No More Learning

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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. Transcendence, pursuedasanallegory,cannotbetowardanotherplace. Castingtheworldunderthe category of not-water excavates not the space for transcendence, but the space in which we place ourselves within this world. No-water means "We are here". What transcendence is possible, here, offers itself in turning us out o f the space made by the n o - water.
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We move not on the road but by virtue o f the road, but this virtue once called forth places us on the road:
If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
We seem to be moving, although not towards any promise.
can neither stop nor think. We should stop for water, we would or we might or it would be good if we did, in order to drink. The water would answer to our need, but without water we will not or cannot stop. The next line, however, inverts 'there were water we" into "Amongst the rock one cannot stop or", from a plural possibility of community to an abstract One. "Should" becomes "cannot"; one moves by necessity as if by a law of repulsionbetweenthelivingorthehumanandtheinanimate,rocks. Butwhathumanity remains in "one", already abstracted into a categorical identity, and thus akin to rocks? But a kind o f parallelism identifies one's inability to stop "amongst the rock" and the absence o f "water amongst the rock" that suggests that we Narcissus like find ourselves in or even as water. The absence ofwater is, therefore, the absence ofhumanity or our humanity. Againwearemarkedasthenegativelimitofthisworld.
Can sweat be dry? Are we moving and yet always touching the ground? Someone's body has become an object where sweat is never water in the world but only one imagines salt, but that residue is not apparent. The water from our body is dry, which is nonsense.
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We are moving because we
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In what we imagine is his argument against motion, Zeno pictures an infinite gap between movement and being in space: "That which moves, moves neither in the place in which it is, nor in that in which it is not" (Freeman, 47). This is either a confusion in the definition of movement, which should be understood as a metadescription, Ax, or a problem in representation solved by the calculus. For Zeno in his defense o f Parmenides the possibility o f contradiction determines the limits o f what can exist. Earlier Thales had argued that life is movement. Thus Parmenides argued not only that what exists is unchangeable, unmoving, continuous and ungenerated, but that this existence includes us as living beings. Eliot attempts to include being human within a logic o f identity that does not lead to Parmenides' totality, as a metaphor let's say x=x, but to fragments, or x=y; x=z; z=a; etc. This equality between disparate identities is, however, not underwritten by self-reflection or any metaphoric version of the associative law.
The road is always both a totality relative to us (and thus we can disregard the earth's changed position and the totality of altered relations things and people have to the road), and thus we can step into it twice. The road is also determined as a road through ourmovementonit,anetchingoftimepointingalwaysforward. Theroadasaway inscribes hope in its proleptic winding.
Dead mountain mouth o f carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors mudracked houses
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A dying earth, if not already dead, gap-mouthed (the dead soldier on the ground in Guernica) becomes person-like in death, gaining a coherence through its inanimate stasis; death brings the world into human form, where life like the Hyacinth garden, or the possibility o f "April with his showres soote," turns the enervation o f will into the sign o f human death:
"They called me the hyacinth girl. "
Yet when we came back, late from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart o f light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
Water from the empty sea is reduced to the absence of spit. Water is what Quine calls a mass term, where the plural is the same as the singular: our investment and use o f these words invokes our existence within a confusion between identity and containment; to avoid this confusion, and thus to mark our relation with God is what motivated Quakers to insist on using 'thee' and 'thou' in conversation to distinguish singular and plural uses ('ye' and 'you') of the second person; what's at stake in this? the loss of this distinction has a moral and an ontological consequence; but if we can call this, along with the Quakers, a confusion, it is also a connection, a dissolution in the way Heidegger attempts to dissolve identity into function, between identity and existence. The absence o f water excludes the grammar of these words and thus this link. But is not the realm of the dead a
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world which lacks exactly this link between identity and existence, at least human, mortal existence?
The emptiness (leer) is transposed into the leer ofthe "red sullen faces [that] sneer and snarl" . The emptiness o f the sea in the world o f neither living nor dead (the dying? ) becomes in the world o f still dying, in the midst o f the dead, populated both by mudracked houses (memory ofwater: like the mountains translated into static objects by the loss of water) and hostile faces (why nothing more than faces? ). The living world with its hyacinth girls draws the world as only this possibility o f love and nothing else: a poem. As
this possibility shrinks the world becomes repopulated with meaningless objects, not as metonymies or metaphors of love or the beloved, but ofthemselves; the waters recede, the desolationofpossiblebutvanishingfecunditybecomesadesolationofthedead. A metonymy o f itself? A metaphor o f itself is an-identity: a=a.
Our dying coalesces the metaphors into personification; can one then stand, lie, or sit on these teeth or in this hole of the mouth? : "[0]ne can neither stand nor lie nor sit". This reads like a description o f an ambush in the desert o f the American west, the hero without a home surrounded by enemies in mud houses and from the mountains. The proving ground where a hero becomes a hero: a world of difference and identity formulated by the possible negation o f the hero, o f substance. The world can be reconstituted if these threatened negations are themselves negated, and the world o f "Oed'
und leer das Meer" would return. But it was this silence that led to mountains in the first place.
This fragmentation cuts life off from other forms of life:
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And the dead tree gives not shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Thisrealityiswithoutwhatthetextcodesasfemininecomfort. Itisoneofimpervious substance, resistant to any penetration that would allow a communal transference between things. Objectsservetoreflectthemselvesintotheexternalworld. Fromthesereflections an object builds a relational dependency and interconnection, which, as it arises out of its ownidentity,doesnotbreachthewallsofitsintegrity. Theseshadowsaretheunreal projections o f being in a world where they can have little actual connection with the putative physical substance o f the rocks and trees from which they are formed. Yet they havedefiniteform,whichis,however,self-createdamomentbefore. Shadowcanstand
for mind because it has an ontological claim on us and is generated from the quantifiable interactions of rock and sun, and yet exists only as an absence, a hole in the light, a seemingly substanceless quality.
Only There is shadow under this rock,
(Come in under the shadow ofthis red rock),
And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
Man has become a sundial, where he stands in the center, himself unchanging, surrounded by the shadowy manifestations o f time ("each in his prison"). Shadows generated through the interaction o f identity and time oppose, or are at least fundamentally different from
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images cast by the non-regenerative identities ofrock. Eliot will not speak ofthis temporal process. The voice in The Waste Land rejects the beginning and end, the points oftransformation. He is interested in the gap between these moments as a paralytic moment o f incomplete transition between distinct states o f being.
Withinthisparalyticgap,anT despairsofeverreconstructingthere-creative relationshipbetweenidentities. T-despairarisesfromone'sowncontainmentwithinthis fragmented world. The metaphysical fragmentation ofthe world creates, or mirrors, the emotional separation between people caught in such a world (what kind? ):
I will show you fear in a handful o f dust.
Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind\
Wo weilest du?
With hysteria and opera, the lack o f women amidst rocks and water, returning to the earlier voices and the failure to construct or retain or protect the social, the only ethics available here is the identification o f oneself with the despair o f loss.
A lover separated from his or her beloved (but the status o f women is partly what is questioned by a metaphysics constructed through such a personal grouse; this does not mean one can make psychological claims on the basis o f a derived metaphysics o f identity. Calling it logocentric and patriarchal do their work as allegories, as further metaphysics, not inappropriate when one gives a different kind of content to a higher level symbolism, buthereitisthemetaphysicalstatusof'women'thatisatstake. Notare'women'good?
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but are they real? an anxiety that the quiddity o f humanness that is under assault by the world, or at least in Eliot's mind, cannot be separated from a version of our form of life at thesociallevel. Thisisafterallapoembuiltoutofvegetativemythsofrebirth. Buthow can one generate caring, concern, values of any sort from things? Or from fear in a handful o f dust? This is human fear attending the 'dust' in 'dust to dust', to be cast onto our grave, as that from which we were made and as that out of which we were made: our fear.
I am on the edge of a further turn into the operatic. The Waste Land requires 'our' operatic participation in responding or rather accepting the burden o f the poem's pronouns as 'ours'. (What in the poem is an aria and what a recitative? Are such distinctions stable within the poem? ). The Waste Land and opera move toward the same limits (under philosophical pressure opera asks about the ontological claim such singing
might have on us; a literary form of such a question would ask how can or do or should we become this 'us' [who would the 'we' be? ]).
Toward what limits does opera approach? Opera can be configured, at least, around three different limits: between singing and speaking (as in Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, within a musical totality describing the world, God, or being human), between desire and sense (as in Mozart's Don Giovanni), and between the mechanical, often understood as the music itself and the human, let's say the expressive (as in Offenbach's TalesofHoffmann). Alloftheselimitsareunderstood,withinopera,asthreatening
death. What kind of death and for whom? Catherine Clement's describes how we, as male and female, approach this limit:
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This is how opera reveals its peculiar function: to seduce like possums, by means of aesthetic pleasure, and to show, by means of music's seduction (making one forget the essential), how women die--without anyone thinking, as long as the marvelous voice is singing, to wonder why. (iOpera, 59)
If this is true, then music's pleasure is that it offers ajustification (for death, or killing, or singing) as a ground (or a distraction: are these the same? ). Justification is structured as an organized forgetting and remembering enacted through identification and distancing (entering into the grammar ofthe music through allegorizing one's relationship to the characters/ singers in the opera). Gregory Nagy, in his discussion of how Archaic Greek lyric oral poetry constructed the rhetorical forms for poetry, epic, and history, discovers this same structure in the linguistic relation between mnemosune and lethe:
As Detienne points out, lethe is not only the opposite of mnemosune 'remembering': it can also be an aspect o f mnemosune. For example, the goddess Mnemosune is described in the Theogony of Hesiod as giving birth to the Muses, divine personifications of the poet's power, so that they, through their poetry, may provide lesmosune 'forgetting' of sadness and of worries for humankind (53-55); whoever hears the Muses no longer memnetai 'remembers' his own ills (Theogony 98-103). (53)
This is, of course, one way of understanding how the fragments and allusions work in The WasteLand. Areader'srecognitionorunderstandingofalineorallusion(evenifthis
means only 'this is a conversation; or 'this is a wife') and ignorance of or confusion about a line is structured as a remembering and a forgetting, collapsing, as in opera, justification
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into the grounding logic of the aesthetics (of our reading the lines as poetry). It is unclear, however, how I can allegorize myselfin relation to the poem, and, therefore, it is unclear what is being justified.
The Waste Land consists of operatic gestures. What counts as a gesture within The Waste Landl A fragment, an allusion, a quote, a glimpse, a name. Because no conversation, action, event or reference has anything approaching narrative completeness or contextual clarity, every passage can do no more than gesture toward its completion of relevance or meaning. A gesture, therefore, becomes an interpretive conclusion. Can I
recognize a gesture if I cannot attach the putative gesture to a body, face, or a mind? These gestures are versions ofHeideggerian 'weilen' and are understood within the poem togeneratelanguage. Isthisanordinarygestureofawomanortheoperaticgestureofa diva? :
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)
Gestures occur at moments (or at the nexus) of incommensurable inputs, systems, or domains (worlds). Gestures of this sort are not language but determine the contextual limitswithinwhichlanguagewillmakesense. Theymarkthelimitsofourinhabitationof language and the world, and thus show the boundaries o f something analogous to the Tractarian metaphysical T . In saying this, however, I do not mean to put forward a theory about language and gesture or about this metaphysical T . My goal is rather to navigate
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within the site o f incommensurable language games (The W aste Land) in relation to the kinds oflimits articulated inPhilosophicalInvestigations andFinnegans Wake.
This operatic stance (in and towards The W aste Land) if attached not to Eliot but to the intelligence or horror or disgust or seduction of his poetry, is what Kierkegaard, vertriloquizing as the aesthetically motivated A in Either/Or, describes as his love of Mozart:
Immortal Mozart! You to whom I owe everything--to whom I owe that I lost my mind, that my soul was astounded, that I was terrified at the core o f my being--you to whom I owe that I did not go through life without encountering something that could shake me, you whom I thank because I did not die without having loved. (49)
This is one way o f describing the limit towards which opera approaches. A loss o f mind precipitates an astonishment of soul. The beloved is that which terrifies A as if it were death. But this terror is exemplified and expressed through a ridiculous and impossible list ofconquests(inDonGiovanni)andbysinginghumanrelationshipsintononsense. Opera turns the Romantic sublime, which might make us feel ridiculous, into the ridiculous (by this I mean the opera, or the nonsense of The Waste Land). To lose that which causes A to lose his mind "would demolish the one pillar that until now has prevented everything from collapsing for me into a dreadful nothing" (49). Living at this limit between living and dying, insanity o f mind and clarity or expressiveness o f soul, in other words to risk death, preserves A's humanity or the fact of his being anything (which of course he is not! ).
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Don Giovanni's desire exposes this essence, or constructs this essence as the meansbywhichmenrecognizethebodiesofwomen. ButDonGiovanni'sdesire,as sensuous desire, can construct only the external form of femininity, as if women had no insides, no subjectivity, no soul. It is through this failure that the souls o f 'women' are created. The opera "The Tales ofHoffmann", however, is structured around the acceptanceofthelimitsofsensuousdesire. Itthenasks,ifwemakethiswoman,makea Woman (Stella, the poet Hoffmann's "real" love) out ofthree women (his fictional loves), like constructing a copy o f our beloved out o f bits o f pictures o f many different women, do we have a woman, or merely a clever simulation?
Nicklausse explains, at the end of "The Tales of Hoffmann", that the three woman Hoffmann has loved, that the three stories he has told (and for us, the audience, enacted, embodied, imagined, displayed, and sung in his own voice as well as in those o f the women and men involved, although of course all these parts were not sung by our Hoffmann), are fictitious and used to describe one woman: Stella. This does not make a lot of sense. Stella seems to actually like our Hero enough to send him the key to her dressing room. Do we listen and watch this opera and ask: What does Hoffmann want of Stella? or What does Hoffmann think love is? The structure o f the opera masks these questions behind its solution ofthe identity of Stella. She can be divided into three parts: young girl, courtesan, and artist. She can be divided, exposed, and most importantly reducedtotheseparts. TheoperaisnotaboutHoffmann'sloveorevenhisfailures. Instead it asks and pretends to answer what makes a woman something to desire? What is a woman such that she is a being that can be desired? and thus How can 'we' construct a
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woman such that 'we' can desire her or become her? Opera continually asks this question, not simply because o f patriarchal politics (although this is important), but because it is not at all obvious how one can desire another being which one recognizes as not oneselfj and thus as something that cannot be known with any certainty, which I take to mean to know as another mind. How can one define oneself as a being existing within the internal space o f the mind, as a subject, as if one identified oneself by content, love and desire that which remains a form? It is not so simple to say that men treat women as objects. That is only true if one uses "object" as a metaphor. In opera, women are desired because it is impossible for men to love them as objects. Would anyone love a rock, a bit o f ground unless it was more than an object, personified somehow, entrapped within a system of values in which it functions as an extension of someone's identity within some particular grammar or social context?
Thejob of "The Tales ofHoffmann" is to make a man's mind into a woman's, and failing that to make a man's mind into the body of a woman. The body of the opera appears to be a story about three of Hoffmann's love affairs. We enter into his imaginative world,intowhatpurportstobehismemoriesandthusintohismind. Thesehistories, however, do not recapture or recapitulate the past. In the melodrama o f opera, the identity o f the beloved is described by a mythic history (organized around desire, generic forms and social types, social power, and so on). This identity in opera is determined by its thematic limits, by the possibility o f moving from speech to singing (and back again), from desire to possession, from the inanimate, or the mechanical, to the animate. Kierkegaard asserts that opera, in its enactment o f the musical, does not describe the
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achievement o f consciousness (which would require language, not opera). Thus the "immediate-erotic stage" constituting music (as demonstrated in its exemplar, Mozart) "must not be thought o f as persons on different levels with respect to consciousness; at all times I am dealing only with the immediate in its total immediacy" (Either/Or 1. 74). Musicdescribesthelimitbetweentimeandsense(ornonsenseifyouwant). ThisIthink
justifies Kierkegaard (or A) in situating the dialectic of opera and music before or outside ofthe Hegelian figuration of human thinking (or being) as grounded and always taking place through consciousness. Hegel pictures human beings, as did Descartes, as defined by their consciousness, whereas Kierkegaard wants to re-posit the soul, not as having any particular content, but as constituting our stance toward ourselves though our interactions
with others (such a stance might in certain moments be defined as being conscious or self- conscious). This concern transplanted from "Don Giovanni" to "The Tales ofHoffmann" could take the form of the question 'Is the identity of this woman a mind of a soul? "
This is a question that merges into both the articulation o f the subjunctive possibilities shadowing the despair of The Waste Land and the fragmentation and death that threaten it.