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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. It is one ofthe ironies ofthe poem, that the epigraph makes this fragmentation the object o f desire and the subjunctive a motive for horror. How do you reach death? Or how do you know you are dead?
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living or dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart o f light, the silence,
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Oed' und leer das Meer.
You might not be living or dead if beauty faced you as memory built as a Grecian urn, even if later you assume that "only by", what the Four Quartets calls, "the form, the pattern,/ Can words reach The stillness, as a Chinesejar still/ Moves perpetually in its stillness", and "thou art desolate, can e'er return. " Statue-like you "could not speak", nor see, nor know anything. ' "[Mjarble men and maidens overwrought" into silence empty
their heads, like the little town Keats describes, turning themselves into jugs by becoming the void and that void filled by "Oed' und leer das Meer" (Desolate and empty sea).
We bury the dead to keep them out of our world. How can one be neither living nor dead? Is this third state made visible in "The Burial of the Dead" the patience or the dying discovered in the speaking o f the thunder? Light has no heart to see. But such looking drags the markers of space (light) and time (sound) into a synesthesiac succession of dimensions: the heart of light is silence, and when the light fades, when the electric circuit between clouds and earth cycles to completion, the heart o f darkness might be the soundofthunder. Icanonlylookintosilenceifmymindbuildssoundanditsabsenceinto a visible universe. The confusion between seeing and hearing, while logical nonsense, mimics being neither living or dead. How can such confusion determine a mind as a mind? A human from an animal or a thing? Through love one can become a voided world oneself and lose the beloved as a mirror o f ones own desolation.
The sound reverberates against the rocks and slopes o f the wasteland. The sound is an echo, not of or with the reality of spring, but with the imprint of spring's force, an extension of spring; an intangible manifestation from the past to the present: sensory
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phantasms, as Aquinas would call them, auditory shadows whose form, source, referent exists as both some lost originary sound and as the causes ofthose sounds. In The Waste
Land, this thunder, as it foretells that which never comes, becomes an ironic exposure of the land's dryness, a travesty o f hope. Language has changed here. The modeling o f the world and o f a social relations, by dolphins and chimpanzees as well as by humans, allows us to predict behavior, to plan and negotiate within the complex social world all ofthese species function within. It gives us the ability to lie and trick. We might ask, "what does the thunder mean? " The answer might be, "It means it will rain"; or "It follows lightening'" or "God spoke. " In every case the meaning of the sound is its cause, understood synecdochially when raining; understood metaphorically if God speaks. The thunder in "What The Thunder Said" does not invoke any of these, nor can it mean or predict these; no God speaks, no rain falls, no lightening nor no physics orders the ontological universe of the poem. The thunder foretells its own primacy; it foreshadows its continued sounding, marking this world as always before the rain, the lightening and God.
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain.
This intangible reverberation oflife arises again two stanzas later:
Who is the third who walks beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another beside you
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Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman --But who is that on the other side o f you?
"Whoisthethird. . . "seemstoaskforidentification. Butthe'I'isaskingifthethird,this X exists. It is always possible that the person "wrapt in a brown mantle" if not o f one's own party, race, group, and so on, may not be recognized as a person. The temptations of psychosis stand before us like religious visions o f Christ. Who one is collapses into that one is. The questioning here, and the temptation to psychosis it dramatizes collapses the distinction between essence and existence that allowed Aquinas to construct identities withinasimultaneousaxiologicalandontologicalscaleleadingtoGod. Accordingto
Eliot, these lines were "stimulated by the account o f the Antarctic expeditions," casting them as a form o f psychosis generated by the landscape. This is the loss o f a human world and its replacement by our mind writing out o f our control onto desolation. This story o f seeing three as a fantasy in snow ironizes Christ's resurrected journey with two o f his disciples, after he had been crucified and entombed. Christ, as the hooded hangman, the Fisher King, suggests the spiritual incarnation o f the "white road" through The W aste Land. This road is the transitive link between death and rebirth figured as the theological or psychotic functioning of our mind. This does not mean either story should or can be dismissed or therapized into sense. Nor does it offer itself as a psychosis replacing our common experience.
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9. 3 Thevisibilityofthesubjunctive
In the next stanza Eliot unites the image ofthe "reverberation ofthunder ofspring" with Christ as the reverberation o f spirit, but through a shift in perspective back into human life, into the process of dying:
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur o f maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only
Maryliesbeneaththecrosscryingin"lamentation"forherson. Hissacrificenomatter what hope o f resurrection it will bring, must always be a loss to her. And this loss and this cry must be spoken for all those dying in The Waste Land, and for the Great Mother Earth itself. This cry blends with the reverberation of spring and thus it is tied to the maternal womb of the river and the sea, from which The Waste Land must be recreated.
Eliot transposes the sound of spring, the imagined force of water, and the maternal lamentation into a woman in The Waste Land. She is an artist, who creates through her own body, as does Phlebas, and even the red rock:
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
In a line of dissolution is this woman playing Nero as "they" all drown? 3 The strands of her hair suggest the currents of the sea and the streams of a river rushing over rock. The strands o f her hair recall the maternal Thames and the sea currents picking Phlebas' bones.
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These strands ofboth water and hair reverberate through her creative will, and become music;shecreatesanaestheticanddynamicexpressionofcreatedbeauty. Withinthis music, however, there whistles a parody of creation; bats masked or deformed with baby faces. Is this music akin to the words generated from the hair?
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. (Ins. 108-109)
Firelight and fiery points animate language, savagely. This is the Sibyl again, speaking the Heraclitian logos in "The Fire Sermon":
When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about the room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
(Ins. 253-56)
A woman brushing her hair returns to make music or language with a gramophone. She is, however, no longer even an electro-static transmitter, but an automaton interpreting and expressing her folly (her passions) through mechanically reproduced performances. This doesnotmakeherapriestinterpretingherownwords(asanoracle). Thismusicexists only as a comment o f someone else, marked by another indefinite pronoun: "This music crept by me upon the waters" (ln. 257). Who hears the music? Is it the same music? Again this line could be a part o f a causal chain linking fragments: the woman put on the record
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causing someone (a 'me') to hear the music speak. The music itself has dropped out, except as a figure (as in Finnegans Wake an intentional limit) we follow as it continues "along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street" (ln. 258). These women-with-hair are indistinguishable from a single woman or the idea o f 'women'.
What proceeds from these strings sounds another "and". The silence ofbat speech does not prevent our mammalian recognition of our baby-selves in their faces, not in sound but in violet light. Bats follow like sound the fiddling o f hair, displayed in its beauty, an already dead part o f a woman's still living body. These bats parody music, poetry, the created. Such a parody forms these shifting aspects o f waste land fragments as the world itself. The poetic structure describing the change from line to line, and the symbolic ordering of this shift, constitutes an oscillation between a domain of space and a domain of sound or time:
A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out o f empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
We can mark these ABABAABB: 'A' marks a spatial domain and 'B' a sound/time domain. Even in "A women d r e w . . . " the action o f drawing her hair puns into a line-
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drawing, something like a Degas pastel describing the woman and the world around the axis o f this drawn out hair, the hair drawn for us here in these lines. In the next line "[FJiddled whisper music" acts 'on' those strings, sounding against the lines o f the previous line.
We do not understand what music on those strings can mean but for the never visible movement ofthe woman. The causal force ofthe woman drawing her hair disappears in the ambiguity of"drew' and the tension of"hair out tight". She becomes a musician after she makes her music: what was she before? This is a way of asking what realm of potentiality is articulated in The Waste Land: the potential for meaning, for entering into the world as a person with an identity stabilized beyond the confusion of
pronoun reference in the poem?
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out o f empty cisterns and exhausted wells
This recognition in the light of our phylogenesis, of our common ancestry, suddenly finds volume in our whispered music becoming whistled and the fiddled sounds on this human hairbecomingbeatingwings. Whisperingpromisessomesecretsandthreatensthe dissolution o f the whispered sea currents against Phlebas' bones.
This devolution of sound through our kinship with these bats (are they representations of our words? or of the pre-reflexive soul Stephen Daedulas rendered from
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astorytomatchhischanging: "abat-likesoulwakingtotheconsciousnessofitselfin darkness and secrecy and loneliness . . [Portrait, 183]? ) follows down, away from the light but further into space, repeated in the next line by the inversion o f towers. The incommensurability or the synesthesiac collapse of sound and time into space can easily describe how we inhabit an 'I' in 'a world,' or find ourselves organized as if we were a world. The problem ofwhat this sound mean, just as the problem of what the thunder said and meant, lies as much in us as it does in the sound or towers. Aristotle animated Plato's mythic cave metaphor ofthe relation between truth and appearance, between 'I' and 'world' by analogizing the problem into the biology ofthose bat denizens ofthe cave:
Therefore, since the truth seems to be like the proverbial door, which no one can fail to hit in this respect it must be easy, but the fact that we can have a whole truth and not the particular part we aim at show the difficulty o f it. Perhaps, too, as difficulties are oftwo kinds, the cause ofthis difficulty is not in the matter or facts (Ttpayiiacnv) but in us; for as the eyes of bats are to blaze of day, so is
the mind of our soul to things which are by nature most manifest of all.
(M? /. 993b9-ll)
The eyes of bats are like the "mind of our soul. " Light is like the ordinary or like things. The Waste Land is not a world of light, but consists of sketches of the world arranged to make visible the soul dying or waiting. It brings out the soul, sharpens our hearing o f the voice as the mark of humanity and not the face. Bats in this poetic darkness do not see anything. They whistle, crawl, and beat their wings. A bat-soul moves down, paralleling the upside down towers, inverted caves inverted down. We imagine bat-baby-faces, but
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their moving bodies would have disappeared against the "blackened wall. " The bat-soul becomes a sinister ciying. What is the relation between the soul and the world? Eliot answers here with 'what is the relation between the bat and the missing light, symbolic sense, darkness, sound, the towers, bells? Our poetic meta-eyes can see this bat and these towers and hear these sounds, just as a bat could see itselfwith its bat-eyes in such a darkness. Thesubstanceofthebellsdissolvesintoreminiscenceandthetowersinto soundandtime,clockingtheirinversionintothevoid. Inthelastlinethevoicessinging like the fiddled whisper music acts upon the substance of the world, this substance here being empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In the following stanza, the alteration between lines is compressed into an alterationwithinlines,agreaterproximitypromisingresolution. Theorderofthedialectic is less rigid, but still structuring a kind o f poetic meta-change as an opposition between space and sound, primary change. A decayed hole among mountains; moonlight followed by singing grass; an empty chapel as the wind's home; no windows and a swinging door (movement). These oppositions are punctuated by tumbled graves, and after the swinging door by dry bones and a standing cock on the rooftop. The sound o f the cock's species nameistakenupimmediatelyfollowinginarepresentationofhissoundingcall: Coco rico co co rico. The bones we are told will harm no one. This is an answer to the fear in a handfulofdust,areplytoourowninternalshakinginthisgraveyard. Safetyresidesin stasis, and if the world still reminisces in its toiling of the time, and the cock warns of the coming day, this time is time past, and the day is "a flash of lightening. " But we do not
glimpse the world. The lightening is a substanceless line o f energy, the animal sounding a
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mock pre-thunder, that like the inverted towers simply clocks a moment without illuminatingtheworld. Thislighteningisfollowed"then,"inoneofthefewcasesofa temporal designation o f order in this section o f the poem, with a damp gust; faint moonlight, the grass singing o f line 386 intensifies into lightening and the then into a damp gust. But a damp gust is no longer a song, and the promised meaning o f lightening and
the wind "bringing rain" never occurs. The language o f nature, the signs o f the weather do not answer our need. We are left waiting with the limp leaves (Ins. 394-5) "for rain. "
What kind oftime is kept here? Keeping something like time is keeping a void, and our living becomes avoiding voids, turning these seeming gaps between moments, in a certain logic, the 'contra' in 'contradiction,' into identity. But such a stability is not continuing if it removes change, by a turning into objecthood. 'Avoiding,' like berrying, means a kind of skipping past the pits of change, inverting as Eliot has these towers so that they become cisterns. But again the effect is backward. We need to turn cisterns into
towers, our avoiding becoming like a voiding we will go. How do I void a void? Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours. Sound and time without a cause and without changes in the present. This tolling is the same over and over, a tolling the limit between now and the past, or experience and memory. Here the tolling, following a world- collapsing-synesthesia, accompanies the voiding o f height and the loss o f ground; a set o f clock hands stuck on six o'clock, not twelve, translating space into sound. The word is not, however, reanimated by memory; but a subjunctive interaction in an ABAB dialectic between spatial and temporal symbolic ontologies temporalizes possibility into parody. Such a temporalization transplants our expectations from the world into language.
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Wittgenstein remarks, "It is in language that an expectation and its fulfillment make contact" (PI, ? 455). Hope is human:
One can imagine an animal angry, frightened, unhappy, happy startled. But hopeful? And whynot?
A dog believes his master is at the door, but can he also believe his master will come the day after tomorrow? --And what can he not do here? -How am I supposed to answer this?
Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use o f language. That is to say, the phenomena of hope are modes of this complicated form of life (If a concept refers to a character of human handwriting, it has no application to beings that do not write. )
(PI, p. 174)
What about language, or poetic language, that engenders hope as a possibility o f being human? This asks how as human beings do we inhabit the temporal possibilities of language without losing the world, more specifically in The Waste Land, without losing the physics ofthunder and the irreal visions ofour waking dreams and fictions?
Wittgenstein argues that the intentionality of our language is not attached to the world, but rather intentional statements (I wish that x; I expect y; I have a suspicion about z) are matched by statements that describe their fulfillment, verification, denial, failure, etc. (see ? ? 136, 429, 458).
An order is own execution. " So it knows its execution, then even before it is there? --But that was a grammatical proposition and it means: If an order runs
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"Do such-and-such" then executing the order is called "doing such-and-such".
(PI? 458)
Approaching one kind of poetic voice approaches nonsense, as in Finnegans Wake where (when) the rules or grammar organizing intentionality in our ordinary language are excluded in poetic language such that nothing can satisfy as either a description o f fulfillment (of intentionality) or as an adequate interpretation of truth-value, reference, intentionality, meaning. This changing o f the language into the non-intentional (which is sometimes described as non-functional language) does not dissolve language but redirects intentionalitytowardussuchthatwedescribethefulfillmentoflanguage. Asadescription we function as quoted statement, the cite of language's self-reflection not our own.
Language replaces us; poetry can describe this replacement and resist it. Such poetry distrust words, and rightly so. The magic of language is its danger.
Poetry that constructs the reader as its intentional target enacts a peculiar kind of conversion: the conversion into a counterfactual.
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
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Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But the sound o f water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
In this passage there are four possible worlds, each following the other, built from simple metaphysics, which if we hold water to invoke the human, or at least the living, then these worlds or pictures o f being human as a possibility, negated by the world, but functioning nevertheless against it. These worlds can be described as (1) subjunctive flux ('I' as absolute limit), (2) generative transformation ('I ' recast as flux and identity), (3) musical ('I' as sound), and parody ('I' as bird song):
1) If water and no rock: a waterworld of total flux or chaos, an inversion of rock and not-water. In this subjunctive (world) change or indeterminacy is marked by the negationofidentity(rock). Identityisnegatedfromwithinthesubjunctive. Thereisno
ground on which to stand in this world, and thus the T , functioning much like
Wittgenstein's metaphysical 'I'. The 'I' is split. It is constituted as this subjunctive world: a world constituted by its desires and in its alienation from the world of rock. The poetic T is constituted a t the limit o f the world o f rock and fragments as itself subjunctive. The instability ofthe 'I'within the world ofrock is so great as to make this subjunctive fantasy the limit ofthat world. The 'I' does not exist within the poem in any recognizableform. Itexistswithinthepoemthroughtheexpressionofwhattheworldof
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rock is not. Thus, it enters the world of The Waste Land (the waste land) through and as this subjunctive.
2) "If rock and water, water, spring and pool": this describes a spiraling symbolic transformation from the concept of identity (rock) through opposition by conceptual flux or generation (water) into sublated forms o f generation and identity (springandpool). Therepetitionof'water'crystallizeswaterawayfromitsoppositionto rock into theform ofgeneration (water, water). The nature ofgeneration is focused into a spring, a source that rewrites the doubling ofwater into a mating, which produces an effect, a pool, a version o f a determinate identity. A pool mimics rock in its form and expresseswaterinitscontentormatter. Thestructureofthesubjunctiveworldinthisline
is a story o f self-conversion into both flux and indetity in a stable world.
3) "If there were the sound of water only": sound is an effect of "water over a rock. " This sound, caused at a distance, posits a world beyond sight and counter to cicada, the cricket that fails to comfort, and the dry grass singing. There exists two kinds o f sounds, both defined by their cause. In the first case (identity resistance), cicada and dry grass sound through the vibrations caused by the resistance o f two impenetrable extensions ofthe same kind rubbing against each other. In the second case (categorical resistance) sound is generated through the categorical difference, within the semantics of
the poem, between rock and water (abstracted through their difference into a more fundamental material resistance generating sound). One can imagine the friction between
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the dry grass igniting into flame. The water can wash away the rock in a kind of parody of penetrability. Thissoundisnotthunder,whichistheharbingerofwaterandnotacause
o f water. I f the T is split into the first world in order to mark its access to any world, and if in the second world it is converted through a symbolic logic into a specific form within a rock world, then the content o f these worlds is now sound.
4) "Butsoundofwaterover. . . wherethe. or"arockwherethehermit- thrush sings" gives this bird's world as double: a mimic of the water or an echo,
memory, or parody manifest as a dynamic pool against the rock. The hermit-thrush's "dripdropdrip"song,inaworldwithwatermimicswaterinanonomatopoeia. This
might be a language. This might be a primal scene describing a natural referential language or the speaking of nature to itself. The last four nominal drops of the bird's song shapes mimicry into a rock parody o f water. In a world without water such songs are subjunctive or an alien nonsense that we would hear like we might hear the dry grass singing. Is this song the words o f the Sibyl? or the singing o f a woman in an opera? ThefirstsubjunctiveworldisconstitutedbythemissingT asbothitssurrogateandasan expression o f its desires. These desires constitute a limit, but only a subjunctive limit, to theactualityofrock. Thusthesubjunctiveconstitutesboththecontentofthe'I'within
the world of rock and fragments and an escape from that same world. In the final subjunctive world the janus-stance o f the T , towards itself as the subjunctive world and towards the world of rock (as a limit), structures the world as fantasy or parody of itself. The content of the 'I' has been displaced into sound according to the same translation in
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opera o f women into form at the limits o f the voice (speech/ singing), o f desire, and o f the human (animate/ inanimate).
Time as the limit o f the world is enacted through the shifting content o f these subjunctive possibilities. When Eliot ends the poem with "I say upon the shore . . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins" this T exists between these limits, but not as a limit. The poem does not figure an T within the text except as either an object or as the subjunctive. Thestructuresofidentity(rock:space)andchange(water:sound)are activated, animated into a dialectic o f shifting between these subjunctive possibilities. The T , as either a pronoun which we can speak or as the poetic voice, is always outside these possibilities. He is not their limit, they are his limit, just as sound and space are. This is to say that the missing subject of the poem is victimized by time and space as is the Sibyl and
the operatic figures and stances o f the woman (women) in The W aste Land.
The poem enacts the condition ofthe Sibyl described by its epigraph. The Waste
Land is organized around an aesthetic atomism in which language and the world are broken into an admixture of obdurate "echoes' and "rocks," or images, voices, and phrases that exist as differentiated identities, a system o f limits. Eliot undoes the human intovoicesandtheanimationofsymbols. Consciousnessstabilizedthroughidentity,asa measure o f the world or as a mode o f self-reflection, made ontological, made visible, allegorized into matter and into fragments, looks like changes of the sort victimizing the Sibyl, although one might also imagine someone getting bigger or changing kind, mutating. Thislastpossibilityis,ofcourse,whatwecallevolution. Imightfindmy education, mediated by my speaking in an oracular voice, enacting my language as mine
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and as coherent, embodying truth or sense, or my form of life, as a desire to stabilize myself in my speech. I might shape my words into rocks and water, water, spring and a pool in which I can recognize myself. But there might not be any water, in which case will I recognize myself in these fragments? Evolution describes not only the phylogenesis o f life, but pictures meaning as continuity (survival), replacement (extinction and death), and succession (reproduction and generation), traced through and by means ofthe stability of DNA or Life. Phylogenesis and ontogenesis do not recapitulate each other so much as provide the language enacting the meaning o f change in both a coherent picture and in despair: the despair of the Sibyl and The Waste Land. This is the way tragedy means, by preserving, within scenes o f anxiety and crisis the syntax (systems o f order) describing our mind (consciousness, soul, psyche, and so on) and our world (environment, context, God) asours. ThecostofthisstabilityinTheWasteLand,however,isthatallthatiscreatedis a subjunctive counterpoint and the sacrifice of 'women' to sound.
The ontological problem of The Waste Land is to reintegrate the pattern of identity (the Sibyl's immortality) and the pattern o f change (the Sibyl's decay) within the gaps between identities holing a world. The holes in this world emerge as a consequence o f the hypostatization o f identity into an ontological ground. This is a world where infinite regression is possible: the tortoise and the hare both never reaching the finish line, never passing each other. In such a world the model of salvation lies in death and resurrection. This sets up the archetypal problem ofwhat one could call temporal ontology. How does one moment, and the identities it contains or defines, affect, cause and become another moment? Even if we think the calculus, with or without Leibniz's infinitesimal, can keep
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the arrow in flight at every point or moment, the relation between change or time and identity or pattern or stability determines our conception of matter or substance or atoms or representation or realism. The status ofwhat exists and its description in recent years has been expressed as the problem o f realism and representation. These debates ask what is the relation between concept and matter. Are there irreducible domains of reality or experience? (Intentionality? Grammar? ). Can reality be reduced to some form or kind of matter described by strict laws: consciousness to physiology (eliminative materialism) or of all effect to atomic causes (although few physicists would claim this).
The theology o f creation and recreation sets up a basic underlying cosmological perspective relating change and being. The Waste Land is Eliot's purposefully failed attempt to reformulate such a creative theology (metaphysics), masquerading as a myth, within the spiritual, physical and emotional malaise o f modem life. The last section o f the poem instantiates the gap between identities, and represents that intangible now, where life exists but does not change. Eliot has removed the dynamism from time by displacing change into the projection ofmeaning and desire into a subjunctive shadow ofboth the poemandtheworldofrock. Inthismomentthereisstasis,strugglingtobecome
dynamic.
The last section o f the poem represents a symbolic attempt to reintegrate identity andchange,representedrespectivelyasrockandwater. Thus"WhatTheThunderSaid" is not a representation o f decay, but on an expanded and metaphoric scale it is that space between the dissolution of one moment or identity and the recreation of another, described asakindoflanguage. Withinthissectionthereexistsasymbolictensionbetweenidentity
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(a continuity o f a distinct being, itself unchanging and unitary) and dynamic transformation: rock and water. The primary state which must be overcome, in The Waste Land, is the paralytic gap between dissolution and regeneration, or the gap between dissolution (the Sibyl's decay) and death. The transcendence o f this gap involves a transformative leap between one state ofbeing into another.