) by meteoromancy and
linguified
heissrohgin" (FW228.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
I find thismixinginTheWasteLandoperatic.
Howisthisenactmentofstaying(notreallya stasis) or lingering or dwelling through the fragments different from the astonishment of soul Kierkegaard describes as an effect of Opera?
Certainly the power of The Waste Land is not the "exuberant gaiety" that is the power o f Don Giovanni.
This gaiety is the expression of"his voice, the voice ofthe sensuous" (96).
How would we describe the
voices in The Waste Land?
Heidegger leaves us in a world of things, with neither people nor the scientific
logic with which to build these things into people. This is something like the world in which Tristan finds himself in The Waste Land. Heidegger wants to get to the organic coherence of the world as a form of life that can speak 'weilen' with the ontological force that he needs to reconstitute a particular thing into staying, dwelling, being the world, avoiding the traditional attempts to link particulars and universals (examples, exemplars, forms, versions, reflections, and so on). Heidegger's romanticism remains akin to Schlegel's in his attempt to reconstruct a semantics with ontological force. His attempt, however, blocks offany questioning ofthe giveness ofthe world (like Wittgenstein, he
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wants to disconnect 'how the world is' form "what is higher. God does not reveal himself intheworld'(TLP6. 432);Heideggerbothbeforeandafterhisturn("dieKehre") rejects this kind o f transcendence: Wittgenstein and Heidegger always had alien views concerning logic. What is common between them, however, is not just their appeal to the ordinary and to the grammar of language (albeit in different ways) but their failure to understand the depth of questions about how the world is). For Eliot some possible world speaks 'verwielen' and from this speaking he must construct its semantics, in this case the semantics o f thunder.
What is created in an by The Waste Lcmdl
The attempt to justify the poetry results in an appeal to and requires the constructionofakindoftheoryofmind. Whythisisremainsamystery. Ifmindsfunction within an ontological universe described by science, by strict laws describing a totality of possibilities, then these constructions have force only in so far as they articulate themselves in relation to such an ontology. When Eliot deciphers "What The Thunder Said" as "The spoke the thunder/ DA," the etymological force o f DA, and its inclusion in
Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata (control) does not get taken up into mythological or theological promises or stories separate from the physics of thunderstorms and the indifference of these natural processes to our concerns, understanding, and meanings. Howdoesitgettakenup? Orhowarewetakenupbyit?
Is this thunder the voice of our beginning as human beings, or our end? Vico and, through him, Joyce settled thunder at the beginning of humanity, driving our ancestors
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into caves and into society. From our havens listening toward heaven, our "forebears" (FW572. 06) mimicked onomatpoetically thunder into language:
The first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightening bolts and thunderclaps were signs make to them by Jove; whence from m o , to make a sign, can numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of ove. The science o f language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science o f the language o f the gods. (NS379)
The world requires divination, and thus "Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the gentile world [721, 925]" (NS381). Divination, as the form of what Vico calls "poetic metaphysics," "seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modificationsofthemindofhimwhomediatesit"(NS364). Themythicconsciousnessis
gripped by a kind o f idealism that resists the conscious articulation o f the question "Are the signs I see in the world actually in the world or a function o f my interpretations? "
"Because o f the indefinite nature o f the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himselfthe measure of all things" (NS120). What is the nature of this ignorance? In this case it is the ignorance attending finding ourselves fragments (represented or acted out in our ignorance of the meaning of The Waste Land). Eliot's ignorance is not directed at the world and its workings but toward God and the
justificationoftheworld. ThisisagainakintoVico'sdescriptionofpoeticmetaphysics:
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So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendof i t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendofit omnia). . . . . . . . . for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS405)
How do we extend our mind into our mind? The Waste Land requires us to remark our ignorance of the significance or nature of our own believing and of our visions as self- reflexive ignorance: our ignorance of our ignorance.
Vico explicitly grounds the poetic and the mythic in the same logic, or poetic wisdom. Eliot's project in The Waste Land is ostensibly the same (or similar). What is the poetic logic Eliot uses to expose the mutual relation between poetry and myth? (This is another way o f asking what does the poem create? ). I do not want to explore this question byexaminingEliot'suseofmythorhisuseanddistortionsofquotations. Vicooffersa way into a more interesting question about how we enter into the correlation (an origin) between language and consciousness. If Vico's history is too obscure, then, at least, his argument that human consciousness derived from mythical consciousness and that this mythical stance toward the world articulates a poetic metaphysics places the logic of origins within the logic of coherence determining language as a language, a consciousness as a consciousness, or a mind as a mind. These logics of origin and coherence are akin to
Heidegger's configuration of the thing as the staying of the quadrature. The logic of origin and coherence in The Waste Land function as the aesthetics (or justification) of
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fragmentation within the poem. Eliot's aesthetics o f fragmentation is the poetic enactment of the Sibyl's condition described in the poem's epigraph. Such an aesthetics attempts to organize language, consciousness, and the world within and around the inhabitation o f the concept o f identity represented (or enacted) by the Sibyl.
Unlike Vico and Joyce, Eliot does not ground the speaking o f the thunder in the "first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts" (NS374). Eliot does not give us a complete thunder language, nor the integrated language or form o f life evolved, evolving and expressing the infrarational mind of someone, but rather the grammatical (the linguistic forms, examples, usages, bits) limits between thunder language(s) and the minds and times and societies in which they made sense, between the theology of God's language
and the insensate forms o f nature's indifference to make our kind o f sense. offers different kinds o f education: an incarnation versus T&ks(h*,xxj:
Then spoke the thunder DA
Datta: what have we given?
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
The thunder
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"DA/Dattat" if heardfrom the beginning of time or humanity pretends to describe the transformation of a sound into a phoneme and then into a ritual language. If heard as a beginning, "D A . . D A . . DA" decomposes our language back into phonemes and then into exclamation and then noise. Even if someone spoke Sanskrit fluently "Datta," "Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" sound outside o f any ordinary language game, not with philosophical weight but with religious mass. This language is alien. It must mean, but no one can understand it like they might 'this is my house. ' It might mean, however, 'this is my house. ' The order of sounds that makes a language is the same order of sounds that makes thunder. This is true even if all we can understand by thunder is its physical causes. Science speaks the order of the universe.
What can this language mean against physics?
Thunder disturbs the universe.
It disturbs us with a question: "Datta: what have we given? " To whom? we ask
back. Who is this 'we'? The thunder speaks to me not because it is a language but because it threatens me into a 'we'. What have I given to you? The thunder can turn 'you' into an 'us'. If we mimicked thunder to create language, this means we formed mirrors through which we could see ourselves as both individuals and as human beings. Thunder-reflection is self-reflection.
The demands of this 'we' can be taken up in friendship as it is in the line following "Datta . "My friend, blood shaking my heart. " At night or when we turn our ears toward ourselves the blood sounds our own thunder, shaking us into life as much as the thunder into fear: 'My friend, my heart in my chest, and in our language as I write myself
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into concepts, and into the world, my friend, as passions circulate amongst us. ' What kind o f language is this?
We reach the foundation of who 'we' are:
By this, and this alone, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
By what alone have we existed? By giving or not giving? By friendship or blood or daring and surrender? This "By this" cannot be found in descriptions after the fact, or in memories, in further representations edited even in our own minds, or in our own giving of things and money within the law, under the auspices of order and definition, or in the places and spaces we possessed. Either we do not know what 'exist' means here, or we do not know giving, friendship, blood, daring, or surrender.
Do we mistake the unrepresentable for the inexpressible? or for our privacy? The demand to sympathize (Dayadhvam) is ironically answered by a picture of solipsism, "each in his prison. " The pain I feel is my pain and not yours, but 'my pain' and your response to my pain is not determined by either my knowledge o f it (I experience it, or in other words, I pain: pain! ) or your knowledge ofthe truth ofmy pain. You respond to my expressionorthemanifestationsofmypain. Wittgensteinremarks,
What makes it so plausible to say that it [the pain] is not the body? --Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say
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so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one
looks into his face. (PI? 286)
I can, however, fall into absurdity and find it not plausible to acknowledge the other as human. Peoplehavebeenknowntofallintoparts,bothinPetrarchianpoeticloveblazons andinAliceinWonderlanddistortionsandeverynight,asleep. Asleeponeloses ontologicalaccesstoone'sface. Inpartialanswertooneofmyinitialquestions,'whatis being created? ', I can answer "Faces are not being created, nor even found. ' The language of The Waste Land is attached to human beings through a collection of names: Marie, Madame Sosostris, Phoenician Sailor, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, Mrs. Equitone, Saint Mary Woolnoth, Philomel, Stetson, Lil, Albert, Bill, Lou, May, Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, Tiresias, Elizabeth I, Leicester, Phlebas, and Hieronymo. Not all of these names are names o f human beings who had once lived. Is there any significance in
replacing the face with a name? It in effect turns all names into pronouns.
These words do not speak in the context o f god: the voices are extracted from
everydaylife. Itistheordinarywhichbordersonhysteria. ThisisEliot'stransformation of a feminine voice into a parody ofMozart's Queen ofthe Night:
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think. " (Ins. l 11-114)
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Hysteria attaches one's nerves to oneself. These "nerves" are a physical synecdoche for a mental condition, a hysteria played out against human indifference and uncaring and alienation within a marriage. The same hysteria can stay a person in a disintegrating relationship: "my nerves are bad . . . stay with me. " (This is one way o f 'staying' the world inalanguageoflove. ItisoneoftheconclusionsofEliotthatsuch'staying'isdamning). The husband here has lost or renounced his voice (a sibyl-like diminishment); he functions in these lines as a metaphysical 'I', a limit determining the scope of but not included within the world, dominated by the women's speaking. But the absent husband's implicit authorial position (maybe as bricoleur) means he ventriloquizes her speaking, and she
ventriloquizes his soul (the negative outlines o f his face sketched in his absence). Catherine Clement, in her book on Opera, asks about what she understands as patriarchal fear: "What haste, what hatred drives them to reduce woman to her image? " (28). The image of women in The Waste Land is described by speaking. Is the image of the diva, her body,herface,hersinging,orhervoice? InTheWasteLandoneoftheimagesdescribing thelimitbetween silenceandsong(whichisitselfthelimitbetweensilenceandspeech) and between desire and possession is female hair:
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread our in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)
Do we imagine this scene parodies lightening and thunder? Parody requires judgment, enacting mimicry within a structure ofvalues. To suggest that parody is the origin of
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language is to mock the question o f origin when it is understood as answerable by something like parody. Joyce's use o f Vico's stages o f history (including the theory that speech imitates thunder) suggests exactly this kind o f parody, transforming putative origins into limits. (What motivates parody? a tool in what game? A chimpanzee will mimic other chimps and humans, but why not parody them? )
Is Eliot pursuing a similar project of transforming origins into limits? Maybe. There is at least a confusion between parodies and rumors:
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
What are "aethereal rumours"? They are night-words, but aethereal words can be from Godandtherumorspromises. Buttheserumorsre-animate(revive)ifonlyforamoment, the fragmented body o f Coriolanus. By what does Coriolanus exist? At night we lose our body. We might find ourselves in any body. We can find ourselves as a we-body, as "the They" .
Thisisagainpartoftheinstabilityofpronouns. TheserumorsinFinnegansWake (a "foull subustioned mullmud"; Sebastian Melmoth, one o f Wilde's masks and, therefore, an expression of and a disguise against rumor or exposure [228. 32]) are "Allwhile,. . . , preying in his mind, son o f Everallin, within himself, he swure" (228. 03-04). Some 'he' swore and was sure that he was who he was (which could be anyone). Recalling Stephen inPortrait ofthe Artist as a YoungMan, or Joyce, himself) a young man, the dreamer (maybe here thinking through HCE) reincorporates himself in the possibility o f leaving
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himselfbehind by leaving the (or a) world behind, remembering or traveling or writing or sleeping:
He would split. He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte. . . He take skiff come first dagrene day overwide tumbler, rough and dark, till when bow of the shower show of the bower with three shirts and a wind, pogoda permettant, crookolevante, the bruce, the coriolano and the ignacio. (FW228. 05-11)
In 'his' splitting and flight, weather permitting (R. pogoda, 'weather'), in a search for wisdom or escape from the world (permanent pagoda), God willing (Deo volente), fleeing debt (crook and levant), 'he' becomes Robert Bruce, Coriolanus, and St. Ignatius Loyola; or rather he is the qualities these names describe if they become adjectives (or as if the adjectives become a single name or description o f his being in this flight, while reading maybe): Robert Bruce, silence; Coriolanus, exile; and St. Ignatius, cunning.
This flight or movement away and towards marks subjective historical time, fragmentingtheworldandconstitutingatransportable'I'betweenthefragments. This 'he' is "recorporated, (prunty!
) by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin" (FW228. 20-
1). This mysterious "meteoromancy" suggests a divination through reading meteors, a reading of chance streaks, instead of stable stars (although there is some regularity in meteor showers, there is no regularity in any particular meteor which bums away in the atmosphere). Byreadingthechancefireworksoftheskyweallegorizeourselvesasboth unstable and unique. Reincorporating, in this case, proceeds not only through meteoromancy, but through "linguified heissrohgin," on first reading another description of the Wake as a linguified language of rogue/roving names (G. heifieri). The collapse of
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Roh (G. raw) and heifi^G. hot), the raw and the cooked, as one kind of human limit between kinds o f societies, between humans and animals, in the confusion o f names (heissrohgin; and one's personal investment o f oneself in identities, language games, relationships, and so on) describes the action o f recorporation as a self-interpretation. To be "recorporated, (prunty! ) by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin" means to gain formasanegativespace, orratherasthesubjunctivenexusofthesetofpossibilities describing our stances toward the future and within language. Meteoromancy, therefore, is the divination o f the ephemeral, the generation o f predictive interpretations, through and as the instability o f identity (names and faces) enacted through the possibilities o f language which constitutes, in effect, any pronoun.
Two of the related figures for this kind of self-interpretation in The Waste Land is a dismemberment into parts (a human hand or God's hand) and navigation:
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
"Damyata" means 'control,' but whose over what or whom? The instability of the 'ground' o f the undrinkable sea replaces the stasis o f the drought and desert. And land has become a boat over which some expert hand has control, a dismembered hand controlling a dismembered land (a boat). The mind separated into a prison but answered by sympathy. This is a hand not attached to a person. It could be anyone's. The boat, a floating jug, "responded/ Gaily," as if alive, with quickness, as if not dead, animated by the
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controlling expert hand. But whose hand? This boat scene is allegorized into a scene of love? lust? caring? power?
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
Someone's heart could respond like a boat, and in this it could describe human love in the daring of surrender or the exaltation of control or love of God, the 'your' becoming a hypothetical 'thou' to God's 'I'. The hand like those attacking the blindfolded Christ can be anyone's. The skill to control a boat, should one find water, can become someone's through education. This skill is a quality, but ofwhose hands? The 'we' includes "your heart" and some "hands. " "Your heart" is mock essence and love of what is always subjectively vorhanden, marking something as human, but without that which is to be marked. This 'we' cannot attach itself to persons.
The body is remade into an 'I' casting between the logic of aridity and stones and a further remaking of these fragments into order (this logic of aridity will generate four subjunctive worlds):
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my hands in order?
How would this ordering change the world? What kind of question is this? Some 'I' asks himself or herself'if I should act or enact an order (determined how? ) on the lands that form my world? ' Should I refit exactly these words into a world? Why exactly do these
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things not make a world for me? ' A science ofthe mind bom our ofwhat Vico called ignorance, but Freud called the unconscious, and what we respond to at time as intentionality, what Brentano called the essentially mental, or which Wittgenstein called the grammatical (as the limit organizing our negotiations between the psychological and the physical) understands the form o f this not as an analogue for the identity o f things, the position Heidegger attacks, but as the analogue for the structures o f the mind:
The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means o f reflection.
This axiom gives us the universal principle o f etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and the properties of bodies to signify the institutions o f the mind and spirit.
(NS236-37)
Bishop argues that Joyce develops this insight into the practice of "an extended 'abnihilization ofthe eytm' throughout the Wake (353. 22 [I. ab nihilo, 'from nothing'])" in which he "shows the body lying everywhere under the surface of language (L. lingua, 'tongue'])" (198).
Finnegans Wake and The Waste Land enact different kinds of crucifixion. Finnegans Wake crucifies God through his embodiment or incarnation as human: this is the crucifixion ofsleep, the realization ofthe limits ofthe body, that allows for or opens up the possibilities of mind or spirit that we interpret as dreams or as soul. The Waste Land crucifies human beings, as if we were already asleep: a crucifixion of vision, or
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dreams themselves. Crucifixion can seem like standing in air. Air is the only element missing (or diminished) in The Waste Land: we are buried in earth, burning burning in fire, drowning in water. What Karl Barth takes as "the positive relation between God and man", Eliot takes as the demand the world makes on us, to ask, what Barth asserts: "The righteousness of God is our standing-place in the air--that is to say, where there is no human possibility of standing- whose foundations are laid by God Himselfand supported by Him only" (The Epistle to the Romans, iii. 21). How do we stand "before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world to time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up"? (iii. 21). Where do we stand when we ask "Mein Irisch Kind,/ Wo weilest du? " In a subjunctiveAfterAfterAfter. PhlebasthePhoenicianhasdrowned,daringtosurrenderto despair and falling from his ship, a mock Fisher King and Christ. . He has performed the
final act of dissolution, which the Sibyl desires but cannot consummate.
The first stanza o f "What The Thunder Said" describes Jesus' imprisonment and
his death from the perspective o f those watching it, those remaining in the physical, material world, where death is not transformation but loss:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation Ofthunder of spring over distant mountains
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He who was living is now dead.
This succession o f "after" clauses, although sounding paratactic, grammatically invoke and then fail to complete a logically conditioned temporal succession of"after this, then that. " "After" combines the force o f the conditional "i f with a claim not simply o f logical inevitability, but o f temporal order: o f intention ("after this, I will") or historical fact (after this, that happened") or rather awkwardly a kind of modal present ("after that, I do this"). What is done or will be done or was done after the torchlight is repressed until after the frostysilencewhoseafterisrepresseduntilaftertheagony. Eachoftheseantecedentsas part of a temporal sequence are markers in time, taking the place of a subject, an T (thus in the preceding sentence the ease by which I can say "the frosty silence whose 'after"'). The consequent to the "after X" grammatically requires a temporal marker, for example,
"After the torchlight, the shouting and the crying began. " (This would not be required if the consequent included a human subject, as in "after the frosty silence, Joe spoke. " Time markers act as subjects, and subjects organize and mark the present, and thus determine what counts as after and what before. ) A temporal marker could be replaced by a preposition chaining this event (the shouting and crying) to another. But such a preposition is missing as well. The fragmentation ofthe paratactic 'after's', the fragmentation oftemporal and causal linearity, is extended back into the logic o f'after' (the temporal B-series, historical time or physical time, measured time) dissolving the temporal force o f 'after' into a triply asserted pause. Language is turned into metaphysics by turning the psychological fears ofPrufrock into an ontological description ofthe collapse oftemporal succession and grammatical structure into waiting.
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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
I do not mean that the metaphysics of The Waste Landjustifies any kind of answer to this question (not even the authority oftradition). Rather it justifies the question. ( For Albert the Great this would be what would determine the poem as literature and not philosophy, which can articulate answers. It is implicit within Aquinas' theology that neither philosophy nor theology can give definitive answers, but rather reformulate the possibilities answering and determining the questions we ask. )
How does one turn descriptions into questions? After After After x, y, and z, The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
O f thunder o f spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead.
"The crying" could be followed by any number o f prepositions, linking "the CTying" logically with the "[pjrison and palace and reverberation: cryingfor: over the loss and suffering of Christ or our own dying (self-pity); crying in: the Sibyl in her prison or us in ours caught in solipsism or in crimes and sins or glories and power in palaces; crying as: becoming the limits o f our lives, the walls, or the physics o f our own noises or voices [reverberating]; crying by, with, on, etc. : translating our emotions and outbursts toward objects and translating these back toward our concerns. The possibilities, and the very
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suggestiveness of our prepositional expectation is caught up by the beginning "O f thunder" in the succeeding line: "The shouting and the crying . . . Of thunder of spring over distant mountains". Consequently, we are (or at least I am) tempted to transpose this backwards and read the line as 'The shouting and the crying of prison and palace and reverberation. ' Things cry here, physics cries and shouts. This'prison and palace foreshadows the interpretation ofthe third word ofThunder-speech:
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only We think o f the key, each in his prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
Eliot casts the prison as an image for our solipsism.
idealism. Thethunderorthesublimedescribesormarksthelimitsbetweenthe phenomenalandthenoumenal,andinthismarkingdissolvestheworld. Theworld remains as a reality beyond, but other minds exist beyond our knowing. Eliot in the notes quotes Bradley:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. Ineithercasemyexperiencefallswithinmyowncircle,acircleclosed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.
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This is the irony of some kinds of
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Bradley disconnects both external and internal sensations from their meaning, which would bring in language and thus the biological, social, historical context and identity (what Wittgenstein calls our form of life) organizing these sensations as sensations. Eliot uses Bradley as a light to both blind and illuminate. He invokes other mind skepticism and traces a limit (a circle, a prison, a palace) between the self and knowing and being known byothers. Thisismoreofadistractionthanitisuseful. Bradleyalsodigsamoatbetween sensations and meanings (in the way Eliot quotes him). In reading The Waste Land it is the question 'What does it mean? ' that continually forces itself upon us, before the question 'Do we know Eliot? ' or 'Does anyone know us? ' These questions become more legitimately, 'Does The Waste Land know or describe or understand us? or we it? ' This is
the disjunction that the Sibyl finds herselfin: she still experiences our world but it is not her world, and thus her experience is nonsense.
I f we extract the nonsense, or the prepositionless prisons and palaces, which might describe ourselves, our condition, or our world, then we are left with something like: "after the torchlight, the frosty silence, the agony, the shouting and the crying ofthunder of spring over distant mountains, He who was living is now dead. . . " The grammar recovers part o f its temporal logic, or rather language gains a new temporal metaphor, a new way of determining the priority of relations within and through which the meaning of sentences map the ontological rules o f succession. We are offered a temporal algorithm:
He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.
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With these lines we have entered that interval in time between death (Good Friday) and resurrection (Easter). Phlebas is dead, the old moment has passed, yet we have not re- entered the next moment. This "He who is dead" could be some particular person, marked in the poem as Phlebas, or Christ, or Tiresias, or someone we know, or even ourselves. Thesplittingbetweenthirdpersonsingular'He'andfirstpersonplural'We,' between dead and dying, divides the difference between being an object, third person- dead, and being alive, our first person-dying together. 'Weilen' is translated into patience,
except this 'staying' has become a form o f dying.
9. 2 On the road to objecthood
What is this dying? The gift o f water can become a jug, or the jug can become a worldandthewateracanopy. Eliotcallsthis"DeathByWater":
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry o f gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.
A current under the sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
0 you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
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(underlines added)
In this picture o f being human, identity seems to arise out o f the question 'what am I such that I can die? ' McCulloch's question, "what is man that he can know number? ", under the pressure of this logic could be answered with 'I am that whose shelter is or who is sheltered [this question cannot get behind this distinction] by number. ' But this answer is incomplete without knowing what number delimits from within and makes visible as such.
Is number a concept like death? Number might describe the limit o f quality, or qualia, phenomenal experience. Our counting, therefore, even counting ourselves as one, as part o f a sum o f people, makes present the qualities we experience as a person through which we also describe others. How do we count ourselves as being addressed by any poem, text or word?
Wecanenterapassagethroughitsverbs. Thepressureagainstformandnumber inPhlebas'deathpassagemovesthroughtheverbs. Phlebasforgot: Phlebasacts,but acts against himself(he remains Phlebas to us but he has forgotten, our personification of the dead), reanimated enough so that the loss ofthe world is his loss. In this loss of memory Phlebas, the Phoenician trader, loses the predicative use o f 'loss' in relation to 'profit'. The sea picked his bones: The world acts against Phlebas' body. The peristalsis of profit and loss that he forgot is picked up in the next stanza in his own rising and falling, which also calls back the "deep sea swell. " Phlebas, as Phlebas, is now nested not within his body but in this periodicity (semantically uniform and continuous, if not in the movement o f real waves). "As he rose and fell" Phlebas' identity, what he is, collapses into the verb "passed. " He does not act, even through the negation o f his forgetting, but
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becomescoextensivewithaparticulartemporalseries: "Hepassedthestagesofhisage and youth/ Entering the whirlpool. " Phlebas' personal regression, from age to youth, reverses the fate o f the Sibyl. Can we call this death? The purity o f the burning, the transcendent promise o f "O Lord Thou pluckest me out" closing "The Fire Sermon" opens in this drowning the "river's tent" that began "The Fire Sermon. " Beneath the absence of the "empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette boxes, cigarette ends/ Or other testimony of summer nights" Phlebas passes (this 'passing' is not a living) his life. Nested in world-time and passed through his end to his beginning,
Phlebas enters, and is further nested within at least an image o f absolute movement, "the whirlpool. " Instead of entering into either hell or climbing unto paradise with Beatrice, Eliot invokes Dante by translating both the comedy into a failed harrowing and Beatrice into symbolic metaphysics, into the water itself, as both the context and guide, or at laest as the means of change. To enter the whirlpool as if the subject of an episode of This Is Your Life! is to enter "the womb ofthe sea. " The ocean represents a characteristically feminine dynamic creative principle, through which both death and resurrection are enacted.
Although this symbolic designation is clear in The Waste Land, Eliot specifically draws this picture in "Ash Wednesday":
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit o f the fountain, spirit o f the garden. . .
Sister, mother
And spirit ofthe river, spirit ofthe sea,
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Suffer me not to be separated.
The sea and the creative dynamic it represents, opposes the process o f differentiation and identification: "suffer me not to be separated. " The waters o f the Thames listen, in The Waste Land, with maternal silence: "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. "
Buttheydonotspeak,norcanPhlebas. WecanfollowPhlebastothewhirlpool but not into it. We are not dead and have not forgot; we are addressed and entreated to "consider" :
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Phlebas, who is now dead but was once like you, marks, as does any name, the limit of finititude. Could this, can this, does this force us into an existential crisis, into dread? If not, then what? If we resist our inclusion within the initial two categories of Gentile or Jew are we immune from the dread of the vision? If we lose faith, then how do we see Phlebas? If we can read the symbolic links that structure the poem with mythic force then are we not already reading as Gentile or Jew, as a function even of our difference from thesefaiths? TheGentileandJewatleastwerehandsomeandtallasPhlebas. Infactthe particularity o f the equation 'either G or J is like P who died' forces us to understand this, regardless of whether we hear the poem as addressed to us, as an equation describing human kind. This ritual and its obscurity make it impossible for us to read this from within as if we, ourselves, made this claim about Phlebas. In this way we are both inside and outside ofthe poem.
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We turn the wheel oftime, or the wheel of fate, or the wheel of our bicycle as we movethroughtheworld. Thisturningmimicsboththecircleofthewhirlpoolandthe periodicity ofthe rise and fall ofthe sea, and like profit and loss is not predicated of something. But unlike any ofthese previous clocks, we are the "human engine" ofthis time, "like a taxi throbbing waiting" (ln. 217) for the engine o f the world to push us into the future. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which can be counted.
voices in The Waste Land?
Heidegger leaves us in a world of things, with neither people nor the scientific
logic with which to build these things into people. This is something like the world in which Tristan finds himself in The Waste Land. Heidegger wants to get to the organic coherence of the world as a form of life that can speak 'weilen' with the ontological force that he needs to reconstitute a particular thing into staying, dwelling, being the world, avoiding the traditional attempts to link particulars and universals (examples, exemplars, forms, versions, reflections, and so on). Heidegger's romanticism remains akin to Schlegel's in his attempt to reconstruct a semantics with ontological force. His attempt, however, blocks offany questioning ofthe giveness ofthe world (like Wittgenstein, he
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wants to disconnect 'how the world is' form "what is higher. God does not reveal himself intheworld'(TLP6. 432);Heideggerbothbeforeandafterhisturn("dieKehre") rejects this kind o f transcendence: Wittgenstein and Heidegger always had alien views concerning logic. What is common between them, however, is not just their appeal to the ordinary and to the grammar of language (albeit in different ways) but their failure to understand the depth of questions about how the world is). For Eliot some possible world speaks 'verwielen' and from this speaking he must construct its semantics, in this case the semantics o f thunder.
What is created in an by The Waste Lcmdl
The attempt to justify the poetry results in an appeal to and requires the constructionofakindoftheoryofmind. Whythisisremainsamystery. Ifmindsfunction within an ontological universe described by science, by strict laws describing a totality of possibilities, then these constructions have force only in so far as they articulate themselves in relation to such an ontology. When Eliot deciphers "What The Thunder Said" as "The spoke the thunder/ DA," the etymological force o f DA, and its inclusion in
Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata (control) does not get taken up into mythological or theological promises or stories separate from the physics of thunderstorms and the indifference of these natural processes to our concerns, understanding, and meanings. Howdoesitgettakenup? Orhowarewetakenupbyit?
Is this thunder the voice of our beginning as human beings, or our end? Vico and, through him, Joyce settled thunder at the beginning of humanity, driving our ancestors
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into caves and into society. From our havens listening toward heaven, our "forebears" (FW572. 06) mimicked onomatpoetically thunder into language:
The first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightening bolts and thunderclaps were signs make to them by Jove; whence from m o , to make a sign, can numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of ove. The science o f language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science o f the language o f the gods. (NS379)
The world requires divination, and thus "Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the gentile world [721, 925]" (NS381). Divination, as the form of what Vico calls "poetic metaphysics," "seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modificationsofthemindofhimwhomediatesit"(NS364). Themythicconsciousnessis
gripped by a kind o f idealism that resists the conscious articulation o f the question "Are the signs I see in the world actually in the world or a function o f my interpretations? "
"Because o f the indefinite nature o f the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himselfthe measure of all things" (NS120). What is the nature of this ignorance? In this case it is the ignorance attending finding ourselves fragments (represented or acted out in our ignorance of the meaning of The Waste Land). Eliot's ignorance is not directed at the world and its workings but toward God and the
justificationoftheworld. ThisisagainakintoVico'sdescriptionofpoeticmetaphysics:
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So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendof i t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendofit omnia). . . . . . . . . for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS405)
How do we extend our mind into our mind? The Waste Land requires us to remark our ignorance of the significance or nature of our own believing and of our visions as self- reflexive ignorance: our ignorance of our ignorance.
Vico explicitly grounds the poetic and the mythic in the same logic, or poetic wisdom. Eliot's project in The Waste Land is ostensibly the same (or similar). What is the poetic logic Eliot uses to expose the mutual relation between poetry and myth? (This is another way o f asking what does the poem create? ). I do not want to explore this question byexaminingEliot'suseofmythorhisuseanddistortionsofquotations. Vicooffersa way into a more interesting question about how we enter into the correlation (an origin) between language and consciousness. If Vico's history is too obscure, then, at least, his argument that human consciousness derived from mythical consciousness and that this mythical stance toward the world articulates a poetic metaphysics places the logic of origins within the logic of coherence determining language as a language, a consciousness as a consciousness, or a mind as a mind. These logics of origin and coherence are akin to
Heidegger's configuration of the thing as the staying of the quadrature. The logic of origin and coherence in The Waste Land function as the aesthetics (or justification) of
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fragmentation within the poem. Eliot's aesthetics o f fragmentation is the poetic enactment of the Sibyl's condition described in the poem's epigraph. Such an aesthetics attempts to organize language, consciousness, and the world within and around the inhabitation o f the concept o f identity represented (or enacted) by the Sibyl.
Unlike Vico and Joyce, Eliot does not ground the speaking o f the thunder in the "first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts" (NS374). Eliot does not give us a complete thunder language, nor the integrated language or form o f life evolved, evolving and expressing the infrarational mind of someone, but rather the grammatical (the linguistic forms, examples, usages, bits) limits between thunder language(s) and the minds and times and societies in which they made sense, between the theology of God's language
and the insensate forms o f nature's indifference to make our kind o f sense. offers different kinds o f education: an incarnation versus T&ks(h*,xxj:
Then spoke the thunder DA
Datta: what have we given?
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
The thunder
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"DA/Dattat" if heardfrom the beginning of time or humanity pretends to describe the transformation of a sound into a phoneme and then into a ritual language. If heard as a beginning, "D A . . D A . . DA" decomposes our language back into phonemes and then into exclamation and then noise. Even if someone spoke Sanskrit fluently "Datta," "Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" sound outside o f any ordinary language game, not with philosophical weight but with religious mass. This language is alien. It must mean, but no one can understand it like they might 'this is my house. ' It might mean, however, 'this is my house. ' The order of sounds that makes a language is the same order of sounds that makes thunder. This is true even if all we can understand by thunder is its physical causes. Science speaks the order of the universe.
What can this language mean against physics?
Thunder disturbs the universe.
It disturbs us with a question: "Datta: what have we given? " To whom? we ask
back. Who is this 'we'? The thunder speaks to me not because it is a language but because it threatens me into a 'we'. What have I given to you? The thunder can turn 'you' into an 'us'. If we mimicked thunder to create language, this means we formed mirrors through which we could see ourselves as both individuals and as human beings. Thunder-reflection is self-reflection.
The demands of this 'we' can be taken up in friendship as it is in the line following "Datta . "My friend, blood shaking my heart. " At night or when we turn our ears toward ourselves the blood sounds our own thunder, shaking us into life as much as the thunder into fear: 'My friend, my heart in my chest, and in our language as I write myself
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into concepts, and into the world, my friend, as passions circulate amongst us. ' What kind o f language is this?
We reach the foundation of who 'we' are:
By this, and this alone, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
By what alone have we existed? By giving or not giving? By friendship or blood or daring and surrender? This "By this" cannot be found in descriptions after the fact, or in memories, in further representations edited even in our own minds, or in our own giving of things and money within the law, under the auspices of order and definition, or in the places and spaces we possessed. Either we do not know what 'exist' means here, or we do not know giving, friendship, blood, daring, or surrender.
Do we mistake the unrepresentable for the inexpressible? or for our privacy? The demand to sympathize (Dayadhvam) is ironically answered by a picture of solipsism, "each in his prison. " The pain I feel is my pain and not yours, but 'my pain' and your response to my pain is not determined by either my knowledge o f it (I experience it, or in other words, I pain: pain! ) or your knowledge ofthe truth ofmy pain. You respond to my expressionorthemanifestationsofmypain. Wittgensteinremarks,
What makes it so plausible to say that it [the pain] is not the body? --Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say
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so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one
looks into his face. (PI? 286)
I can, however, fall into absurdity and find it not plausible to acknowledge the other as human. Peoplehavebeenknowntofallintoparts,bothinPetrarchianpoeticloveblazons andinAliceinWonderlanddistortionsandeverynight,asleep. Asleeponeloses ontologicalaccesstoone'sface. Inpartialanswertooneofmyinitialquestions,'whatis being created? ', I can answer "Faces are not being created, nor even found. ' The language of The Waste Land is attached to human beings through a collection of names: Marie, Madame Sosostris, Phoenician Sailor, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, Mrs. Equitone, Saint Mary Woolnoth, Philomel, Stetson, Lil, Albert, Bill, Lou, May, Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, Tiresias, Elizabeth I, Leicester, Phlebas, and Hieronymo. Not all of these names are names o f human beings who had once lived. Is there any significance in
replacing the face with a name? It in effect turns all names into pronouns.
These words do not speak in the context o f god: the voices are extracted from
everydaylife. Itistheordinarywhichbordersonhysteria. ThisisEliot'stransformation of a feminine voice into a parody ofMozart's Queen ofthe Night:
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think. " (Ins. l 11-114)
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Hysteria attaches one's nerves to oneself. These "nerves" are a physical synecdoche for a mental condition, a hysteria played out against human indifference and uncaring and alienation within a marriage. The same hysteria can stay a person in a disintegrating relationship: "my nerves are bad . . . stay with me. " (This is one way o f 'staying' the world inalanguageoflove. ItisoneoftheconclusionsofEliotthatsuch'staying'isdamning). The husband here has lost or renounced his voice (a sibyl-like diminishment); he functions in these lines as a metaphysical 'I', a limit determining the scope of but not included within the world, dominated by the women's speaking. But the absent husband's implicit authorial position (maybe as bricoleur) means he ventriloquizes her speaking, and she
ventriloquizes his soul (the negative outlines o f his face sketched in his absence). Catherine Clement, in her book on Opera, asks about what she understands as patriarchal fear: "What haste, what hatred drives them to reduce woman to her image? " (28). The image of women in The Waste Land is described by speaking. Is the image of the diva, her body,herface,hersinging,orhervoice? InTheWasteLandoneoftheimagesdescribing thelimitbetween silenceandsong(whichisitselfthelimitbetweensilenceandspeech) and between desire and possession is female hair:
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread our in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)
Do we imagine this scene parodies lightening and thunder? Parody requires judgment, enacting mimicry within a structure ofvalues. To suggest that parody is the origin of
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language is to mock the question o f origin when it is understood as answerable by something like parody. Joyce's use o f Vico's stages o f history (including the theory that speech imitates thunder) suggests exactly this kind o f parody, transforming putative origins into limits. (What motivates parody? a tool in what game? A chimpanzee will mimic other chimps and humans, but why not parody them? )
Is Eliot pursuing a similar project of transforming origins into limits? Maybe. There is at least a confusion between parodies and rumors:
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
What are "aethereal rumours"? They are night-words, but aethereal words can be from Godandtherumorspromises. Buttheserumorsre-animate(revive)ifonlyforamoment, the fragmented body o f Coriolanus. By what does Coriolanus exist? At night we lose our body. We might find ourselves in any body. We can find ourselves as a we-body, as "the They" .
Thisisagainpartoftheinstabilityofpronouns. TheserumorsinFinnegansWake (a "foull subustioned mullmud"; Sebastian Melmoth, one o f Wilde's masks and, therefore, an expression of and a disguise against rumor or exposure [228. 32]) are "Allwhile,. . . , preying in his mind, son o f Everallin, within himself, he swure" (228. 03-04). Some 'he' swore and was sure that he was who he was (which could be anyone). Recalling Stephen inPortrait ofthe Artist as a YoungMan, or Joyce, himself) a young man, the dreamer (maybe here thinking through HCE) reincorporates himself in the possibility o f leaving
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himselfbehind by leaving the (or a) world behind, remembering or traveling or writing or sleeping:
He would split. He do big squeal like holy Trichepatte. . . He take skiff come first dagrene day overwide tumbler, rough and dark, till when bow of the shower show of the bower with three shirts and a wind, pogoda permettant, crookolevante, the bruce, the coriolano and the ignacio. (FW228. 05-11)
In 'his' splitting and flight, weather permitting (R. pogoda, 'weather'), in a search for wisdom or escape from the world (permanent pagoda), God willing (Deo volente), fleeing debt (crook and levant), 'he' becomes Robert Bruce, Coriolanus, and St. Ignatius Loyola; or rather he is the qualities these names describe if they become adjectives (or as if the adjectives become a single name or description o f his being in this flight, while reading maybe): Robert Bruce, silence; Coriolanus, exile; and St. Ignatius, cunning.
This flight or movement away and towards marks subjective historical time, fragmentingtheworldandconstitutingatransportable'I'betweenthefragments. This 'he' is "recorporated, (prunty!
) by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin" (FW228. 20-
1). This mysterious "meteoromancy" suggests a divination through reading meteors, a reading of chance streaks, instead of stable stars (although there is some regularity in meteor showers, there is no regularity in any particular meteor which bums away in the atmosphere). Byreadingthechancefireworksoftheskyweallegorizeourselvesasboth unstable and unique. Reincorporating, in this case, proceeds not only through meteoromancy, but through "linguified heissrohgin," on first reading another description of the Wake as a linguified language of rogue/roving names (G. heifieri). The collapse of
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Roh (G. raw) and heifi^G. hot), the raw and the cooked, as one kind of human limit between kinds o f societies, between humans and animals, in the confusion o f names (heissrohgin; and one's personal investment o f oneself in identities, language games, relationships, and so on) describes the action o f recorporation as a self-interpretation. To be "recorporated, (prunty! ) by meteoromancy and linguified heissrohgin" means to gain formasanegativespace, orratherasthesubjunctivenexusofthesetofpossibilities describing our stances toward the future and within language. Meteoromancy, therefore, is the divination o f the ephemeral, the generation o f predictive interpretations, through and as the instability o f identity (names and faces) enacted through the possibilities o f language which constitutes, in effect, any pronoun.
Two of the related figures for this kind of self-interpretation in The Waste Land is a dismemberment into parts (a human hand or God's hand) and navigation:
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
"Damyata" means 'control,' but whose over what or whom? The instability of the 'ground' o f the undrinkable sea replaces the stasis o f the drought and desert. And land has become a boat over which some expert hand has control, a dismembered hand controlling a dismembered land (a boat). The mind separated into a prison but answered by sympathy. This is a hand not attached to a person. It could be anyone's. The boat, a floating jug, "responded/ Gaily," as if alive, with quickness, as if not dead, animated by the
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controlling expert hand. But whose hand? This boat scene is allegorized into a scene of love? lust? caring? power?
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
Someone's heart could respond like a boat, and in this it could describe human love in the daring of surrender or the exaltation of control or love of God, the 'your' becoming a hypothetical 'thou' to God's 'I'. The hand like those attacking the blindfolded Christ can be anyone's. The skill to control a boat, should one find water, can become someone's through education. This skill is a quality, but ofwhose hands? The 'we' includes "your heart" and some "hands. " "Your heart" is mock essence and love of what is always subjectively vorhanden, marking something as human, but without that which is to be marked. This 'we' cannot attach itself to persons.
The body is remade into an 'I' casting between the logic of aridity and stones and a further remaking of these fragments into order (this logic of aridity will generate four subjunctive worlds):
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my hands in order?
How would this ordering change the world? What kind of question is this? Some 'I' asks himself or herself'if I should act or enact an order (determined how? ) on the lands that form my world? ' Should I refit exactly these words into a world? Why exactly do these
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things not make a world for me? ' A science ofthe mind bom our ofwhat Vico called ignorance, but Freud called the unconscious, and what we respond to at time as intentionality, what Brentano called the essentially mental, or which Wittgenstein called the grammatical (as the limit organizing our negotiations between the psychological and the physical) understands the form o f this not as an analogue for the identity o f things, the position Heidegger attacks, but as the analogue for the structures o f the mind:
The human mind is naturally inclined by the senses to see itself externally in the body, and only with great difficulty does it come to understand itself by means o f reflection.
This axiom gives us the universal principle o f etymology in all languages: words are carried over from bodies and the properties of bodies to signify the institutions o f the mind and spirit.
(NS236-37)
Bishop argues that Joyce develops this insight into the practice of "an extended 'abnihilization ofthe eytm' throughout the Wake (353. 22 [I. ab nihilo, 'from nothing'])" in which he "shows the body lying everywhere under the surface of language (L. lingua, 'tongue'])" (198).
Finnegans Wake and The Waste Land enact different kinds of crucifixion. Finnegans Wake crucifies God through his embodiment or incarnation as human: this is the crucifixion ofsleep, the realization ofthe limits ofthe body, that allows for or opens up the possibilities of mind or spirit that we interpret as dreams or as soul. The Waste Land crucifies human beings, as if we were already asleep: a crucifixion of vision, or
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dreams themselves. Crucifixion can seem like standing in air. Air is the only element missing (or diminished) in The Waste Land: we are buried in earth, burning burning in fire, drowning in water. What Karl Barth takes as "the positive relation between God and man", Eliot takes as the demand the world makes on us, to ask, what Barth asserts: "The righteousness of God is our standing-place in the air--that is to say, where there is no human possibility of standing- whose foundations are laid by God Himselfand supported by Him only" (The Epistle to the Romans, iii. 21). How do we stand "before an irresistible and all-embracing dissolution of the world to time and things and me, before a penetrating and ultimate KRISIS, before the supremacy o f a negation by which all existence is rolled up"? (iii. 21). Where do we stand when we ask "Mein Irisch Kind,/ Wo weilest du? " In a subjunctiveAfterAfterAfter. PhlebasthePhoenicianhasdrowned,daringtosurrenderto despair and falling from his ship, a mock Fisher King and Christ. . He has performed the
final act of dissolution, which the Sibyl desires but cannot consummate.
The first stanza o f "What The Thunder Said" describes Jesus' imprisonment and
his death from the perspective o f those watching it, those remaining in the physical, material world, where death is not transformation but loss:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation Ofthunder of spring over distant mountains
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He who was living is now dead.
This succession o f "after" clauses, although sounding paratactic, grammatically invoke and then fail to complete a logically conditioned temporal succession of"after this, then that. " "After" combines the force o f the conditional "i f with a claim not simply o f logical inevitability, but o f temporal order: o f intention ("after this, I will") or historical fact (after this, that happened") or rather awkwardly a kind of modal present ("after that, I do this"). What is done or will be done or was done after the torchlight is repressed until after the frostysilencewhoseafterisrepresseduntilaftertheagony. Eachoftheseantecedentsas part of a temporal sequence are markers in time, taking the place of a subject, an T (thus in the preceding sentence the ease by which I can say "the frosty silence whose 'after"'). The consequent to the "after X" grammatically requires a temporal marker, for example,
"After the torchlight, the shouting and the crying began. " (This would not be required if the consequent included a human subject, as in "after the frosty silence, Joe spoke. " Time markers act as subjects, and subjects organize and mark the present, and thus determine what counts as after and what before. ) A temporal marker could be replaced by a preposition chaining this event (the shouting and crying) to another. But such a preposition is missing as well. The fragmentation ofthe paratactic 'after's', the fragmentation oftemporal and causal linearity, is extended back into the logic o f'after' (the temporal B-series, historical time or physical time, measured time) dissolving the temporal force o f 'after' into a triply asserted pause. Language is turned into metaphysics by turning the psychological fears ofPrufrock into an ontological description ofthe collapse oftemporal succession and grammatical structure into waiting.
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Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
I do not mean that the metaphysics of The Waste Landjustifies any kind of answer to this question (not even the authority oftradition). Rather it justifies the question. ( For Albert the Great this would be what would determine the poem as literature and not philosophy, which can articulate answers. It is implicit within Aquinas' theology that neither philosophy nor theology can give definitive answers, but rather reformulate the possibilities answering and determining the questions we ask. )
How does one turn descriptions into questions? After After After x, y, and z, The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
O f thunder o f spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead.
"The crying" could be followed by any number o f prepositions, linking "the CTying" logically with the "[pjrison and palace and reverberation: cryingfor: over the loss and suffering of Christ or our own dying (self-pity); crying in: the Sibyl in her prison or us in ours caught in solipsism or in crimes and sins or glories and power in palaces; crying as: becoming the limits o f our lives, the walls, or the physics o f our own noises or voices [reverberating]; crying by, with, on, etc. : translating our emotions and outbursts toward objects and translating these back toward our concerns. The possibilities, and the very
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suggestiveness of our prepositional expectation is caught up by the beginning "O f thunder" in the succeeding line: "The shouting and the crying . . . Of thunder of spring over distant mountains". Consequently, we are (or at least I am) tempted to transpose this backwards and read the line as 'The shouting and the crying of prison and palace and reverberation. ' Things cry here, physics cries and shouts. This'prison and palace foreshadows the interpretation ofthe third word ofThunder-speech:
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only We think o f the key, each in his prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
Eliot casts the prison as an image for our solipsism.
idealism. Thethunderorthesublimedescribesormarksthelimitsbetweenthe phenomenalandthenoumenal,andinthismarkingdissolvestheworld. Theworld remains as a reality beyond, but other minds exist beyond our knowing. Eliot in the notes quotes Bradley:
My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. Ineithercasemyexperiencefallswithinmyowncircle,acircleclosed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.
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This is the irony of some kinds of
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Bradley disconnects both external and internal sensations from their meaning, which would bring in language and thus the biological, social, historical context and identity (what Wittgenstein calls our form of life) organizing these sensations as sensations. Eliot uses Bradley as a light to both blind and illuminate. He invokes other mind skepticism and traces a limit (a circle, a prison, a palace) between the self and knowing and being known byothers. Thisismoreofadistractionthanitisuseful. Bradleyalsodigsamoatbetween sensations and meanings (in the way Eliot quotes him). In reading The Waste Land it is the question 'What does it mean? ' that continually forces itself upon us, before the question 'Do we know Eliot? ' or 'Does anyone know us? ' These questions become more legitimately, 'Does The Waste Land know or describe or understand us? or we it? ' This is
the disjunction that the Sibyl finds herselfin: she still experiences our world but it is not her world, and thus her experience is nonsense.
I f we extract the nonsense, or the prepositionless prisons and palaces, which might describe ourselves, our condition, or our world, then we are left with something like: "after the torchlight, the frosty silence, the agony, the shouting and the crying ofthunder of spring over distant mountains, He who was living is now dead. . . " The grammar recovers part o f its temporal logic, or rather language gains a new temporal metaphor, a new way of determining the priority of relations within and through which the meaning of sentences map the ontological rules o f succession. We are offered a temporal algorithm:
He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience.
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With these lines we have entered that interval in time between death (Good Friday) and resurrection (Easter). Phlebas is dead, the old moment has passed, yet we have not re- entered the next moment. This "He who is dead" could be some particular person, marked in the poem as Phlebas, or Christ, or Tiresias, or someone we know, or even ourselves. Thesplittingbetweenthirdpersonsingular'He'andfirstpersonplural'We,' between dead and dying, divides the difference between being an object, third person- dead, and being alive, our first person-dying together. 'Weilen' is translated into patience,
except this 'staying' has become a form o f dying.
9. 2 On the road to objecthood
What is this dying? The gift o f water can become a jug, or the jug can become a worldandthewateracanopy. Eliotcallsthis"DeathByWater":
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry o f gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss.
A current under the sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
0 you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
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(underlines added)
In this picture o f being human, identity seems to arise out o f the question 'what am I such that I can die? ' McCulloch's question, "what is man that he can know number? ", under the pressure of this logic could be answered with 'I am that whose shelter is or who is sheltered [this question cannot get behind this distinction] by number. ' But this answer is incomplete without knowing what number delimits from within and makes visible as such.
Is number a concept like death? Number might describe the limit o f quality, or qualia, phenomenal experience. Our counting, therefore, even counting ourselves as one, as part o f a sum o f people, makes present the qualities we experience as a person through which we also describe others. How do we count ourselves as being addressed by any poem, text or word?
Wecanenterapassagethroughitsverbs. Thepressureagainstformandnumber inPhlebas'deathpassagemovesthroughtheverbs. Phlebasforgot: Phlebasacts,but acts against himself(he remains Phlebas to us but he has forgotten, our personification of the dead), reanimated enough so that the loss ofthe world is his loss. In this loss of memory Phlebas, the Phoenician trader, loses the predicative use o f 'loss' in relation to 'profit'. The sea picked his bones: The world acts against Phlebas' body. The peristalsis of profit and loss that he forgot is picked up in the next stanza in his own rising and falling, which also calls back the "deep sea swell. " Phlebas, as Phlebas, is now nested not within his body but in this periodicity (semantically uniform and continuous, if not in the movement o f real waves). "As he rose and fell" Phlebas' identity, what he is, collapses into the verb "passed. " He does not act, even through the negation o f his forgetting, but
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becomescoextensivewithaparticulartemporalseries: "Hepassedthestagesofhisage and youth/ Entering the whirlpool. " Phlebas' personal regression, from age to youth, reverses the fate o f the Sibyl. Can we call this death? The purity o f the burning, the transcendent promise o f "O Lord Thou pluckest me out" closing "The Fire Sermon" opens in this drowning the "river's tent" that began "The Fire Sermon. " Beneath the absence of the "empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette boxes, cigarette ends/ Or other testimony of summer nights" Phlebas passes (this 'passing' is not a living) his life. Nested in world-time and passed through his end to his beginning,
Phlebas enters, and is further nested within at least an image o f absolute movement, "the whirlpool. " Instead of entering into either hell or climbing unto paradise with Beatrice, Eliot invokes Dante by translating both the comedy into a failed harrowing and Beatrice into symbolic metaphysics, into the water itself, as both the context and guide, or at laest as the means of change. To enter the whirlpool as if the subject of an episode of This Is Your Life! is to enter "the womb ofthe sea. " The ocean represents a characteristically feminine dynamic creative principle, through which both death and resurrection are enacted.
Although this symbolic designation is clear in The Waste Land, Eliot specifically draws this picture in "Ash Wednesday":
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit o f the fountain, spirit o f the garden. . .
Sister, mother
And spirit ofthe river, spirit ofthe sea,
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Suffer me not to be separated.
The sea and the creative dynamic it represents, opposes the process o f differentiation and identification: "suffer me not to be separated. " The waters o f the Thames listen, in The Waste Land, with maternal silence: "Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song. "
Buttheydonotspeak,norcanPhlebas. WecanfollowPhlebastothewhirlpool but not into it. We are not dead and have not forgot; we are addressed and entreated to "consider" :
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Phlebas, who is now dead but was once like you, marks, as does any name, the limit of finititude. Could this, can this, does this force us into an existential crisis, into dread? If not, then what? If we resist our inclusion within the initial two categories of Gentile or Jew are we immune from the dread of the vision? If we lose faith, then how do we see Phlebas? If we can read the symbolic links that structure the poem with mythic force then are we not already reading as Gentile or Jew, as a function even of our difference from thesefaiths? TheGentileandJewatleastwerehandsomeandtallasPhlebas. Infactthe particularity o f the equation 'either G or J is like P who died' forces us to understand this, regardless of whether we hear the poem as addressed to us, as an equation describing human kind. This ritual and its obscurity make it impossible for us to read this from within as if we, ourselves, made this claim about Phlebas. In this way we are both inside and outside ofthe poem.
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We turn the wheel oftime, or the wheel of fate, or the wheel of our bicycle as we movethroughtheworld. Thisturningmimicsboththecircleofthewhirlpoolandthe periodicity ofthe rise and fall ofthe sea, and like profit and loss is not predicated of something. But unlike any ofthese previous clocks, we are the "human engine" ofthis time, "like a taxi throbbing waiting" (ln. 217) for the engine o f the world to push us into the future. Counting abstracts things into the concept o f quantity, determining identity as that which can be counted.
