The transcendence o f this gap
involves
a transformative leap between one state ofbeing into another.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
We do not understand what music on those strings can mean but for the never visible movement ofthe woman.
The causal force ofthe woman drawing her hair disappears in the ambiguity of"drew' and the tension of"hair out tight".
She becomes a musician after she makes her music: what was she before?
This is a way of asking what realm of potentiality is articulated in The Waste Land: the potential for meaning, for entering into the world as a person with an identity stabilized beyond the confusion of
pronoun reference in the poem?
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out o f empty cisterns and exhausted wells
This recognition in the light of our phylogenesis, of our common ancestry, suddenly finds volume in our whispered music becoming whistled and the fiddled sounds on this human hairbecomingbeatingwings. Whisperingpromisessomesecretsandthreatensthe dissolution o f the whispered sea currents against Phlebas' bones.
This devolution of sound through our kinship with these bats (are they representations of our words? or of the pre-reflexive soul Stephen Daedulas rendered from
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astorytomatchhischanging: "abat-likesoulwakingtotheconsciousnessofitselfin darkness and secrecy and loneliness . . [Portrait, 183]? ) follows down, away from the light but further into space, repeated in the next line by the inversion o f towers. The incommensurability or the synesthesiac collapse of sound and time into space can easily describe how we inhabit an 'I' in 'a world,' or find ourselves organized as if we were a world. The problem ofwhat this sound mean, just as the problem of what the thunder said and meant, lies as much in us as it does in the sound or towers. Aristotle animated Plato's mythic cave metaphor ofthe relation between truth and appearance, between 'I' and 'world' by analogizing the problem into the biology ofthose bat denizens ofthe cave:
Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim at show the difficulty o f it. Perhaps, too, as difficulties are oftwo kinds, the cause ofthis difficulty is not in the matter or facts (Ttpayiiacnv) but in us; for as the eyes of bats are to blaze of day, so is
the mind of our soul to things which are by nature most manifest of all.
(M? /. 993b9-ll)
The eyes of bats are like the "mind of our soul. " Light is like the ordinary or like things. The Waste Land is not a world of light, but consists of sketches of the world arranged to make visible the soul dying or waiting. It brings out the soul, sharpens our hearing o f the voice as the mark of humanity and not the face. Bats in this poetic darkness do not see anything. They whistle, crawl, and beat their wings. A bat-soul moves down, paralleling the upside down towers, inverted caves inverted down. We imagine bat-baby-faces, but
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their moving bodies would have disappeared against the "blackened wall. " The bat-soul becomes a sinister ciying. What is the relation between the soul and the world? Eliot answers here with 'what is the relation between the bat and the missing light, symbolic sense, darkness, sound, the towers, bells? Our poetic meta-eyes can see this bat and these towers and hear these sounds, just as a bat could see itselfwith its bat-eyes in such a darkness. Thesubstanceofthebellsdissolvesintoreminiscenceandthetowersinto soundandtime,clockingtheirinversionintothevoid. Inthelastlinethevoicessinging like the fiddled whisper music acts upon the substance of the world, this substance here being empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In the following stanza, the alteration between lines is compressed into an alterationwithinlines,agreaterproximitypromisingresolution. Theorderofthedialectic is less rigid, but still structuring a kind o f poetic meta-change as an opposition between space and sound, primary change. A decayed hole among mountains; moonlight followed by singing grass; an empty chapel as the wind's home; no windows and a swinging door (movement). These oppositions are punctuated by tumbled graves, and after the swinging door by dry bones and a standing cock on the rooftop. The sound o f the cock's species nameistakenupimmediatelyfollowinginarepresentationofhissoundingcall: Coco rico co co rico. The bones we are told will harm no one. This is an answer to the fear in a handfulofdust,areplytoourowninternalshakinginthisgraveyard. Safetyresidesin stasis, and if the world still reminisces in its toiling of the time, and the cock warns of the coming day, this time is time past, and the day is "a flash of lightening. " But we do not
glimpse the world. The lightening is a substanceless line o f energy, the animal sounding a
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mock pre-thunder, that like the inverted towers simply clocks a moment without illuminatingtheworld. Thislighteningisfollowed"then,"inoneofthefewcasesofa temporal designation o f order in this section o f the poem, with a damp gust; faint moonlight, the grass singing o f line 386 intensifies into lightening and the then into a damp gust. But a damp gust is no longer a song, and the promised meaning o f lightening and
the wind "bringing rain" never occurs. The language o f nature, the signs o f the weather do not answer our need. We are left waiting with the limp leaves (Ins. 394-5) "for rain. "
What kind oftime is kept here? Keeping something like time is keeping a void, and our living becomes avoiding voids, turning these seeming gaps between moments, in a certain logic, the 'contra' in 'contradiction,' into identity. But such a stability is not continuing if it removes change, by a turning into objecthood. 'Avoiding,' like berrying, means a kind of skipping past the pits of change, inverting as Eliot has these towers so that they become cisterns. But again the effect is backward. We need to turn cisterns into
towers, our avoiding becoming like a voiding we will go. How do I void a void? Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours. Sound and time without a cause and without changes in the present. This tolling is the same over and over, a tolling the limit between now and the past, or experience and memory. Here the tolling, following a world- collapsing-synesthesia, accompanies the voiding o f height and the loss o f ground; a set o f clock hands stuck on six o'clock, not twelve, translating space into sound. The word is not, however, reanimated by memory; but a subjunctive interaction in an ABAB dialectic between spatial and temporal symbolic ontologies temporalizes possibility into parody. Such a temporalization transplants our expectations from the world into language.
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Wittgenstein remarks, "It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact" (PI, ? 455). Hope is human:
One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy startled. But hopeful? And whynot?
A dog believes his master is at the door, but can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow? --And what can he not do here? -How am I supposed to answer this?
Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use o f language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life (If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write. )
(PI, p. 174)
What about language, or poetic language, that engenders hope as a possibility o f being human? This asks how as human beings do we inhabit the temporal possibilities of language without losing the world, more specifically in The Waste Land, without losing the physics ofthunder and the irreal visions ofour waking dreams and fictions?
Wittgenstein argues that the intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ? ? 136, 429, 458).
An order is own execution. " So it knows its execution, then even before it is there? --But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs
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"Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such".
(PI? 458)
Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, as in Finnegans Wake where (when) the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation of truth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not dissolve language but redirects intentionalitytowardussuchthatwedescribethefulfillmentoflanguage. Asadescription we function as quoted statement, the cite of language's self-reflection not our own.
Language replaces us; poetry can describe this replacement and resist it. Such poetry distrust words, and rightly so. The magic of language is its danger.
Poetry that constructs the reader as its intentional target enacts a peculiar kind of conversion: the conversion into a counterfactual.
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
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Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But the sound o f water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
In this passage there are four possible worlds, each following the other, built from simple metaphysics, which if we hold water to invoke the human, or at least the living, then these worlds or pictures o f being human as a possibility, negated by the world, but functioning nevertheless against it. These worlds can be described as (1) subjunctive flux ('I' as absolute limit), (2) generative transformation ('I ' recast as flux and identity), (3) musical ('I' as sound), and parody ('I' as bird song):
1) If water and no rock: a waterworld of total flux or chaos, an inversion of rock and not-water. In this subjunctive (world) change or indeterminacy is marked by the negationofidentity(rock). Identityisnegatedfromwithinthesubjunctive. Thereisno
ground on which to stand in this world, and thus the T , functioning much like
Wittgenstein's metaphysical 'I'. The 'I' is split. It is constituted as this subjunctive world: a world constituted by its desires and in its alienation from the world of rock. The poetic T is constituted a t the limit o f the world o f rock and fragments as itself subjunctive. The instability ofthe 'I'within the world ofrock is so great as to make this subjunctive fantasy the limit ofthat world. The 'I' does not exist within the poem in any recognizableform. Itexistswithinthepoemthroughtheexpressionofwhattheworldof
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rock is not. Thus, it enters the world of The Waste Land (the waste land) through and as this subjunctive.
2) "If rock and water, water, spring and pool": this describes a spiraling symbolic transformation from the concept of identity (rock) through opposition by conceptual flux or generation (water) into sublated forms o f generation and identity (springandpool). Therepetitionof'water'crystallizeswaterawayfromitsoppositionto rock into theform ofgeneration (water, water). The nature ofgeneration is focused into a spring, a source that rewrites the doubling ofwater into a mating, which produces an effect, a pool, a version o f a determinate identity. A pool mimics rock in its form and expresseswaterinitscontentormatter. Thestructureofthesubjunctiveworldinthisline
is a story o f self-conversion into both flux and indetity in a stable world.
3) "If there were the sound of water only": sound is an effect of "water over a rock. " This sound, caused at a distance, posits a world beyond sight and counter to cicada, the cricket that fails to comfort, and the dry grass singing. There exists two kinds o f sounds, both defined by their cause. In the first case (identity resistance), cicada and dry grass sound through the vibrations caused by the resistance o f two impenetrable extensions ofthe same kind rubbing against each other. In the second case (categorical resistance) sound is generated through the categorical difference, within the semantics of
the poem, between rock and water (abstracted through their difference into a more fundamental material resistance generating sound). One can imagine the friction between
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the dry grass igniting into flame. The water can wash away the rock in a kind of parody of penetrability. Thissoundisnotthunder,whichistheharbingerofwaterandnotacause
o f water. I f the T is split into the first world in order to mark its access to any world, and if in the second world it is converted through a symbolic logic into a specific form within a rock world, then the content o f these worlds is now sound.
4) "Butsoundofwaterover. . . wherethe. or"arockwherethehermit- thrush sings" gives this bird's world as double: a mimic of the water or an echo,
memory, or parody manifest as a dynamic pool against the rock. The hermit-thrush's "dripdropdrip"song,inaworldwithwatermimicswaterinanonomatopoeia. This
might be a language. This might be a primal scene describing a natural referential language or the speaking of nature to itself. The last four nominal drops of the bird's song shapes mimicry into a rock parody o f water. In a world without water such songs are subjunctive or an alien nonsense that we would hear like we might hear the dry grass singing. Is this song the words o f the Sibyl? or the singing o f a woman in an opera? ThefirstsubjunctiveworldisconstitutedbythemissingT asbothitssurrogateandasan expression o f its desires. These desires constitute a limit, but only a subjunctive limit, to theactualityofrock. Thusthesubjunctiveconstitutesboththecontentofthe'I'within
the world of rock and fragments and an escape from that same world. In the final subjunctive world the janus-stance o f the T , towards itself as the subjunctive world and towards the world of rock (as a limit), structures the world as fantasy or parody of itself. The content of the 'I' has been displaced into sound according to the same translation in
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opera o f women into form at the limits o f the voice (speech/ singing), o f desire, and o f the human (animate/ inanimate).
Time as the limit o f the world is enacted through the shifting content o f these subjunctive possibilities. When Eliot ends the poem with "I say upon the shore . . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins" this T exists between these limits, but not as a limit. The poem does not figure an T within the text except as either an object or as the subjunctive. Thestructuresofidentity(rock:space)andchange(water:sound)are activated, animated into a dialectic o f shifting between these subjunctive possibilities. The T , as either a pronoun which we can speak or as the poetic voice, is always outside these possibilities. He is not their limit, they are his limit, just as sound and space are. This is to say that the missing subject of the poem is victimized by time and space as is the Sibyl and
the operatic figures and stances o f the woman (women) in The W aste Land.
The poem enacts the condition ofthe Sibyl described by its epigraph. The Waste
Land is organized around an aesthetic atomism in which language and the world are broken into an admixture of obdurate "echoes' and "rocks," or images, voices, and phrases that exist as differentiated identities, a system o f limits. Eliot undoes the human intovoicesandtheanimationofsymbols. Consciousnessstabilizedthroughidentity,asa measure o f the world or as a mode o f self-reflection, made ontological, made visible, allegorized into matter and into fragments, looks like changes of the sort victimizing the Sibyl, although one might also imagine someone getting bigger or changing kind, mutating. Thislastpossibilityis,ofcourse,whatwecallevolution. Imightfindmy education, mediated by my speaking in an oracular voice, enacting my language as mine
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and as coherent, embodying truth or sense, or my form of life, as a desire to stabilize myself in my speech. I might shape my words into rocks and water, water, spring and a pool in which I can recognize myself. But there might not be any water, in which case will I recognize myself in these fragments? Evolution describes not only the phylogenesis o f life, but pictures meaning as continuity (survival), replacement (extinction and death), and succession (reproduction and generation), traced through and by means ofthe stability of DNA or Life. Phylogenesis and ontogenesis do not recapitulate each other so much as provide the language enacting the meaning o f change in both a coherent picture and in despair: the despair of the Sibyl and The Waste Land. This is the way tragedy means, by preserving, within scenes o f anxiety and crisis the syntax (systems o f order) describing our mind (consciousness, soul, psyche, and so on) and our world (environment, context, God) asours. ThecostofthisstabilityinTheWasteLand,however,isthatallthatiscreatedis a subjunctive counterpoint and the sacrifice of 'women' to sound.
The ontological problem of The Waste Land is to reintegrate the pattern of identity (the Sibyl's immortality) and the pattern o f change (the Sibyl's decay) within the gaps between identities holing a world. The holes in this world emerge as a consequence o f the hypostatization o f identity into an ontological ground. This is a world where infinite regression is possible: the tortoise and the hare both never reaching the finish line, never passing each other. In such a world the model of salvation lies in death and resurrection. This sets up the archetypal problem ofwhat one could call temporal ontology. How does one moment, and the identities it contains or defines, affect, cause and become another moment? Even if we think the calculus, with or without Leibniz's infinitesimal, can keep
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the arrow in flight at every point or moment, the relation between change or time and identity or pattern or stability determines our conception of matter or substance or atoms or representation or realism. The status ofwhat exists and its description in recent years has been expressed as the problem o f realism and representation. These debates ask what is the relation between concept and matter. Are there irreducible domains of reality or experience? (Intentionality? Grammar? ). Can reality be reduced to some form or kind of matter described by strict laws: consciousness to physiology (eliminative materialism) or of all effect to atomic causes (although few physicists would claim this).
The theology o f creation and recreation sets up a basic underlying cosmological perspective relating change and being. The Waste Land is Eliot's purposefully failed attempt to reformulate such a creative theology (metaphysics), masquerading as a myth, within the spiritual, physical and emotional malaise o f modem life. The last section o f the poem instantiates the gap between identities, and represents that intangible now, where life exists but does not change. Eliot has removed the dynamism from time by displacing change into the projection ofmeaning and desire into a subjunctive shadow ofboth the poemandtheworldofrock. Inthismomentthereisstasis,strugglingtobecome
dynamic.
The last section o f the poem represents a symbolic attempt to reintegrate identity andchange,representedrespectivelyasrockandwater. Thus"WhatTheThunderSaid" is not a representation o f decay, but on an expanded and metaphoric scale it is that space between the dissolution of one moment or identity and the recreation of another, described asakindoflanguage. Withinthissectionthereexistsasymbolictensionbetweenidentity
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(a continuity o f a distinct being, itself unchanging and unitary) and dynamic transformation: rock and water. The primary state which must be overcome, in The Waste Land, is the paralytic gap between dissolution and regeneration, or the gap between dissolution (the Sibyl's decay) and death.
The transcendence o f this gap involves a transformative leap between one state ofbeing into another. Thus the goal ofthe fifth section is to integrate the creative process of change within the logic of identity; this is what the poem understands as reanimation, and what it finds impossible.
1To what degree does self-replication constitute self-consciousness?
2This is the point one could begin a critique ofBeing and Time. The economy between Dasein and tools, objects,things,asalwaysparticularsfailstocapturethematerialityoftheworld. Thegivenessofthe worlddescribesourinclusionwithin"DasMan",withinananimatetotality. ForHeideggertheworld neveropensupasmaterialandobjective. Daseinisnotobjectified,andtherefore,oureveryday involvementintheTheyfailstopickoutothersasfellowDasein. Thedehumanizationofothersdescribed as our everyday involvement in the They, I think, is tied to Heidegger's failure to imagine the inanimate world against us, turning us into objects and animating itself as a totality.
3 The woman, as a causal node, an indefinite identity, recreates music from her own body,
albeit a dead extension o f her head, a translation o f some living past (cells) into the dead
present (hair cells), as the object and synecdochially an image o f a 'woman' and 'beauty. '
This woman establishes a temporal connection between the creative water image existent
before The Waste Land and the sterile identify of The Waste Land in the present, of which she
isapart. Time,themostfundamentalpatternoftransformation,re-arisesasanaesthetic
echo from the dead cities o f the past; the falling towers o f the city above the mountains
reaching toward the earth, parodies o f her drawn tight hair (among other more obvious
things) perched above the dry womb o f the earth.
And upside down in air were towers
T olling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells
In these cisterns and wells there can be no life, no movement, and hence no sound, for they are simply driedshells. Yetfromoutofthisstaticbarrennessvoicescanbeheard. Thereisnoapparentsourcefor thissound. AsinanOperaanotherwomanhasbeenkilled,sacrificedbytransformingthepossibilityofat leastsomeman'srelationwithsomewomanintoontologicalclaims. Withoutatemporaldesignation, such a 'then' or 'when,' etc. , the use of the conjunction 'and' to define the relationship between phrases leads to a confused building o f composite images, with unclear temporal order and hazy causal connection. A self-reflexive time continual changes itself back into itself every life the same life but lost.
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m
THE SEXUAL ONTOLOGY OF THE PSYCHE
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10
The Sexual Ontology of the Psyche
10. 1 Conversation with God and Self
The question "Who is the third who walks always beside you? " is answered, in The Waste Land, as the sound of "maternal lamentation", as "hooded hordes swarming/ over
endless plains", by a women drawing "her black hair out tight", by aridity, all forms of "memory and desire", but desire breeding backwards into memory. Under the aspect of this aridity, by the fact that "we have existed", The Waste Land becomes a version of what Wittgenstein called "[m]emory time": "Memory time. . . is (like visual space) not a part o f the larger time, rather the specific order o f events and situations in thought // memory//. Inthistimethereis,e. g. ,nofuture"(BigTranscript? 105). 1Atimewithout a future describes a phenomenological cocoon, a bubble of the now, opposed to historical or "physical time, the order o f events in the physical world" (B ig Ttranscript, ? 105). In Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein asserts that "[w]hat we understand by the word 'language' unwinds in physical time. (As is made perfectly clear by the comparison with a mechanism. )" (PR ? 69). Eliot, however, did not imagine that language functioned only through historical or physical time, through event and action ordered as the past, present and future. The W aste Land, instead, constitutes "memory time" as a kind o f language. This language is built through a poetics that collapses images, voices, words, and phrases into a logic, a set o f relations, defined by the concept o f identity (x=y), into an admixture ofadumbrate "echoes" and "rocks" that cannot mean within the "world" because language
Notes for this chapter begin on page 458
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does not have the power to order historical time through the logic o f identity that determines what is real and true within this world.
This kind of aesthetic atomism, similar to Wittgenstein's Tractarian logical atomism, although functioning within a different linguistic domain, cannot create a future: things only signify within memory and as differentiated identities. The Waste Land pictures this confrontation between "memory time" and "physical time" as a tragic impasse.
Finnegans Wake challenges and rewrites this conception of the relation between language andtime. Joycedoesnotdenythesignificanceofidentity(astautology,forexample)in how we mean, but he attempts to enact, through his description o f our "noughttime", our no-time, night-time, experience, a poetic logic of the future. This "poetic logic", as Vico describes it, "insofar as it considers things in all the forms by which they may be signified" (NS 400), should not be understood as a theory o f meaning, but rather as an investigation of how we mean at the limits of sense. At these limits the construction of the possibility of a future (at least for us to continue reading), as an effect, articulates a what I think should
be called a theology of our "nat language" as a part of our ordinary language. Iflanguagemeansanythingwithin TheWasteLanditattachesitselftotheworld
as a form of everyday, common hysteria, something like speaking "demotic French" in London (In. 212), or asking oneselfor someone else, as ifone could no longer tell the difference between a joke and a plea, or between Shakespeare and "O O O O that Shakspeherian Rag", "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head? " And do we answer: "Yes I am alive because I have something in my head"? How do I know? Why would that make me alive? How can an emotional (or a social or historical) crisis take the
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formoftheontologicalriddles: "Whatisreal? "or"AmIalive? " Insuchconfusion,ifwe all took notice o f what has passed, we might all be surprised that "death had undone so many" as if we had been surprised by someone turning on the lights.
The narrator asks, "Shall I at least set my lands in order? ", and then a voice concludes-* these ruins shore my ruins into a shore on which I sit asking shall I at least set my lands in order? What would it mean to set one's lands in order? In the third to last line o f the poem Eliot recalls Kyd's Spanish Tragedy as a fragment "shored against my ruins" : "Why then De fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. " Eliot invests himself in these fragments as Hieronymo does when he pretends madness in order to avenge his son's murder. Hieronymowritesaplayinwhich,whileperformingoneoftheparts,hekillsthe murderer. If we must write a play, create an extraordinary context in order that we may act with a kind ofjustice (but if this is our play how can it be a justice for others? ), then morality, even o f a demented sort, requires the creation o f a supporting world, an ontology. If words are not binding then neither is the World; "These are the letters that all men refuse" in Karl Shapiro's moral "Alphabet". If one's fellow human beings seem not
to understand this alphabet, one might speak to God; Augustine asks, in his Confessions, "allow me to speak before your mercy, though I am but dust and ashes (Gen. 18: 27). Allow me to speak: for I am addressing your mercy, not a man who would laugh at me. Perhaps even you deride me (cf. Ps. 2: 4), but you will turn and have mercy on me (Jer. 12: 15)" [I. vi (9)]. Eliot reconstitutes this conversation through organizing his fragments around forms of authority--but the demand that leads to his response is not simply his gripe or his failure. The ontological riddles "what is real? " and "Am I alive? " act as the
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demands of language to act as prayer, or as the way through which we might act or will or judge or entail obligation, speak our commitment, or be entitled or enabled through
language.
In Finnegans Wake Augustine's conversation with God is replaced with a
conversation with the missing matter ofa sleeping body and ofthe world (whose? ), and with a missing consciousness and meaning (again whose? ). 2 These two axes are something like Aquinas' division o f our mind into intellect and will. The night world reveals the telos ofthese two axes to be beyond, something like what K. Rahner calls in The Foundations ofChristian Faith a "holy Mystery", the 'asymptotic term' that "presents itselfto us in the mode ofwithdrawal, ofsilence, ofdistance, ofbeing always inexpressible, so that speaking of it, if it is to make sense, always requires listening to its silence"(69, 64). But again these 'asymptotic term[s]" are always directed simultaneously towards oneself and towards the world. I think these two directions should be expressed respectively as Augustinian and
Thomist theological descriptions of the intentionality of our language. For my purposes, here and now, I will only sketch these theological descriptions as seemingly opposing limits that Joyce twists into a new proximity, a new geometry crystallized out of "soundsense"(121. 15)or"sinse"(83. 12)or"sinns"(330. 18). InAugustinewefindan allegorical distension ofthe everyday into himselfand towards God, a collapse of metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force of Augustine's formulation of the relation between the human and the divine into a hierarchy of shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward Absolute Actuality. Finnegans
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W ake writes out our ordinary experience o f the night as between these two points: "Is this space o f our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? " (154. 25-26).
The Wake's syntax of nonsense, therefore, is, mirroring Ashberry's description of the temporal articulation of how we are:
"Only out of such 'perfectly useless concentration' can emerge the one thing that is useful for us" our coming to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers o f the life that is always on the point o f coming into being. " (67)3
The temporal physics of the Wake, the logic of succession organizing its words and grammars and stories, "under articles thirtynine ofthe reconstitution" (596. 09) (a remaking o f the world by remaking our language), under the pressure o f "sublumbunat[ion]" (607. 21) becomes metaphysics: we ask and are asked "Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? Its the same told of all. Many. " (18. 18- 20). This question can be retranslated into, How is that which exists put together such that it is, and such that it exists within the possibility that it can mean something, or how can we read anything least o f all what we all know or tell ourselves. "Its world" is the same as "the logos of somewome [women; womb] to that base anything" (298. 20), where "base anything" suggests a logarithmic base of infinite possibility (an inversion of Aquinas' Aristotelian vision of God as Absolute Act).
The Wake, the sleeper, Joyce, and any reader still awake are all the "simpletop dumbfool". . . holy mooxed and gaping up the wrong phace as if you was seeheeing the gheist that stays foreneast" (299. 13-16). This "wrong phace," very likely the sleeper's and our own, as part of a "Theoatre" (587. 08), pursues both the "Theoccupant that
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RueandredfulandthewholeinhibitanceofNeuilands"(348. 14-16). ThepresenceofGod in his own dreadful script, recalling Augustine, that writes the inhabitants and inhibitions and repressions into whole new islands, New Ireland, new world, New Jerusalem. Such a pursuit places us all in "theoperil" (223. 28) "phac[ing]" with "[n]either a soul to be saved our a body to kicked" (298. 36) "the howtosayto itiswhatis hemustwhomust worden schall"(223. 27-28), the Wakean version o f God's "I am what I am. " Excavating this "fimdementiaUy theosophagusted" (610. 01) as a mind, the fundament o f its world, a "self- exiled in upon his ego" (189. 06), both god-like and god disgusted exposes the totality of what is through our moral stance toward the world, an investment in the relation between whatweareandwhatis. Thesubstanceofthistheology,however,isasmucha fundament than a foundation, the litterings of events, identities, phrases, desires, expectations etc. "matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19. 36-20. 1). In this excavation I will limit myselfto "[e]xpatiat[ing] then how much times we live in" (55. 04), to exploring what is at stake in such a theology through how the possibilities of being anything are enacted through the Wakecm grammar distorting the relation between
before and after.
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals
of time", in order to determine the measure of the present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the
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present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline o f befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition o f the "now" characterized as a form o f being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes different language games What do we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition o f time "as the Life ofthe Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"[3. 7. 11], If we reimagine the soul as our form of life and expand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in
Wittgenstein's PhilosophicalInvestigations. Because ofhis separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category. 4 For Augustine, if time is the measure o f "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
Time gets broken into complex distensions of expectation, attention and remembrance. This distension, a version of which is at work in the interaction between language games in Investigations, fragments the mind, so that Augustine is always faced with losing himself:
. . . I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until
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that day when, purified and molten by the fire ofyour love, I flow together to
merge into you. (XI. xxxi [41])
Joyce transforms and inverts this plea to God for integration into a riddle o f being and remaining in what he calls "sollemn nupitalism". "Sollemn" contains the roots "Soil" and "Sol", which mean respectively to make foul, defile, and the sun united as the foul and the sublime as the everyday 'soul'. What Augustine calls the "terror and love" of God's word and the distension o f the self as time becomes for Joyce the "Pluralbilities" o f "the one subtrance o f a streamsbecoming" (FW597. 07-08). Thus we can enter into Joyce's construction of our moral and existential disintegration as and mapped into the night through two versions of what he calls "the first riddle of the universe":
the first riddle ofthe universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . --all give up? ; when he is a . . . Sham (170. 3-24).
The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12).
"Whenas",notwhereas, this"nam",aninvertedman,aname,an"Iamnot"inarchaic English, a sin in Cornish, "time" ("an am") and "life" or "soul" ("anam") in Irish, is a watch, ticking away this last rittlerattle of "anniverse". The soul and time are not only a watch, in this both a rhythm and a dumbshow, but the negation and fragmentation o f our being human into versions of ourselves, of ourselves a sham (originally a fraudulent trick, and therefore an imposture cognate with shame, both related to the Gothic ga-hamon, to dress [to cover oneself]). This is as if someone becomes themselves a whim, (Old Norse) "to let one's eyes wander" from oneself. Finnegans Wake makes sham and whim cognate,
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or rather they both mark the distensions of "a nam" along a single axis in two directions. One becomes a whim as part o f a whole, from the perspective o f God, as one becomes ones own writing, and thus read as if without depth, or a sham in the interactions with others and with oneself--one's other shams.
The Wake's deconstruction of reality is the simultaneous destruction of identity and the connections between "things," in a reality which is "moving and changing every part of the time"(l 18. 22). The words o f the Wake lose their source and their end, and exist as constant becomings of meaning, which never coalesce into a determinate identity of meaning. Thus,
-Which was said by whem to whom?
--It wham. But whim I can't remember. --Fantsy! funtasyonfantasy,amnaesfintasies! (493. 16-18)
The first question begins by asking for the identity of a particular word: it asks "which," implying a single word among many. The next part o f the question, "by whem," is derived from "when" and the German "wem," meaning 'whom". Thus, "by whem to whom" asks for the identity of the speaker and the person spoken to, and for the time at which the word was spoken. This Word lacks any relationship to time or being, for the word is only fantasy,fancy. Oritis"Vanitas,vanitasvanitatum,omnisvanitias.
pronoun reference in the poem?
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out o f empty cisterns and exhausted wells
This recognition in the light of our phylogenesis, of our common ancestry, suddenly finds volume in our whispered music becoming whistled and the fiddled sounds on this human hairbecomingbeatingwings. Whisperingpromisessomesecretsandthreatensthe dissolution o f the whispered sea currents against Phlebas' bones.
This devolution of sound through our kinship with these bats (are they representations of our words? or of the pre-reflexive soul Stephen Daedulas rendered from
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astorytomatchhischanging: "abat-likesoulwakingtotheconsciousnessofitselfin darkness and secrecy and loneliness . . [Portrait, 183]? ) follows down, away from the light but further into space, repeated in the next line by the inversion o f towers. The incommensurability or the synesthesiac collapse of sound and time into space can easily describe how we inhabit an 'I' in 'a world,' or find ourselves organized as if we were a world. The problem ofwhat this sound mean, just as the problem of what the thunder said and meant, lies as much in us as it does in the sound or towers. Aristotle animated Plato's mythic cave metaphor ofthe relation between truth and appearance, between 'I' and 'world' by analogizing the problem into the biology ofthose bat denizens ofthe cave:
Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim at show the difficulty o f it. Perhaps, too, as difficulties are oftwo kinds, the cause ofthis difficulty is not in the matter or facts (Ttpayiiacnv) but in us; for as the eyes of bats are to blaze of day, so is
the mind of our soul to things which are by nature most manifest of all.
(M? /. 993b9-ll)
The eyes of bats are like the "mind of our soul. " Light is like the ordinary or like things. The Waste Land is not a world of light, but consists of sketches of the world arranged to make visible the soul dying or waiting. It brings out the soul, sharpens our hearing o f the voice as the mark of humanity and not the face. Bats in this poetic darkness do not see anything. They whistle, crawl, and beat their wings. A bat-soul moves down, paralleling the upside down towers, inverted caves inverted down. We imagine bat-baby-faces, but
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their moving bodies would have disappeared against the "blackened wall. " The bat-soul becomes a sinister ciying. What is the relation between the soul and the world? Eliot answers here with 'what is the relation between the bat and the missing light, symbolic sense, darkness, sound, the towers, bells? Our poetic meta-eyes can see this bat and these towers and hear these sounds, just as a bat could see itselfwith its bat-eyes in such a darkness. Thesubstanceofthebellsdissolvesintoreminiscenceandthetowersinto soundandtime,clockingtheirinversionintothevoid. Inthelastlinethevoicessinging like the fiddled whisper music acts upon the substance of the world, this substance here being empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In the following stanza, the alteration between lines is compressed into an alterationwithinlines,agreaterproximitypromisingresolution. Theorderofthedialectic is less rigid, but still structuring a kind o f poetic meta-change as an opposition between space and sound, primary change. A decayed hole among mountains; moonlight followed by singing grass; an empty chapel as the wind's home; no windows and a swinging door (movement). These oppositions are punctuated by tumbled graves, and after the swinging door by dry bones and a standing cock on the rooftop. The sound o f the cock's species nameistakenupimmediatelyfollowinginarepresentationofhissoundingcall: Coco rico co co rico. The bones we are told will harm no one. This is an answer to the fear in a handfulofdust,areplytoourowninternalshakinginthisgraveyard. Safetyresidesin stasis, and if the world still reminisces in its toiling of the time, and the cock warns of the coming day, this time is time past, and the day is "a flash of lightening. " But we do not
glimpse the world. The lightening is a substanceless line o f energy, the animal sounding a
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mock pre-thunder, that like the inverted towers simply clocks a moment without illuminatingtheworld. Thislighteningisfollowed"then,"inoneofthefewcasesofa temporal designation o f order in this section o f the poem, with a damp gust; faint moonlight, the grass singing o f line 386 intensifies into lightening and the then into a damp gust. But a damp gust is no longer a song, and the promised meaning o f lightening and
the wind "bringing rain" never occurs. The language o f nature, the signs o f the weather do not answer our need. We are left waiting with the limp leaves (Ins. 394-5) "for rain. "
What kind oftime is kept here? Keeping something like time is keeping a void, and our living becomes avoiding voids, turning these seeming gaps between moments, in a certain logic, the 'contra' in 'contradiction,' into identity. But such a stability is not continuing if it removes change, by a turning into objecthood. 'Avoiding,' like berrying, means a kind of skipping past the pits of change, inverting as Eliot has these towers so that they become cisterns. But again the effect is backward. We need to turn cisterns into
towers, our avoiding becoming like a voiding we will go. How do I void a void? Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours. Sound and time without a cause and without changes in the present. This tolling is the same over and over, a tolling the limit between now and the past, or experience and memory. Here the tolling, following a world- collapsing-synesthesia, accompanies the voiding o f height and the loss o f ground; a set o f clock hands stuck on six o'clock, not twelve, translating space into sound. The word is not, however, reanimated by memory; but a subjunctive interaction in an ABAB dialectic between spatial and temporal symbolic ontologies temporalizes possibility into parody. Such a temporalization transplants our expectations from the world into language.
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Wittgenstein remarks, "It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact" (PI, ? 455). Hope is human:
One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy startled. But hopeful? And whynot?
A dog believes his master is at the door, but can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow? --And what can he not do here? -How am I supposed to answer this?
Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use o f language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life (If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write. )
(PI, p. 174)
What about language, or poetic language, that engenders hope as a possibility o f being human? This asks how as human beings do we inhabit the temporal possibilities of language without losing the world, more specifically in The Waste Land, without losing the physics ofthunder and the irreal visions ofour waking dreams and fictions?
Wittgenstein argues that the intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ? ? 136, 429, 458).
An order is own execution. " So it knows its execution, then even before it is there? --But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs
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"Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such".
(PI? 458)
Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, as in Finnegans Wake where (when) the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation of truth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not dissolve language but redirects intentionalitytowardussuchthatwedescribethefulfillmentoflanguage. Asadescription we function as quoted statement, the cite of language's self-reflection not our own.
Language replaces us; poetry can describe this replacement and resist it. Such poetry distrust words, and rightly so. The magic of language is its danger.
Poetry that constructs the reader as its intentional target enacts a peculiar kind of conversion: the conversion into a counterfactual.
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
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Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But the sound o f water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
In this passage there are four possible worlds, each following the other, built from simple metaphysics, which if we hold water to invoke the human, or at least the living, then these worlds or pictures o f being human as a possibility, negated by the world, but functioning nevertheless against it. These worlds can be described as (1) subjunctive flux ('I' as absolute limit), (2) generative transformation ('I ' recast as flux and identity), (3) musical ('I' as sound), and parody ('I' as bird song):
1) If water and no rock: a waterworld of total flux or chaos, an inversion of rock and not-water. In this subjunctive (world) change or indeterminacy is marked by the negationofidentity(rock). Identityisnegatedfromwithinthesubjunctive. Thereisno
ground on which to stand in this world, and thus the T , functioning much like
Wittgenstein's metaphysical 'I'. The 'I' is split. It is constituted as this subjunctive world: a world constituted by its desires and in its alienation from the world of rock. The poetic T is constituted a t the limit o f the world o f rock and fragments as itself subjunctive. The instability ofthe 'I'within the world ofrock is so great as to make this subjunctive fantasy the limit ofthat world. The 'I' does not exist within the poem in any recognizableform. Itexistswithinthepoemthroughtheexpressionofwhattheworldof
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rock is not. Thus, it enters the world of The Waste Land (the waste land) through and as this subjunctive.
2) "If rock and water, water, spring and pool": this describes a spiraling symbolic transformation from the concept of identity (rock) through opposition by conceptual flux or generation (water) into sublated forms o f generation and identity (springandpool). Therepetitionof'water'crystallizeswaterawayfromitsoppositionto rock into theform ofgeneration (water, water). The nature ofgeneration is focused into a spring, a source that rewrites the doubling ofwater into a mating, which produces an effect, a pool, a version o f a determinate identity. A pool mimics rock in its form and expresseswaterinitscontentormatter. Thestructureofthesubjunctiveworldinthisline
is a story o f self-conversion into both flux and indetity in a stable world.
3) "If there were the sound of water only": sound is an effect of "water over a rock. " This sound, caused at a distance, posits a world beyond sight and counter to cicada, the cricket that fails to comfort, and the dry grass singing. There exists two kinds o f sounds, both defined by their cause. In the first case (identity resistance), cicada and dry grass sound through the vibrations caused by the resistance o f two impenetrable extensions ofthe same kind rubbing against each other. In the second case (categorical resistance) sound is generated through the categorical difference, within the semantics of
the poem, between rock and water (abstracted through their difference into a more fundamental material resistance generating sound). One can imagine the friction between
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the dry grass igniting into flame. The water can wash away the rock in a kind of parody of penetrability. Thissoundisnotthunder,whichistheharbingerofwaterandnotacause
o f water. I f the T is split into the first world in order to mark its access to any world, and if in the second world it is converted through a symbolic logic into a specific form within a rock world, then the content o f these worlds is now sound.
4) "Butsoundofwaterover. . . wherethe. or"arockwherethehermit- thrush sings" gives this bird's world as double: a mimic of the water or an echo,
memory, or parody manifest as a dynamic pool against the rock. The hermit-thrush's "dripdropdrip"song,inaworldwithwatermimicswaterinanonomatopoeia. This
might be a language. This might be a primal scene describing a natural referential language or the speaking of nature to itself. The last four nominal drops of the bird's song shapes mimicry into a rock parody o f water. In a world without water such songs are subjunctive or an alien nonsense that we would hear like we might hear the dry grass singing. Is this song the words o f the Sibyl? or the singing o f a woman in an opera? ThefirstsubjunctiveworldisconstitutedbythemissingT asbothitssurrogateandasan expression o f its desires. These desires constitute a limit, but only a subjunctive limit, to theactualityofrock. Thusthesubjunctiveconstitutesboththecontentofthe'I'within
the world of rock and fragments and an escape from that same world. In the final subjunctive world the janus-stance o f the T , towards itself as the subjunctive world and towards the world of rock (as a limit), structures the world as fantasy or parody of itself. The content of the 'I' has been displaced into sound according to the same translation in
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opera o f women into form at the limits o f the voice (speech/ singing), o f desire, and o f the human (animate/ inanimate).
Time as the limit o f the world is enacted through the shifting content o f these subjunctive possibilities. When Eliot ends the poem with "I say upon the shore . . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins" this T exists between these limits, but not as a limit. The poem does not figure an T within the text except as either an object or as the subjunctive. Thestructuresofidentity(rock:space)andchange(water:sound)are activated, animated into a dialectic o f shifting between these subjunctive possibilities. The T , as either a pronoun which we can speak or as the poetic voice, is always outside these possibilities. He is not their limit, they are his limit, just as sound and space are. This is to say that the missing subject of the poem is victimized by time and space as is the Sibyl and
the operatic figures and stances o f the woman (women) in The W aste Land.
The poem enacts the condition ofthe Sibyl described by its epigraph. The Waste
Land is organized around an aesthetic atomism in which language and the world are broken into an admixture of obdurate "echoes' and "rocks," or images, voices, and phrases that exist as differentiated identities, a system o f limits. Eliot undoes the human intovoicesandtheanimationofsymbols. Consciousnessstabilizedthroughidentity,asa measure o f the world or as a mode o f self-reflection, made ontological, made visible, allegorized into matter and into fragments, looks like changes of the sort victimizing the Sibyl, although one might also imagine someone getting bigger or changing kind, mutating. Thislastpossibilityis,ofcourse,whatwecallevolution. Imightfindmy education, mediated by my speaking in an oracular voice, enacting my language as mine
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and as coherent, embodying truth or sense, or my form of life, as a desire to stabilize myself in my speech. I might shape my words into rocks and water, water, spring and a pool in which I can recognize myself. But there might not be any water, in which case will I recognize myself in these fragments? Evolution describes not only the phylogenesis o f life, but pictures meaning as continuity (survival), replacement (extinction and death), and succession (reproduction and generation), traced through and by means ofthe stability of DNA or Life. Phylogenesis and ontogenesis do not recapitulate each other so much as provide the language enacting the meaning o f change in both a coherent picture and in despair: the despair of the Sibyl and The Waste Land. This is the way tragedy means, by preserving, within scenes o f anxiety and crisis the syntax (systems o f order) describing our mind (consciousness, soul, psyche, and so on) and our world (environment, context, God) asours. ThecostofthisstabilityinTheWasteLand,however,isthatallthatiscreatedis a subjunctive counterpoint and the sacrifice of 'women' to sound.
The ontological problem of The Waste Land is to reintegrate the pattern of identity (the Sibyl's immortality) and the pattern o f change (the Sibyl's decay) within the gaps between identities holing a world. The holes in this world emerge as a consequence o f the hypostatization o f identity into an ontological ground. This is a world where infinite regression is possible: the tortoise and the hare both never reaching the finish line, never passing each other. In such a world the model of salvation lies in death and resurrection. This sets up the archetypal problem ofwhat one could call temporal ontology. How does one moment, and the identities it contains or defines, affect, cause and become another moment? Even if we think the calculus, with or without Leibniz's infinitesimal, can keep
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the arrow in flight at every point or moment, the relation between change or time and identity or pattern or stability determines our conception of matter or substance or atoms or representation or realism. The status ofwhat exists and its description in recent years has been expressed as the problem o f realism and representation. These debates ask what is the relation between concept and matter. Are there irreducible domains of reality or experience? (Intentionality? Grammar? ). Can reality be reduced to some form or kind of matter described by strict laws: consciousness to physiology (eliminative materialism) or of all effect to atomic causes (although few physicists would claim this).
The theology o f creation and recreation sets up a basic underlying cosmological perspective relating change and being. The Waste Land is Eliot's purposefully failed attempt to reformulate such a creative theology (metaphysics), masquerading as a myth, within the spiritual, physical and emotional malaise o f modem life. The last section o f the poem instantiates the gap between identities, and represents that intangible now, where life exists but does not change. Eliot has removed the dynamism from time by displacing change into the projection ofmeaning and desire into a subjunctive shadow ofboth the poemandtheworldofrock. Inthismomentthereisstasis,strugglingtobecome
dynamic.
The last section o f the poem represents a symbolic attempt to reintegrate identity andchange,representedrespectivelyasrockandwater. Thus"WhatTheThunderSaid" is not a representation o f decay, but on an expanded and metaphoric scale it is that space between the dissolution of one moment or identity and the recreation of another, described asakindoflanguage. Withinthissectionthereexistsasymbolictensionbetweenidentity
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(a continuity o f a distinct being, itself unchanging and unitary) and dynamic transformation: rock and water. The primary state which must be overcome, in The Waste Land, is the paralytic gap between dissolution and regeneration, or the gap between dissolution (the Sibyl's decay) and death.
The transcendence o f this gap involves a transformative leap between one state ofbeing into another. Thus the goal ofthe fifth section is to integrate the creative process of change within the logic of identity; this is what the poem understands as reanimation, and what it finds impossible.
1To what degree does self-replication constitute self-consciousness?
2This is the point one could begin a critique ofBeing and Time. The economy between Dasein and tools, objects,things,asalwaysparticularsfailstocapturethematerialityoftheworld. Thegivenessofthe worlddescribesourinclusionwithin"DasMan",withinananimatetotality. ForHeideggertheworld neveropensupasmaterialandobjective. Daseinisnotobjectified,andtherefore,oureveryday involvementintheTheyfailstopickoutothersasfellowDasein. Thedehumanizationofothersdescribed as our everyday involvement in the They, I think, is tied to Heidegger's failure to imagine the inanimate world against us, turning us into objects and animating itself as a totality.
3 The woman, as a causal node, an indefinite identity, recreates music from her own body,
albeit a dead extension o f her head, a translation o f some living past (cells) into the dead
present (hair cells), as the object and synecdochially an image o f a 'woman' and 'beauty. '
This woman establishes a temporal connection between the creative water image existent
before The Waste Land and the sterile identify of The Waste Land in the present, of which she
isapart. Time,themostfundamentalpatternoftransformation,re-arisesasanaesthetic
echo from the dead cities o f the past; the falling towers o f the city above the mountains
reaching toward the earth, parodies o f her drawn tight hair (among other more obvious
things) perched above the dry womb o f the earth.
And upside down in air were towers
T olling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells
In these cisterns and wells there can be no life, no movement, and hence no sound, for they are simply driedshells. Yetfromoutofthisstaticbarrennessvoicescanbeheard. Thereisnoapparentsourcefor thissound. AsinanOperaanotherwomanhasbeenkilled,sacrificedbytransformingthepossibilityofat leastsomeman'srelationwithsomewomanintoontologicalclaims. Withoutatemporaldesignation, such a 'then' or 'when,' etc. , the use of the conjunction 'and' to define the relationship between phrases leads to a confused building o f composite images, with unclear temporal order and hazy causal connection. A self-reflexive time continual changes itself back into itself every life the same life but lost.
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m
THE SEXUAL ONTOLOGY OF THE PSYCHE
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10
The Sexual Ontology of the Psyche
10. 1 Conversation with God and Self
The question "Who is the third who walks always beside you? " is answered, in The Waste Land, as the sound of "maternal lamentation", as "hooded hordes swarming/ over
endless plains", by a women drawing "her black hair out tight", by aridity, all forms of "memory and desire", but desire breeding backwards into memory. Under the aspect of this aridity, by the fact that "we have existed", The Waste Land becomes a version of what Wittgenstein called "[m]emory time": "Memory time. . . is (like visual space) not a part o f the larger time, rather the specific order o f events and situations in thought // memory//. Inthistimethereis,e. g. ,nofuture"(BigTranscript? 105). 1Atimewithout a future describes a phenomenological cocoon, a bubble of the now, opposed to historical or "physical time, the order o f events in the physical world" (B ig Ttranscript, ? 105). In Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein asserts that "[w]hat we understand by the word 'language' unwinds in physical time. (As is made perfectly clear by the comparison with a mechanism. )" (PR ? 69). Eliot, however, did not imagine that language functioned only through historical or physical time, through event and action ordered as the past, present and future. The W aste Land, instead, constitutes "memory time" as a kind o f language. This language is built through a poetics that collapses images, voices, words, and phrases into a logic, a set o f relations, defined by the concept o f identity (x=y), into an admixture ofadumbrate "echoes" and "rocks" that cannot mean within the "world" because language
Notes for this chapter begin on page 458
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does not have the power to order historical time through the logic o f identity that determines what is real and true within this world.
This kind of aesthetic atomism, similar to Wittgenstein's Tractarian logical atomism, although functioning within a different linguistic domain, cannot create a future: things only signify within memory and as differentiated identities. The Waste Land pictures this confrontation between "memory time" and "physical time" as a tragic impasse.
Finnegans Wake challenges and rewrites this conception of the relation between language andtime. Joycedoesnotdenythesignificanceofidentity(astautology,forexample)in how we mean, but he attempts to enact, through his description o f our "noughttime", our no-time, night-time, experience, a poetic logic of the future. This "poetic logic", as Vico describes it, "insofar as it considers things in all the forms by which they may be signified" (NS 400), should not be understood as a theory o f meaning, but rather as an investigation of how we mean at the limits of sense. At these limits the construction of the possibility of a future (at least for us to continue reading), as an effect, articulates a what I think should
be called a theology of our "nat language" as a part of our ordinary language. Iflanguagemeansanythingwithin TheWasteLanditattachesitselftotheworld
as a form of everyday, common hysteria, something like speaking "demotic French" in London (In. 212), or asking oneselfor someone else, as ifone could no longer tell the difference between a joke and a plea, or between Shakespeare and "O O O O that Shakspeherian Rag", "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head? " And do we answer: "Yes I am alive because I have something in my head"? How do I know? Why would that make me alive? How can an emotional (or a social or historical) crisis take the
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formoftheontologicalriddles: "Whatisreal? "or"AmIalive? " Insuchconfusion,ifwe all took notice o f what has passed, we might all be surprised that "death had undone so many" as if we had been surprised by someone turning on the lights.
The narrator asks, "Shall I at least set my lands in order? ", and then a voice concludes-* these ruins shore my ruins into a shore on which I sit asking shall I at least set my lands in order? What would it mean to set one's lands in order? In the third to last line o f the poem Eliot recalls Kyd's Spanish Tragedy as a fragment "shored against my ruins" : "Why then De fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. " Eliot invests himself in these fragments as Hieronymo does when he pretends madness in order to avenge his son's murder. Hieronymowritesaplayinwhich,whileperformingoneoftheparts,hekillsthe murderer. If we must write a play, create an extraordinary context in order that we may act with a kind ofjustice (but if this is our play how can it be a justice for others? ), then morality, even o f a demented sort, requires the creation o f a supporting world, an ontology. If words are not binding then neither is the World; "These are the letters that all men refuse" in Karl Shapiro's moral "Alphabet". If one's fellow human beings seem not
to understand this alphabet, one might speak to God; Augustine asks, in his Confessions, "allow me to speak before your mercy, though I am but dust and ashes (Gen. 18: 27). Allow me to speak: for I am addressing your mercy, not a man who would laugh at me. Perhaps even you deride me (cf. Ps. 2: 4), but you will turn and have mercy on me (Jer. 12: 15)" [I. vi (9)]. Eliot reconstitutes this conversation through organizing his fragments around forms of authority--but the demand that leads to his response is not simply his gripe or his failure. The ontological riddles "what is real? " and "Am I alive? " act as the
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demands of language to act as prayer, or as the way through which we might act or will or judge or entail obligation, speak our commitment, or be entitled or enabled through
language.
In Finnegans Wake Augustine's conversation with God is replaced with a
conversation with the missing matter ofa sleeping body and ofthe world (whose? ), and with a missing consciousness and meaning (again whose? ). 2 These two axes are something like Aquinas' division o f our mind into intellect and will. The night world reveals the telos ofthese two axes to be beyond, something like what K. Rahner calls in The Foundations ofChristian Faith a "holy Mystery", the 'asymptotic term' that "presents itselfto us in the mode ofwithdrawal, ofsilence, ofdistance, ofbeing always inexpressible, so that speaking of it, if it is to make sense, always requires listening to its silence"(69, 64). But again these 'asymptotic term[s]" are always directed simultaneously towards oneself and towards the world. I think these two directions should be expressed respectively as Augustinian and
Thomist theological descriptions of the intentionality of our language. For my purposes, here and now, I will only sketch these theological descriptions as seemingly opposing limits that Joyce twists into a new proximity, a new geometry crystallized out of "soundsense"(121. 15)or"sinse"(83. 12)or"sinns"(330. 18). InAugustinewefindan allegorical distension ofthe everyday into himselfand towards God, a collapse of metaphysics into confession. Aquinas inverts the implosive force of Augustine's formulation of the relation between the human and the divine into a hierarchy of shifting sets of ontological relations and identities moving toward Absolute Actuality. Finnegans
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W ake writes out our ordinary experience o f the night as between these two points: "Is this space o f our couple o f hours too dimensional for you, temporiser? " (154. 25-26).
The Wake's syntax of nonsense, therefore, is, mirroring Ashberry's description of the temporal articulation of how we are:
"Only out of such 'perfectly useless concentration' can emerge the one thing that is useful for us" our coming to know ourselves as the necessarily inaccurate transcribers o f the life that is always on the point o f coming into being. " (67)3
The temporal physics of the Wake, the logic of succession organizing its words and grammars and stories, "under articles thirtynine ofthe reconstitution" (596. 09) (a remaking o f the world by remaking our language), under the pressure o f "sublumbunat[ion]" (607. 21) becomes metaphysics: we ask and are asked "Can you rede (since We and Thou had it out already) its world? Its the same told of all. Many. " (18. 18- 20). This question can be retranslated into, How is that which exists put together such that it is, and such that it exists within the possibility that it can mean something, or how can we read anything least o f all what we all know or tell ourselves. "Its world" is the same as "the logos of somewome [women; womb] to that base anything" (298. 20), where "base anything" suggests a logarithmic base of infinite possibility (an inversion of Aquinas' Aristotelian vision of God as Absolute Act).
The Wake, the sleeper, Joyce, and any reader still awake are all the "simpletop dumbfool". . . holy mooxed and gaping up the wrong phace as if you was seeheeing the gheist that stays foreneast" (299. 13-16). This "wrong phace," very likely the sleeper's and our own, as part of a "Theoatre" (587. 08), pursues both the "Theoccupant that
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RueandredfulandthewholeinhibitanceofNeuilands"(348. 14-16). ThepresenceofGod in his own dreadful script, recalling Augustine, that writes the inhabitants and inhibitions and repressions into whole new islands, New Ireland, new world, New Jerusalem. Such a pursuit places us all in "theoperil" (223. 28) "phac[ing]" with "[n]either a soul to be saved our a body to kicked" (298. 36) "the howtosayto itiswhatis hemustwhomust worden schall"(223. 27-28), the Wakean version o f God's "I am what I am. " Excavating this "fimdementiaUy theosophagusted" (610. 01) as a mind, the fundament o f its world, a "self- exiled in upon his ego" (189. 06), both god-like and god disgusted exposes the totality of what is through our moral stance toward the world, an investment in the relation between whatweareandwhatis. Thesubstanceofthistheology,however,isasmucha fundament than a foundation, the litterings of events, identities, phrases, desires, expectations etc. "matters that fall under the ban of our infrarational senses" (19. 36-20. 1). In this excavation I will limit myselfto "[e]xpatiat[ing] then how much times we live in" (55. 04), to exploring what is at stake in such a theology through how the possibilities of being anything are enacted through the Wakecm grammar distorting the relation between
before and after.
Augustine in his Confessions examines his soul, as that which is "aware of intervals
of time", in order to determine the measure of the present. He reduces, in a kind of infinite regression, one hundred years to a year, a year to a month, a month to a day, a day to an hour, an hour to a durationless moment no longer "divisible into past and future. " Time can only be constituted as existing as a form o f being (as real) in the present, and yet this present cannot be measured or understood through an analogy with space: "the
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present occupies no space. " Augustine has reduced what McTaggert called a B-series, a timeline o f befores and afters, to something like his A-series, or rather the existential condition o f the "now" characterized as a form o f being (and thus a durationless point). Each series constitutes different language games What do we measure when we think we are measuring or comparing longer and shorter times past, or imagining times that will be? We are on the edge of subliming our language into metaphysics. Augustine, however, follows this reasoning into the soul to reach something like Plotinus' definition o f time "as the Life ofthe Soul in movement as it passes from one stage ofact or experience to another"[3. 7. 11], If we reimagine the soul as our form of life and expand experience into the complex interactions between language games this is not unlike how time is exposed in
Wittgenstein's PhilosophicalInvestigations. Because ofhis separation between the grammatical and the psychological, however, time is not hypostasized into a metaphysical category. 4 For Augustine, if time is the measure o f "the present consciousness, not the stream of past events which have caused it" (Xl. xxix [39]), then the way in and through which we articulate time in our everyday practices constructs our relation with the world and its passing as our conscious mind.
Time gets broken into complex distensions of expectation, attention and remembrance. This distension, a version of which is at work in the interaction between language games in Investigations, fragments the mind, so that Augustine is always faced with losing himself:
. . . I am scattered in times whose order I do not understand. The storms of incoherent events tear to pieces my thoughts, the inmost entrails of my soul, until
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that day when, purified and molten by the fire ofyour love, I flow together to
merge into you. (XI. xxxi [41])
Joyce transforms and inverts this plea to God for integration into a riddle o f being and remaining in what he calls "sollemn nupitalism". "Sollemn" contains the roots "Soil" and "Sol", which mean respectively to make foul, defile, and the sun united as the foul and the sublime as the everyday 'soul'. What Augustine calls the "terror and love" of God's word and the distension o f the self as time becomes for Joyce the "Pluralbilities" o f "the one subtrance o f a streamsbecoming" (FW597. 07-08). Thus we can enter into Joyce's construction of our moral and existential disintegration as and mapped into the night through two versions of what he calls "the first riddle of the universe":
the first riddle ofthe universe: asking, when is a man not a man? . . --all give up? ; when he is a . . . Sham (170. 3-24).
The first and last rittlerattle o f the anniverse; when is a nam nought a nam whenas it is a. Watch! (607. 10-12).
"Whenas",notwhereas, this"nam",aninvertedman,aname,an"Iamnot"inarchaic English, a sin in Cornish, "time" ("an am") and "life" or "soul" ("anam") in Irish, is a watch, ticking away this last rittlerattle of "anniverse". The soul and time are not only a watch, in this both a rhythm and a dumbshow, but the negation and fragmentation o f our being human into versions of ourselves, of ourselves a sham (originally a fraudulent trick, and therefore an imposture cognate with shame, both related to the Gothic ga-hamon, to dress [to cover oneself]). This is as if someone becomes themselves a whim, (Old Norse) "to let one's eyes wander" from oneself. Finnegans Wake makes sham and whim cognate,
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or rather they both mark the distensions of "a nam" along a single axis in two directions. One becomes a whim as part o f a whole, from the perspective o f God, as one becomes ones own writing, and thus read as if without depth, or a sham in the interactions with others and with oneself--one's other shams.
The Wake's deconstruction of reality is the simultaneous destruction of identity and the connections between "things," in a reality which is "moving and changing every part of the time"(l 18. 22). The words o f the Wake lose their source and their end, and exist as constant becomings of meaning, which never coalesce into a determinate identity of meaning. Thus,
-Which was said by whem to whom?
--It wham. But whim I can't remember. --Fantsy! funtasyonfantasy,amnaesfintasies! (493. 16-18)
The first question begins by asking for the identity of a particular word: it asks "which," implying a single word among many. The next part o f the question, "by whem," is derived from "when" and the German "wem," meaning 'whom". Thus, "by whem to whom" asks for the identity of the speaker and the person spoken to, and for the time at which the word was spoken. This Word lacks any relationship to time or being, for the word is only fantasy,fancy. Oritis"Vanitas,vanitasvanitatum,omnisvanitias.
