Der Rote Baron

I just found some "old" pics of Matthias Schweighoefer in my collection. But given that his big break in English-language cinema hasn't even been released in this country yet, here it is instead (or the trailer, at any rate). I suppose the younger version of the eponymous hero (or villain, if you're British) probably doesn't last much longer in this movie than Affleck and Hartnett's prepubescent alter egos did in Pearl Harbor. But all-in-all this film does look very nice.

Game for it!

Huzzah! A friend has written to me with news that the much vaunted movie of Ender's Game gives one grounds for hope. Having seen Hollywood recently rip the heart and soul out of one of my favourite children's books (i.e. The Dark is Rising, by Susan Cooper) and then defecate on the remains (i.e. they turned it into this) I'm intensely suspicious.

In fact the bastards almost have a scorched earth policy towards classics nowadays. Clearly there are some movie execs who would rather rush out a shite version of a kids' classic than let the title go to another studio that might wait a couple of years (or decades!) and then do it better and more lucratively. (Just consider the early treatments for a Lord of the Rings film, think what we were spared, but also consider that an even crummier and more rushed version of Tolkien even than Peter Jackson's effort would have been nowhere near as aristically - i.e. financially - rewarding.)

Who would my Ender be? Answer: I wouldn't have just one. I'd have a regular army of Enders from the age of six (when the story kicks off - and I use the phrase advisedly) through to sixteen. It's an approach that can work. Anyone who's seen the TV-version of the life of J M Barrie (which was vastly superior to the drippy Depp and Winslett version) will know what I'm talking about. Ideally though they'd all be cast by Pippa Hall (i.e. she who discovered Jamie Bell, David from I am David, the Narnia kids, the pretty/ugly boy in Eragon, and most recently the chillingly good Asa Butterfield in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) - and if we have to have an English Ender then so what? Beware the long shadow of Jake Lloyd!

And the director? Well, it's got to be Spielberg! Hasn't it? Just provided that he get's back to where he was with Minority Report, with maybe a dash of Empire of the Sun! And who knows? We could end up with the next Christian Bale as a souvenir!

Game on!

But is it right?

A good question the Dancing King raises over on his blog, but which should concern anyone posting pretty pics of almost any sort on the 'Net (quite apart from copyright considerations) is, quite simply, "Is it right?" Well, I'm still half-expecting Google and Blogger at the end of the month to wet themselves, take this blog down and delete my account. But quite apart from the madcap neo-prudery of the net-head generation, some of whom now see Wikipedia ("-pedia"! Geddit?) as a threat to the world's morals (but not gay marriage, or killing unborn babies, or terrorism, all of which are quite legitimate subjects for blogging)... Quite apart from them, the question remains. Is it right?

Morally, of course, it actually depends on what precisely you're doing. Are you just looking at pics of boys, lets say in swimming trunks (or "speedos", as they're called in the rest of the world)? Or are you doing so with lascivious intent? A man who looks at a women lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Just follow the logic. Are you looking at these pics because you want to get an erection? Or are you looking at these pics (and posting them, for that matter) for other reasons, albeit in the full and certain knowledge that you and/or others will almost certainly get erections as a result?

Morally this is actually quite a subtle distinction. It's an important one though, and all sorts of important geo-political events can hinge on it. Is it wrong for a pilot to drop a bomb if he foresees a strong likelihood of civilian casualties, and so on? Unfortunately a lot of modern people just don't view the world in moral terms - just in an extreme Calvinist sort of way, taking no account of motive and only considering actions in terms of net material benefit.

My answer is of course that it's good to like boys. Indeed, it is our positive duty not just to "like" them but to love them, and that is why I post pictures of them here - because unlike the love of the angels human love has physical elements to it, and boys are physical creatures (and unusually so, maybe). Fully human love, as I have tried to explain in my various posts on the subject, cannot exist in some disembodied state. The main purpose of this blog is of course to "blog out" my thoughts and feelings about children, boys, sexuality, morality, and whatever else comes into my head. Its secondary purpose though is to encourage men to love boys in a world in which men have no interest in children in general or in boys in particular.

As far as I am concerned, a few unintended (even if not unforeseen) "consequences" (i.e. going on "down there") of posting pics here is but a small price to pay for the good I hope may come of it.

The Four Loves: 3. Affection

As it happens I'm hardly in an emotionally fit state to write about this vast and complex topic. This is not got to being particularly heartfelt or well thought out, therefore, but here goes.

Just as friendship can best be thought of as the love of equals, with birds of a feather flocking together and so on, affection can best be thought of as love between those who are not equal. Yes, children and parents are the best example, but I think one could just as easily make a case for children and hamsters, or masters and servants, or doctors (and nurses!) and their patients. This is the love that tugs at the "heart strings". It's the aching, visceral sort of love that one feels when a little boy falls over and grazes his knee, and when large blue eyes well up with tears. But of course it's also the love of giggles and tickles and hugs. And it's the love of someone smaller and weaker than yourself as he falls asleep in your arms.

Now, there are a couple of points that simply have to be made, and they both have to do with men (i.e. "and women"). More specifically, they have to do with the fact that just as friendship is a masculine sort of love, with men being more gregarious than women (from the boardroom to the clubroom - and indeed to the male-only sauna) so affection is thought of traditionally as a female virtue rather than a masculine one. There are, I think, two reasons why this is the case.

My first reason is, I imagine, pretty controversial, and it goes as follows. The four different loves affect different parts of the human body in different ways. To be more specific, three of the four loves affect the human body, with charity not necessarily affecting the body at all. In saying that, I am of course taking it for granted that the soul, wherein the love of the reason and the will that I call charity resides, can (continue to) exist outside of the human brain. If you don't accept such a (very ancient) philosophical premise, then let us say that charity is the love of the head rather than of the heart. The loves of the heart, then, are friendship, which is purely a love the heart, and sexuality, which is a love of, er, "down there"... and affection, which comes between friendship and sex and whose "seat" resides in between the loins and the heart. I think of affection as being chiefly the love of the tummy, in fact. It's the "butterflies in the stomach"-feeling you get when a beautiful eleven-year-old laughs at one of your jokes. It's that silky feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you noticed that a toddler has wandered off near a main road.

Where I'd get even more controversial is in diagnosing women as more prone to these feelings than men due to their different sexual physiology. From Hippocrates to Freud, the notion that women's emotions are affected by their uteruses has certainly been accepted by men, even if women themselves are nowadays less than happy to be thought of as being more prone to emotion. Indeed the modern term 'hysteria', as popularised by Freud, comes from the Greek hystera 'womb'. Whether there is much validity in this psychosomatic theorising, of course, I don't know. But what we do know is that women do like children more than men do, and they do spend a lot more time carrying them around with them (e.g. before they're born). To a certain extent it's more natural for a woman to clasp a child to her tummy than it is for a man to do so. And so on.

Now for my second reason, which is if anything even more controversial! And that is that I think the proximity of the viscera to the pudenda is such that the two sorts of love can frequently overlap and become confused. Or at any rate they can in men, whose visceral capacity to love is often overlooked in favour of his sexual capacity. This confusion is then compounded by society's ever deepening paedophobia and paranoia about sex and children (and reproduction, though that's for another time). Another problem (again, for anoether day) the increasing masculinisation of men. (Should come as news to the sort of American "conservative" who thinks the big problem with the modern world is that we've all gone a bit too girly!) Here of course Freudian psychoanalysis actually hasn't helped at all. Freud's crucial mistake was to think that friendship and affection were outgrowths of sexuality. A good enough theory, except that it was (Ahem!) bollocks. Specifically, it was completely backwards. Friendship, affection and sexuality are all part of a single emotional continuum. But sexuality itself is just one part of a larger human capacity, and that is the human capacity to love.

Examples from literature? Actually there are a couple I can think of off the top of my head. One is of course Lolita - on of very few genuine pedo classics. (I haven't read Death in Venice - quelle horreur! - but I have been told by those who have that in that work the man's interest in the boy is not erotic.) A non-pedo example of what I'm talking about would be in Graham Greene's little book The Heart of the Matter, in which the troubled hero falls in love with a sickly, vulnerable young woman who is young enough to be his dead daughter (as in Death in Venice - or at least the film-version) and then finds himself, without fully realising it, drawn into an adulterous relationship with her. How many men, I wonder, have caught sight of Macauley Culkin's bouncing blond bangs and felt not just natural affection, which is bad enough in today's butch and brutal world, but also inklings of something deeper still - which in today's atmosphere of paedophic paranoia actually frightens and disgusts them? (The fear nowadays amongst men is I think quite genuinely that if you like little boys then you must be a pedo - almost as if giving in to the one emotion will automatically open the floodgates to erections and precum whenever there's a kid in the room.)

For men, then, affection is "woman's love" in much the same way as friendship is a masculine sort of love. Whether sexuality is more masculine or feminine, of course, which arguably boils down to whether men or women are "sexier", I certainly am not qualified to say. The Victorians thought (or like to think) that women were less sexual than men (except of course for those harlots and strumpets who weren't, and so on). But given how immodestly most woman nowadays dress (even when compared to modern men, at least once the sun comes out), I'd be surprised if anyone really contended that nowadays.

Of course, one final point could do with being made once again. It is quite easy to have friendships and affections that are not loving. We do, however, still think of them as being friendships and affections, in much the same way as an excitable schoolboy might say that he "loves" chocolate eclairs, or indeed just as a dirty magazine might talk about "making love" when in fact what it's talking about has nothing to do with marriage, or indeed reproduction, and really consists of little more than a man masturbating inside a woman's vagina. (Languages other the English, which is in a fact an amazingly supple and subtle language, do not even make the distinction between "like" and "love".) The reason for this, quite simply, is that man is what C S Lewis (in his essential work The Screwtape Letters) calls a "hybrid" being. He is part spirit and part animal. It is possible, therefore, for his animal side to have appetites for various things without there being any rational element that directs him towards the wellbeing of that object. A dog likes his Pedigree Chum just as surely as he likes his pedigree chums. But he has no rationality directing him to treat one any better than the other. There is nothing going on his doggy brain more complicated than a series of Pavlovian conditioned responses.

For a love to be fully human, therefore, it needs emotion but it also needs reason. A man who just goes around "having sex" without thinking about it is, I think we can all agree, simply acting like an animal, not a human being. And irrational friendships and irrational affections can wreck a life just as surely as irrational sex can. But I would also stress the opposite point - that there is something not altogether human about pure, cold charity. It's all very well for angels, perhaps. But God Himself took on human flesh in order to love us with a human body. With true humanity comes human flesh and human complexity. For me, friendship, provided it is rational friendship, is deeper and more human than mere charity. (Personally I can't stand "charitable" people. They're snooty and stuck up and insufferable and priggish. Uncharitable people, on the other hand, in my experience tend to be fun to be with and just generally nicer human beings.) And in the same way affection is deeper, fuller and more human than mere friendship.

All of which leaves the deepest, fullest, most human - and most complicated! - form of love still to come!

[Golly! Looking at the time, I just noticed it's taken me an hour and half to write this post. I suppose time flies when you're really concentrating on something.]

'The Lost Chord'

By the immortal Arthur Sullivan!

Sullivan actually wrote 'The Lost Chord' on the death of his brother. The real reason I chose it for this evening is that this evening I received some very sobering news from my mother about her health. It's nothing to panic about, but it is going to be mean quite a lot of difficulty over the next few months.

I suppose it might seem vain to ask my readers to pray for my mother - especially given that I don't want to say what her real name is.

On the other hand the Grace of God is the one commodity we can have in this world that we can know will never be wasted. As the great English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson puts it, 'More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.'

UPDATE: According to this vid's YouTube label this is actually Peter Auty - the original boy who sang the "Walking in the Air" song from The Snowman (i.e. before Aled Jones, who just happened to scrub up slightly better, really made it his own and the never looked back).

The Four Loves: 2. Friendship

Now it starts to get complicated.

I started with charity because charity is the purest form of love, and that means that it is the simplest. It is the sort of love that is purely intellectual. It aims purely at the good of another person without any "good feeling" going with it - or, if you like, without any feeling of fondness or sexuality coming back, as it were, as a "reward". The purely charitable man is motivated purely by a sense of duty towards his fellow creatures and towards his Creator. As St Paul puts it, he is completely selfless.

The other possibility, of course, is that such a pure, dutiful, selfless man doesn't really exist. That's not to say that there aren't charitable people out there. (I like to imagine that there are.) But their motives are not purely charitable. When they act to help their fellow human beings, in reality they have all sorts of emotions "mixed in" with their charitable motives. A man who collects for babies in the Third World will most likely have feelings of compassion, and quite possibly affection, for those whose plight he wishes to relieve. I have been told that most people who are involved in charitable work will have take an interest in the cause (whether it be cancer of cystic fibrosis or homelessness or famine relief or whatever) because they have a sister or brother or child or aunt or parent who has been affected by the issue that they are interested in. Or, indeed, because of a friend!

Lewis is his usual acute self when he points out that the Ancients (that is to say our ancestors, or at least our intellectual forebears) prized friendship far more highly than we do today. In fact nowadays it sounds quite incongruous to talk about friends "loving" each other. Yes, I dare say that once a year, or once in a lifetime, stout-hearted, salt-of-the-earth American men, after a long night of comradeliness in a bar or tavern, might slap each other's shoulders and say "Gee, I love you guys." (C'mon! I've seen Cheers. I know these things go on.) But Englishmen certainly don't behave like that. In fact it would positively turn our stomachs to say anything of the sort.

In the good old days, the symbol of all four types of love, from time in memorial, was always the kiss. Husbands and wives kissed (incuding in bed!). Parents kissed their children and vice versa. Friends of the same sex kissed on meeting and parting, as they did in England in the Middle Ages, as they still do in some European countries, and as is still the normal custom in the Arab world. Indeed "liturgical" kisses, including when venerating holy objects and relics, was a wholly unremarkable part of mainstream religion. Nowadays, of course, the kiss is almost totally sexual: kisses have vanished from most modern religions (just as religion itself is vanishing from public life in this country, just as it did long ago in America and France), a man who kisses another man will get old-fashioned looks in the street (and quite possibly some unwelcome attention from other men), boys resent being kissed even by their own mothers, and a man who kisses a boy can expect a knock on the door from the local constabulary.

What friendship and the other two loves do still have though, I think, is emotion. The seat of the emotions is the heart. And the heart has always been, at least in the Christian world, the principal symbol of what we call love. In Christianity even the love of God is represented by a heart, and this is because it is the essential tenet of Christianity that God became Man and created for Himself a human heart with which to love the human race. It is the heart that is the source and summit of the "good feelings" that one has when one is with one's friends. (Arenaline, dopanine, serotonin? Don't ask me to be exact, but I'd have thought that all these and more have their parts to play, pumping around the body and into the brain, during a great night out with your mates.) Similarly, the heart is also there to power the deeper, more visceral feelings that one has towards one's children, not to mention the sexual feelings one has towards one's spouse, fiancée, "bit on the side", or whatever takes your fancy.

Well, all this really goes for "love" in general. Friendship, specifically, is the simple feeling of enjoying being with people one likes. Man is a social animal, and so to a certain extent it is natural for him to enjoy being with other people. To those who would agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that 'Hell is other people' I can only say 'Just try a couple of weeks of loneliness and you'll soon change your mind!' Friendship is often called brotherly love, because it is the sort of love that ought to exist between brothers. (Don't come to close to me and my brothers, but never mind.) It also exists between sisters, though for certain genetic and evolutionary reasons it is more evident between men. (Genetically women are more heterogenous than men, and as such they are less gregarious: boys tend to have groups of friends or gangs, girls tend to have "best friends" or "girlfriends" - and of course if a boy has a boyfriend then he's a whoopsie - and so on.)

There are a couple of important points that are worth making about friendship or brotherly love as a masculine phenomenon. The first regards its military role, and it is this. I have been told by those who have experienced it (and I have read it as well) that in the Army, in a war, when one engages with the Enemy, one immediately forgets politics and religion, one forgets wives and sweethearts. One even forgets one's country. One even forgets oneself. When the Enemy attacks, a man fights back not to defend anything else, or even himself, but to defend the man next to him; and he will perform the most phenomenal acts of bravery purely for the sake of his comrades in arms. He might not die for his country, or even his wife and family. But an officer will die for his men, and a man will die for his mates. And greater love hath no man.

The other point, which follows from the military aspect of "brotherhood", is that friendship has provided the key theme of the greatest works of art our species has ever produced. The oldest story in the world is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. (See the pic at the beginning of this post.) The first and greatest work of actual literature in the western canon, twenty-seven centuries old and still a damn good read, is a work that we nowadays call The Iliad but which the ancients would have thought of as the Menin or The Rage of Achilles. Contrary to modern popular belief, that poem is not really about the Siege of Troy (or 'Ilium'), but about the emotional life of its greatest hero, who is Achilles. It is about how Achilles, driven by lust and pride, leaves the Trojan War, deserting the Achaeans (or 'Greeks', as they're nowadays known), and about how the death of his best friend Patroclus convinces him to return to the field of battle. (And no, I don't have much time for the fairly distasteful fifth-century Athenian re-interpretations of the poem, with which we are still very much lumbered to this day - see here, for example - that make out that Patroclus was really Achilles' boyfriend/"young friend" and that the whole thing is really about sublimated homosexuality. There's certainly no evidence for that sort of interpretation in Homer.)

If you want to understand the true meaning of friendship then you could do worse than to start with Homer, go on to Beowulf, and then just work your way on through all the great epics of our culture. (And have a look at the Holy Bible as well, why not! It's all good stuff.) But you'd do better simply to have friends. Friends are those who are your social, intellectual and physical equals, whose company you enjoy, whether physically or intellectually (through truly the two cannot be separated), but purely for it's own sake - and whom you can trust. There is nothing more (nor less) to it than that.

The most important point that has to be made about friendship, however, is that true friendship, (or true "brotherly" love) is complex. It is not purely physical but has to have an element of the first sort of love (that is to say charity, or intellectual love) "inside" it, so to speak. Charity, in fact, is the sine qua non not just of friendship but of all the other sorts of love as well. As St. Paul puts it, even acts such as giving up one's life for others or giving money to the poor are morally worthless unless they are done out of charity. In reality, I like to think that they are, even though of a necessity it is a charity that is normally "mixed in" with the other emotions.

In fact charity forms the basis of friendship just as friendship forms the basis of the other two loves. And how this works we shall I hope see in due course.

The Four Loves: 1. Charity

OK then! Let's start simple and get complicated!

Charity (caritas in Latin, agape in Greek) is the highest, purest, simplest and oldest form of love. It is older than the human race. It is as old as the Universe itself. It is also, arguably, the reason why the Universe was created in the first place. It has nothing to do with emotion - or, to be more accurate, it can exist without emotion. Is a product of pure reason and pure will. It is the love that the Angels have for each other, for their Creator, and for us human beings. It is the love that the Creator Himself has for all created things. And it is the highest duty that we human beings can ever possibly have.

To be honest, the classic text on charity is still St. Paul's, so having made my preliminary remarks I think I'll leave the rest of this post to him.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.

[I Corintians 13]

The other virtues will one day pass away. So will the other sorts of love. But the pure love of the mind, the love of reason and will, will endure forever.