Thinking, or let's say being human,
generates
an anxiety about being human, about being alive or dead.
Constructing a Replacement for the Soul - Bourbon
(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. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a falling rock. These enabling patterns emerge in the more complicated syntax of music or poetry or physics.
Patterns are the form of animation, activated by the "synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered,orliquid--troubledandconfused"ofanunidentified'her'(86-89). Already, this 'her' and her artifice "drowned the sense in odours," into nonsense and the double threatofdesireandmemorywithwhichthepoembegins. Thelossofsense(thinking, language, rationality) and the senses (the world) construes feminine artifice as a cause of solipsism, upheld because this 'her' is already her artifice and thus more thing than human. The only marks ofthe human are the 'her' and the absent (male) target ofthese odors
whose use o f 'sense' identifies him with this speaking: stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
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Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
While the odors (emitted from "her strange synthetic perfumes") can contain and drown "the senses," they are contained within the air currents which lead through a strict causal chain from "vials o f ivory and coloured glass" to stirring the pattern on the ceiling: these odors stirred by the air fatten the candle flame, which functioning like a transducer flings smoke to stir the patterns on the ceiling. This stirring is a phenomenological effect and again marks an T at the limit o f language. "Stirred by" leads to 'Stirring", the animation o f patterns in the coffered wood, a physical causal chain generates a qualitative effect within the world limited by the T .
This causal chain is fragmented into a conversation in which the speaker's inability to 'stir' her husband, I imagine, ends with a renunciation of a confirmation of a phenomenological isolation:
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
"Nothing ? "
The wind is unheard (In. 175), the river empty of possible debris, nymphs "and their friends, the loitering heirs o f city directors" are departed, no longer loitering, without forwarding addresses. The emptiness and the midden heap of modem life that is its subjunctive shadow is answered by poetic ritual ventriloquism:
By the waters ofLeman, I sat down and wept. . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
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The conflation o f Psalm 37, Lake Geneva (Leman) where Eliot convalesced, and the archaic noun Leman (lover) marks the inhabitation of the 'I' as the limit of a particular world marked by these particular sentences (words are always borrowed; but here sentences and phrases determine a cultural-grammatical pattern into which an 'I' can be marked or in relation to which a stance can be taken (T or F, expressive, assertive, and so on). An'I'cannotenteraword:ourrelationtowordsisnonsensicaloutsideofsome grammatical pattern.
What is the grammar o f 'living,' 'being dead,' and 'dying'? He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
The lines "He who. . . " and "We who. . . " follow an similar syntax, and thus both we and Phlebas, or Christ, or the Fisher King, are contained within the same temporal series, not before and after but living then dying then death. We are alive and he was alive, apparentlyatthesametimeinthepast. Eliotestablishesanequivalencybetweenour condition o f being (alive) and Phlebas'. Phlebas, however, has died and we are in the midstofdying. Thus,inthis'now'weexisttogetherinthesyntaxthatdescribesusboth. Phlebas' has been changed from being something to becoming nothing but a memory and a name(s). Although we have left the state o f being alive, we have not advanced in our decaytotheconditionthatwouldresultindeath. ArewesimplylessdeadthanPhlebas? We know each other, we recognize and are recognized within the circle of our prison or palace by our dying and death. Why not by our living?
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If we imagine we have to learn to be human through a lesson in and on death (as if learning is the same as constructing or being engineered by natural selection into being human, which it might be), the usual story goes something like this:
I am as you are, as he and she are alive. You are no longer as I am: will you return? WillIbenolongerasIam? Mybeingasyouareisasamenessthat mimics being here together at all. Identity is like being alive. Loss is dying. Will we all become stones or find ourselves turned into vultures. Will you prey on my body and will I then return to being as you are?
How do we imagine the category of death could claim us? We build our culture, our social relations through our emotional relations, through playing our sameness (our identity as replacements for each other in getting food, in mating, in power and status) as if that sameness describes our being. But any such existential monologue presupposes thought: and this is thinking our being mortal as the limit to being. This thinking is not the recognition of limited power. Those limits are set by the world and physiology and circumstance, as much for animals as for us.
The logic o f this kind o f monologue requires the attribution o f similar mental states to others as a means o f defining a possible future. This results in the recognition o f the category of human beings as a construction of our being in the world, what we now call evolution, as operating like our recognition.
Thinking, or let's say being human, generates an anxiety about being human, about being alive or dead. The abstraction o f our humannessisinitiallynotintoqualitiesorproperties,race,cultures,orwhatever, butinto loss. Saying'our'marksthelimitsofourhumanityasacategorythatcanbelost. IfIcan
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lose my life, I can lose my humanity. Science formalizes this insight. Literature might describe these limits as the possibility of what it means to be human, Science from its technological manifestations in stone tools and industrialization to its theoretical models in evolutionary theory and physics describes these limits as effects o f either operations on the world or in the modem world as effects of laws operating on us. Literature explores the meaning o f these limits as the operation o f the world on us, and science either offers a means o f operating on the world or o f describing the operation o f the world on us as ordered but meaningless. The force behind the question 'What did the Thunder say? ' asks 'What can indifference say? ': what can we understand or interpret indifference to mean?
If the question 'What is life? ' is understood as "What distinguishes animate and inanimate objects? " biology offers a description o f the difference:
animate objects are self-replicating systems containing genetic code that undergoes mutation and whose variant individuals undergo natural selection . . . . animate systems have three characteristics that allow them to evolve. They have (1) heredity, (2) a basis o f variation in their hereditary material, and (3) populations consisting o f variant individuals undergoing competition and differential reproduction in a changing environment, that is, natural selection occurring on the basis o f differences in fitness o f these individuals.
(Edelman, Topobiology 5-6)
This descriptive definition ofthe animate is structured around the formation ofidentities of relative stability, not o f purity: temporal extensions which resist entropic pressures described by the second law of thermodynamics through self-sustaining self-replication.
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As self-replicating systems animate objects constitute a hierarchical structure of overlapping continuous identities, whose relative stability constitutes them as identities. Richard Dawkins, using principles developed by W. D. Hamilton, argues that evolution should be understood as an effect ot the self-replication ofDNA through its construction o f survival machines (plants and animals). DNA forms the most fundamental identity extension for all terrestrial animation. Evolution constructs other self-replicating systems which define unities o f extension both as individuals and species. Human bodies, beyond themselves, contain a number o f different identities so defined: genes, cells, body systems andorgans. Humananimalsconstitutefurtherhigherlevelidentitiesandsystems, primarily species and other groupings (including societies) matching or describing underlying genetic similarity and thus stability. These identities, however, are not who we are. They characterize a limit in relation to other limits described within the ontology constructed through the possibilities o f self-replication at a particular level o f complexity. DNA describes a constituent and functional molecular identity. Individuals describe a constituent and functional identity in relation to similarly constituted and acting individuals. One cannot put anymore philosophical weight on these distinctions than this. 1
The Sibyl is a meta-description o f this kind of identity, and she is, therefore, a kind of measure of our species-being from beneath that description; or she is a measure of an individual life from the perspective o f a cell; or she is a measure o f our DNA as the defininglimitofourspecies. WearenevertheSibyl,buttheSibyldescribestheidentities within which we function. But I have got the direction of time wrong here. The Sibyl in her diminishment rewinds her identity backwards towards her emergence as anything.
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How can time go backward by going forward? The Sibyl is the answer (but then so are we as human beings from generation to generation or as versions ofthe dead Phlebas). The Sibyl describes a kind o f continuity that stretches back to our beginning, marking this continuity as continual loss, and thus as despair.
In Eliot's The Cocktail Party an unidentified guest asks Edward after his wife has left him "Are you going to say, you love her? " Edward replies,
Why, I thought we took each other for granted. I never thought I should be any happier Withanotherperson, Whyspeakoflove?
We were used to each other. So her going away At a moment's notice, without explanation, Only a note to say that she had gone
And was not coming back --well, I can't understand it. Nobody likes to be left with a mystery:
It's so . . . unfinished.
The loss of Edward's wife is the loss of the given. This loss begins a new time, instantiated in three parts: a going away (at a moment's notice), a blank "without explanation", and a being gone marked by a note. The moment o f going is personified as her amanuensis, givinghernotice. Thisisatimeorganizedaroundherabsence. Thelackofexplanation expresses her absence. Justification is, therefore, a mark ofbeing a person and being present. This absence is sandwiched, as the lack o f an explanation, a why, between this moment's notice and "a note to say that she had gone. " If she had never returned he
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would have eventually realized that she had gone, or he might have imagined that she had been kidnapped, and the mystery would be about if she had gone not why she had gone. The time o f going and being gone would not be determined as a function o f her intention. This intention and the lack of explanation constructs the gap between the going and the being gone as the subjunctive possibilities constituting her will as her own. I f the relationship is finished then what is unfinished? The blank moment, the moment when she
was still present but going, in which she could have given an explanation, surrounded by 'the moment's notice' (which is not notice at all) and the her note, provides the syntax of time without its semantics. The semantics in this case is, however, her actually going. And thus Edward can see the change in his world after the fact, but he is not a part of the timeline that is marked by her going and being gone. They mark a doorway through
which his wife left and which remains open. This is why it is unfinished. This time (his loss) has no meaning because although his world has changed he does not recognize himselfinthatworld. Hisworldhaschangedbutheisnotinhisworld. TimeforEdward is nothing more than what one could call the meta-syntactical order of limits: a knot of not's and no's (notice, note, not, nobody) constructing communication, continuity and change, and identity as a set ofpossible interpretations through which Edward projects his attachments as the world. The moment of no explanation only exists as it were outside of
the world as a set o f subjunctive possibilities. Edward, therefore, can neither experience this loss as his own loss (as opposed to a loss within his world) nor can he translate this change into a history (and therefore give it meaning).
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The Unidentified Guest recognizes the unfinished mysteriousness o f this change, but pursues how losing the given ofour world means a loss of ourselves (in other words picturing the loss o f his wife as what it is exactly not: a loss o f himself):
There's a loss o f personality; Or rather, you've lost touch with the person
Youthoughtyouwere. Younolongerfeelquitehuman. You're suddenly reduced to the status of an object --
A living object, but no longer a person.
It's always happening, because one is an object
As well as a person. But we forget about it
As quickly as we can. (CPE 307)
A person is either constituted as a self-generated subjunctive or as an object. Either I inhabit my thought of myself, function within the subjunctive, or I am "no longer a person. " Someone is real to me only in so far as they function within the pattern in which Irecognizethem,asIrecognizemyself,withinthissubjunctive. Existinginthis subjunctive world, however, seems supported or at least dependent on others functioning within its limits. Edward's wife not only becomes invisible to Edward, but Edward becomes invisible to himself except as an object.
Why an object? The loss ofthe given ofyourselfis the loss ofyour imagined 'you'. It maybe that I am no longer a husband, or attractive, or happy, or my future is no longer whatitwas. Myidentityandpersonhoodisconstitutedinthesubjunctiveoftheimagined past of what I before took for granted (defining my expectations) and the subjunctive
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possibilities opened up by the mystery, in this case, between her going and her being gone. I have a finished and an unfinished personhood. I am not determined by my own thinking, thatis,Iamnotmarkedwithinmyownsubjunctiveorganizationofwhatisgiven. The world described by Lavinia's absence, the record o f her going, the birth o f a moment, and herbeinggone,thebirthofwriting,reduceEdward'sexpectationstothatabsence. He can no longer construct his expectations and his hopes within a language which includes both himself and the world. This failure turns him into an object. He becomes the object describedbyHeidegger'sversionofscience: living+object. Ourpersonhoodsupervenes on our objecthood, which we try to ignore or forget. The indifference ofthe new time, of oursubjunctivecontainmentwithinthisindifferenceormysteriousness,makesobjects: the battle for personhood is over who or how whomever can mark oneselfas a set of possibilities, that is, to determine or believe ourselves the subjunctive of the world.
These subjunctive enactments can be described as social roles and acts, doing or functioning, and pretending or becoming:
When you've dressed for a part
And are going downstairs, with everything about you Arranged to support you in the role you have chosen, Then sometimes, when you come to the bottom step There is one step more than your feet expected Andyoucomedownwithajolt. Justforamoment You have experience ofbeing an object
At the mercy o f a malevolent staircase.
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Or, take a surgical operation.
In consultation with the doctor and the surgeon, In going to bed in the nursing home,
In talking to the matron, you are still the subject, Thecentreofreality. Butstretchedonthetable, Y ou are a piece o f furniture in a repair shop
For those who surround you, the masked actors; All there is ofyou is your body
And the 'you' is withdrawn. . . (CPE 307)
After putting on the cocktail party role, an act o f will or choice by which one enters into the possibility o f meeting others, I descend the stairs. I am not thinking about walking.
So I might say my body is walking if I can imagine its expectations proceeding as if from it and not from me. This might happen at night, or awake I might remember this as my condition at night. "There is one step more than your feet expected/ And you come down with a jolt. " This is the moment's notice when my feet find the world different than they imagined, I imagine. This jolt of lightening brings the world against me. Unlike in Being and Time, however, the stairway as ready-to-hand does not become an object present-to- hand, rather I become present to myselfas an object. 2 The staircase becomes animate, with a malevolent intentionality directed against me. Our animation of the staircase proceeds from our ignorance about the causes o f our failure to find the expected step. The worldhasceasedtobeours. Inthelossoftheworldwetranslateourselvesintothe temporal limit describing the loss of the world as going, in the moment's notice in which
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we find our feet have expectations, and the gone, in which we understand ourselves as acteduponbytheworld. Thistranslationgeneratesthesubjunctivepossibilitiesasan unexplained why in which I cannot choose, nor function myself within or as a subjunctive mode. Iamanobjecttotheworld:apuppet.
Doctors and nurses, "masked actors" surround you the patient becoming a body becoming a piece o f furniture, that which holds humans above the earth, temporary foundations of our humanity as against our animality. We have become the ground of our being, nothing but organs, bones, and gristle. How is being surrounded by actors, this could be a description of a cocktail party, surrounded by cocks screeching "Co co rico co co rico," different from having "everything about you [ajrranged to support you in the role you have chosen"? One has been excluded from the actor's guild, from the set of possibilities from which one can choose to be. As "the centre o f reality" I subject the world to the whims of possibility defining me. To be in a world is to be an object within someone else's world. As an object I have been condensed into the contentless syntax defined as the limit, the tangent between going and gone, an object to others: a chair.
A patient on the table, already an object, awaits death: He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
We are dying and, like the Sibyl, we are not (yet? ) able to reach that point of absolute dissolution. Herdesirefordeath,however,isreplacedintheselineswithpatience. Tobe patient is to endure. Endurance builds up an idea of identity: a continuity of being in the
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midst of events. Thus, its primary meaning is indurate, or to harden, to establish a perspectiveandanidentityunaffectedbyexternalreality. Asacorollary,therefore, enduranceistheextensionofbeingfromonepointtoanother. Thisdefinitionexposesthe underlying conception o f being from which the primary meaning is derived. Patience
transcends immediate conditions by a strict condensation of identity away from the destructive change threatening it. Patience, therefore, becomes the action o f living, or the extension ofthe principle oflife, inthe midst ofdecay and death. Yet we were alive inthe past, for we are dying now. Thus, this extension becomes an extension o f the past moment ofliving into the decay ofthe present: a reverberation ofspring among the mountains o f desert rock.
Thisreverberationrepresentsthedynamicforceofbecoming. Itsexistenceinthe dying world, however, is by virtue of its hardened endurable form. Consequently, it cannot become the actuality of spring, for it cannot break through its own opaque and hardened being. Thus we cannot see spring, just as we cannot see the past. All that remains is sound. Patience transcends the present, but the direction o f this transcendence istowardthepast(anegativedirectioninrelationtotime). Thus,itcannotbridgethegap between the present and the future; it is not a positive recreative transformation between an identity in the present and a potential identity in some future present.
We have left the paralysis of the Sibyl's non-transcendent realm. But we have yet to direct this recreative transcendence into the actuality o f nature, where it can become more than a mere sound. Our patience describes the content between 'a moment's notice' and the note we leave behind as the subjunctive. Life is counterfactual.
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This is life in The Waste Land (the waste land): Here is not water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains Which are the mountains ofrock without water
This "here' consists o f impenetrable identities called rocks and the idea o f absent water. "Here is not water. . asserts existence (here) through negation. Thus, this world consists ofthe idea ofwater, our abilityto negate this idea, and rocks. This initial 'Here' has a universalizing force (in that it seems to describe a world or a state) such that a logical structure emerges: rocks = not-water. This is not, however, an analytic synonymy, but rather a conception o f meaning as identity which expresses the law o f the excluded middle. But the not-water negates the idea of water attached to the poetic voice. This T , or the poem, is the excluded middle, an excluded limit, who, or which, points toward the water it negates and toward the not-water which is the rock. I use the phrase 'not-water which is the rock' because what is being asserted is 'Here is this world' or simply 'here is only rock'. This voice or this line by articulating the existent through both negation and assertion determines this voice or this line for us as the categorical marker among indicative identity (this is rock: and thus the logic o f reference), semantic identity (this is not-water: and thus a logic o f meaning), and subjunctive abstraction (this could be water:
the logic o f possibility). These lines could describe our condition.
This world expands in the next line: Rock and no water and the sandy road.
Reduced into the metaphysics ofrock (ofidentity) this becomes Rock + 0 + sandy road.
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Do these add up to a world? Can we get a world through paratactic addition? We can only move in this place on the road. Do we imagine that this road was made by people? A road functions like the idea ofwater, a possibility. We say the road moves through the mountains, but the road is static. The road moves or winds as if unfolding through our walking even before our walking. We recognize a road as itself a proleptic picture or manifestation of our own experience ofwhat the road promises. Can you step into the same road twice? The road snakes winding, the skin o f a rock serpent, "above among the mountains". The idea of water and of negation translate as a kind of effect into the "Here", where this road as something made recalls an origin, a making in which the mountains were negated, and transformed. The 'is' of existence in "here is not water. .
is not continued in the mountains, "[w]hich are mountains of rock without water": the mountains are the mountains (an identity), but also "the mountains o f . . . " (predication). These mountains consist of what is, that is, "of rock without water'. The mountains are what they consist of, which is what exists as being (the rock) and not-being (not-water). Three uses o f our verb o f 'to be' function identically here.
The road which was above, and because above among the mountains, move us up. This movement makes apparent that what is above is the same as below.
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. Patterns best described by numbers organize a syntax, between sound-tones or between poetic lines, or between a magnet and a falling rock. These enabling patterns emerge in the more complicated syntax of music or poetry or physics.
Patterns are the form of animation, activated by the "synthetic perfumes, unguent, powdered,orliquid--troubledandconfused"ofanunidentified'her'(86-89). Already, this 'her' and her artifice "drowned the sense in odours," into nonsense and the double threatofdesireandmemorywithwhichthepoembegins. Thelossofsense(thinking, language, rationality) and the senses (the world) construes feminine artifice as a cause of solipsism, upheld because this 'her' is already her artifice and thus more thing than human. The only marks ofthe human are the 'her' and the absent (male) target ofthese odors
whose use o f 'sense' identifies him with this speaking: stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
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Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
While the odors (emitted from "her strange synthetic perfumes") can contain and drown "the senses," they are contained within the air currents which lead through a strict causal chain from "vials o f ivory and coloured glass" to stirring the pattern on the ceiling: these odors stirred by the air fatten the candle flame, which functioning like a transducer flings smoke to stir the patterns on the ceiling. This stirring is a phenomenological effect and again marks an T at the limit o f language. "Stirred by" leads to 'Stirring", the animation o f patterns in the coffered wood, a physical causal chain generates a qualitative effect within the world limited by the T .
This causal chain is fragmented into a conversation in which the speaker's inability to 'stir' her husband, I imagine, ends with a renunciation of a confirmation of a phenomenological isolation:
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
"Nothing ? "
The wind is unheard (In. 175), the river empty of possible debris, nymphs "and their friends, the loitering heirs o f city directors" are departed, no longer loitering, without forwarding addresses. The emptiness and the midden heap of modem life that is its subjunctive shadow is answered by poetic ritual ventriloquism:
By the waters ofLeman, I sat down and wept. . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
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The conflation o f Psalm 37, Lake Geneva (Leman) where Eliot convalesced, and the archaic noun Leman (lover) marks the inhabitation of the 'I' as the limit of a particular world marked by these particular sentences (words are always borrowed; but here sentences and phrases determine a cultural-grammatical pattern into which an 'I' can be marked or in relation to which a stance can be taken (T or F, expressive, assertive, and so on). An'I'cannotenteraword:ourrelationtowordsisnonsensicaloutsideofsome grammatical pattern.
What is the grammar o f 'living,' 'being dead,' and 'dying'? He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
The lines "He who. . . " and "We who. . . " follow an similar syntax, and thus both we and Phlebas, or Christ, or the Fisher King, are contained within the same temporal series, not before and after but living then dying then death. We are alive and he was alive, apparentlyatthesametimeinthepast. Eliotestablishesanequivalencybetweenour condition o f being (alive) and Phlebas'. Phlebas, however, has died and we are in the midstofdying. Thus,inthis'now'weexisttogetherinthesyntaxthatdescribesusboth. Phlebas' has been changed from being something to becoming nothing but a memory and a name(s). Although we have left the state o f being alive, we have not advanced in our decaytotheconditionthatwouldresultindeath. ArewesimplylessdeadthanPhlebas? We know each other, we recognize and are recognized within the circle of our prison or palace by our dying and death. Why not by our living?
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If we imagine we have to learn to be human through a lesson in and on death (as if learning is the same as constructing or being engineered by natural selection into being human, which it might be), the usual story goes something like this:
I am as you are, as he and she are alive. You are no longer as I am: will you return? WillIbenolongerasIam? Mybeingasyouareisasamenessthat mimics being here together at all. Identity is like being alive. Loss is dying. Will we all become stones or find ourselves turned into vultures. Will you prey on my body and will I then return to being as you are?
How do we imagine the category of death could claim us? We build our culture, our social relations through our emotional relations, through playing our sameness (our identity as replacements for each other in getting food, in mating, in power and status) as if that sameness describes our being. But any such existential monologue presupposes thought: and this is thinking our being mortal as the limit to being. This thinking is not the recognition of limited power. Those limits are set by the world and physiology and circumstance, as much for animals as for us.
The logic o f this kind o f monologue requires the attribution o f similar mental states to others as a means o f defining a possible future. This results in the recognition o f the category of human beings as a construction of our being in the world, what we now call evolution, as operating like our recognition.
Thinking, or let's say being human, generates an anxiety about being human, about being alive or dead. The abstraction o f our humannessisinitiallynotintoqualitiesorproperties,race,cultures,orwhatever, butinto loss. Saying'our'marksthelimitsofourhumanityasacategorythatcanbelost. IfIcan
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lose my life, I can lose my humanity. Science formalizes this insight. Literature might describe these limits as the possibility of what it means to be human, Science from its technological manifestations in stone tools and industrialization to its theoretical models in evolutionary theory and physics describes these limits as effects o f either operations on the world or in the modem world as effects of laws operating on us. Literature explores the meaning o f these limits as the operation o f the world on us, and science either offers a means o f operating on the world or o f describing the operation o f the world on us as ordered but meaningless. The force behind the question 'What did the Thunder say? ' asks 'What can indifference say? ': what can we understand or interpret indifference to mean?
If the question 'What is life? ' is understood as "What distinguishes animate and inanimate objects? " biology offers a description o f the difference:
animate objects are self-replicating systems containing genetic code that undergoes mutation and whose variant individuals undergo natural selection . . . . animate systems have three characteristics that allow them to evolve. They have (1) heredity, (2) a basis o f variation in their hereditary material, and (3) populations consisting o f variant individuals undergoing competition and differential reproduction in a changing environment, that is, natural selection occurring on the basis o f differences in fitness o f these individuals.
(Edelman, Topobiology 5-6)
This descriptive definition ofthe animate is structured around the formation ofidentities of relative stability, not o f purity: temporal extensions which resist entropic pressures described by the second law of thermodynamics through self-sustaining self-replication.
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As self-replicating systems animate objects constitute a hierarchical structure of overlapping continuous identities, whose relative stability constitutes them as identities. Richard Dawkins, using principles developed by W. D. Hamilton, argues that evolution should be understood as an effect ot the self-replication ofDNA through its construction o f survival machines (plants and animals). DNA forms the most fundamental identity extension for all terrestrial animation. Evolution constructs other self-replicating systems which define unities o f extension both as individuals and species. Human bodies, beyond themselves, contain a number o f different identities so defined: genes, cells, body systems andorgans. Humananimalsconstitutefurtherhigherlevelidentitiesandsystems, primarily species and other groupings (including societies) matching or describing underlying genetic similarity and thus stability. These identities, however, are not who we are. They characterize a limit in relation to other limits described within the ontology constructed through the possibilities o f self-replication at a particular level o f complexity. DNA describes a constituent and functional molecular identity. Individuals describe a constituent and functional identity in relation to similarly constituted and acting individuals. One cannot put anymore philosophical weight on these distinctions than this. 1
The Sibyl is a meta-description o f this kind of identity, and she is, therefore, a kind of measure of our species-being from beneath that description; or she is a measure of an individual life from the perspective o f a cell; or she is a measure o f our DNA as the defininglimitofourspecies. WearenevertheSibyl,buttheSibyldescribestheidentities within which we function. But I have got the direction of time wrong here. The Sibyl in her diminishment rewinds her identity backwards towards her emergence as anything.
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How can time go backward by going forward? The Sibyl is the answer (but then so are we as human beings from generation to generation or as versions ofthe dead Phlebas). The Sibyl describes a kind o f continuity that stretches back to our beginning, marking this continuity as continual loss, and thus as despair.
In Eliot's The Cocktail Party an unidentified guest asks Edward after his wife has left him "Are you going to say, you love her? " Edward replies,
Why, I thought we took each other for granted. I never thought I should be any happier Withanotherperson, Whyspeakoflove?
We were used to each other. So her going away At a moment's notice, without explanation, Only a note to say that she had gone
And was not coming back --well, I can't understand it. Nobody likes to be left with a mystery:
It's so . . . unfinished.
The loss of Edward's wife is the loss of the given. This loss begins a new time, instantiated in three parts: a going away (at a moment's notice), a blank "without explanation", and a being gone marked by a note. The moment o f going is personified as her amanuensis, givinghernotice. Thisisatimeorganizedaroundherabsence. Thelackofexplanation expresses her absence. Justification is, therefore, a mark ofbeing a person and being present. This absence is sandwiched, as the lack o f an explanation, a why, between this moment's notice and "a note to say that she had gone. " If she had never returned he
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would have eventually realized that she had gone, or he might have imagined that she had been kidnapped, and the mystery would be about if she had gone not why she had gone. The time o f going and being gone would not be determined as a function o f her intention. This intention and the lack of explanation constructs the gap between the going and the being gone as the subjunctive possibilities constituting her will as her own. I f the relationship is finished then what is unfinished? The blank moment, the moment when she
was still present but going, in which she could have given an explanation, surrounded by 'the moment's notice' (which is not notice at all) and the her note, provides the syntax of time without its semantics. The semantics in this case is, however, her actually going. And thus Edward can see the change in his world after the fact, but he is not a part of the timeline that is marked by her going and being gone. They mark a doorway through
which his wife left and which remains open. This is why it is unfinished. This time (his loss) has no meaning because although his world has changed he does not recognize himselfinthatworld. Hisworldhaschangedbutheisnotinhisworld. TimeforEdward is nothing more than what one could call the meta-syntactical order of limits: a knot of not's and no's (notice, note, not, nobody) constructing communication, continuity and change, and identity as a set ofpossible interpretations through which Edward projects his attachments as the world. The moment of no explanation only exists as it were outside of
the world as a set o f subjunctive possibilities. Edward, therefore, can neither experience this loss as his own loss (as opposed to a loss within his world) nor can he translate this change into a history (and therefore give it meaning).
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The Unidentified Guest recognizes the unfinished mysteriousness o f this change, but pursues how losing the given ofour world means a loss of ourselves (in other words picturing the loss o f his wife as what it is exactly not: a loss o f himself):
There's a loss o f personality; Or rather, you've lost touch with the person
Youthoughtyouwere. Younolongerfeelquitehuman. You're suddenly reduced to the status of an object --
A living object, but no longer a person.
It's always happening, because one is an object
As well as a person. But we forget about it
As quickly as we can. (CPE 307)
A person is either constituted as a self-generated subjunctive or as an object. Either I inhabit my thought of myself, function within the subjunctive, or I am "no longer a person. " Someone is real to me only in so far as they function within the pattern in which Irecognizethem,asIrecognizemyself,withinthissubjunctive. Existinginthis subjunctive world, however, seems supported or at least dependent on others functioning within its limits. Edward's wife not only becomes invisible to Edward, but Edward becomes invisible to himself except as an object.
Why an object? The loss ofthe given ofyourselfis the loss ofyour imagined 'you'. It maybe that I am no longer a husband, or attractive, or happy, or my future is no longer whatitwas. Myidentityandpersonhoodisconstitutedinthesubjunctiveoftheimagined past of what I before took for granted (defining my expectations) and the subjunctive
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possibilities opened up by the mystery, in this case, between her going and her being gone. I have a finished and an unfinished personhood. I am not determined by my own thinking, thatis,Iamnotmarkedwithinmyownsubjunctiveorganizationofwhatisgiven. The world described by Lavinia's absence, the record o f her going, the birth o f a moment, and herbeinggone,thebirthofwriting,reduceEdward'sexpectationstothatabsence. He can no longer construct his expectations and his hopes within a language which includes both himself and the world. This failure turns him into an object. He becomes the object describedbyHeidegger'sversionofscience: living+object. Ourpersonhoodsupervenes on our objecthood, which we try to ignore or forget. The indifference ofthe new time, of oursubjunctivecontainmentwithinthisindifferenceormysteriousness,makesobjects: the battle for personhood is over who or how whomever can mark oneselfas a set of possibilities, that is, to determine or believe ourselves the subjunctive of the world.
These subjunctive enactments can be described as social roles and acts, doing or functioning, and pretending or becoming:
When you've dressed for a part
And are going downstairs, with everything about you Arranged to support you in the role you have chosen, Then sometimes, when you come to the bottom step There is one step more than your feet expected Andyoucomedownwithajolt. Justforamoment You have experience ofbeing an object
At the mercy o f a malevolent staircase.
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Or, take a surgical operation.
In consultation with the doctor and the surgeon, In going to bed in the nursing home,
In talking to the matron, you are still the subject, Thecentreofreality. Butstretchedonthetable, Y ou are a piece o f furniture in a repair shop
For those who surround you, the masked actors; All there is ofyou is your body
And the 'you' is withdrawn. . . (CPE 307)
After putting on the cocktail party role, an act o f will or choice by which one enters into the possibility o f meeting others, I descend the stairs. I am not thinking about walking.
So I might say my body is walking if I can imagine its expectations proceeding as if from it and not from me. This might happen at night, or awake I might remember this as my condition at night. "There is one step more than your feet expected/ And you come down with a jolt. " This is the moment's notice when my feet find the world different than they imagined, I imagine. This jolt of lightening brings the world against me. Unlike in Being and Time, however, the stairway as ready-to-hand does not become an object present-to- hand, rather I become present to myselfas an object. 2 The staircase becomes animate, with a malevolent intentionality directed against me. Our animation of the staircase proceeds from our ignorance about the causes o f our failure to find the expected step. The worldhasceasedtobeours. Inthelossoftheworldwetranslateourselvesintothe temporal limit describing the loss of the world as going, in the moment's notice in which
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we find our feet have expectations, and the gone, in which we understand ourselves as acteduponbytheworld. Thistranslationgeneratesthesubjunctivepossibilitiesasan unexplained why in which I cannot choose, nor function myself within or as a subjunctive mode. Iamanobjecttotheworld:apuppet.
Doctors and nurses, "masked actors" surround you the patient becoming a body becoming a piece o f furniture, that which holds humans above the earth, temporary foundations of our humanity as against our animality. We have become the ground of our being, nothing but organs, bones, and gristle. How is being surrounded by actors, this could be a description of a cocktail party, surrounded by cocks screeching "Co co rico co co rico," different from having "everything about you [ajrranged to support you in the role you have chosen"? One has been excluded from the actor's guild, from the set of possibilities from which one can choose to be. As "the centre o f reality" I subject the world to the whims of possibility defining me. To be in a world is to be an object within someone else's world. As an object I have been condensed into the contentless syntax defined as the limit, the tangent between going and gone, an object to others: a chair.
A patient on the table, already an object, awaits death: He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
We are dying and, like the Sibyl, we are not (yet? ) able to reach that point of absolute dissolution. Herdesirefordeath,however,isreplacedintheselineswithpatience. Tobe patient is to endure. Endurance builds up an idea of identity: a continuity of being in the
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midst of events. Thus, its primary meaning is indurate, or to harden, to establish a perspectiveandanidentityunaffectedbyexternalreality. Asacorollary,therefore, enduranceistheextensionofbeingfromonepointtoanother. Thisdefinitionexposesthe underlying conception o f being from which the primary meaning is derived. Patience
transcends immediate conditions by a strict condensation of identity away from the destructive change threatening it. Patience, therefore, becomes the action o f living, or the extension ofthe principle oflife, inthe midst ofdecay and death. Yet we were alive inthe past, for we are dying now. Thus, this extension becomes an extension o f the past moment ofliving into the decay ofthe present: a reverberation ofspring among the mountains o f desert rock.
Thisreverberationrepresentsthedynamicforceofbecoming. Itsexistenceinthe dying world, however, is by virtue of its hardened endurable form. Consequently, it cannot become the actuality of spring, for it cannot break through its own opaque and hardened being. Thus we cannot see spring, just as we cannot see the past. All that remains is sound. Patience transcends the present, but the direction o f this transcendence istowardthepast(anegativedirectioninrelationtotime). Thus,itcannotbridgethegap between the present and the future; it is not a positive recreative transformation between an identity in the present and a potential identity in some future present.
We have left the paralysis of the Sibyl's non-transcendent realm. But we have yet to direct this recreative transcendence into the actuality o f nature, where it can become more than a mere sound. Our patience describes the content between 'a moment's notice' and the note we leave behind as the subjunctive. Life is counterfactual.
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This is life in The Waste Land (the waste land): Here is not water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains Which are the mountains ofrock without water
This "here' consists o f impenetrable identities called rocks and the idea o f absent water. "Here is not water. . asserts existence (here) through negation. Thus, this world consists ofthe idea ofwater, our abilityto negate this idea, and rocks. This initial 'Here' has a universalizing force (in that it seems to describe a world or a state) such that a logical structure emerges: rocks = not-water. This is not, however, an analytic synonymy, but rather a conception o f meaning as identity which expresses the law o f the excluded middle. But the not-water negates the idea of water attached to the poetic voice. This T , or the poem, is the excluded middle, an excluded limit, who, or which, points toward the water it negates and toward the not-water which is the rock. I use the phrase 'not-water which is the rock' because what is being asserted is 'Here is this world' or simply 'here is only rock'. This voice or this line by articulating the existent through both negation and assertion determines this voice or this line for us as the categorical marker among indicative identity (this is rock: and thus the logic o f reference), semantic identity (this is not-water: and thus a logic o f meaning), and subjunctive abstraction (this could be water:
the logic o f possibility). These lines could describe our condition.
This world expands in the next line: Rock and no water and the sandy road.
Reduced into the metaphysics ofrock (ofidentity) this becomes Rock + 0 + sandy road.
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Do these add up to a world? Can we get a world through paratactic addition? We can only move in this place on the road. Do we imagine that this road was made by people? A road functions like the idea ofwater, a possibility. We say the road moves through the mountains, but the road is static. The road moves or winds as if unfolding through our walking even before our walking. We recognize a road as itself a proleptic picture or manifestation of our own experience ofwhat the road promises. Can you step into the same road twice? The road snakes winding, the skin o f a rock serpent, "above among the mountains". The idea of water and of negation translate as a kind of effect into the "Here", where this road as something made recalls an origin, a making in which the mountains were negated, and transformed. The 'is' of existence in "here is not water. .
is not continued in the mountains, "[w]hich are mountains of rock without water": the mountains are the mountains (an identity), but also "the mountains o f . . . " (predication). These mountains consist of what is, that is, "of rock without water'. The mountains are what they consist of, which is what exists as being (the rock) and not-being (not-water). Three uses o f our verb o f 'to be' function identically here.
The road which was above, and because above among the mountains, move us up. This movement makes apparent that what is above is the same as below.
