Fellow disbelievers,
a Unlike the Lord - who miraculously emerged as we know after three days and thereafter strode the earth disseminating the Lord’s message – I gave up on my mission to disperse the word and thoughts of Bishop Berkeley and their relevance to the salvation of the dire and multitudinous threats now facing God’s creatures and creations. Instead (I have to abjectly confess) I retired to bed with brief barely active upright intervals spent washing up, oven cleaning, toilet cleaning, lawn mowing, manure making, tossing of sheep’s ordure round our tender Peruvian cabbage plants and ( most abject of all) indiscriminate and extended periods watching sport. I developed an unnatural and exaggerated appetite for ball watching. This appetite overwhelmed me. I had eyes only for the ball. The ball stroked, punted, drilled, dribbled, passed, grasped, intercepted, threaded. punched, thrown, looped, bent,kicked, smashed, looped etc. Mayr complained of neglect. I forgot the Bishop. Only now and very falteringly have I retrieve my earlier passions or rather they have been retrieved for me. Forcibly. So why the reappearance of the Bishop in my thoughts yu might ask? It is not let me be clear that my faith in the Bishop’s relevance have revived; but rather that the Bishop has refused to go away or to be more accurate his ghost or his ghost of his ghost has visited me repeatedly in my noctural hours. Over and over. Faintly. Prodding me. Coughing in ear. Lightly kicking me in the shins. Even lightly this is painful for a man of my vintage and fleshless femurs. Murmuring in his soft firm Irish voice. He refuses to decease. Mayr has woken and complained – demanded explanations – got serious – made it robustly clear that without regular sleep she is unable to continue with her causes and and that these are in need of urgent and on going attention.
See. The Bishop or rather his ghost of a ghost has asked me – exhorted me even – to read him, to do him justice. To attend to him. I am mortified. I am driven by divided passions – the ball sailing over bodies,disappearing beneath and betwixt bodies, rolling over and over across immaculately green turfs – and the bishops opaque words. I mean – I find that – to move from the ball in its glorious repeatingmotions to the words of the Bishop is not easy.
To illustrate, the Bishop writes:
‘ If…we consider the difference there is betwixt natural philosophers and other men regard to their knowledge of the phenomena, we shall find nit consists, not in an exacter knowledge of the efficient causes that produces them, for that can be no other than the will of a spirit, but only in a greater largeness of comprehension whereby analogies, harmonies and agreements are discovered in the works of nature, and the particular effects explained, that is, reduced to general rules, which rules grounded on the analogy and uniformness observed in the production of natural effects, are most agreeable and sought after by the mind…
And yet. And naggingly. The Bishop or the ghost of the Bishop persists. He tramps across my consciousness. He wags his finger in my face. He kicks balls out of sight
So.
Betwixt ball watching and smallness of comprehension, what do you advise?
God Bless and do not allow yourself at this moment when the temptation is so great and persistent to be deflected or seduced by rolling balls.
Bishop Berkeley’s most distant ancestor.
June 28, 2010 at 10:52 am |
To be slower than Jesus is no shame. We and all your followers rejoice at your return, and hope to see you stick around for longer than He did. Moving on to the question of the hour: anybody can, in theory, “keep their eye on the ball” (though my own early efforts left me covered less in glory than bruises). But to follow its motion continuously over the course of some hours, while attending equally to the wider field of play, in order to comprehend a match from start to finish in all its patterns and positionings, its strategies and tactics, its tricks and manners, its airs and graces, its recurrences and rivalries, its clashes and conflagrations, its triumphs and tragedies, its miracles and missed opportunities, its fiascos and fumbles, its surges and retreats, its aesthetics and mathematics, its history and sociology, its biology, chemistry and physics – this, indeed, is the labour of a lifetime, and no ignoble task for a natural philosopher.
And moreover: what is this study if not the discovery of “analogies, harmonies and agreements,” demanding the exact “largeness of comprehension” spoken of by your revered ancestor or descendant? So it seems that all along you have been doing philosophy without knowing it. Hence you have no reason to make any change in your habits, beyond occasionally committing your thoughts on the subject to metaphoric print at this address, at least for the duration of the World Cup.
There is nothing to fear from balls, in short. Let there be balls in abundance. What matters is how you roll.