mechoui wrote about the vexed question of migration into Canada, avoiding both left and right pieties, and arguing instead that the issue is a demographic one across the board: “lower birth rates abroad will reduce their numbers sooner or later, and that once settled in the West, their demographic impact will diminish as they and their children have smaller families.”
Next we published David Bromwich on private thought and speech. In a clear and analytic manner, Bromwich pushes into often obscured territory regarding how our thoughts and opinions are formed, and what happens when we try to articulate them: “would we really want the casting of our thoughts, even into the well-marked precincts of public speech, to be subject to the tightest possible moral oversight?” In an era of surveillance and censorship, we have seem the “reduction of the natural energetic contact between private thoughts and public speech, which is to say: a loss of the virtue of sincerity, without which all thought and all speech are worthless.”
Juan David Rojas wrote about recent political events in the Dominican Republic, noting that “Whether the Dominican Republic becomes a Caribbean Taiwan or—more likely—a typical Latin American state characterized by dependency and stagnation remains to be seen.”
Ryan Zickgraf wrote about whether comparisons to ‘68 make sense in relation to the current Gaza protests. He concludes not: “For now, members of the New New Left seemingly prefer to find solidarity with each other—and sometimes Hamas—than Americans living off-campus.”
This week, in the UK, in the rain, Rishi Sunak called a snap election for July 4th. Dan Hitchens wrote a wide-ranging overview of Starmer’s character and prospects. Will the likely new Labour PM have the guts to take on corporate and financial forces?
It isn’t clear that Starmer’s progressive aspirations can be achieved without confronting the massive financial and corporate powers which gleam over the London skyline. It seems impossible to solve the housing crisis without annoying the housebuilding oligopoly and the mortgage lenders. It’s not obvious how you can raise working conditions without confronting exploitative firms. It will be hard to protect everyday institutions like nurseries, veterinary practices and care providers without crossing the private equity people. Hard to raise standards in public services without undermining the outsourcing behemoths. And hard, ultimately, to flourish without diverting investment and talent away from the financial sector, where fortunes and careers are made.
Finally, our weekend read comes from ex-The Baffler editor John Summers. He writes movingly about his friend, and the late thinker, David Graeber: “David’s romantic realism, at once insisting on the universality of humankind and celebrating the limits of our ability to know other people, helped me to see the predicament clearly. “Alienation,” he once said, “is a sign that you understand something about the reality of the world.””
Nina Recommends
This week I’ve been listening to Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown, just out. Anyone conscious in the mid-1990s will recall Portishead’s cold, aching, post-rave blunted, break-beaten sound, which was ubiquitous for a time, particularly in the South-West, where I grew up. It was a mournful pleasure to see Tricky again recently. I’ve always loved Beth Gibbons’s voice, thin and white as a sheet, an anorexic ghost mourning a dead lover. The 1990s was a great time for songs about lack in general: blissed-out pop-euphoria singing about having no money and no desire, hip hop filled with longing.
Portishead’s Three (2008) reached peculiar heights, creating a drugged out record so high and crystalline the air became unbreathably thin and ecstatic in the way that not eating for three days induces. Gibbons, who rarely—and admirably—puts out anything here turns folky (though hints of Portishead’s “Mysterons”—“All for nothing/Did you really want”—in “Floating on a Moment” remind us that the 90s was both a long time ago, and not). Warm guitars, backing vocals, sliding strings and musty, echoing drums lend Gibbons a depth and cinematic expansiveness that feel appropriate for this latest outing, with its mix of wisdom, longing and pain: “And all that I want you to want me/The way that you used to” (“Lost Changes”). People die; memories become pebbles; a voice sings in the dark.
We have brownies in Girl Scouts in the US, I had no idea that’s where the name came from! Very interesting.