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This is KZSU Stanford. Welcome to entitled opinions. My name is Robert Harrison
and we're coming to you live from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Didn't you wrap up entitled opinions for the year last week with that quirky monologue about birds?
Well, yes, in fact I did. So what am I doing back on air one week later? Well, here's what happened.
The program director of KZSU just sent out an email to all air-cleared personnel about time slots needing to be filled today.
And there it was my regular time slot. Tuesday five to six. Sitting there like a forsaken garden empty deserted abandoned.
So I said what the hell I'll do it. I'll fill the hour one way or another. Just how I'm going to do that I'm not quite sure but trust me.
We'll get through the hour one way or another.
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All right.
[Music]
Thank you very much.
Okay. So not exactly sure how to proceed here. The writer Lauren Stern, author of Tristan Chandy. He had a method he was asked about how he goes about writing his books.
And he says I write my first sentence and pray to God for the second.
I would be nice if I had a first sentence. I'm not sure where I'm going to be. I think I'm going to begin with a Jack-aranda tree.
Right in the center of campus and the quadrangle. That's an amazing tree. It seems to bloom and blossom precisely in the week of graduation.
I don't know how they do it but year in and year out it seems like that tree is at its glory whenever all the people come in for the graduation.
All for me it symbolizes something about the educational process as if to suggest that the students who are graduating have blossomed and bloomed the way the Jack-aranda tree has at that moment.
And that would seem to suggest that one of our vocations as educators is to cultivate students, their minds, their souls.
The Jack-aranda tree is there in the center of Stanford campus and in that regard it symbolizes more than just the educational process.
But it really stands for the environment that we live in here on an American campus. Stanford is full of gardens.
I have some favorite ones, King Skote Garden for example, a small little garden near the Faculty Club.
It has a little pond enclosed hardly anyone ever there for some reason. I don't know why.
And that's one of many gardens. In fact you could say that the whole campus is garden-like.
And in that regard it's not that unusual a lot of American campuses seem to have a garden-like atmosphere.
And in that respect I think they actually park and back to the very first academies.
In Greece for example I'm thinking of the Platonic Academy which is the first academy that really came into existence, first sort of institution of higher learning as it were.
Founded by Plato sometime around the year 387 BC.
Outside of the walls of Athens it was about a mile, outside the gate on the northern part of Athens.
Wasn't exactly a garden, it was more like a park, it was walled in.
But it did have that same sort of atmosphere of removal from the center, radioactive center of Athens in that case.
An environment where students were inducted into a way of life submitted to a discipline they had cultivation of the body through gymnastics.
The mind obviously through dialectic, mathematics, geometry.
And also the soul, music, music was a very central activity there.
And it seemed like there was a philosophy there in the Platonic Academy of educating the whole person.
And doing so at a certain remove from the reality, political reality especially of Athens.
In a self-enclosed, self-contained, you might call it a somewhat utopic environment.
And there the students would spend a lot of time engaged in symposia.
Not symposia the way we do it here, academic conferences, but symposia which really means drinking parties or conversations held around meals and feasts.
It was like getting inducted into a cult or into a sect if you got admitted to the Platonic Academy.
But from what I know, the purpose of the Platonic Academy wasn't to cultivate knowledge for knowledge of sake, virtue for virtue's sake, or beauty for beauty's sake.
However, noble, those projects may be.
Now Plato understood the vocation of his school as being a nursery for future statesmen.
Plato looked at the sorry political reality of his time and he thought that the only way to come to the rescue of his beloved city of Athens is to turn the rulers into philosophers and philosophers into rulers, one or the other.
And therefore the young men that he would educate at the Platonic Academy were always reminded that their ultimate responsibility once they left was to either become the counselor of the
of rulers or to become rulers themselves.
Because this was based on an ethic of responsibility, responsibility for the police for the city.
I know that many people think that Plato has been associated with a certain ideology of tyranny, despotism if you read as republic, it doesn't sound very democratic.
The way we understand democracy these days.
Nevertheless, I think you could say that at some fundamental level Plato remained a truly committed republican.
A republican in the sense that every citizen in a republic assumes responsibility for care for the fate of the city.
And in that regard, I believe that Plato's Academy was a place where what you were educating ultimately were citizens, more than philosophers.
But of course for him, philosophy was essential to probing what the deeper meaning of citizenship is.
A lot has changed, I suppose, since that time.
And we've just concluded our own graduation ceremonies and you hear a lot of inspired talk at these graduation events.
Very eloquent.
But it's not clear to me exactly how we conceive of consideronship these days in our nation.
And in the western world at large and indeed in the world in general, it's not clear to me what the vocation of the educator is.
Is it to produce a citizen, upstanding citizen?
At times I get the impression that the only purpose, if not obligation of citizens in our society, is to be consumers.
To work to the point where one can accumulate the means in order to consume the fruits of the earth.
And it's this ethic of consumption that seems to be driving the whole global system that we're all involved with.
And I can't think of anything more antithetical to the ethos of gardening, education, cultivation, care, responsibility than an ethic of consumption.
It seems like all the forces in modern technology, in the modern economy, global economy, medical research, that all seem to have some implicit objective, which is to bring about on the earth an addenic condition, a kind of earthly paradise where we would somehow be able to all of us live for a very long time.
Perhaps even forever, if some of these theorists of the so-called optional mortality theorists are right to live for a very long time, to live comfortably and to live as enjoyers dominated really by our ethics of desire rather than an ethical responsibility.
So, I don't know, I don't know what Eden means in our present context, but I do have a feeling that this is one of the oldest myths not only coming from the Hebrew scriptures, but it seems like all ancient cultures seem to have their own version of a garden of Eden, of an earthly paradise, of a kind of place where life was easy, garden existence.
The oldest epic to have come down to us is the epic of Gilgamesh.
And in the epic of Gilgamesh, you have not one but two fantastical gardens of this sort.
You have the Garden of the Gods, which the epic describes in these terms, all round Gilgamesh stood bushes bearing gems.
There was fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it beautiful to look at.
Lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit sweet to sea.
For thorns and thistles there was hematite and rare stones, a gat and pearls from out of the sea.
That's one garden and there's another called Dilmoon, a so-called Garden of the Sun, and that lies beyond the great mountains and bodies of water that surround the world of mortals.
And it's here that utnapishtiem, it's the only man he and his wife, is the only couple among mortals to have been granted immortality.
And it's here in the Garden of the Sun that they enjoy the fruits of their exceptional existence.
To utnapishtiem alone, the Gods had granted everlasting life and with it repose peace and harmony.
Gilgamesh goes on a desperate quest to reach this land and to speak to utnapishtiem in search of immortality himself.
And after a very arduous and desperate journey, he arrives there only to be forced to return back to the tragedies and cares of his earthly city because immortality is denied to him.
That's one text where we have an earthly paradise that's imagined.
The pathos of Gilgamesh is that he's not able to finally live out his days there, he has to go back to utuk and die like all of us.
But let's probe a concept of an earthly paradise and find out if such an environment is really as desirable as some of the ancient texts make it out to be.
Because if it's true as I'm suggesting that a certain kind of myth of Eden is driving our age and world history without it becoming particularly explicit, then it's all the best things that we can find in our lives.
It's explicit that it's all the more incumbent upon us to understand what we would be getting into if we were and are to succeed in transforming this mortal earth of ours into a earthly paradise of sorts.
So think of Uthna Pishtiem. His exceptional privilege is that he has granted everlasting life, not just immortality, everlasting life.
Immortality comes in very different forms. You can have it through fame or foundational acts or the enduring memorials of art and scripture.
But unending life is a fabulous privilege of only a select few. One of those is Menelaus.
Now he was a Greek, he's a Greek hero, one of the, he's a brother of Agamemnon from the Trojan War.
And we know from the Odyssey that Menelaus, like Wutna Pishtiem, was granted this special exemption from death with direct transport to the gardens of Elysium at the far end of the earth.
And I'm quoting Homer here, where there is made the easiest life for mortals, where there is no snow nor much winter there, nor is there ever rain, but always the stream of the ocean sends up breezes of the West wind blowing briskly for the refreshment of mortals.
This, because Helen is yours and you Menelaus, are sun in law therefore to Zeus.
By the way, for all her unmatched beauty, it seems that this was really what the big fuss about Helen was all about.
And maybe that was why there was a Trojan War in the first place, because whoever possessed her was destined for the Isles of the Blessed rather than the gloom of Hades.
Now, if you had a choice between the gloom of Hades or the Isles of the Blessed with a full-bodied experience there, all of us would opt for the Isles of the Blessed in Elysium.
Because for human beings, happiness outside of the body is very difficult to imagine and impossible to desire.
We can desire deliverance from the body and desire it very ardently, but that's another matter.
The best proof of this in my mind is the fact that the beatified souls, the saints and dantas paradise, anticipate with a surplus of joy, the resurrection of their flesh at the end of time.
One could say that their bliss in heaven is incomplete in fact until they recover in time.
What time has robbed them of, namely, their personal identities which were bound up with their flesh.
So, as I tell my students sometimes when I teach dantas, all of us on earth, insofar as we are in our bodies, are more blessed than the saints and dantas heaven.
Now, it's otherwise with the likes of Menelius and Wootenapishtim and Adam and Eve before the fall. Why?
Because these fantastic garden worlds are places where the elect can possess the gift of their bodies without paying the price for the body's passions.
They can enjoy the fruits of the earth without succumbing to the law of death and disease that holds sway over ordinary mortals.
And in fact, for a very long time, this endless prolongation of bodily life in a garden-like environment, protected from the tribulations of pain and mortality was the ultimate image of the good life.
Aha, or was it? This is the question.
If you read Homer, Menelius isn't no rush to go off to his islands in the stream.
Earthly paradises, like doom and orilisium, they might offer ease and perpetual spring, but that comes at a cost, and that cost is an absolute isolation from the world of mortals.
That means from friends, family, city, and especially history, exile, both from the private and public spheres of human interaction, deprives you of both the cares and the consolations of human life.
And most of us are much more attached to those cares and consolations that we may ever suspect.
So to go on living in these garden worlds, men must either denature themselves or else succumb to the kind of melancholia that you find among the souls in Dante's limbo.
These are souls or shades who exist as Dante puts it in Dizio sense a spayme in desire without hope.
Involved in, there's a great line where Thoreau writes, "Be it life or death. We crave only reality."
And it's precisely reality that you don't get in those garden worlds.
But we don't have to pose hypothetical questions to Menelius in the Odyssey when we can consult Odysseus directly. Think of this.
Calipso's Island, where Odysseus found himself maroon for many years, remember?
That, in every respect, is a kind of aisle of the blessed.
It's in the far-flung reaches of the ocean. It has a flourish in green environment, fountains, vines, violets, and birds.
Well, let me read how Homer describes it in a scene which is really prototypical of many subsequent scenes like this in the history of Western literature.
She was singing, Calipso was inside the cave with a sweet voice as she went up and down the loom and wove with a golden shuttle.
There was a growth of grove around the cavern, flourishing. All there was there, and the black polar and fragrant cypress.
And there were birds with spreading wings who made their nests in it, little owls and hawks and birds of the sea with long beaks, who are like ravens.
But all their work is on the sea water.
But I got those into my bird monologue last week.
And right about the hollow cavern extending a flourishing growth of vine that ripen with grave clusters.
Next to it there were four fountains, and each of them ran shining with water, each next to each.
But turned to run in sundry directions, and round about there were meadows growing soft with parsley and violets, and even a god who came into that place.
And in that place, would have admired what he saw, his heart delighted within him.
Very exceptional passage, you don't get many descriptions of nature and Homer, and that's one of the very few.
Anyway, this is the environment that Calipso invites a disiess to share with her.
And into the bargain, she also offers him immortality.
But we all know the story.
Cold to her offer, a disiess spends all his days on the seashore, with his back to this earthly paradise,
sulking, weeping, yearning for his homecoming, to wear, to the harsh and craggy Ithaca.
Nothing, it seems, can console him for his exile from the land of his fathers.
Regardless of all his travails and responsibilities.
In fact, that first introduction of Odysseus in the Odyssey shows that there's nothing that can still within this guy's breast his desire to repossess the coordinates of his human identity.
And it's precisely his human identity that he's stripped of on Calipso's island.
Even the certainty that death awaits him.
After a few decades of life on Ithaca, should he make it back, even this certainty that he's going to die.
Soon or rather than later, can't persuade him to give up his longing for return.
I think that what Odysseus longs for on Calipso's island and what keeps him in a state of exile there is precisely a life of care.
Or you could say that he longs for the world in which human care finds his fulfillment.
In his case, that world would be the world of family, homeland and genealogy.
In our case, it might be something different.
But it's that alienated core of care in his human heart that sends him to the desolate sea shore every morning.
And it keeps him out of place in this worldless garden of Calipso.
In fact, Calipso says, if you only knew in your heart how many hardships you were fated to undergo before getting back to your country,
you would stay here with me and be Lord of this household and be an immortal.
But the problem is that Calipso is a goddess.
The shining goddess at that.
And as a goddess, you can't understand the extent to which Odysseus insofar as he is human is held fast by care, despite or even because of the burdens that it places on him.
[Music]
My name is Calipso and I have lived alone.
Live on an island and I've awakened to move a dawn on a long time ago.
I watched him struggle with the seas, and that he was drowning.
And I brought him into me.
Now today, call more and I,
He's his way after the night.
I let him go.
My name is Calipso and I garden over the road.
Thinking wild and hidden in the sweetness of your frozen fire.
It broke longer than a searing to move.
I tell a nation that I could take, so that it is hidden.
It's all the waves, and the tears I'm falling away.
I can't do it here for you.
I'll have it in the world.
[Music]
My name is Calipso and I have lived alone.
In the dawn he sails away to the god for ever more.
And the waves were taken in again, but there were no ways now.
I was standing on the shore with a clean heart in my tongue.
When you said he'd stay might be and the sky will burn.
It's the only time I ever knew.
I do not ask him to return.
I let him go.
[Music]
That was Suzanne Vega, a track called Calipso.
When I saw the Institute standing, gave me a moment to collect my thoughts.
I was saying that Odysseus is an archetype of the human being who is held fast by care.
Does if care were like a woman who has his grasp on him, and as long as he is in possession
of him, then Calipso really doesn't have a chance.
There's a very ancient parable that comes down to us across the ages, which speaks very eloquently
of this powerful hole that Kura or care has on human nature.
Kura is the Latin goddess for care.
Here's how it goes.
Once when care was crossing a river, she saw some clay.
She thoughtfully took up a piece and began to shape it while she was meditating on what she had made.
Jupiter came by.
Care asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted.
But when she wanted her name to be bestowed upon it, he forbade this and demanded that it be given his name instead.
While care and Jupiter were disputing earth the rose and desired her own name be conferred on the creature,
since she had furnished it with part of her body.
They are Saturn to be their arbiter, and he made the following decision which seemed a just one.
Since you, Jupiter have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death.
And since you earth have given its body, you shall receive its body.
But since care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives.
And because there is now a dispute among you as to its name, let it be called "Omo" or "It is made of humus" or the earth.
I would submit that Odysseus is another name for "Omo".
And that's why he can't lie easily in calipso's arms.
Because as I said, he's already held fast by another pair of arms.
Now, I had Odysseus been forced to remain on calipso's island for the rest of his endless days,
and had he not lost his humanity in the process he most likely would have taken to gardening.
I mean, what else could he do? No matter how redundant the activity of garden may have been in that environment,
I believe that for human beings like Odysseus, they have an irrepressible need to devote themselves to something.
A garden that comes into being through one's own labor and tending efforts is very, very different from the fantastical gardens,
earthly paradises, where things are pre-given spontaneously for one's enjoyment.
So that's why I had Odysseus given himself over to gardening.
His humanly cultivated patch of ground would appear to us as a kind of oasis if we could see it.
An oasis of care in the landscape of calipso's otherwise a carefree world in Ireland.
So although our earthly man-made gardens may evoke or recreate images of Eden,
they always retain a human signature that reveals in their aspects the fact that human hands have brought them into being.
And it's this signature called it the Mark of Kura that would make Odysseus's garden stand out in calipso's home world.
Now if we compare the parable of Kura with the story of Adam and Eve and Genesis,
we find that there are certain affinities and yet very marked differences as well.
In Genesis, God seems to have created a carefree Adam and put him in the garden of Eden as if to shield him from the reality of things.
You know how parents are, especially these days, very concerned to shield their children from reality.
It seems like the God of Genesis had a similar concern for Adam.
The irony is that he puts Adam into the garden of Eden and says to him that he must keep it,
he must become the caretaker of its environment.
And yet how can God possibly expect Adam to become a caretaker when he took such pains to make sure that his creature did not have a care in the world?
The extent to which Adam and Eve are carefree or careless is most evident to me in the kind of casual manner in which they performed that momentous act that gets them expelled from the garden.
Quote, "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was pleasant to the eye and a tree to be desired to make one wise,
as she took of the fruit thereof and did eat and gave also under her husband with her and he did eat."
That's all that Genesis says about the motivation.
It doesn't mention anything about overbearing pride nor irrepressible curiosity.
This is not necessarily a rebellion against God.
In fact, there's not even that heady thrill of transgression, but in that one mindless innocence, their act was committed without fear and trembling.
Without any drama of temptation or fascination of the forbidden, in fact, it was without motivation at all.
It was out of sheer carelessness that they did it.
But how could it have been otherwise?
Again, given the way God deprived them of the means to cultivate a sense of responsibility.
So the problem with Adam and Eve in the garden was not so much their will to disobedience as their flaky, thoughtless dispositions.
In Eden, Adam was unburdened by worries, but by the same token he was also incapable of devotion.
And without devotion, our humanity cannot realize its potential.
Every story that comes to us from myth tells us this.
In Eden, everything was there for Adam, including his wife.
But after his exile, he was there for everything else.
For it was only by dedicating himself or only by committing himself.
That he could render inhabitable an environment that exacted his labor.
Out of this kind of self-commitment was born the love of something other than oneself.
Hence was born the possibility of human culture as such.
But nowadays, the more successful we are in recreating, addenic conditions for ourselves, the more we revert back to that single-minded love of oneself.
Rather than love of something that is not oneself.
And no human being is happy when self-love is the only love that's left to him or her.
Because human beings are fully human only when things matter.
Nothing was at stake for Adam and Eve in the garden.
Nothing was at stake until suddenly in one decisive moment.
Self-revelation, everything was at stake.
So these were the garden's impossible alternatives.
Live in moral oblivion within its limits, or acquire awareness at the cost of being thrown out.
I know many among us would opt to live in moral oblivion within the limits of that world.
But others of us would pay the price of the fall in order to be handed over to our humanity.
I would like to suggest that not Adam but Eve is the progenitor of humanity.
It's thanks to her that there are any progenitors at all.
And if she has to take the blame for the fall from Eden, she should also get the credit for it.
Because it was the fall finally that turned husband into father, wife and a mother,
and gave this very childlike couple a parental maturity that could never have achieved
that they not found their way out of that protective environment.
In fact, it seems that there was no fecundity of generations in Eden.
It's only after the fall that procreation comes into the picture, into the human story.
And why is that? Because where there is no death, there is no birth either.
That's why the expulsion was not only a fall into mortality, and everyone wants to insist on the fall into mortality and blame Eve for that.
We're still blaming Eve to a certain extent for that.
It was also a fall into what Hannah Arendt called "Natality" by which she meant the possibility of initiation of new beginnings through human action.
Let's go back to Odysseus for a moment by choosing mortality over immortality.
In other words, by rejecting Kalipso's offer.
Odysseus repeats that fateful choice that Eve made,
and in so doing he proves himself to be an adult.
Gilgamesh is still a kid, he's still an adolescent.
Odysseus is a more mature individual.
Through that choice to embrace his mortality, he reaffirms his place in the genealogical line,
that makes of mortal life a link in the chain of generations.
It's always about the land of the fathers, and it's only in the land of his fathers at Odysseus finally reclaims that human identity.
And what does that mean is human identity? It doesn't mean himself, his inner self, his true self.
No, it means.
An identity that defines him as the son of Liertes, an anti-clayer, the husband of Penelope, and the father of Telemachus.
That's what the coordinates of his human identity amount to.
But it's Eve.
She's the one who allowed boys to become men, and she's the one who turned Adam into Odysseus.
In fact, I received a postcard the other day from Italy, and it shows an image of a painting in a church in Anacapri,
1761, Leonardo, Cajese, it's an image of expulsion, Adam and Eve being forced out of the garden.
Adam looks completely stricken and desolated by the event, and Eve is up there in an almost,
I wouldn't want to say joyous, but it looks like she's looking forward to a future with eager anticipation.
While Adam is there lost and Adam lost.
And why wouldn't Eve rejoice about the expulsion?
After all, she was created, but was she, who was a step-ford wife?
She was created as a step-ford wife with everything provided for her, everything except the prospect of self-fulfillment.
The same was true for Adam, yes, in a certain sense impressionally speaking.
But he does seem to have less dread of the mindless, ultimately-fectness happiness that this couple was expected to enjoy in their garden.
And that's probably because he did not hear the call of Natality as intensely as Eve.
Eve's transgression was itself already an act of motherhood, or through that act of eating the fruit she gave birth to the mortal human self,
which realizes its potential in the unfolding of time, be it through work, procreation, art, or the contemplation of things divine.
God should have foreseen that.
He should have foreseen that by endowing Eve with a potential for Natality, he made it painful for her to endure the sterile mirror, which the garden reflected back on her.
One of Eve's daughters, Eleanor Wilner, contemporary poet, describes the sterility of that mirror in a poem of hers,
called a moralized nature is like a garden without flowers, from a remarkable collection called the Girl with Bees in Her Hair.
Here's that poem.
And nowhere in the shade of those verbuten trees was there the feel of cool moss underfoot, never the veils of water, gravity flung over the edges of granite into the dark that the earth was
into the dark that pools below.
No restless hours, no buggied frog unfurling its tongue, no insect hum of propagation, no busy messengers of change, nowhere the silken powers of desire into which the bees plunge, drunk on nectar and remembrance of the larval honeylust.
No flowers in Eden, not even one.
I'm inclined to trust Wilner's ancestral memory of that place, Eden, I mean.
Because no one has a deeper reach into primal things than Eleanor Wilner, from which I just quoted, that there were fruit that there was fruit without flowers in Eden,
suggests that it was a frozen, temporally suspended nature which rained there.
That poem goes on about beauty, how beauty had no figure.
Why? Because without generation and decay, there is no beauty.
Here is how the poem continues.
Beauty had no figure, no sacred symmetry, centripetal, slowly opening to a half glimpse nuclear core.
Hard enough to melt the Arctic, ice-bound heart of God.
One flower in Eden, and they would have known beauty, and knowing that would know how beauty fades.
To this testament of beauty's evidence, we could add another one.
That of Wallace Stevens, who was a quintessential post-lapsearian poet, wrote a famous poem called "Sunday Morning."
This poem takes us inside the mind of a young woman who is in her garden, very earthly garden, my dad.
It takes us into her mind as she meditates on matters of life and death, transcendence, and she clearly is feeling the pathos of nature's beauty, not only in the world around that surround her, but also in her mortal, yet at the same time seminal body.
During the silent meditation she asks herself, "Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall?
Or do the bow's hang always heavy in that perfect sky, unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth with rivers like our own that seek for seas they never find?
The same receding shores that never touch within articulate pang, why set the pair upon the river banks or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there, the silken weavings of our afternoons, and pick the strings of our insipid lutes.
Death is the mother of beauty mystical within whose burning bosom we devise our earthly mothers waiting sleeplessly.
If we want to attribute a deeper motive to the ancient Eve when she ate of the pomegranate,
He was no doubt a burning desire to become an earthly mother of this sort.
He was to make the fruit real, that was the underlying urge.
The latter day Eve and Steve's pom, who sits in a sunny chair listening to the green freedom of a cockatoo,
That woman is content to watch the spring unfold with its waken birds that quote "test the reality of misty fields" before they move on elsewhere.
To test realities are distinctly terrestrial imperative, but at a certain point the woman says to herself,
"But in contentment I still feel the need of some imperishable bliss.
And I don't want to suggest that feeling the need for that imperishable bliss is something that isn't any way fatuous.
I think that it's very difficult to be human and not have such an astallja.
And let's forget that if we are all descendants of Eve, we're bound to feel that because unlike Adam, Eve was created in Eden.
She hasn't paradesiac origin.
And through her maybe we have all inherited a kind of native nostalgia for some imperishable bliss.
But if that bliss were ever to be granted to us, where we ever to experience it,
we would lose at once both the bliss and the need for it.
That's the cruel tragic paradox of the human condition.
It's perishability that turns bliss into beauty and vice versa."
According from Stevens again, "Death is the mother of beauty, and from her alone shall come fulfillment to our dreams and our desires."
Without death there is no fulfillment, no ever changing moods of the phenomenal world.
Death may quote "strew the leaves of sure obliteration on our paths."
Yet she makes the willows, shiver in the sun, or maidens who were want to sit and gaze upon the grass.
Inclusion, at least my conclusion, death is neither the negation nor the termination of life.
It's the generative source of nature's ceaseless movement in deformed.
Passions of rain or moods and falling snow, greetings in loneliness, or unsubdueed elations when the forest blooms,
gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights, all pleasures in all pains remembering the bow of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
The appearances, oh their point-and-see, their almost unbearable beauty and power of what I call it, "evocation."
They owe that to the time-bound mortality that attunes us to the fleeting moods of nature.
This kind of attunement was not possible in Eden.
Why? Because it's garden was essentially moodless, precisely because its environment was not mortalized.
Precisely because human care, which imbues nature with its pathos, had no place there.
You take human care out of the equation and nature's appearances become sterile.
Nature blossoms forth in a tapestry of soul penetrating appearances only where care enters into the picture,
giving the visible world the power to intimate rather than merely indicate.
What do I mean by that?
I mean the difference between being in nature or in a scene of nature as opposed to those nature scenes that you'll see sometimes along the walls of airport terminals.
That's indication, not intimation.
Where the phenomenon does not rise up from recessive depths, there is no appearance as such but only a static and rayified image.
It's a difference between the image and appearance.
And an appearance is dynamic, it arises from some source.
And where there is no appearance, there are no moods and where there are no moods, there is no attunement.
So one could say that in Eden Adam and Eve were in some sense blind to the world.
In a single instant Eve changed that and suddenly she became all eyes.
It was as if Eve, in tasting the fruit, aid of the seed of death, from which human vision is born.
Sort of vision that Stevens young woman possesses.
I'm going to quote another short poem by Eleanor Willner now.
It's called the apple was a northern invention.
In this poem she describes the moment of the opening of the human eye.
When she ate the pomegranate and this is Eve, when she ate the pomegranate it was as if every seed with its wet red shining coat of sweet flesh clinging to the dark core was one of nature's eyes.
Afterward it was nature that was blind and she who was wild with vision condemned to see what was before her and behind.
Here too we should trust Willner, I think that the fruit was a pomegranate, not an apple.
The pomegranate is the fruit of Persephone.
Who was Persephone? The daughter of Demeter.
She's the one who has to descend into the underworld.
The rejoiner husband Pluto, the king of the underworld, every autumn, where he spent six months a year in that underworld taking with her the seeds of the pomegranate and it's in the spring time that she's allowed to return to her mother.
Demeter, the goddess of agriculture by the way.
As time in its past and future recesses is opened up the wonder of things is disclosed to human eye.
And that's the point isn't it the shattering of immediacy.
The fall away from our complete absorption in things is what gives appearances, these dimensions and depths, in and out of which their forms and moods shine forth in their enigma.
The pomegranate it seems lent its eyes to this woman.
And who knows, maybe it is or was the inner will of nature as a whole that operated through Eve.
Maybe it was nature's inner will to hand its beauty over to human testimony or to become visible in its phenomenal planetitude, who had transferred of its eyes that is to say its seed,
to Eve's natal vision.
And if that much is true, then the famous serpent figures as what has an ambassador of the world's desire to render its bounties manifest.
That serpent tempted Eve to open her eyes, to shed her blindness and to be reborn in a new visionary self.
And to conclude, I would say that only something as bottomless and inexhaustible as human care could take proper custody of the wonders of the visible world.
So if Eve became wild with vision at the moment of her rebirth, it's because it takes a wilderness of pain, death, suffering and toys.
Suffering and toil to give density, opacity and mood to appearance.
I believe that we don't ask or should not ask whether this price is too high to pay.
We pay it in regardless, but it is also the case that miracles are by their very nature priceless.
That will wrap it up.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions, a kind of post-avian epilogue.
Stay tuned for decades. She's gonna be coming up at the top of the hour.
And I will see you sometime. I don't know when exactly, but sometime. Thanks for listening.
Please, I'll be the man who's wasting me.
It is some underneath me of white hands come home.
And a safey man's burning me.
Why am I crying, how I want to?
How can I smile and make it right?
For six days and days in the night.
And not giving and loathsome vibes.
I don't want that.
I don't want that. I know. With all my can't let be what I want to be.
Just one thing by the feeling.
The door and with you that do help me.
And then it's probably the way.
I want to go down.
And take the same off the line.
This makes me this, but just one night.
Don't think I'd make it, but then I might.
I'm going back to the ones that I know.
And I know when I'm going back to the ones that I know.
I know when I'm going back to the ones that I know.
And I know when I'm going back to the ones that I know.
I know when I'm going back to the ones that I know.