Christina Thompson’s Sea People is a feast of wonders. To me, the most delightful chapter of this bouquet of miracles, is the chapter on Polynesian navigation; not by map and compass, but by stars and sun, color of clouds and sea, shape of clouds, flight of birds, smell of the air. And… the swell.

Which is a very slow, low amplitude, barely detectable, long wave in the ocean; the way the whole body of the ocean rises and falls by very little indeed but over its whole body; on the surface of which dance, and sometimes rage, the waves which we readily see and hear, and which the surfers surf. The Pacific swell, apparently, has a certain, constant direction and to detect it, the Polynesian navigator lies flat at the bottom of his craft. Perhaps he is only kidding the Pakeha (whites) when he says that the best way to detect it, is to feel it in one’s testicles, which act as nature’s most sensitive pendulum.

As I read it, I remembered that I have seen the swell. Many years ago, I climbed a high mountain in Eastern Taiwan and looked out west, onto the ocean; I was so high up, perhaps 1500m, or 2000, that I could see the curvature of earth at the horison; and there I saw the swell, the way the whole ocean almost imperceptibly rose and fell before me, not with the small waves on its surface, which, from this height registered only as small diacritical marks of foam, but, as it were, with its whole body. I more sensed it than saw it, it was so imperceptible; and not while looking at the ocean but while looking above it, at the sky just above the horizon; as if out of the corner of my eye, with my peripheral vision.

I remember how shaken I was by what I have thus detected. I have seen something tremendous, gigantic, cosmic, yet silent, and barely detectable, like a giant carnivore hiding in the dark.

Christina Thompson, Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia

Picture a dark, overcast day, thick fog, a solitary man walking with a dog across a black field. Ahead, in the mist, looms the shadowy outline of a forest. It is deathly quiet. And only once there is a sound: the piercing call of a skittish shrike on the wing.

The golden autumn has ended, and we have entered the second — the black — autumn here. All is quiet, melancholy, and immensely beautiful.

I have always liked being alone and have always derived a sense of peace and comfort from solitude. The silent communion with my own self has always given me a sense of calm, control, and purpose; and this is perhaps why I like this dark, cold, lonely season; and why I love this music. Others find it sad and depressing, but I am familiar and friendly with the mood; for me it is heartening and comforting.

Marie Bonaparte was not royalty; and raised in a sheltered, largely solitary life, surrounded by a few servants and tutors. So marrying Prince George of Greece, at the age of 25, which made her part of the European royal family (the various German, Russian, British and Greek offshoots of it), and its constant procession of mutual visits, joint cruises, family weddings and baptisms and anniversaries, meant for her entering an entirely new world. She observed it with the fresh eye of an outsider.

“Four months spent with family gatherings three times a week”, she wrote. “It’s too much for me. Last week there were visits of the aunts from Russia and England. All royal bourgeois, these Danes, bourgeois virtues and defects, united, honest, good, simple, kind, desperately the common path.”

And elsewhere: “The mentality (…) lacked that strong imprint provided by the presence of a will. Soft, indecisive, tame… the czar was unable to decide which of the two parties to choose for the good of the empire, and [uncle] Waldemar [of Denmark] was unable, before going out, to decide between two overcoast: ‘Georgie, tell me what I shall put on ‘.”

Celia Bertin, Marie Bonaparte, A life

While Andrew Cook’s shtick is to prove the involvement of British spies in the assassination of Rasputin; and the book isn’t really much about the life of the man, only his death; the book is a must read because it is… a wild holler. It would make a fantastic script for a Monty Python style comedy, albeit perhaps not very politically correct.

The killers of Rasputin — the supposed British spy aside — were Russian princes; and they were a hilarious lot. When one calls upon them at 5PM they are liable to be just rising from bed, having their day’s first coffee (and maybe suffering a minor case of DT’s). The large living involves serious risks to life and limb, such as emergency visits to hospitals to have a fish bone removed from their throat. They plot their plot over breakfasts at which they chase endless cups of coffee with endless glasses of brandy and, unsurprisingly, their plot involves a lot of aspects which do not quite seem to make sense (there is a lot about parking and reparking a car for reasons that escape both reader and author); but some that make profound sense, such as this, that since one of them will be posing as a chauffeur, he goes out and spends 600 rubles (an equivalent of perhaps $6,000 today) on an appropriate outfit, and then models it for his co-cospirators, who agree that he looks the very model of an insolent chauffeur in it (bravo). “The next decision is serious: they had to find a date in their busy schedules to do the deed. One Grand Duke wanted to do this before the 12th, as he was leaving for a holiday by the sea, while another’s diary was just too full until the 16th.”

An impasse.

Then they decided the method, which will be that one of them will lure Rasputin into basement and first attempt to poison him, and if that fails, shoot him; while the others will be waiting upstairs. Soon they figure that waiting alone might get boring, so they decide to invite two demi-mindaines to help while away the time.

Rasputin is dully brought in and given poison, which he eats, and drinks, and — nothing. The assassin runs upstairs for advice what to do. Shoot him, say his friends who are busy at the moment. He goes back and shoots him, which distresses him, and he needs to run upstairs and throw up. When he returns, he sees the dead Rasputin open first one, then the other of his bloodshot eyes. The assassin-prince runs away in a panic.

Meanwhile police come around to inquire about the shooting and the conspirators explain (what else), that the party got a little out of hand and they have been shooting the household dogs (a most normal occurence at any Russian princely party, obviously). After the policeman, satisfied, goes away, the assassins go back into the basement and find that Rasputin, poisoned and shot, has risen and walked out into the garden. Finally, they find him in the garden, shoot him a few more times, flail the dead body with a truncheon, and then take it to the river to dump it under ice. Having dumped it, they realized they forgot to weight it with the chain and weights which they had bought for the purpose, so they throw the chain and weights in after him… etc.

I finished this book, much of which is written in the style of a police procedural, in one sitting; and, at night, I woke up several times laughing.

The illustration at the top is of Princess Irina, the wife of one of the assassins: Rasputin was lured into the basement to meet her. What a stunning beauty. I don’t know about you. I hyperventillate.

Andrew Cook, To kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin

• 

• 

Emmeline and Christabel Pankhursts, the mother-daughter team behind the WSPU, Women’s Social and Political Union, famous for its incendiary, confrontational and at times violent strategies adopted to promote viting rights for women; Mrs and Ms Suffragist; after nearly 30 years of dogged fighting for the rights of women, suddenly, on the outbreak of WWI, dropped all that and became conservative, warmogering, Hun-devouring patriots.

When the PM, Asquith, after doggedly opposing women’s franchise for 30 years, indicated that he had changed his mind and would propose votes for women in Parliament, they opposed him. “The men had proven their claim to the vote by making it possible to keep a country in which to vote. Can any woman face the possibility of the affairs of this country being settled by consciencious objectors, passive resisters and shirkers?”, wrote Emmeline.

Writes Phillips: “One has to rub one’s eyes in disbelief. The militant who had gone to war against the government, who had been jailed and gone on hunger strike, who had commanded violent deeds and mounted decades long propaganda offensive, all in the cause she had endlessly proclaimed of freeing oppressed women from slavery and worse, was now effectively airbrushing that from history.”

“In the English speaking nations, under the British flag and the Stars and Stripes, women’s influence is higher, and her political rights more extended than in any other part of the world”, thundered Emmeline now.

This strikes both Phillips, and the reader, as unexpected, and odd. But it shouldn’t. The activists, it seems, are often such: the cause does not matter; the activity does.

Annie Besant was, as Bernard Shaw observed, “like many public speakers, a great actress. She was successively an evangelical, an atheist Bible-smasher, a Darwiniast secularist, a Fabian socialist, a strike leader, and finally a Theosophist, exactly as Mrs Siddons was Lady Macbeth, Lady Randolph, Beatrice, Rosalind, and Volumnia”.

The point, in other words, is: it isn’t the act, it is the acting.

Which is the brilliant insight of Le Carre’s Little Drummer Girl: take any British (or German, or Kosovar) pro-Palestinian activist, apply a little elbow grease and she will be the best agent The Mossad has ever had.

“She wrote three incomprehensible books about religion”.

(Wikipedia: In 1920, Dora Marsden withdrew from the literary and political scene and spent fifteen years in seclusion, completing a “magnum opus” drawing from philosophy, mathematics, physics, biology and theology. It was eventually published by Harriet Shaw Weaver in two volumes as The Definition of the Godhead in 1928 and Mysteries of Christianity in 1930. This large body of work produced by Marsden was not well received (not even by her former supporters) and she suffered a psychological breakdown in 1930, which was further deepened by the death of her mother in 1935. It is said that her moods fluctuated between very optimistic or pessimistic views of her work and that she developed delusional beliefs. In 1935 Marsden was admitted to the Crichton Royal Hospital located in Dumfries where she lived for the rest of her life. The hospital classified her as severely depressed. Marsden died of a heart attack in 1960).

She was in her last 40 years, I suppose, quite a lot like Hong Xiuquan, the Emperor of the Taiping, who spent the last several years of his reign secluded, writing endless theological texts in which he worked out exactly the nature of God, and his relationship to him. We do not know whether he was tormented by doubts about the validity of his work.

But then, unlike Marsden, he was the Emperor.

Melanie Phillips, The Ascent of a Woman: A history of the suffragette movement and the ideas behind it

John Sturart Mill met his wife to be, already married to a man 20 years her senior, at the insistence of her husband who thought the two had so much in common, they would inevitably hit it off.

Perhaps he did not mean in quite this way. (There are indications a year later the two had to be “reconciled”).

Being upright philosophers, the two recoiled at the (erotic? they always denied it) passion which sprung up between them; put distance between themselves; but exchanged philosophical treatises on marriage in which they tried to untangle the complex knot of love, marriage, duty and freedom. Eventually, through this elevated discussion, they came to the conclusion that liberty trumped duty and went to Paris together; and remained lovers (platonic, they insisted) for the next 21 years. It seems Mr Taylor, the husband, came in time to accept the situation — it appears Mill spent many weekends with Mrs Taylor at her and Mr Taylor’s countryside villa.

Two years after Mr Taylor died, the Mill and Mrs Taylor wed.

Mill and Harriet Taylor had an intense intellectual relationship; he credited her with much of his work. When she died he wrote about her contribution to his On The Subjection of Women:

But for her rare knowledge of human nature and comprehension of moral and social influences, though I should doubtless have held my present opinions, I should have had a very insufficient perception of the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society and with all the difficulties of human improvement.

Annie Besant, the President of The Theosophical Society, and Leadbeater, its visionary (who saw auras and communicated constantly with The Masters via visions) had a sort of deal. She ran the society and let him be the visionary (and defended him against charges of pederasty); his visions in turn conveniently seemed to always support her policies.

A similar relationship was at the center of another great religious movement: The Taiping. The leader of the rebellion, and self styled Emperor of the Empire of Heavenly Peace, got to be the boss; his sidekick, the King of Nine Thousand years, was the prophet through whom God spoke and issued instructions. By accepting his prophecies, the Emperor built up his prophet; in turn, his prophet’s prophecies invariably built up the Emperor. This is a common and effective strategy.

But what happens when the visionary gets overambitious? After all, the whole shebang hangs on his ability to deliver the divine blessing, right? So should not he be the number one? In the case of the Taipings, the official prophet at one point demanded ceremonial equality with the Emperor; in response, the Emperor had him murdered; the Great Taiping Empire collapsed and was drowned in blood in a matter of a few months.

Leadbeater never turned on Annie Besant: perhaps he felt he really needed her cover for his problems with the law; but Theosophy suffered a similar blow when in a magical week the movement’s number three, Aurundale, and a few close associates, including his wife, had a series of spiritual visions during which they were elevated (by The Masters, naturally), to the highest eschelons of spiritual status and proposed themselves to be the Twelve Apostles to the coming Messiah.

This was in fact, a coup d’etat.

In response Annie Besant did not have the upstarts murdered but tried to find an accomodation — to question Aurundale’s visions would invite the question what made them different from Leadbeater’s. As a result, Theosophy’s image declined and its power was sapped by the subsequent internal struggles between different visionary functions. But, unlike The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, it still exists.

The lesson here might be — do not murder your prophets.

Roland Vernon, Star in the East, Krishnamurti and the Invention of a Messiah
Jonathan Spence, God’s Chinese Son

And just sad ones. At one point, young Krishnamurti found himself surrounded by a group of admiring pretty girls from good homes; they served as his attendants, studied and meditated with him, traveled with him; they called themselves gopis — for the cow-herd attendants of Krishna (whose successor Krishnamurti was supposed to be). He kept saying his “work” with them was to prepare them to go to Australia and study with the official prophet of the movement, Leadbeater, who had gone to Australia after a pederasty scandal in India (where he had gone in the first place after a pederasty scandal in England). That was Krishnamurti’s way to pass onto someone else the “work” which he did not seem to understand — he had not yet developed his shtick. The girls did go to study with Leadbeater and one after another all quickly left: they were not nubile boys, so Leadbeater did not care. And he was not a beautiful youth, so — neither did they. The saddest, and commonest story of life: great hope, excitement, erotic buzz, challenge and struggle and then — nothing. Your great hope passes you on to someone a lot less attractive than he.

Roland Vernon, Star in the East, Krishnamurti and the Invention of a Messiah

Several tragic figures emerge from the reading of this story. Take Emily Lyutens, wife of the architect of New Delhi, abandoned in her marriage by her husband in favor of his work, she turned to Theosophy, which she was in position to help both financially and politically, so she quickly rose to inner circles; she then fell in love with the youthful beautiful Krishnamurti; and he in turn, at the time still Theosophy’s boy wonder, the discovered and groomed future World Teacher, future successor to Buddha and Jesus Christ, raised in the usual princely straight jacket of training preparing him for his mission, probably fell in love as well: Emily was the only person who did not place demands on him; the only person who loved him for being himself. The situation was frought with all kinds of possible dangers, and Emily renounced sex — perhaps for the sake of her own spiritual advancement, or perhaps to allow herself to come close to the boy wonder with some degree of safety. A twenty year intense entanglement followed and gradually grew more and more bitter for Emily: Thesophical leadership seeing how close and influential she became with Krishnamurti and fearing the power within the organization that this might give her, denied her further initiations, basically freezing her spiritual progress within the organization; and, in time, Krishnamurti grew up, developed interests in other, younger women, including her own daughters.

How bitter is the cup of life.

Roland Vernon, Star in the East, Krishnamurti and the Invention of a Messiah