The end of the 20th Century permitted a long reprieve from the positivism that has dominated the calculus of disciplines since the Enlightenment captured the minds of Comte and the Jacobian grasp that ushered in both our Imperium and our happiness under capitalism.  Still, the deaths of these three men within days of one another speaks loudly to the mortal clay that binds both men and Imprimus:  the fact that ideas of consequences.

Hitchens was a contemporary Orwell.  I always liked the man, even when I found him overbearing.  An iconoclast to the end, he always had the fortitude and strength of his convictions.  My only reservation was his goaded mien to slay dragons.  His hatred of Kissenger and Mother Teresa was unfounded.  Still, the man fascinated his audience with chain smoking, scotch drinking 1960′s Chronkite behavior.  He embodied an archaic flair not seen for decades.  His hatred of Fascism of any kind is what prompted him to become an American.  His death from cancer was a blow given his stature and propensity for bombast.  I will miss the man.  Christopher Hitchens had intellectual integrity.  Most broadcasting personalities never arrive at where he began:  a fierce love of liberty and human dignity properly understood.  Rest in Peace.

Vaclav Havel’s ‘Letters To Olga’ reveals a man fit to join the ranks of  John Paul II and Lech Walesa.  Yes, I understand the cracks in the facade given the lavishness of his lifestyle after the death of Communism.  But, he remains the finest example of how embodied integrity, fortified by the intellectual heritage birthed by the Church as ‘human dignity’ brought down that concrete wall in Berlin.

I cite his ‘Letters To Olga’ for the simple reason that dissent literature, especially those reminiscent of Solzhenitsyn are simply standard bearers for the rest of us here in the West, fattened from our leisure.  Havel lived the gallows he sought to bring down.

Most human beings never get to clearly articulate the dreams that goad them.  Not Havel.   While awaiting either execution or torture, he wrote letters to his lovely quiet wife from prison.  Havel’s ‘Letters To Olga’ deserves a place in the pantheon of dissent literature alongside ‘The Gulag’ from Alexander Solzhenitsyn.   My guess is that his life in Lisbon with new wife has tarnished the man.  But such is the wagers of the chatter class that dominate television.  I think we owe him more than can be given.  At the least he embodied the very best of Western Christian Humanism.  Not a bad act to follow.  As for me, I can only relish the reality he so lovingly espoused in ‘Letters To Olga’.

How to end a week of uncompromising dread?  Watching the grim Stalinist wake of Kim Jong II, I am reminded of the political and social impact of the Incarnation.  An insight that gave shape to the response that became a Solzhenitsyn, Havel and Hitchens:  the firm belief, given shape in history, that ALMIGHTY GOD HAS WAGERED HIMSELF IN GOVERNING THE AFFAIRS OF MEN.

The second of several anticipated future volumes of Becketts correspondence is now published.  We can glimpse the diaries and letters to acknowledge the presence that goaded him.  It is modernism that weighed so heavily upon the man.  Samuel Beckett is what happens when one lives completely and totally within the house of Protestantism.  A home built on the severance of sensibilities.  A bare table or Van Gogh’s shoes is the perfect embodiment of the presence that weighed so heavily on the man.

His life with James Joyce helps as a key to unlock the mysteries that proved so fatal to him, but for me, it is in acknowledging the austere, Puritan, even Spartan flair that unlocks our understanding of the man.

Modernism is best understood within literature, for it is there that we can glimpse the chasm that goaded those who sought to vanquish the PRESENCE that offered solace to some many classic humanists.  How can THAT which healed Dante, Virgil, Machiavelli, Shakespeare and many other authorities be rejected in favor of a stark cynicism.  Are the ancient stoics a better, more analogous find for modernists?  Perhaps?  But I think the rejection of authority or better yet, the relation between inheritance and grace is seminal if one is to unlock the motivation of any modernist.  Here Samuel Beckett is central.

Beckett and the modernists despised the arbitrary narrative devices that supported so many classical sensibilities.  They rejected the humanizing claim that cultural authority heralds.  After Somme they may have a point.  What I wish to consider is this very claim.   Can one grow up and be fed at the modernist table?  My hunch is that they threaten more than they console.  At the very least, modernists loved to expose in stark details the sham of any cultural inheritance.

The writers I mentioned above found plot, dramatic incident and narrative momentum, the very devices necessary for cogent, linear novela absurd.  Upon measuring their own lives, they found such devices inept in rendering any cogent representation of daily life.   What did Freud give that helped the modernist?  Freud unleashed the authority of being helplessly flawed, incomplete and contradictory.  For the Modernists, we begin here.

If Beckett is the perfect embodiment of modernism, then we must begin to understand the mortal drive to break with authorial tradition and seek new ground by drawing upon a new heritage: one informed from an atomized understanding of human identity.

What did our literate modernists wish for?  They wanted to give a voice, a body, to those little hesitations, those sieges of doubt, those anxious questionings that beset, besiege us even as we attempt to construct a cogency being thrown to the world.  How else to say it: modernist narrative ALWAYS involves a disrupted momentum.

Historically, the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation is a great place from which one can render an examination of the intellectual patronage of modernism.  But its remoteness to the devastation of the First and Second World War makes it untenable from the experience of carnage that ruled life in the trench.  Perhaps a more salient feature is the disassociation of sensibility, that infamous aesthetic from Friedrich Schiller (die Entzauberung der Welt) is a far better place from which we can mine the origins of this mutable movement.

The aesthetics of modernism is the impact of disenchantment.  The aesthetics of the Reformation and the Enlightenment embodied in the industrial reformation gives form.  Enter the primacy of Dickens.  Modernists loathed the old certainties, the immemorial rituals, the deadened hierarchies of Monarchies.  Here, the informing presence of any consolation is the be reputed with impunity.  In this world, grace yields to the bustling marketplace of enterprise, production and rampant individualism.  Perhaps the realism of a Marxist aesthetic is more analogous in outlook.  Nevertheless, the anguished life under a vanquished god is the norm.

It was under Rabelais and Cervantes that the discovery of decisive change was acknowledged.  But no authority gave form to this assent until the 20th century.  This is why Kafka or maybe Borges are studied.  For me, Picasso or Beckett remains the perfect embodiment from which to study this disassociation of sensibility.  Fair warning:  it is my judgement that although worthy of serious study, one cannot live and thrive at their table.  The caustic self doubt that drove their genius is poison.  For me, the true judgement of modernism is discovered by examining its inability for cogency in ethics or metaphysics.  But wait. . .

Modernism is ultimately an ethical proposition.  And it is one that may frighten into despair.

Can we live with only the reality of Good Friday?  Can a human being find reason to live when the very act of living is unbearable?  Can anyone thrive in a world where power reigns supreme?

Modernism has some significance for contemporary people, especially when studied synoptically and inter-culturally with Islam or positivism.

I don’t think modernism has the last word.

The gift that is sacramental realism cannot be refuted.  It can only be ignored.

The last word on this interplay will not take the shape of a syncretism.  That would only cheapen the lessons that modernists could impart.

In the meantime, it is my firm belief that the absolutism of an atomized self is insufficient.  Let’s start there.

The Democratic Party no longer really concerns itself with anything outside its own rigid understanding of ‘historicism’, usually limited a mythic heritage of Camelot.  This unrealized past cannot pay a dividend as it struggles with conservatives and the role of religious liberty as evidenced in the latest clash of ‘civilizations’ between US Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ and Catholic Bishops regarding the Food and Drug Administrations stand to make available without a prescription a ‘morning after pill’ for girls as young as eleven.  Margaret Sanger eugenics meets Marshall McLuhan’s tribal night.

Is there a real need for girls aged eleven to need ‘a morning after pill’?  And if so, why?  I think Marshall McLuhan’s corpus sheds light on this most moral of cultural sentiments.   The sad truth is that more girls in our self styled progressive culture (read anarchy) are introduced into a hyper-sexed lifestyle far earlier than ever before, and with grave personal and cultural consequences.  I think Dr. Charles Murray and Dr. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s documentation is enough to reconsider the permanent arrival of McLuhan’s ‘tribal night.’   Let me explain:  domesticated digital electronic media has huge cognitive impact, for it decentralizes any user from any cultural template organized around an informing center.  This drama is being enacted upon the lest beneficial of society:  girls.  The sexing up of young girls is intrinsic to both the very medium used by youths, and to the mores that dominate our cultural landscape.  Only a rival competing source of authority can mitigate this inevitable clash.  Enter the Church.

The Catholic Church remains a bulwark at the fore of social services in the United States. They are organized and funded.  For decades, American Bishops have accommodated the various secular decrees that roll out of both State Capitals, Washington and the Supreme Court.  What’s different this time around is the political/social field in which unintended consequences from secular legislation currently reside.

All parties involved in this clash have ardently believed that both conscience rights and abortion funding would be tweaked.  Fair enough.  But now, the Church and social conservatives are finally coming around to recognize the irreconcilable militancy that resides at the core of the Democratic Party.

Obamacare, abortion and the hosts of other secular rights pursued by the American left is  regarded by those on the right, as being built on force.  Obamacare’s individual mandate, abortion on demand, homosexual marriages, the panels to decide healthcare etc. . have lead to an awakening among those on the right to re-examine their historical accommodation.

A synoptic view of the American left reveals a dangerous atomized view of the human person, a view at odds with the mores that have dominated Western Civilization for centuries.  Can the claims of religious liberty and conscience be dealt with from inside the house of relativity?  Are we not nominalists upon pursuing any coherent strategy from within the intellectual confines of the American left?  Is everything an adjunct to be manipulated from within the house of positivism?

American liberalism has a long distinguished view on such matters.  John Courtney Murray from Fordham University still remains the standard bearer when considering an examination of the edifice that supports ANY cogent, coherent view of religious liberty.  Sadly, the American left has borne itself to abandon its once Herodian strategy in favor of open rebellion.  The question remains:  can it remain truly liberal while pursuing totalist goals in a manner analogous to absolutism.

December 1979 would signal the end for the Soviet Empire throughout South Central Asia.  No one at the time could envision it.  Ironically, one would think that somewhere in the bowels of the Kremlin would reside a Leninist who could understand that any nation without a stable urbanized social base would reject Marxism.  Hadn’t Lenin and Marx both fervently believed that the best chances for Marxism resided in thoroughly westernized urban social environs?  It isn’t quite hubris that fits this momentous reversal, nor is it stupidity, for Moscow was invited into Afghanistan by the countries newly minted Leninists.  The Afghan Communist leader Hafizullah Amin was desperate to have the tutelage of Moscow.  The first act that Soviet special forces performed upon entering Kabul was to murder Amin.  Celebrating his coup at a lunch party, he was initially poisoned by the KGB but survived.  Upon awakening he was captured and ruthlessly murdered.  Ironically, Amin did the same to his predecessor Nur Muhammad Taraki.  But why murder Amin?  The answer is ideological.

Yuri Andropov (KGB Chairman), Dmitry Ustinov (Minister of Defense), and Andrei Gromyko (Foreign Minister) had come to distrust Amin.  He had studied in the United States before returning to Central Asia.  It was sheer paranoia that Amin was a CIA plant that drove Moscow to eliminate Amin.  Even Leonid Brezhnev thought that any time spent in Afghanistan would be short lived.

The invasion was completely mis-read throughout western chanceries.  The invasion should not have been interpreted as an expansionist move but instead as an isolated case of a client holding disproportionate influence over a patron.  Soon enough, Moscow was obliged to maintain its interest.  The law of diminishing returns just never penetrated the veil of that iron curtain.

A little history is in order.  The Soviet invasion had absolutely nothing to do with the removal of Muhammed Zahir Shah, who reigned over Afghanistan from 1933-1973 when he was ousted by his cousin Muhammed Daud.  The Soviets had good relations with both men.  Real troubles began when Daud was deposed in April of 1978 by Afghanistan Communists known as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).  This group was bitterly divided into two factions, the Parcham and Khalq, both political and cultural groups that were basically tribal in their orientation.  Because Rodric Braithwaite was the British Ambassador to Moscow from 1988-1992 and remains the best authority on cable traffic between Moscow and Kabul.  The ‘April Revolution’ in deposing Daud by the PDPA was an unwelcomed thunderous bolt that Moscow felt hamstrung in denying.  According to Braithwaite, Moscow’s continuous inappropriate framework of analysis only widened the already hardened dissonance.  Absolutely no one understood nor strove to understand the complex social and ethnic structure of Afghanistan.   This gamed an already tenuous political economy that riddled Moscow to its core.

Both Kalinovsky and Braithwaite maintain that Moscow’s incursion into Kabul should NOT be interpreted as decisive in the disintegration of the Soviet Union!  This is surprising given how so many prominent professionals have stated and explained otherwise.  Perhaps an application of David Hume can enlarge the canvas we’re studying; can we contain the historical, diplomatic and ideological composition that inform causality distinct from correlates?  Is not a more synoptic vision, one less enamored from positivism more fruitful here?  Can international relations of this order have a distinct probative value?  Neither author takes up this challenge.

The humiliating defeat is undeniable.  The impact of that defeat in the hearts of South Asian nomads is undeniable too.  Perhaps Afghanistan can evade the hardened truths westerns seek in validating their preconceptions.

Nevertheless, Braithwaite and Kalinovsky are worthy of their endeavor.

Subsidizing the markers does not produce the traits, if anything it undermines them.  Its like saying one can promote basketball skills by distributing expensive sneakers.”

How else to say it:  the errors of Socialism are intellectual.

Dr. Cloksy refutes the main argument against hitting Iranian nuclear facilities by revealing that Iran does not have resources from which to rebuild, that it can thwart any American military initiative and that Teheran can get its population to rally. For Dr. Cloksy the Iranian regime is currently at its weakest point, this is evidenced in the extraordinary measures regarding domestic repression.

Its simple:  don’t preclude that an Iranian hegemony is inevitable.

How are we to attack Iran?

Superior air attacks will cripple the Ayatollah’s ability to protect themselves from popular overthow!  Both the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Basij paramilitaries along with Al Quods Force will be busy trying to protect an already weakened regime.  The US Navy can handle the Iranian Navy’s fastest boats and midget submarines throughout the Persian Gulf.  Artillery battery strikes throughout the Strait of Hormuz can secure this choke point.  An American attack would mortally threaten Hamas, Hezbollah, Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong II and Hugo Chavez. The key reality here is the status of the Iranian regime domestically!

As Libya proved, American military assistance in developing representational governance is a worthwhile investment.

Regime change remains the best option in dealing with Iran.  It can best be achieved by using the determination of the Iranian people.  Disabling the theocracies militant machinery of domestic repression would leave the Satanic Theocrats mortally vulnerable to the aspirations of its people.

Ahmad Vahidi is now residing in Argentina, he’s the one responsible for detonating bombs in 1994 murdering Israeli’s throughout Santiago.

Iran has tripled its diplomatic presence throughout the region gaining Uranium and business deals with many regional players including Brazil.  Iran has a permanent deficit in nuclear rich requirements.  This is the primary reason why it cultivated relations with many African autocrats.

The list is long but Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Mexico are the list of influential clients for Teheran.

The tip of this spear is easy to discern:  it’s the Machiavellian tip of the sword aimed at The Great Satan, are we ready to deal with an ambitious Iran at our door?

Toynbee was right, great Civilizations aren’t murdered, they commit suicide.

For the west to recapture the terrible beauty that is human identity under the barrage of positivism will require a titanic philosophical effort analogous to great exploration.  A rearguard action of immense proportion fit for our time.  Any takers!  First, a historical look at the human person (identity), property, sexual ethics and the social, political impact of Christian Revelation.

The very first Roman poet to examine early childhood was Statius who lived during the time of Emperor Domitian (81-96 A.D.)  In his writings Statius engagingly writes of his joy in the presence of a boy child in his household.  Further examination of this child reveals that the baby is not Statius’ son but his slave.  This boy was termed in Roman times as ‘Verna’ meaning ‘house-reared’.  It is probable that the child is the offspring of Statius’ own household slaves.  This makes the boy strict property, to be shaped and dispensed with according to Roman law.  Let me translate:  the boy’s early adolescence would most likely be spent ministering to his owner’s sexual desires.  As shocking as this is to modern sensibilities, adult-child relations in past civilizations are not uncommon, yet exceedingly difficult for historians to mine.  Nevertheless, by the standards of contemporary Roman society, Statius’ relationaship with his ‘verna’ was clearly quite normal.  House reared slaves would play a variety of roles from surrogate son to erotic plaything.  All of this is examined in Christian Laes ‘Children In The Roman Empire:  Outsider’s Within’ and Veronique Dasen ‘Children, Memory, Family Identity In Roman Culture’.

Both authors reveals what most sophisticated readers already understand:  ancient Roman society was not interested in child development.  The very concept of human identity is finally resolved with Chalcedon around 450 A.D.  The eastern Church Fathers (specifically the Cappodocians) formulated an understanding of human personhood (identity) that was primarily a sacramental reflection on Genesis Chapter two.  With the forgiveness of sin came a new idea:  the indissoluble nature of human identity itself; unity and plurality united within a concrete ‘singularity’.  (I leave it for contemporary physics’ to catch up with Orthodox theologians on the nature of this reality.)

Nevertheless, identity during ancient times was an undifferentiated morass.  For Romans and other regimented societies (think Sparta), humanness was a social category.  Whether or not a twelve year old child was regarded as an acceptable sexual partner was determined not by biology, but by the child’s social status.  The same held true for work.  Just witness the tombstone of Quintus Artulus who died at the age of four in the silver mines of Banos de la Encina in Spain (called Andalusia), this tombstone accurately depicts the sheer brutality of life for any child.

To be fair, sexual advances toward a freeborn Roman child of any age, male or female was punishable by death!  But notice, the absolute relative status of personhood in ancient societies.  This neatly fits our contemporary situation regarding any extension of legal positivism.  The social status of identity was resolved by the Orthodox Church, fixed by the American Revolution, and ratified by Lincoln.  In our rush to be acceptable to our ‘progressive’ vision, we have thrown overboard all such archaic traditions.  We have now arrived where we began:  an understanding of human identity as an undifferentiated morass only complicated by the resurgence of technology and a flaccid cultural vanguard unwilling to defend the glory of a Tradition that granted the successful Civilization that the West has become!

But all is not lost, the Roman Imperium was defeated and the West continued to provide the only true solace:  a true, real alternative to the inhuman idealism that grounded previous civilizations; human identity as an unrepeatable, indissoluble unity.

The question for today is this:  who among us is ready to defend that gift.  The field is open and the battle is already joined.

Given the Islamic irritant that was Spain and the success of its pincer movement up into both Hungary and France around 1200 A.D.  It fell to the Spanish and Henry the Navigator to find away around the sons of Ishmael.  Given new rigging of ships and the political motivation to outpace Islam, both Spain and Portugal set out to hug the west coast of Africa in search of what became of India, the Philippines and Japan.  How else to say it:  that Mediterranean Lake became a sideshow after the discovery of the Americas.

The Dark Continent would again capture the imagination of western Europeans in what became Victoria’s Empire.  The names of Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Richard Burton are well known forerunners to our Lawrence of Arabia.  The two key decades of exploration into both Central African Congo and the search for the origins of the Nile are told by Tim Jeal in ‘Explorers of the Nile:  The triumph and tragedy of a great Victorian adventure.’

Exploring Central Africa from its Eastern border as well as going south to discover the origin of the Nile meant wading into and surviving the backdrop of torture, casual execution, disease, warfare, massacre, pillage and extortion almost impossible for contemporary people to imagine.

Tim Jeal is the biographer of both Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.  He begins with richard Burton and Speke’s journey to Lake Tanganyika (1856-9) and Speke’s ‘discovery’ of Lake Victoria.  Jeal ends with Stanley’s legendary trans-African crossing (1874-7) from Zanzibar in the east to the mouth of the Congo in the west, perhaps the greatest feats of exploration in the entire annals of history.

There are ten biographies of Burton, but only one of Speke.  Speke solved the world’s greatest mystery by discovering the source of the Nile.  In 1858 John Speke stood on the shore of a huge lake that was called Nyanza Ukerewe (renamed by Speke as ‘Victoria’), he instinctively sensed that this was the source of the Nile River flowing 4,230 miles north.  John Speke was right and Richard Burton had it wrong.  Burton claimed that the origin of the Nile was Lake Tanganykia.  Nevertheless, it was Burton who garnished the greatest acclaim, even being Knighted before his untimely death in 1890.

Here’s how Speke won:  In May of 1858, Speke, on his own inclination, left Burton’s Lake Tanganyika expedition (Burton was ill and could no longer travel) and journeyed with a few men 200 miles north to find Lake Ukerewe.  The sheer size of the body of water and its height above sea level (Speke’s calculation was 4,000 feet above sea level, considerable higher than Tanganyika) convinced him that here lay the headwaters for the Nile.  Speke returned in 1860-63 with James Grant to explore its shores and found the falls (Ripton Falls) where the Nile exited Lake Victoria to begin with its journey north into the Mediterranean.

Both Livingstone and Burton were violently against the ‘speculations’ of John Speke.  Given the flair that became of both it is obvious that they are burnished onto the British psyche.  But it was Speke who was right!  Not Burton or Livingstone.  As in our day, flair, charisma and drama overcome all other considerations.

It fell to Henry Morton Stanley in 1874 to circumnavigate the lake to vindicate Speke.

The question becomes, what accounts for the failure that was Speke’s untarnished reputation?

The answer is simple.  John Speke died in a horrible hunting accident exactly at the moment when the Nile Debate was at its feverish height, leaving the field clear for other competitors.

John Speke and Richard Burton were scheduled to debate each other at the Royal Geographical Society during the summer of 1864, arbitrated by Livingstone.  The day before the debate, Speke’s rifle accidently went off killing him immediately during a hunting trip.  The only witness was his cousin George Fuller, the gamekeeper was to far away to be of any real forensic assistance.  According to the only biography of John Speke (Alexander Maitland’s 1971 biography) Speke’s gun had an extremely light pull on the trigger, making it lethal for any user or circumstance to fire.

The best explanation is that Speke nervously cocked the hammer of one barrel so lightly that a jar on the stock would make it fire.  Having climbed a wall with his rifle jammed into his armpit, bringing the stock into violent contact with stone killed him instantly.

Thus ending a brilliant career of England’s best explorer.

The Victorian race to explore Africa cannot be understood outside explorational antipathies that were primarily intellectual.  We simply cannot ignore how Africa served as a great catalyst from which to expel personal demons and shape a life informed from passionate media.  Solitude, strangeness, danger and the lure of great wealth and fame propelled most Victorian explorers.  John Speke was different.

Speke was not motivated by stark contrasts, whether personal or not.  He just never fit the bill that served as a template for most:  the unending displays of petty bickering, petulance and self regard.  Speke found no room in his heart for such.  As such, the academics bane toward pedantic gesture was not for him.  The complicated eccentric psyches that propelled the Victorian explorers are all on display in this book, one simply cannot ignore the sheer weight of multiple neuroses that contributed the tremendous energy, personal stamina and courage required to master the Dark Continent.

Tim Jeal’s rehabilitation of John Speke is really long overdue.

The first full biography of Joyce was written in 1959, Richard Ellman’s classic ‘James Joyce’ remains the standard to this day.  Ellman reveals three events that serve as epiphanies to unlock the mad genius that drove Joyce.  The first event was a sexual experience as a sixteen old boy with a prostitute, ‘pulled to the ground and deftly seduced.’  That pull, that fall, was transformational in how it ushered Joyce in the life of Darkness unyielding.  The second event that dominated the life of Joyce happened on June 09, 1904 when he met Nora Barnacle in Dublin.  The third was the violent crise de nerfs suffered by his troubled daughter Lucia at the Gare du Nord in Paris while waiting to board the boat train for England.   Heady stuff indeed.

Remember Bernard Malamud’s line ‘all biography is ultimately fiction.’  This is what is required when one tries to read anything biographical about Joyce.  For any biography of Joyce must take up thread bare fabrics of a life composed of scattered correspondence, journal entries and interviews with acquaintances; a weave of strands unbecoming a great  writer.  This growing void only accompanies the obstructionism of the Joyce estate.  Stephen Joyce, the grandson of James and executor of Joyce’s literary estate continues to provide entrenched hostility to any attempt to bridge the lacunae.

Perhaps Carl Jung’s correspondence with Joyce in light of counseling his daughter can bring much light on the dynamics that drove the madness of King James.

In the end, Joyce cannot BUT  be presented as a tired and broken figure, worn down by the constant drip of domestic concerns he was unable to master:  money, domestic strife, health problems, and the strain of Lucia’s increasingly uncontrollable behavior.   Any true  glimpse of Joyce must content with a remote, self absorbed, careless parent, completely absorbed to the devotion of writing.  The social, spiritual and moral impact of such a parent in undeniable in its ruthlessness.  Jung was right.  The damage to Nora, Lucia and other ‘loved ones’ reveals the primacy of secular values devoid of grace.  A life fit for a modernist.