Eliot asks in The Waste Land, I imagine, 'How do we dwell in and stay
language
as our world?
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
(239)
"Thinking brings. . . Being comes, lighting itself. . . under way to language"; what does this describe? The circularity of"Being. . lighting itself', the agency ofthinking "put[ting] its saying of Being into language as the home of ekistence" ("Letter", 239), and the intimacy o f language "raised into the lighting o f Being" animates and personifies Being, thinking, and language, as actors and acting, in their becoming visible as what they are. They function as both minds (animate agents) and worlds (grounds and context) making visible each other as the other in this functioning, as if before the differences between these hypostasize into subjects and objects, or selfand world, or particulars and universals. These relations and 'entities', however, are not part of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction would require justification: why these and not other categories or beings or aspects? why lighting? how does one light the other? Heidegger removes human agency, the temptations toward skepticism and subjectivity by excluding
the demand for justification from his questioning. Rhetorically he does this by presenting his thinking as a description that acts ontologically ("Thinking is a deed . . . its saying
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? merely brings the unspoken word o f Being to language")- Thinking describes thinking, and in this thinking implicates the world, undermines subjective reductions o f being, etc. The equivocation of being "equally near and equally far" (DD177) is opposed by
nearness--through which the world and things appropriate each other (fit and mutually belong together) in the mirror-play and the staying/ dwelling of the ring and gering. Nearness is therefore an ontological value, giving and staying and dwelling through which we understand the earth as nourishing, the sky as sky, the divinities as "beckoning messengers", and mortals as capable of death. Things are not of equal value. How do we recognize or live within this unequal value? How can things have any value that we can recognize? Not by being made, but by dwelling within the reflective implications that determine the world as world within a mutually reflective totality of relations.
Anima mundi seu orbis
How do these fragments oftime (or function) make a world? The world is a unity as a function of the functioning of a thing (not an effect, because the function of any particular thing includes the quadrature and presents the world as world, it does not form it). Thisseemsabsurdifweincludemorethanonething. Isthequadrature'stayed'in different ways in and for each thing? In other words, things as the condensation of different function-time series produce each a different 'staying' or 'dwelling' of the world. The difficulty o f the world functioning as a world determined by these fragmented times returns Heidegger to the problem of many times (and possible worlds) 15th century philosophers found themselves facing.
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? I f time arises as a function o f movement then different movement rates produce different times. 15th century philosophers posited an Absolute measure in relation to which all of these different rates were regularized as time. Appealing to Aristotle, this absolutemeasureisbestdescribedinthecelestialmovements. Thisleavestwoproblems. How does this celestial movement determine time for us in our everyday life and within the sublunar world? That is, how do we experience time? and what is the temporal relation between the celestial clock and the different movements describing change in the world? The second question takes a peculiar medieval form derived from the incident in
Joshua (10. 12) where God stopped the movement ofthe heavens but time continued on earth: "thesunstoppedbuttimewenton"(Confessions,XI. xxiii[30]). Augustine constructed time as a function o f the soul, and thus he could untie the world from time. Aristotelian versions o f time, however, require movement and a uniform physical periodicity for change to emerge.
Ockham attempts to resolve, or rather integrate, Augustinian and Aristotelian times:
Thus one sees how a man does not see heaven can perceive the movement of heaven, once he perceives himself as existing in an existence subject to change (se esse in esse tranmutabili), meaning once he perceives his own coexistence with a mobile moving uniformly and continuously, or once he grasps the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously and uniformly.
Second, as has just been stated, when we perceive that we exist in an existence subject to change, we perceive time essentially, for we perceive then that
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? something moves continually and uniformly--and this is to perceive time essentially It suffices for him to grasp the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously and uniformly; in fact, that is the concept proper to the movement o f heaven. (Duhem, 318-19)
Ockham develops the role ofheaven intwo other arguments, but he concludes only, as he does here, that celestial movement is accidental to time, but supervenes on it. What Ockham recognizes is that time requires a conceptual uniform and continuous temporal order that includes both us and the world. Our knowledge o f this movement, although it may arise from observation and induction, requires only our existential acknowledgment andcontainmentwithinafundamentaltemporalorder. Thisacknowledgmentfollows through a double perception: of ourselves as subject to change in relation to an external temporal order with which we coexist.
Walter Burley develops Ockham's solution and formulates the nature of the absolute measure as necessarily the first movement:
I assert that in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in a confused way; in fact, we perceive that there is a simple and uniform movement which is the measure ofthe movement we are perceiving. But whether this simple and uniform movement is the movement of heaven or some other movement, we do not perceive. Thus when we perceive any movement whatever, we perceive the first time in some way; in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in a confused way moreover, in perceiving any
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? movement whatever, we perceive the particular time that results from that
movement. (Duhem, 326)
The first movement and its extension as the temporal order o f the world constructs a coherent and singular time-world. Without this originary ground time could fragment into different time scales and rates, if not within the same physical world, at least at different future time (or at past times):
" . . the word time does not signify something single, distinct in its totality from allpermanent things,whosenatureorbeingcanbeexpressedbymeansofa definition. But we must imagine that this world signifies that first continual and uniform movement, and that it also signifies at the same time, the soul that conceives the before and after and what is between the two in this movement. " (Ockham, Tractatus de succesivis, in Duhem, 306)
Although Ockham argued that a fixed body was required for local movement to appear as movement and that this fixed body need not be an actual body in nature, but can be an abstract concept. He develops this same idea in his description oftime, but hesitates to described the standard in relation to which time emerges as an abstract concept. Nicholas Bonet, a contemporary of Ockham, however, draws this conclusion. He distinguishes between two kinds oftime: natural time which is constituted by as many different times as movements, and mathematical time, which is constituted through abstraction in relation to asinglestandard. ThisiswhatDuhemcallstheAbsoluteClockandwhatGraziadei developed into the series that wound back reaches a point of unity between natural and mathematical worlds:
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? Even though time is the measure o f all movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement first and properly. (Duhem, 360)
When Heideggerjettisons the making ofthe thing as part of its identity, he loses this series. As we have seen the consequence ofHeidegger's functional description ofthings fragments the world into multiple times. How are these times stabilized into a single world or time? They cannot be stabilized into a single time without invoicing either (1) physics, to construct something like an absolute clock describing a mathematical order or a physical order o f ontogenesis or (2) a perceptual apperceptive order (as do Augustine and Kant). The first, while it does not reduce the world in the way that Heidegger fears
(physical laws are not the world nor can any science, except in special cases [physics and chemistry] reduce one level of complexity to another), it does problematize the animation o f the world, reintroduces the problem o f substance, and reintroduces a metaphysics o f science. What is the relation between physical descriptions of time and our perception of time? . The second, filters the world through our perception or knowing or mind, and, therefore, places us on the edge of a skeptical teeter-totter.
W e recognize change in us and change in the world. I f these are different, how are they related? Heidegger answers we are things, and these things enact time as the functioning through which they emerge at any point as what they are. But what kind of functional description, or semantic embodied series captures our functioning? Things are units o f time, but these units are not stabilized relative to each other nor are they uniform
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? except as semantic concepts. There are many times: only what counts as a thing stabilizes the concept o f time as what is. 21
Kant in On the Form andPrinciples o fthe Sensible and the Intelligible World, a precursor to the first Critique, proposes that time is not a concept, as Leibniz argues against Locke in the New Essays, but a fundamental, pure intuition: "you conceive all actual things in time, and not as contained under the general concept oftime, as under a common characteristic mark" (? 14)22 In the Critique o fPure Reason, this has become
Time is not discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts o f one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition. Moreover, the proposition that different times cannot be simultaneous is not to be derived from a general concept. The proposition is synthetic, and cannot have its origin in the concepts alone. It is immediately contained in the intuition and representation o f time. (A 32/ B 47)
The unity o f time is not established by God, being, or an Absolute clock, but rather by objects which constitute a world within the singularity o f an intuition.
Heidegger in "Das Ding" redescribes this being in time within the singularity o f an intuition by refiguring or turning inside out the world and things and mortals and divinities as 'weHen'. 'Weilen', to stay, linger, dwell, functions as an absolute clock-- that is, the pressure that translates the ontological into a semantic condensation is stabilized, as are all things, all temporal series, in the semantics of 'weilen' taken into the implicate totality of whatHeideggercallsthequadrature. Inthechainofimplicationconstitutingathing--
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? each functor depends on. the categorical difference between its descriptive force and 'weilen'. Alloftheseotherfunctorsaswordsdescribethefunctioningofthejugwithin
thesemanticsofourordinarylanguage. Thereisametaphoricclaritytothisimplicate chain that is missing in Heidegger's use o f'weilen'. The sense of 'weilen' does not attach to the jug through its function, as do the other terms, but through the personification of the jug that allows it to 'take', 'gather', 'outpour', 'gather'-- and 'dwell': to claim these wordsasexpressiveofitself. 'Dwell'heremarkstheentrancesi'weilen'intothe dimension of function. The more obscure meaning of 'weilen' as 'staying' flattens the temporal order described by function into semantics, where the meaning o f this world requires the construction o f a world-organism, a form o f life, in which this semantics can have meaning. The object o f "Das Ding", therefore, is an attempt to construct this form of life through the elucidation of the semantics o f'weilen'.
The syntax o f function that describes the jug, however, cannot describe either the world or us. The relation between things, therefore, requires this further abstraction into stasis--or rather into the subjunctive. But it is exactly this subjunctive that needs to be described in order for 'weilen' to function as the categorical functor between the descriptive and functional temporal series and the world-constituting relations ofthe quadrature (Geveirt). Not only must Heidegger describe humans as things, but he must also describe the world, the quadrature, and in this redescribe how all three can describe a function, an identity, and an unfolding of time, a time series, as an implication that includes the others. Such an attempt would precipitate the skeptical dilemmas he is trying to avoid. The emergence ofthe opposition between making and given, where the given is emergent
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? in our relation to things and in their functioning, must also include our species history. Heidegger's question about how the world emerges as a world must also include Thoreau's question 'why do these things make a world? '. Our self-reflective awe includes not just the philosophical question 'why is there anything instead o f nothing? ', but the questions'whythesethingsinsteadofothers? whymeinsteadofanother? ' Buildinga mind stabilizes this questioning by integrating how is this world mine with why is this world mine, not instead of another's but instead of simply 'not mine. ' I can make myself in order to make the world. Heidegger wants to forget this question in the givenness of things.
1Translating Geveirt as 'fourfold' as does Hofstadter, confuses the categorical distinction between the kind of coherence among earth and sky, divinities and mortals and that which is achieved in the abstraction o f the einfaltigen\ these domains are distinct and cannot be reduced one to the other, but complete each other while retaining the other category as a set o f relations or possibilities that enact the world in a particular way.
2 Der Krug steht als Gefass doch nur, insofem er zu einem Stehen gebracht wurde. 3Heidegger'spictureofscience: Scienceobscureswhat'thejug-characterofthejugconsist[s]',when science, as he believes it does, claims to "inform us about the reality of the actual jug" ("die Wissenschaft konneunsuberdieWirklichkeitdeswirklichenKrugeseinenAufschluflgeben"). Thisisaclaimfew scientistswouldmake,andattheveryleastisstrictlyspeakinglogicallyimpossible. Inductioncannot lead to certainty. The question science asks is 'How does this work? ' It collapses why-questions and what-questions into how-questions. Heidegger's claim, therefore, that science pays 'no heed to that in the vessel which does the containing. . . to how the containing itself goes on" is false. Science specifically provides an answer to "how the containing itself goes on". Its answer is embedded within a system of mathematical (broadly speaking) descriptions, simplified and idealized in order to answer this how. Heidegger's question 'how does the containing itself go on? ' asks not for a causal description but for a kind of transcendental deduction determined within phenomenological limits (and therefore exploring the semantics of 'containing') and describing a set of ontological possibilities. 4TheJournalsandMiscellaneousNotebooksofRalph WaldoEmerson.
5 If we can use Bohm's description o f quantum relations as a metaphor.
61say a noumenal boundary although Heidegger makes a distinction between the Ding an sich and Ding als Ding, because he asserts that from the thing qua thing we may reach thing in itself (DD168), but more importantlyrepresentationandmakingformthethingitselfasthenoumenal. Andthustheysetuptheir own failure.
7traut: cosy, secure, within, intimate, close.
trauen: trust, believe in, venture, dare, marry.
zutrauen: believe sombody is capable of doing something.
8 If the world always stays in this outpouring, beyond or forgonen by our representations, we can only discover it in following this outpouring in whatever world we find ourselves in. Losing the world might seem to suggest instead the possibility that 'this world', accompanied by a wave of an arm (my arm? ), is a
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? true or false world. This can mean either that this might not count as a world, requiring some tests, an examination o f world-criteria, or that this might be a true-world or a false-world.
9 Aristotle's hylomorphism determines substance as matter determined by form, in a similar conceptual unity,inorderprimarilytoresistthePlatonicreductionofmattertoform. Realisminmodemphilosophy argues for the irreducibility o f category in order to resist what is often understood to be, but should not be, the scientific reduction to 'matter'.
10 See On the Way to Language; "Letter on Humanism"; "Dwelling Building Thinking".
11 ". . . Dasein's going-out-of-the-world in the sense of dying must be distinguished from the going-out-of- the-worldofthatwhichmerelyhaslife[desNur-leben-den\. Inourterminologytheendingofanything that is alive, is denoted as "perishing" [Verenden]. We can see the difference only if the kind of ending which Dasein can have is distinguished from the end of a life. Of course "(tying" may also be taken physiologicallyandbiologically. Butthemedicalconceptofthe'exitus'doesnotcoincidewiththatof "perishing". (BT 284-85; 240-41).
12 See Sein undZeit, 88.
u Averrois Cordubensis, lib. IV, comm. 88; cited in Duhem, 301.
14 Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30.
15The Genesis ofHeidegger's Being and Time.
16Basic Concepts, tr. Gary E. Aylesworthy, 21-22.
17 The following is a schematic translation o f this passage: Thinking: (Being, essence) embrace; Embrace (thing, person) = love =favor, Favor = bestow essence as gift: Favor = essence of enabling = unfold as letting it be; enabling= possible (essence of favor): Being enables thinking; enables = make possible; reintegrated into Being as enabling/ favoring2 possibility o f Being.
181 am not finished with perishing and dying, as i f anyone could be! , but I don't want to recapitulate
existential descriptions- but to work out the relation between grammar and ontology--you could read that here as possibility and necessity as stances toward oneselfand the world- and thus not as logical (modal) possibilities.
19"Moira (Parmenides VIE, 34-41)" in Early Greek Thinking, tr. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.
20 Although Heidegger never articulated it as such, this construction o f things as functions responds to Putnam's twin-earth argument and its consequences for functionalism narrowly conceived as a model for the mind.
z,How does form emerge as the kind of thing I should be or am, if I do not already understand form, at least of others, as who they are?
22 In Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, tr. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 373-416.
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? 9. 1 Thunder-talk
9
'Weilen' in The Waste Land
Howdowedwellinandstaytheworldaslanguage? Science,Heidegger imagines, stays the world into quantity, while he stays it into semantics, into the quality of being a thing and a world.
Eliot asks in The Waste Land, I imagine, 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? ' Heidegger's transformation of ontology into semantics mutates, in the poem, into a translation ofthe semantic into the subjunctive under the aspect o f a more restrictive aesthetics o f identity. Eliot's questioning does not undo Heidegger's work, but it shows how the giveness ofthe thing is also made against the fantasy o f the subjunctive. Thus, The Waste Land highlights our language into a subjunctive mode through which we constitute ourselves in language (at the very least investigating the way in which pronouns and names and voices have a claim on us, or 'we' on them). How do we approach the inanimate through the subjunctive?
How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? I find this question in another kind of semantic play on 'weilen' in a fragment Eliot quotes from the opening scene ofWagner's opera Tristan undIsolde:
Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
Notes for this chapter are on page 398
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? A sailor sings these verses. Isolde, mistakenly or not, interprets them to be about her: "Who dares to mock me? " She is th e 'you'. Asking "where you dwell? " to a woman figured as nothing but a pronoun can be understood as another way of asking 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? ' A provisional answer, that will prove not to be an answer at all, but a restatement o f the question is the invocation o f memory and desire withwhichthepoembegins. Theenvironmentandtime(figuredasApril)arestayedinto poetry through the Coincidentia Oppositorum, "mixing/ Memory and desire" (2-3). I find thismixinginTheWasteLandoperatic. Howisthisenactmentofstaying(notreallya stasis) or lingering or dwelling through the fragments different from the astonishment of soul Kierkegaard describes as an effect of Opera? Certainly the power of The Waste Land is not the "exuberant gaiety" that is the power o f Don Giovanni. This gaiety is the expression of"his voice, the voice ofthe sensuous" (96). How would we describe the
voices in The Waste Land?
Heidegger leaves us in a world of things, with neither people nor the scientific
logic with which to build these things into people. This is something like the world in which Tristan finds himself in The Waste Land. Heidegger wants to get to the organic coherence of the world as a form of life that can speak 'weilen' with the ontological force that he needs to reconstitute a particular thing into staying, dwelling, being the world, avoiding the traditional attempts to link particulars and universals (examples, exemplars, forms, versions, reflections, and so on). Heidegger's romanticism remains akin to Schlegel's in his attempt to reconstruct a semantics with ontological force. His attempt, however, blocks offany questioning ofthe giveness ofthe world (like Wittgenstein, he
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? wants to disconnect 'how the world is' form "what is higher. God does not reveal himself intheworld'(TLP6. 432);Heideggerbothbeforeandafterhisturn("dieKehre") rejects this kind o f transcendence: Wittgenstein and Heidegger always had alien views concerning logic. What is common between them, however, is not just their appeal to the ordinary and to the grammar of language (albeit in different ways) but their failure to understand the depth of questions about how the world is). For Eliot some possible world speaks 'verwielen' and from this speaking he must construct its semantics, in this case the semantics o f thunder.
What is created in an by The Waste Lcmdl
The attempt to justify the poetry results in an appeal to and requires the constructionofakindoftheoryofmind. Whythisisremainsamystery. Ifmindsfunction within an ontological universe described by science, by strict laws describing a totality of possibilities, then these constructions have force only in so far as they articulate themselves in relation to such an ontology. When Eliot deciphers "What The Thunder Said" as "The spoke the thunder/ DA," the etymological force o f DA, and its inclusion in
Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata (control) does not get taken up into mythological or theological promises or stories separate from the physics of thunderstorms and the indifference of these natural processes to our concerns, understanding, and meanings. Howdoesitgettakenup? Orhowarewetakenupbyit?
Is this thunder the voice of our beginning as human beings, or our end? Vico and, through him, Joyce settled thunder at the beginning of humanity, driving our ancestors
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? into caves and into society. From our havens listening toward heaven, our "forebears" (FW572. 06) mimicked onomatpoetically thunder into language:
The first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightening bolts and thunderclaps were signs make to them by Jove; whence from m o , to make a sign, can numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of ove. The science o f language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science o f the language o f the gods. (NS379)
The world requires divination, and thus "Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the gentile world [721, 925]" (NS381). Divination, as the form of what Vico calls "poetic metaphysics," "seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modificationsofthemindofhimwhomediatesit"(NS364). Themythicconsciousnessis
gripped by a kind o f idealism that resists the conscious articulation o f the question "Are the signs I see in the world actually in the world or a function o f my interpretations? "
"Because o f the indefinite nature o f the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himselfthe measure of all things" (NS120). What is the nature of this ignorance? In this case it is the ignorance attending finding ourselves fragments (represented or acted out in our ignorance of the meaning of The Waste Land). Eliot's ignorance is not directed at the world and its workings but toward God and the
justificationoftheworld. ThisisagainakintoVico'sdescriptionofpoeticmetaphysics:
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? So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendof i t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendofit omnia). . . . . . . . . for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS405)
How do we extend our mind into our mind? The Waste Land requires us to remark our ignorance of the significance or nature of our own believing and of our visions as self- reflexive ignorance: our ignorance of our ignorance.
Vico explicitly grounds the poetic and the mythic in the same logic, or poetic wisdom. Eliot's project in The Waste Land is ostensibly the same (or similar). What is the poetic logic Eliot uses to expose the mutual relation between poetry and myth? (This is another way o f asking what does the poem create? ). I do not want to explore this question byexaminingEliot'suseofmythorhisuseanddistortionsofquotations. Vicooffersa way into a more interesting question about how we enter into the correlation (an origin) between language and consciousness. If Vico's history is too obscure, then, at least, his argument that human consciousness derived from mythical consciousness and that this mythical stance toward the world articulates a poetic metaphysics places the logic of origins within the logic of coherence determining language as a language, a consciousness as a consciousness, or a mind as a mind. These logics of origin and coherence are akin to
Heidegger's configuration of the thing as the staying of the quadrature. The logic of origin and coherence in The Waste Land function as the aesthetics (or justification) of
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? fragmentation within the poem. Eliot's aesthetics o f fragmentation is the poetic enactment of the Sibyl's condition described in the poem's epigraph. Such an aesthetics attempts to organize language, consciousness, and the world within and around the inhabitation o f the concept o f identity represented (or enacted) by the Sibyl.
Unlike Vico and Joyce, Eliot does not ground the speaking o f the thunder in the "first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts" (NS374). Eliot does not give us a complete thunder language, nor the integrated language or form o f life evolved, evolving and expressing the infrarational mind of someone, but rather the grammatical (the linguistic forms, examples, usages, bits) limits between thunder language(s) and the minds and times and societies in which they made sense, between the theology of God's language
and the insensate forms o f nature's indifference to make our kind o f sense. offers different kinds o f education: an incarnation versus T&ks(h*,xxj:
Then spoke the thunder DA
Datta: what have we given?
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
The thunder
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? "DA/Dattat" if heardfrom the beginning of time or humanity pretends to describe the transformation of a sound into a phoneme and then into a ritual language. If heard as a beginning, "D A . . D A . . DA" decomposes our language back into phonemes and then into exclamation and then noise. Even if someone spoke Sanskrit fluently "Datta," "Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" sound outside o f any ordinary language game, not with philosophical weight but with religious mass. This language is alien. It must mean, but no one can understand it like they might 'this is my house. ' It might mean, however, 'this is my house. ' The order of sounds that makes a language is the same order of sounds that makes thunder. This is true even if all we can understand by thunder is its physical causes. Science speaks the order of the universe.
What can this language mean against physics?
Thunder disturbs the universe.
It disturbs us with a question: "Datta: what have we given? " To whom? we ask
back. Who is this 'we'? The thunder speaks to me not because it is a language but because it threatens me into a 'we'. What have I given to you? The thunder can turn 'you' into an 'us'. If we mimicked thunder to create language, this means we formed mirrors through which we could see ourselves as both individuals and as human beings. Thunder-reflection is self-reflection.
The demands of this 'we' can be taken up in friendship as it is in the line following "Datta . "My friend, blood shaking my heart. " At night or when we turn our ears toward ourselves the blood sounds our own thunder, shaking us into life as much as the thunder into fear: 'My friend, my heart in my chest, and in our language as I write myself
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? into concepts, and into the world, my friend, as passions circulate amongst us. ' What kind o f language is this?
We reach the foundation of who 'we' are:
By this, and this alone, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
By what alone have we existed? By giving or not giving? By friendship or blood or daring and surrender? This "By this" cannot be found in descriptions after the fact, or in memories, in further representations edited even in our own minds, or in our own giving of things and money within the law, under the auspices of order and definition, or in the places and spaces we possessed. Either we do not know what 'exist' means here, or we do not know giving, friendship, blood, daring, or surrender.
Do we mistake the unrepresentable for the inexpressible? or for our privacy? The demand to sympathize (Dayadhvam) is ironically answered by a picture of solipsism, "each in his prison. " The pain I feel is my pain and not yours, but 'my pain' and your response to my pain is not determined by either my knowledge o f it (I experience it, or in other words, I pain: pain! ) or your knowledge ofthe truth ofmy pain. You respond to my expressionorthemanifestationsofmypain. Wittgensteinremarks,
What makes it so plausible to say that it [the pain] is not the body? --Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say
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? so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one
looks into his face. (PI? 286)
I can, however, fall into absurdity and find it not plausible to acknowledge the other as human. Peoplehavebeenknowntofallintoparts,bothinPetrarchianpoeticloveblazons andinAliceinWonderlanddistortionsandeverynight,asleep. Asleeponeloses ontologicalaccesstoone'sface. Inpartialanswertooneofmyinitialquestions,'whatis being created? ', I can answer "Faces are not being created, nor even found. ' The language of The Waste Land is attached to human beings through a collection of names: Marie, Madame Sosostris, Phoenician Sailor, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, Mrs. Equitone, Saint Mary Woolnoth, Philomel, Stetson, Lil, Albert, Bill, Lou, May, Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, Tiresias, Elizabeth I, Leicester, Phlebas, and Hieronymo. Not all of these names are names o f human beings who had once lived. Is there any significance in
replacing the face with a name? It in effect turns all names into pronouns.
These words do not speak in the context o f god: the voices are extracted from
everydaylife. Itistheordinarywhichbordersonhysteria. ThisisEliot'stransformation of a feminine voice into a parody ofMozart's Queen ofthe Night:
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think. " (Ins. l 11-114)
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? Hysteria attaches one's nerves to oneself. These "nerves" are a physical synecdoche for a mental condition, a hysteria played out against human indifference and uncaring and alienation within a marriage. The same hysteria can stay a person in a disintegrating relationship: "my nerves are bad . . . stay with me. " (This is one way o f 'staying' the world inalanguageoflove. ItisoneoftheconclusionsofEliotthatsuch'staying'isdamning). The husband here has lost or renounced his voice (a sibyl-like diminishment); he functions in these lines as a metaphysical 'I', a limit determining the scope of but not included within the world, dominated by the women's speaking. But the absent husband's implicit authorial position (maybe as bricoleur) means he ventriloquizes her speaking, and she
ventriloquizes his soul (the negative outlines o f his face sketched in his absence). Catherine Clement, in her book on Opera, asks about what she understands as patriarchal fear: "What haste, what hatred drives them to reduce woman to her image? " (28). The image of women in The Waste Land is described by speaking. Is the image of the diva, her body,herface,hersinging,orhervoice? InTheWasteLandoneoftheimagesdescribing thelimitbetween silenceandsong(whichisitselfthelimitbetweensilenceandspeech) and between desire and possession is female hair:
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread our in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)
Do we imagine this scene parodies lightening and thunder? Parody requires judgment, enacting mimicry within a structure ofvalues. To suggest that parody is the origin of
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? language is to mock the question o f origin when it is understood as answerable by something like parody. Joyce's use o f Vico's stages o f history (including the theory that speech imitates thunder) suggests exactly this kind o f parody, transforming putative origins into limits. (What motivates parody? a tool in what game? A chimpanzee will mimic other chimps and humans, but why not parody them? )
Is Eliot pursuing a similar project of transforming origins into limits? Maybe. There is at least a confusion between parodies and rumors:
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
What are "aethereal rumours"? They are night-words, but aethereal words can be from Godandtherumorspromises. Buttheserumorsre-animate(revive)ifonlyforamoment, the fragmented body o f Coriolanus. By what does Coriolanus exist?
"Thinking brings. . . Being comes, lighting itself. . . under way to language"; what does this describe? The circularity of"Being. . lighting itself', the agency ofthinking "put[ting] its saying of Being into language as the home of ekistence" ("Letter", 239), and the intimacy o f language "raised into the lighting o f Being" animates and personifies Being, thinking, and language, as actors and acting, in their becoming visible as what they are. They function as both minds (animate agents) and worlds (grounds and context) making visible each other as the other in this functioning, as if before the differences between these hypostasize into subjects and objects, or selfand world, or particulars and universals. These relations and 'entities', however, are not part of a transcendental deduction. Such a deduction would require justification: why these and not other categories or beings or aspects? why lighting? how does one light the other? Heidegger removes human agency, the temptations toward skepticism and subjectivity by excluding
the demand for justification from his questioning. Rhetorically he does this by presenting his thinking as a description that acts ontologically ("Thinking is a deed . . . its saying
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? merely brings the unspoken word o f Being to language")- Thinking describes thinking, and in this thinking implicates the world, undermines subjective reductions o f being, etc. The equivocation of being "equally near and equally far" (DD177) is opposed by
nearness--through which the world and things appropriate each other (fit and mutually belong together) in the mirror-play and the staying/ dwelling of the ring and gering. Nearness is therefore an ontological value, giving and staying and dwelling through which we understand the earth as nourishing, the sky as sky, the divinities as "beckoning messengers", and mortals as capable of death. Things are not of equal value. How do we recognize or live within this unequal value? How can things have any value that we can recognize? Not by being made, but by dwelling within the reflective implications that determine the world as world within a mutually reflective totality of relations.
Anima mundi seu orbis
How do these fragments oftime (or function) make a world? The world is a unity as a function of the functioning of a thing (not an effect, because the function of any particular thing includes the quadrature and presents the world as world, it does not form it). Thisseemsabsurdifweincludemorethanonething. Isthequadrature'stayed'in different ways in and for each thing? In other words, things as the condensation of different function-time series produce each a different 'staying' or 'dwelling' of the world. The difficulty o f the world functioning as a world determined by these fragmented times returns Heidegger to the problem of many times (and possible worlds) 15th century philosophers found themselves facing.
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? I f time arises as a function o f movement then different movement rates produce different times. 15th century philosophers posited an Absolute measure in relation to which all of these different rates were regularized as time. Appealing to Aristotle, this absolutemeasureisbestdescribedinthecelestialmovements. Thisleavestwoproblems. How does this celestial movement determine time for us in our everyday life and within the sublunar world? That is, how do we experience time? and what is the temporal relation between the celestial clock and the different movements describing change in the world? The second question takes a peculiar medieval form derived from the incident in
Joshua (10. 12) where God stopped the movement ofthe heavens but time continued on earth: "thesunstoppedbuttimewenton"(Confessions,XI. xxiii[30]). Augustine constructed time as a function o f the soul, and thus he could untie the world from time. Aristotelian versions o f time, however, require movement and a uniform physical periodicity for change to emerge.
Ockham attempts to resolve, or rather integrate, Augustinian and Aristotelian times:
Thus one sees how a man does not see heaven can perceive the movement of heaven, once he perceives himself as existing in an existence subject to change (se esse in esse tranmutabili), meaning once he perceives his own coexistence with a mobile moving uniformly and continuously, or once he grasps the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously and uniformly.
Second, as has just been stated, when we perceive that we exist in an existence subject to change, we perceive time essentially, for we perceive then that
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? something moves continually and uniformly--and this is to perceive time essentially It suffices for him to grasp the proposition, I coexist with a certain body moving continuously and uniformly; in fact, that is the concept proper to the movement o f heaven. (Duhem, 318-19)
Ockham develops the role ofheaven intwo other arguments, but he concludes only, as he does here, that celestial movement is accidental to time, but supervenes on it. What Ockham recognizes is that time requires a conceptual uniform and continuous temporal order that includes both us and the world. Our knowledge o f this movement, although it may arise from observation and induction, requires only our existential acknowledgment andcontainmentwithinafundamentaltemporalorder. Thisacknowledgmentfollows through a double perception: of ourselves as subject to change in relation to an external temporal order with which we coexist.
Walter Burley develops Ockham's solution and formulates the nature of the absolute measure as necessarily the first movement:
I assert that in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in a confused way; in fact, we perceive that there is a simple and uniform movement which is the measure ofthe movement we are perceiving. But whether this simple and uniform movement is the movement of heaven or some other movement, we do not perceive. Thus when we perceive any movement whatever, we perceive the first time in some way; in perceiving any movement whatever, we perceive the first movement in a confused way moreover, in perceiving any
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? movement whatever, we perceive the particular time that results from that
movement. (Duhem, 326)
The first movement and its extension as the temporal order o f the world constructs a coherent and singular time-world. Without this originary ground time could fragment into different time scales and rates, if not within the same physical world, at least at different future time (or at past times):
" . . the word time does not signify something single, distinct in its totality from allpermanent things,whosenatureorbeingcanbeexpressedbymeansofa definition. But we must imagine that this world signifies that first continual and uniform movement, and that it also signifies at the same time, the soul that conceives the before and after and what is between the two in this movement. " (Ockham, Tractatus de succesivis, in Duhem, 306)
Although Ockham argued that a fixed body was required for local movement to appear as movement and that this fixed body need not be an actual body in nature, but can be an abstract concept. He develops this same idea in his description oftime, but hesitates to described the standard in relation to which time emerges as an abstract concept. Nicholas Bonet, a contemporary of Ockham, however, draws this conclusion. He distinguishes between two kinds oftime: natural time which is constituted by as many different times as movements, and mathematical time, which is constituted through abstraction in relation to asinglestandard. ThisiswhatDuhemcallstheAbsoluteClockandwhatGraziadei developed into the series that wound back reaches a point of unity between natural and mathematical worlds:
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? Even though time is the measure o f all movement, and there is, at the same time, a multitude o f movements, there is, however, only one numerically single time, and not multiple times; that is so because the first movement is unique, and time concerns this movement first and properly. (Duhem, 360)
When Heideggerjettisons the making ofthe thing as part of its identity, he loses this series. As we have seen the consequence ofHeidegger's functional description ofthings fragments the world into multiple times. How are these times stabilized into a single world or time? They cannot be stabilized into a single time without invoicing either (1) physics, to construct something like an absolute clock describing a mathematical order or a physical order o f ontogenesis or (2) a perceptual apperceptive order (as do Augustine and Kant). The first, while it does not reduce the world in the way that Heidegger fears
(physical laws are not the world nor can any science, except in special cases [physics and chemistry] reduce one level of complexity to another), it does problematize the animation o f the world, reintroduces the problem o f substance, and reintroduces a metaphysics o f science. What is the relation between physical descriptions of time and our perception of time? . The second, filters the world through our perception or knowing or mind, and, therefore, places us on the edge of a skeptical teeter-totter.
W e recognize change in us and change in the world. I f these are different, how are they related? Heidegger answers we are things, and these things enact time as the functioning through which they emerge at any point as what they are. But what kind of functional description, or semantic embodied series captures our functioning? Things are units o f time, but these units are not stabilized relative to each other nor are they uniform
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? except as semantic concepts. There are many times: only what counts as a thing stabilizes the concept o f time as what is. 21
Kant in On the Form andPrinciples o fthe Sensible and the Intelligible World, a precursor to the first Critique, proposes that time is not a concept, as Leibniz argues against Locke in the New Essays, but a fundamental, pure intuition: "you conceive all actual things in time, and not as contained under the general concept oftime, as under a common characteristic mark" (? 14)22 In the Critique o fPure Reason, this has become
Time is not discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts o f one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition. Moreover, the proposition that different times cannot be simultaneous is not to be derived from a general concept. The proposition is synthetic, and cannot have its origin in the concepts alone. It is immediately contained in the intuition and representation o f time. (A 32/ B 47)
The unity o f time is not established by God, being, or an Absolute clock, but rather by objects which constitute a world within the singularity o f an intuition.
Heidegger in "Das Ding" redescribes this being in time within the singularity o f an intuition by refiguring or turning inside out the world and things and mortals and divinities as 'weHen'. 'Weilen', to stay, linger, dwell, functions as an absolute clock-- that is, the pressure that translates the ontological into a semantic condensation is stabilized, as are all things, all temporal series, in the semantics of 'weilen' taken into the implicate totality of whatHeideggercallsthequadrature. Inthechainofimplicationconstitutingathing--
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? each functor depends on. the categorical difference between its descriptive force and 'weilen'. Alloftheseotherfunctorsaswordsdescribethefunctioningofthejugwithin
thesemanticsofourordinarylanguage. Thereisametaphoricclaritytothisimplicate chain that is missing in Heidegger's use o f'weilen'. The sense of 'weilen' does not attach to the jug through its function, as do the other terms, but through the personification of the jug that allows it to 'take', 'gather', 'outpour', 'gather'-- and 'dwell': to claim these wordsasexpressiveofitself. 'Dwell'heremarkstheentrancesi'weilen'intothe dimension of function. The more obscure meaning of 'weilen' as 'staying' flattens the temporal order described by function into semantics, where the meaning o f this world requires the construction o f a world-organism, a form o f life, in which this semantics can have meaning. The object o f "Das Ding", therefore, is an attempt to construct this form of life through the elucidation of the semantics o f'weilen'.
The syntax o f function that describes the jug, however, cannot describe either the world or us. The relation between things, therefore, requires this further abstraction into stasis--or rather into the subjunctive. But it is exactly this subjunctive that needs to be described in order for 'weilen' to function as the categorical functor between the descriptive and functional temporal series and the world-constituting relations ofthe quadrature (Geveirt). Not only must Heidegger describe humans as things, but he must also describe the world, the quadrature, and in this redescribe how all three can describe a function, an identity, and an unfolding of time, a time series, as an implication that includes the others. Such an attempt would precipitate the skeptical dilemmas he is trying to avoid. The emergence ofthe opposition between making and given, where the given is emergent
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? in our relation to things and in their functioning, must also include our species history. Heidegger's question about how the world emerges as a world must also include Thoreau's question 'why do these things make a world? '. Our self-reflective awe includes not just the philosophical question 'why is there anything instead o f nothing? ', but the questions'whythesethingsinsteadofothers? whymeinsteadofanother? ' Buildinga mind stabilizes this questioning by integrating how is this world mine with why is this world mine, not instead of another's but instead of simply 'not mine. ' I can make myself in order to make the world. Heidegger wants to forget this question in the givenness of things.
1Translating Geveirt as 'fourfold' as does Hofstadter, confuses the categorical distinction between the kind of coherence among earth and sky, divinities and mortals and that which is achieved in the abstraction o f the einfaltigen\ these domains are distinct and cannot be reduced one to the other, but complete each other while retaining the other category as a set o f relations or possibilities that enact the world in a particular way.
2 Der Krug steht als Gefass doch nur, insofem er zu einem Stehen gebracht wurde. 3Heidegger'spictureofscience: Scienceobscureswhat'thejug-characterofthejugconsist[s]',when science, as he believes it does, claims to "inform us about the reality of the actual jug" ("die Wissenschaft konneunsuberdieWirklichkeitdeswirklichenKrugeseinenAufschluflgeben"). Thisisaclaimfew scientistswouldmake,andattheveryleastisstrictlyspeakinglogicallyimpossible. Inductioncannot lead to certainty. The question science asks is 'How does this work? ' It collapses why-questions and what-questions into how-questions. Heidegger's claim, therefore, that science pays 'no heed to that in the vessel which does the containing. . . to how the containing itself goes on" is false. Science specifically provides an answer to "how the containing itself goes on". Its answer is embedded within a system of mathematical (broadly speaking) descriptions, simplified and idealized in order to answer this how. Heidegger's question 'how does the containing itself go on? ' asks not for a causal description but for a kind of transcendental deduction determined within phenomenological limits (and therefore exploring the semantics of 'containing') and describing a set of ontological possibilities. 4TheJournalsandMiscellaneousNotebooksofRalph WaldoEmerson.
5 If we can use Bohm's description o f quantum relations as a metaphor.
61say a noumenal boundary although Heidegger makes a distinction between the Ding an sich and Ding als Ding, because he asserts that from the thing qua thing we may reach thing in itself (DD168), but more importantlyrepresentationandmakingformthethingitselfasthenoumenal. Andthustheysetuptheir own failure.
7traut: cosy, secure, within, intimate, close.
trauen: trust, believe in, venture, dare, marry.
zutrauen: believe sombody is capable of doing something.
8 If the world always stays in this outpouring, beyond or forgonen by our representations, we can only discover it in following this outpouring in whatever world we find ourselves in. Losing the world might seem to suggest instead the possibility that 'this world', accompanied by a wave of an arm (my arm? ), is a
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? true or false world. This can mean either that this might not count as a world, requiring some tests, an examination o f world-criteria, or that this might be a true-world or a false-world.
9 Aristotle's hylomorphism determines substance as matter determined by form, in a similar conceptual unity,inorderprimarilytoresistthePlatonicreductionofmattertoform. Realisminmodemphilosophy argues for the irreducibility o f category in order to resist what is often understood to be, but should not be, the scientific reduction to 'matter'.
10 See On the Way to Language; "Letter on Humanism"; "Dwelling Building Thinking".
11 ". . . Dasein's going-out-of-the-world in the sense of dying must be distinguished from the going-out-of- the-worldofthatwhichmerelyhaslife[desNur-leben-den\. Inourterminologytheendingofanything that is alive, is denoted as "perishing" [Verenden]. We can see the difference only if the kind of ending which Dasein can have is distinguished from the end of a life. Of course "(tying" may also be taken physiologicallyandbiologically. Butthemedicalconceptofthe'exitus'doesnotcoincidewiththatof "perishing". (BT 284-85; 240-41).
12 See Sein undZeit, 88.
u Averrois Cordubensis, lib. IV, comm. 88; cited in Duhem, 301.
14 Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 29/30.
15The Genesis ofHeidegger's Being and Time.
16Basic Concepts, tr. Gary E. Aylesworthy, 21-22.
17 The following is a schematic translation o f this passage: Thinking: (Being, essence) embrace; Embrace (thing, person) = love =favor, Favor = bestow essence as gift: Favor = essence of enabling = unfold as letting it be; enabling= possible (essence of favor): Being enables thinking; enables = make possible; reintegrated into Being as enabling/ favoring2 possibility o f Being.
181 am not finished with perishing and dying, as i f anyone could be! , but I don't want to recapitulate
existential descriptions- but to work out the relation between grammar and ontology--you could read that here as possibility and necessity as stances toward oneselfand the world- and thus not as logical (modal) possibilities.
19"Moira (Parmenides VIE, 34-41)" in Early Greek Thinking, tr. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi.
20 Although Heidegger never articulated it as such, this construction o f things as functions responds to Putnam's twin-earth argument and its consequences for functionalism narrowly conceived as a model for the mind.
z,How does form emerge as the kind of thing I should be or am, if I do not already understand form, at least of others, as who they are?
22 In Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770, tr. and ed. David Walford and Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 373-416.
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? 9. 1 Thunder-talk
9
'Weilen' in The Waste Land
Howdowedwellinandstaytheworldaslanguage? Science,Heidegger imagines, stays the world into quantity, while he stays it into semantics, into the quality of being a thing and a world.
Eliot asks in The Waste Land, I imagine, 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? ' Heidegger's transformation of ontology into semantics mutates, in the poem, into a translation ofthe semantic into the subjunctive under the aspect o f a more restrictive aesthetics o f identity. Eliot's questioning does not undo Heidegger's work, but it shows how the giveness ofthe thing is also made against the fantasy o f the subjunctive. Thus, The Waste Land highlights our language into a subjunctive mode through which we constitute ourselves in language (at the very least investigating the way in which pronouns and names and voices have a claim on us, or 'we' on them). How do we approach the inanimate through the subjunctive?
How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? I find this question in another kind of semantic play on 'weilen' in a fragment Eliot quotes from the opening scene ofWagner's opera Tristan undIsolde:
Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
Notes for this chapter are on page 398
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? A sailor sings these verses. Isolde, mistakenly or not, interprets them to be about her: "Who dares to mock me? " She is th e 'you'. Asking "where you dwell? " to a woman figured as nothing but a pronoun can be understood as another way of asking 'How do we dwell in and stay language as our world? ' A provisional answer, that will prove not to be an answer at all, but a restatement o f the question is the invocation o f memory and desire withwhichthepoembegins. Theenvironmentandtime(figuredasApril)arestayedinto poetry through the Coincidentia Oppositorum, "mixing/ Memory and desire" (2-3). I find thismixinginTheWasteLandoperatic. Howisthisenactmentofstaying(notreallya stasis) or lingering or dwelling through the fragments different from the astonishment of soul Kierkegaard describes as an effect of Opera? Certainly the power of The Waste Land is not the "exuberant gaiety" that is the power o f Don Giovanni. This gaiety is the expression of"his voice, the voice ofthe sensuous" (96). How would we describe the
voices in The Waste Land?
Heidegger leaves us in a world of things, with neither people nor the scientific
logic with which to build these things into people. This is something like the world in which Tristan finds himself in The Waste Land. Heidegger wants to get to the organic coherence of the world as a form of life that can speak 'weilen' with the ontological force that he needs to reconstitute a particular thing into staying, dwelling, being the world, avoiding the traditional attempts to link particulars and universals (examples, exemplars, forms, versions, reflections, and so on). Heidegger's romanticism remains akin to Schlegel's in his attempt to reconstruct a semantics with ontological force. His attempt, however, blocks offany questioning ofthe giveness ofthe world (like Wittgenstein, he
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? wants to disconnect 'how the world is' form "what is higher. God does not reveal himself intheworld'(TLP6. 432);Heideggerbothbeforeandafterhisturn("dieKehre") rejects this kind o f transcendence: Wittgenstein and Heidegger always had alien views concerning logic. What is common between them, however, is not just their appeal to the ordinary and to the grammar of language (albeit in different ways) but their failure to understand the depth of questions about how the world is). For Eliot some possible world speaks 'verwielen' and from this speaking he must construct its semantics, in this case the semantics o f thunder.
What is created in an by The Waste Lcmdl
The attempt to justify the poetry results in an appeal to and requires the constructionofakindoftheoryofmind. Whythisisremainsamystery. Ifmindsfunction within an ontological universe described by science, by strict laws describing a totality of possibilities, then these constructions have force only in so far as they articulate themselves in relation to such an ontology. When Eliot deciphers "What The Thunder Said" as "The spoke the thunder/ DA," the etymological force o f DA, and its inclusion in
Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damyata (control) does not get taken up into mythological or theological promises or stories separate from the physics of thunderstorms and the indifference of these natural processes to our concerns, understanding, and meanings. Howdoesitgettakenup? Orhowarewetakenupbyit?
Is this thunder the voice of our beginning as human beings, or our end? Vico and, through him, Joyce settled thunder at the beginning of humanity, driving our ancestors
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? into caves and into society. From our havens listening toward heaven, our "forebears" (FW572. 06) mimicked onomatpoetically thunder into language:
The first men, who spoke by signs, naturally believed that lightening bolts and thunderclaps were signs make to them by Jove; whence from m o , to make a sign, can numen, the divine will, by an idea more than sublime and worthy to express the divine majesty. They believed that Jove commanded by signs, that such signs were real words, and that nature was the language of ove. The science o f language the gentiles universally believed to be divination, which by the Greeks was called theology, meaning the science o f the language o f the gods. (NS379)
The world requires divination, and thus "Sibyls and oracles are the most ancient institutions of the gentile world [721, 925]" (NS381). Divination, as the form of what Vico calls "poetic metaphysics," "seeks its proofs not in the external world but within the modificationsofthemindofhimwhomediatesit"(NS364). Themythicconsciousnessis
gripped by a kind o f idealism that resists the conscious articulation o f the question "Are the signs I see in the world actually in the world or a function o f my interpretations? "
"Because o f the indefinite nature o f the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himselfthe measure of all things" (NS120). What is the nature of this ignorance? In this case it is the ignorance attending finding ourselves fragments (represented or acted out in our ignorance of the meaning of The Waste Land). Eliot's ignorance is not directed at the world and its workings but toward God and the
justificationoftheworld. ThisisagainakintoVico'sdescriptionofpoeticmetaphysics:
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? So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them (homo intelligendof i t omnia), this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendofit omnia). . . . . . . . . for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in the things, but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them. (NS405)
How do we extend our mind into our mind? The Waste Land requires us to remark our ignorance of the significance or nature of our own believing and of our visions as self- reflexive ignorance: our ignorance of our ignorance.
Vico explicitly grounds the poetic and the mythic in the same logic, or poetic wisdom. Eliot's project in The Waste Land is ostensibly the same (or similar). What is the poetic logic Eliot uses to expose the mutual relation between poetry and myth? (This is another way o f asking what does the poem create? ). I do not want to explore this question byexaminingEliot'suseofmythorhisuseanddistortionsofquotations. Vicooffersa way into a more interesting question about how we enter into the correlation (an origin) between language and consciousness. If Vico's history is too obscure, then, at least, his argument that human consciousness derived from mythical consciousness and that this mythical stance toward the world articulates a poetic metaphysics places the logic of origins within the logic of coherence determining language as a language, a consciousness as a consciousness, or a mind as a mind. These logics of origin and coherence are akin to
Heidegger's configuration of the thing as the staying of the quadrature. The logic of origin and coherence in The Waste Land function as the aesthetics (or justification) of
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? fragmentation within the poem. Eliot's aesthetics o f fragmentation is the poetic enactment of the Sibyl's condition described in the poem's epigraph. Such an aesthetics attempts to organize language, consciousness, and the world within and around the inhabitation o f the concept o f identity represented (or enacted) by the Sibyl.
Unlike Vico and Joyce, Eliot does not ground the speaking o f the thunder in the "first men, stupid, insensate, and horrible beasts" (NS374). Eliot does not give us a complete thunder language, nor the integrated language or form o f life evolved, evolving and expressing the infrarational mind of someone, but rather the grammatical (the linguistic forms, examples, usages, bits) limits between thunder language(s) and the minds and times and societies in which they made sense, between the theology of God's language
and the insensate forms o f nature's indifference to make our kind o f sense. offers different kinds o f education: an incarnation versus T&ks(h*,xxj:
Then spoke the thunder DA
Datta: what have we given?
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
The thunder
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? "DA/Dattat" if heardfrom the beginning of time or humanity pretends to describe the transformation of a sound into a phoneme and then into a ritual language. If heard as a beginning, "D A . . D A . . DA" decomposes our language back into phonemes and then into exclamation and then noise. Even if someone spoke Sanskrit fluently "Datta," "Dayadhvam," and "Damyata" sound outside o f any ordinary language game, not with philosophical weight but with religious mass. This language is alien. It must mean, but no one can understand it like they might 'this is my house. ' It might mean, however, 'this is my house. ' The order of sounds that makes a language is the same order of sounds that makes thunder. This is true even if all we can understand by thunder is its physical causes. Science speaks the order of the universe.
What can this language mean against physics?
Thunder disturbs the universe.
It disturbs us with a question: "Datta: what have we given? " To whom? we ask
back. Who is this 'we'? The thunder speaks to me not because it is a language but because it threatens me into a 'we'. What have I given to you? The thunder can turn 'you' into an 'us'. If we mimicked thunder to create language, this means we formed mirrors through which we could see ourselves as both individuals and as human beings. Thunder-reflection is self-reflection.
The demands of this 'we' can be taken up in friendship as it is in the line following "Datta . "My friend, blood shaking my heart. " At night or when we turn our ears toward ourselves the blood sounds our own thunder, shaking us into life as much as the thunder into fear: 'My friend, my heart in my chest, and in our language as I write myself
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? into concepts, and into the world, my friend, as passions circulate amongst us. ' What kind o f language is this?
We reach the foundation of who 'we' are:
By this, and this alone, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
By what alone have we existed? By giving or not giving? By friendship or blood or daring and surrender? This "By this" cannot be found in descriptions after the fact, or in memories, in further representations edited even in our own minds, or in our own giving of things and money within the law, under the auspices of order and definition, or in the places and spaces we possessed. Either we do not know what 'exist' means here, or we do not know giving, friendship, blood, daring, or surrender.
Do we mistake the unrepresentable for the inexpressible? or for our privacy? The demand to sympathize (Dayadhvam) is ironically answered by a picture of solipsism, "each in his prison. " The pain I feel is my pain and not yours, but 'my pain' and your response to my pain is not determined by either my knowledge o f it (I experience it, or in other words, I pain: pain! ) or your knowledge ofthe truth ofmy pain. You respond to my expressionorthemanifestationsofmypain. Wittgensteinremarks,
What makes it so plausible to say that it [the pain] is not the body? --Well, something like this: if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say
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? so (unless it writes it) and one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: one
looks into his face. (PI? 286)
I can, however, fall into absurdity and find it not plausible to acknowledge the other as human. Peoplehavebeenknowntofallintoparts,bothinPetrarchianpoeticloveblazons andinAliceinWonderlanddistortionsandeverynight,asleep. Asleeponeloses ontologicalaccesstoone'sface. Inpartialanswertooneofmyinitialquestions,'whatis being created? ', I can answer "Faces are not being created, nor even found. ' The language of The Waste Land is attached to human beings through a collection of names: Marie, Madame Sosostris, Phoenician Sailor, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, Mrs. Equitone, Saint Mary Woolnoth, Philomel, Stetson, Lil, Albert, Bill, Lou, May, Sweeney, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, Tiresias, Elizabeth I, Leicester, Phlebas, and Hieronymo. Not all of these names are names o f human beings who had once lived. Is there any significance in
replacing the face with a name? It in effect turns all names into pronouns.
These words do not speak in the context o f god: the voices are extracted from
everydaylife. Itistheordinarywhichbordersonhysteria. ThisisEliot'stransformation of a feminine voice into a parody ofMozart's Queen ofthe Night:
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think. " (Ins. l 11-114)
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? Hysteria attaches one's nerves to oneself. These "nerves" are a physical synecdoche for a mental condition, a hysteria played out against human indifference and uncaring and alienation within a marriage. The same hysteria can stay a person in a disintegrating relationship: "my nerves are bad . . . stay with me. " (This is one way o f 'staying' the world inalanguageoflove. ItisoneoftheconclusionsofEliotthatsuch'staying'isdamning). The husband here has lost or renounced his voice (a sibyl-like diminishment); he functions in these lines as a metaphysical 'I', a limit determining the scope of but not included within the world, dominated by the women's speaking. But the absent husband's implicit authorial position (maybe as bricoleur) means he ventriloquizes her speaking, and she
ventriloquizes his soul (the negative outlines o f his face sketched in his absence). Catherine Clement, in her book on Opera, asks about what she understands as patriarchal fear: "What haste, what hatred drives them to reduce woman to her image? " (28). The image of women in The Waste Land is described by speaking. Is the image of the diva, her body,herface,hersinging,orhervoice? InTheWasteLandoneoftheimagesdescribing thelimitbetween silenceandsong(whichisitselfthelimitbetweensilenceandspeech) and between desire and possession is female hair:
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread our in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-110)
Do we imagine this scene parodies lightening and thunder? Parody requires judgment, enacting mimicry within a structure ofvalues. To suggest that parody is the origin of
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? language is to mock the question o f origin when it is understood as answerable by something like parody. Joyce's use o f Vico's stages o f history (including the theory that speech imitates thunder) suggests exactly this kind o f parody, transforming putative origins into limits. (What motivates parody? a tool in what game? A chimpanzee will mimic other chimps and humans, but why not parody them? )
Is Eliot pursuing a similar project of transforming origins into limits? Maybe. There is at least a confusion between parodies and rumors:
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
What are "aethereal rumours"? They are night-words, but aethereal words can be from Godandtherumorspromises. Buttheserumorsre-animate(revive)ifonlyforamoment, the fragmented body o f Coriolanus. By what does Coriolanus exist?
