[Music]
This is your host Robert Harrison alongside Victoria Molo for entitled opinions.
As the studios of KZSU continue their shutdown,
entitled opinions, continues to find ways to keep its flickering flame alive.
Today we're dipping into our reserves to offer you a show about dead voices,
memory, and the enigma of beginnings. It's the recording of a talk I gave in 2014
for a Stanford lecture series called Memory and the Arts. The director Rush Rem had invited
me to speak about cultural memory with special reference to the Dylan Thomas Play under Milkwood,
a reading of which was performed a few days after my lecture. We don't have a recording of the
reading, but here are the thoughts I offered my audience on that occasion. Enjoy.
[Music]
Good evening. My name is Rush Rem and it's my pleasure as the Artistic Director of Stanford
Summer Theater to welcome you tonight to the inauguration of our memory play festival.
A collaboration between Stanford Summer Theater, the Continuing Studies program and Stanford's
Institute for Creativity in the Arts. I want to thank Charlie Youngkerman, who is the Dean of Continuing
Studies and also is Dean Mazuti, the Public Events Coordinator for CSP, whose vision and support
have made this evening and the festival possible. Over the next few months we will be presenting a
series of plays dealing with memory, nostalgia, personal recollection, conflicting accounts of the past,
poetic memory, historical remembrance, and, if you're as old as me, it's shadow, historical amnesia,
and what we might call archetypal cultural memory. There's information about the season in
a handout that you perhaps were given and if not you can pick it up outside. But I wanted to just
announce the one event that is upcoming and that is Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood, which is a
masterful recollection of life in a small Welsh town by Dylan Thomas with a splendid professional
cast. Some of you may know the actors from past summer theater seasons, but Jeffrey Burr,
K. Gustavo Lewis, Courtney Walsh, Rosie Hallat, Tom Freeland, and others. The show is free,
it is our spring gift to you, but we do encourage you to make reservations because if you come
the house may be full and you won't be able to get in. And even information about that,
and also our production of George Packer's Betrayed, which happens in May, May 20th,
in Annenberg Auditorium, about Iraqi translators who have been forgotten by the Americans,
and George will actually be in the audience and answer questions after the show. You may know
his work from the New Yorker. He wrote the best-selling book, Assassin's Gate. Then we follow with a 13th
annual, well 13th anniversary season of Stanford Summer Theater, in which we're producing two
full productions. The first is Harold Pinter's Old Times. You don't know Harold Pinter's work. He's
won a Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago, and to play Old Times is a remarkable
erotic, scintillating excursion into what memory is, and if we are to believe ourselves or anybody
else who tells us about the past. We follow that with the archetypal cultural memory of edipus,
in this case, a version by Seneca, in the Great English poet Ted Hughes' translation,
an amazing piece of writing like nothing I know, and an event the events for Stanford
Summer Theater in the summer will take place in July and August. In addition to that, there are
the continuing studies course on memory, continuing studies symposium, and a free film series.
We're extremely fortunate tonight to have Robert Harrison inaugurate our memory play festival.
Robert Poe Harrison holds the Rossina Parati chair of Italian Literature, and I believe he currently
chairs the Division of French and Italian, and in my view, most importantly, I guess. I think he
is the most valuable humanist at this university. Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of
Bay of Future, and examination of Dante's La Vite in Newover, was published by Johns Hopkins University
Press in 1988, and later translated into Japanese. His next book, Forest, The Shadow of Civilization
published in 1992 by the University of Chicago, appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian,
and German, and then later was translated into Japanese and Korean. The Dominion of the Dead
published in 2003, also by the University of Chicago Press, deals with a relationship that the living
maintained with the dead, and that we also maintained with the earth, the humus underneath our
humanity, out of which we come and to which we return. Since translated into German, French,
and Italian, the Dominion of the Dead made a great impact on me personally, and it had much to do
with the idea of the memory play festival. Professor Harrison's recent book, Gardens and Essay on the
Human Condition appeared in 2008, and I encourage you to read it for Harrison combines wide reading,
poetic imagination, and deep understanding of the link between ourselves and the world we inhabit.
In addition to his books, Robert hosts a one of its kind radio show entitled "Dependence on KZSU,"
the show features of hour-long conversations with scholars, writers, and scientists,
and artists, and via internet and podcasts as developed in international audience.
Moreover, Robert is also the founder and lead guitarist of Glass Wave, a progressive rock band,
whose songs reinterpret literary characters with intelligence and really great rock music.
As some of you may have heard for yourselves, last spring in this very auditorium,
I was happy to be in the audience as we would say a night to remember.
In the Dominion of the Dead, Robert writes the following,
"The genuinely modern does not chase after the new. It makes the old new again."
Perhaps that's what memory does as well. In Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood,"
in George Packer's "But Trade," and Harold Pinter's "Old Times," in Seneca's "Eddipus,"
and perhaps in all of us, when we are at our bravest or at our best, we make the old new again.
Please join me in welcoming Robert Harrison, who inaugurates our memory play festival with a talk
entitled "Speak Memory," "Dead Voices."
[applause]
Thank you very much. I can only disappoint after an over-generous introduction like that from Rush.
And thank you very much, Rush, for the invitation. Thank you all for coming to
this talk which I deliberately left vague in its title. I would have enough leeway when the time came to
follow my Itadam as I say in French, my state of soul. I warned Rush that I'm not a Dylan Thomas expert,
and therefore I would talk really about the theme of memory and try to relate my remarks as much
as I can to Dylan Thomas. I read a lot of Dylan Thomas in the past few weeks in preparation for tonight,
and I got completely engrossed in him, so it turns out that I will probably speak a lot more
about Dylan Thomas than I intended to. But first let me share with you a quandary I have when
when I was trying to determine how to begin, because the way you begin will often
pre-determined where you're going to end up, and the very first words of under milkwood
are to begin at the beginning. And this puts me in a kind of dilemma because I wrote a book
referenced by Rush called Dominion of the Dead, in which I claim that in so far as we are human,
we never really have access to beginnings in any substantial sense that to be
human means to always be the descendant of those who came before, and that there are no first
men or women, there's no first words, all the words that I will use tonight and that we'll use in our
discussion period come down to us from those who spoke them before, the dead, if you want to give
them a name, and insofar as we traffic in this medium we call language, we are in a certain sense
reanimating dead words or dead voices if you like it. And therefore when Dylan Thomas has to begin at the
beginning, I find it doubly problematic because I also will reference something a bit further on in
my talk where I believe that Dylan Thomas doesn't believe that there's a true beginning as such
we always find ourselves in the middle of the story. And this might have something to do with the
fact that I began as a Dante scholar and I'm intensely aware of the way the divine comedy which
wants to tell a totalized story of the soul, the state of the soul after death and integrated to
the personal biography and autobiography of its author begins right in the middle of the way,
in the middle of our life's way I find myself in a dark wood and that middle is something that
I believe Dylan Thomas is one of the most eloquent spokespersons for. Now the idea for this series here
about memory and the arts I think is a crucial one in the humanities today we can never tire of
recalling that the nine muses, the muses of literature and the performing arts, their mother was
memory and even when we tell stories to ourselves about origins and this is something that the Greeks did
with particular relish, they believed that they were telling stories that began at the beginning
and I'd like to just begin by referencing something that Plato narrates in at the beginning of the
time years his dialogue where it's very interesting because at the here it's crity as a character named
crity as who tells Socrates an old world story that he heard from his grandfather on the day of the
Apaturia or the registration of youth when crity as was ten years old and his grandfather was over 90
and the grandfather had heard it in his youth from his father who had heard it in turn from
Solon the sage the logiverthianian who had heard it from an old priest during his visit to the
Egyptian city of Says and we in turn hear crity as is the count to Socrates from Plato
an abbreviated version of which I will now retell so that this river of cultural memory might
flow on so this is what happened during his visit to say Solon was asked by his Egyptian hosts
to speak about Greek antiquity and so crity has began to tell his Egyptian hosts about the first
human being for ronius and about dukaelion and pyra and so forth and then he was promptly interrupted
by a venerable old priest who declared oh Solon Solon you Greeks are never anything but children
and there is not an old man among you in mind you are all young and there is no opinion handed
down among you by ancient tradition nor any science which is hory with age
and then the priest goes on to explain why the Greeks are so young in mind and spirit or sika
in their souls and he says that Athens is even more ancient in his founding than the city of
Says but the Greeks have no memory of its origins due to the annihilation of its former civilizations
and these annihilations are brought on by what the priest calls periodic declinations of the
heavenly bodies that unleash a quote great conflagration of things upon the earth
that's somewhat vague but we have to imagine cataclysm in the form of floods and probably volcanoes
and it was one of these conflagrations says a priest that destroyed Atlantis an ancient civilization
of which Solon's Greeks have no memory even though it was their forefathers who thwarted the trans
oceanic at Atlantean conquest of Europe so this is the part of the time he is where we get the
story of Atlantis this fabled ancient civilization that actually is told in a way that still has
people looking for the actual Atlantis somewhere in the Pacific oceans so thanks to the flatness of
the Nile Delta Egypt manages to weather these cosmic upheavals without fatal consequences whereas
the mountainous terrain of Greece causes Athens and its neighboring cities to get devastated and washed
away into the sea by these cataclysmic floods so let me quote the priest whereas in this land in
Egypt neither then nor at any other time does the water come down from above on the fields
having always a tendency to come from below for which reason the traditions preserved here
are the most ancient whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters
and the other prerequisites of life after the usual interval the stream from heaven like a pestilence
comes pouring down and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education
and so you have to begin all over again like children and know nothing of what happened in
ancient times either among us or among yourselves so I'd like to draw attention to the
sickness of the priests distinction between Greek youth and let's call it Egyptian senility as
long as we understand the word senility not in the sense of decrepitude but something that is
hory with age that has a long age so although the goddess Athena founded Athens 1000 years before
she founded Says the Egyptians possess an unbroken memory of and maintain a strict continuity with their
deep past whereas the Greeks keep losing their memory and starting all over again and that's why I
would venture to say that the symbol of Egyptian senility is the river of Greek youth of volcano
and in its evocation of the several lost antiquities of Athens because these cataclysms are
recurrent Plato's myth points I believe to a law of catastrophism that would continue to dominate
Western civilization for centuries and millennia to come because like the Hellenes Western
civilization as a whole would subsequent to Plato himself be destined to periodically lose its memory
it disinherited its past and surrender its achievements to ruin ours is a civilization that for
some reason cannot hold on to its legacies that falls into dark ages of destitution and oblivion
and must quote begin all over again like children and know nothing of what happened in ancient times
it's always astonishes me that the first literary work in Western canon is about the destruction
and not the foundation of a city destruction of the city of Troy and we know that when Homer was
writing or when the Homeric tradition of these poems was originating in the dark it was the dark ages
of Greek times and he was looking back to a lost civilization of the Mycenaeans now and whereas for us
Homer is the beginning of a civilization that we take to be an hour antiquity it actually begins
with the loss of a prior act antiquity because the events that are under description in the Homeric
epics are some 500 years before Homer was writing and I would suggest that today we have the
privilege of seeing this volcanic process at work up close in technicolor as it were
as the entire Christian humanist civilization that slowly consolidated itself in the wake of
Rome's collapse unravels before our eyes it was said of president Garfield late 19th century
that in moments of boredom or to amuse his friends he would take a pencil in each hand and
compose sentences in Greek and Latin at the same time and if one considers that as a student
Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin and vice versa one realizes to
what extent the heavenly declinations have unleashed their fury upon the American presidency
it was not so long ago that a university professor in the classroom would typically leave Greek and
Latin quotes untranslated then he began to provide a translation for the Greek but not for the
Latin nowadays he or she must tell his students or her students that there was such a thing as the
Greek and Latin tongues that there was once a place called Athens and so forth shortly the professor
won't know even that much oh he or she will know it in a way but will not know what to make of it
and we don't know what to make of something you eventually forget about it
Aristotle has an interesting version of a similar sort of idea of catastrophism in the
metaphysics where he Aristotle did not believe in beginnings and he believed in a kind of continuous
an eternal world but he did believe that there were periodic catastrophes that wiped out the memory
of the Greek civilizations and he had this teleological view of all things natural as well as
cultural and he thought that the ultimate purpose of human society was to create the conditions for
philosophers you know that the few philosophers who would use their minds in the philosophical way
were the ultimate golden objective and telos of a human society and he says somewhere in the
metaphysics I believe it's in book 12 that after these sorts of calamities take place flood
volcanoes and so forth people will lose their memory and then they will retell in the form of myth
doctrines that the philosophers had themselves articulated philosophically in the prior age
and this is very interesting because we usually tend to think that myth proceeds philosophy that
mythos proceeds logos and that the logos then abstracts it Aristotle gives a version where actually
it's the memory of philosophical logos that the early myths are actually referring to
and now that I've invoked this word logos I'd like to go from the Greek and Roman
civilization to the Christian very briefly to talk about how things stand with the concept of beginnings
and memory there at least invoking the beginning of the gospel of John which famously begins with the
the verse that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and in Greek of course it's
in the beginning was the logos now even if we take it on faith that in the beginning was the logos
no one really knows what logos meant in the beginning because by the time our words begin to mean
something they already have a past they already reach us by way of our four mothers and four fathers
regardless of our dialect we speak with the words of the dead and that in a special sense is how and
why we speak at all just as humanity begins where there is all ready an ancestor language begins
where it has already begun and there's a poem in Dylan Thomas's collection
called from loves first fever to her plague where Dylan Thomas confirms this where he says and from the
first declension of the flesh I learned man's tongue to twist the shapes of thoughts into the
stony idiom of the brain to shade and knit anew the patch of words left by the dead
so I think this is evidence enough that Dylan Thomas was acutely aware that he
had inherited the very tools of his trade namely words and language from the dead and that his
vocation as a poet was to make sure that that legacy is reanimated in the voice of the living poet
and of all the 20th century poets known to me Dylan Thomas is the most orific of poets in the sense
that he said quintessential the lyrical poet and his poetry works I believe by a magic of
incantation it really is a poetry that should be heard aloud even much more than just being read
because it has a magical power in its music that he is the one person if I had to choose one poet
of the 20th century that I would send down into the underworld to placate the god of the dead
Pluto and to entreat the powers of the underworld to allow him to bring back his dead wife Ehridysse
from the realm of the dead it would really be Dylan Thomas because I think that more than anyone
else he would be able to enchant through the music of his lyrical voice the rocks the animals
and of course all the dead the way Orpheus in the Greek myth does so in the episode when he actually
descends into the realm of the dead in order to retrieve his his dead wife he is given permission
to take her back into the world of the light on one condition of course which is that he never
looked back at her until they have reached the world but Orpheus being a typical nostalgic poet
poet is always bound to memory in a way and it's because he's bound to the image and the memory
of his wife that he undertakes his journey into the underworld in the first place it's beyond him
to actually not turn around and look and therefore lose his wife Ehridysse for the second time because
that's what there's a certain way in which the lyric poet is wedded to the afterlife or is sings
through the inspiration of the dead before I go on to say a few more remarks about Dylan Thomas
I would like to take the occasion to remark that if he is the quintessentially orific poet who descends
into the underworld with his liar and in chance beasts and gods alike there is another
vocation of epic poetry which is equally related to the underworld of the dead and that I believe is
the epic tradition and I don't believe that it's by chance that the great epics whether we're dealing
with the Odyssey or the Anirid or Dante's divine comedy that they all have as one of their central
features a descent of a hero into the underworld to commune with the dead and it's not just the scene
where the hero or the protagonist goes and is represented as speaking with the dead I believe that
epic poetry had as its primary purpose in the societies in which it originated to serve as a
medium of communication or of communion let's say between the living and the dead and I think that
we must never fail to appreciate the degree to which there was a need that was extremely intense
among the ancients to hear themselves spoken to by the dead to receive commandments
from their ancestors to be reassured that they were not abandoned and fore-lorn
as a society of the living because nothing was quite as nothing would fill them as much
as much dread as the notion that the connections between the living and the dead were somehow
severed you know and in those days they did not have recording technologies or video technologies
as we enjoy an art day and age where we can actually listen to the dead speak in their own voices
at least up until a certain point we can see images of the dead it's a JFK we can hear Martin Luther
King into speeches we have the extraordinary and quite unique privilege of hearing the
dead in their own voices for the first time now prior to the invention of these recording technologies
it was the poets and the poets alone whose voices served as the medium of communion
between the living and the dead and it was through their poetry that this converse was maintained
so in the beginning was the logos but no one really knows what the logos meant because
there's always a prior speaker in this case
linguists however tell us that the word logos harkens back to the proto-Indo-European root leg
which meant to gather to collect and to bind together or so they gather because like
for no one has actually seen or heard this fossil tongue from which all Indo-European languages
supposedly derive this is also another fact that we should not fail to be astonished at that
all of the languages that belong to the Indo-European family have a proto-language which is a dead
language that of which there is only conjectural evidence it survived only in its descendants
and to that degree I would say that a truly dead language is one that has no dead language at
its core it was one that was never born in the first place hence an artificial language grounded
not in the logos of legacy but in a merely formal logic and that it's by constantly retrieving
the priority from which they arise that are words retained their capacity to bind,
gather, collect and mean that is why we speak of natural languages
a language is natural to the degree that its native speakers are born into the generative source
from which the saying power of its words ultimately spring and that means that the origin of our
words lies not so much behind them that's in them which in turn means that they contain within them
humic underworlds where the dead holds sway over the very means of speech
and I believe that one of the vocations of poetry in the modern era is an ongoing effort to
reanimate the words that have come down to us in that way and to prevent them from degenerating
into mere denotative terms and in that regard the poetry of Dylan Thomas I think is emblematic
and quintessential when it comes to the way in which words in his poems as well as the play that
is under discussion here under milkwood it come alive in a very special way now one
other problem that I alluded to earlier that I have what when it comes to to begin at the beginning
and how does one begin at the beginning when dealing with Dylan Thomas is the fact that
Dylan Thomas throughout his corpus seems to suggest that once you are born
you are right in the thick of things in such a way that to talk about a beginning and an end is really to
mislead one's conception of where one is because let me read something that he has in his autobiography
portrait of the artist as a young dog it's called and he's talking about when he was a young boy
playing an imaginary game with a friend when they were playing Indians and he says on my haunches
eager and alone casting an ebony shadow with the gores hill jungle swarming the violent impossible
birds and fishes leaping hidden under four stem flowers the height of horses in the early evening
in a dingle near car marthon my friend Jack Williams invisibly near me I felt all my young
body like an excited animal surrounding me the torn knees bent the bumping heart the long heat and
depth between the legs the sweat prickling in the hands the tunnels down to the eardrums the
little balls of dirt the eyes in the socket the tucked up voice the blood racing the memory around
and within flying jumping swimming and waiting to pounce their playing Indians in the evening
I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story and my body was my adventure and my name
that's why I believe dill and tommy is the poet of the middle
they're playing Indians in the evening I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living
story and unlike his near fellow compatriot Samuel Beckett who was convinced that we
come at the end of the story and sometimes even beyond the end of the story for dill and tommy's life
was always right in the middle of things and this middle was himself and his own body and it's
to that extent that I believe that there is a sense in which consciousness body and cosmos
and the words which express all three at once constitute what he means by the middle or the center
and at this center is me myself he says and he also speaks in the same text about in the safe center of
my own identity the familiar world about me like another flesh and it's that body that is around him
that is in there is no separation between subject and object in at this state it's a body which is
his adventure and I would like to maybe I'd like to read a poem of he is a famous well-known poem
which describes the way in which this being in the middle of a story is being in a connection with
the entire world and the cosmos in a way that is perhaps pre-linguistic but the job of the poet is to find
words to speak about this thing that is ultimately unspeakable and this is a poem the force that
through the green fuse drives the flower so the force that through the green fuse drives the
flower drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer and I am dumb to tell the
crooked rows my youth is bent by the same wintry fever the force that drives the water through the
rock strives my red blood that drives the mouthing streams turns mine to wax and I am dumb to
mouthed under my veins how at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks the hand that
whirls the water in the pool stirs the quick sand that ropes the blowing wind hauls my shroud sail
and I am dumb to tell the hanging man how of my clay is made the hang man's lime
the lips of time leech to the fountain head love drips and gathers but the fallen blood
shall calm hersoars and I am dumb to tell a weather's wind how time has ticked a heaven round the stars
and I am dumb to tell the lovers tomb how at my sheet goes the same crooked worm
this identity of the self the body with creation is one that is perhaps impossible to put into
words but it is what the center and the middle of the story is for dill and thomas and
from that point of view to ask the question what does dill and thomas mean at the beginning of
under milkwood when he begins at play to begin at the beginning what can that possibly mean
and this is something that has consternated me a great deal in the last few days
troubling my own sense of how to make make this intelligible to me
but I think one of the ways I can proceed is maybe by referring to the texts here
and suggesting that if there is a beginning in dill and thomas's vision it's a beginning which
always brings one back to a source which is the source that one is most immediately in touch with
when one is right in the very middle of the story and therefore that we should reconceive the
beginning not as something that begins on a linear trajectory from point A that will end up in point Z
but rather this kind of recancy beginning that dill and thomas has in mind at the beginning of his
played under milkwood is finding oneself again at the very center of things so I don't know how
many of you have this play well in mind but let me just read a little bit of the beginning of it
for you to begin at the beginning it is spring moonless night in the small town starless and
Bible black Bible black is interesting because the Bible does begin with genesis begins with the
creation of the world and it begins with the notion that it was all chaos before god actually
begins his work of creation Bible black the cobblest streets silent and the hunched quarters
and rabbits would limp invisible down to the slow black slow black crow black fishing boat
bobbing sea that's beautiful the fishing boat bobbing sea black and slow the sea is another place
of beginnings it would seem the houses are blind as moles or blind as captain cat there in the
muffled middle by the pump and the town clock the shops in morning the welfare hall in widows
weeds and all the people of the lulled and dumb found town are sleeping now
then he goes on to say hush the babies are sleeping the farmers of fishers the tradesmen and he
gives a whole list of people the characters are 69 of them in this play they're all going to be
represented by these rubrics that he enumerates here and then he goes on to say you can hear the
do falling and the hushed town breathing only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded
town fast and slow asleep and you alone can hear the invisible starfall the darkest before dawn
minutely do gay stir of the black dab filled sea where the aruthis a kirlou and skylark
zanzibar rean on the rover the cormorant and the star of whales tilt and ride listen
it is night moving in the streets the professional salt slow musical wind in coronation street
and cockle row it is the grass growing and so forth there is this constant
invocation to listen and it goes on time passes listen time passes first remark about listening
this dark in which the play begins where the town is all asleep and where you cannot see anything
because it's a moonless night and where everything seems blind everything is black and that would
seem to be the origin the source it's actually a series of images for what dillantomas conceived of
as god i could draw attention to a number of places in his poetry where god is associated with
a primordial dark which is a source from which things are born and it is a source which is also as
soon as things are born is holds sway over their death and their destruction and they're undoing
and i believe that you are you got an intimation of that in the poem i read for you about the the shroud
the the worm the death that creation and destruction are inseparable
in this phenomenon known as life and the dark or what he calls in one of his poems this kind of
eternal town is the dark of a god who is a totality of all that is and that the mode of
allowing that darkness to overcome one at the beginning of milkwood is really through the sense of
hearing the sense of vision is also comes into play because he'll say if you listen closely enough
to this silence you will be able to see things near mine no and hearing a certain kind of hearing as
a precondition for a seeing is interesting because well i don't want to get too botanic here but
it it does seem to invoke a all-testamental god who communicates with humans through the sense of
hearing more than through vision it's a god of commandments a god who one who speaks but is not
seen very different from the Greek conception of the divinity where Greek for the Greeks knowledge
and the ultimate a news is that of an intuition that sees things and the Greeks privilege vision over
hearing for a very simple reason is that in our lived experience of vision we can take in a
great plurality of things in one instant no what comes into our field of vision has a multiplicity
of coordinates but we don't need we don't not need time in order to synthesize them together hearing
is a little bit different whatever we hear takes place in real time and it takes place in a kind
of sequential diachronic time hearing is also the most passive of senses certainly vis-a-vis
vision you we are free to close our eyes at any time but we cannot really close off our sense of hearing
so it's a it's it's where a certain passion is at its most intense and it's where time in its
sequentiality is measured because before you can make sense of what i'm going to say in this
sentence by the time it's over you're going to have to bear with me in time and get to the end of it
very different than what you understand when you see something no so for the narrator of under
milk would to begin this play with an invocation to listen hush do you hear time passes listen time
passes this kind of listening i think is what puts the narrator in and the i want to say reader but
i don't want to say reader because we have to remember that this play began as a radio play
that dillantomas was the first version of it came to him under another title early one morning
in nineteen forty four forty five it was broadcast on the b_b_c_ and i think that we have to appreciate what
the role of hearing meant during those circumstances historically where on the one hand you are listening
to a radio and you are actually in touch with that one sense of hearing and anything that you
can see in your mind's eye you have to imagine through what it you are hearing in terms of a voice
in the medium of the radio
the radio was something that people during the war in england
were of course always uh... attuned to because it was the source of the news
the day it was also through the sense of hearing that uh... you heard
the uh...
sirens to get into your shelters
and hide from the bombs
save your life
it was through hearing that you heard the airplanes come in it was certainly through hearing that you
heard the bombs going off
and therefore
there is a very rich
context
for
tomah says
uh... calling for a particularly heightened sense of hearing
when we think of the listener
of this play
radio play
listening to it over the ways during a war
where uh...
what you heard was taking place in real time
as this dark
uh... gets thicker
through
hearing
it also liberates uh... the
vision of the imagination
and
tomah says come closer now only you can hear
the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black
bandage
only you can see in the blinded bedrooms the calms and pedicodes over the
chairs the jugs and basins the glasses of teeth
thou shalt not on the wall and the yellowing dicky bird watching pictures of
the dead
only you can hear and see behind the eyes of the sleepers
the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and
tunes and wishes
and flight and fall and despair
and big seas of their dreams
from where you are
you can hear their dreams
and this is what the first part of the play will uh...
trace the dreams of the townsfolk in the small wellish town
and
the first character whose dream we are going to over here
is captain cat
the retired blind sea captain
main character in this play he's blind
and he's a sea captain
and that puts him
close to the very source no
source of the sea
and this absolute dark
which is a uh...
a kind of god that
tomah
can see the best source
uh... from which things arise into which they uh...
continuously return in death
so captain cat the retired blind sea captain asleep in his bunk in the sea
shelled
ship in bottled
ship shape best
cabin of scooner house
dreams of
never such sees as any that swamped the decks of his s_s_ kid welly bellying
over the bed clause
and jellyfish slippery sucking him down salt deep into the day he dark
so in his dream he is sinking into this element of the sea of the dark black
but
unfathomable sea
and we follow with him
where the fish
combining out
and nibble him
down to his wishbone
and the long drowned
nuzzle up to him
and here in that moment is where
we have the first dialogue
but it's on a dialogue between two people
it's a dialogue
all the drowned
uh...
sea fellows
captain cat remembers
in his sleep
remember me captain says the first round
you're dancing Williams
i lost my step in and tuck it
second round do you see me captain
the white bone talking
i'm tom fred the donkerman
we shared the same girl once
her name was mrs probert
and throughout the play mrs probert is rosy probert is his long uh... lost
love
that he constantly dreams of uh... she's dead
and a woman's voice
rosy probert thirty three duck lane come on up boys
i'm dead
third round hold me captain i'm jonah jarvish come to a bad end
very enjoyable
fourth round alfred pomeroy jon sea lawyer born in mumbles sung like a
linnick crowned you with a flag and tattooed
with mermaids thirst like a dredger died of blisters
first round
this skull at your ear hole
so do you see captain cat
in the water and you see these things floating up to
this skull at your ear hole is
fifth round curvy bevin tell my auntie it was me that palm the or moly
clock
captain cat eye-eye curly second round tell my missus no my never
third round i never done what she said i never
fourth round yes they did fifth round and who brings coconuts and
shawls and pairs to my gwen now first round how is it above second round is
their rama and lava bread
third round bosoms and robin's fourth round
concertina's
uh... first round fighting an onion second round and sparrows and daisies and so on
and so forth and at at the end of this captain cat says oh my dead
dears
and then the narrator takes over from where you are you can hear
in cocco row in the spring moonless night miss price and then we move on to
another dreamer
and another dreamer and another dreamer and we have as i've mentioned before
sixteen nine characters in all
and uh...
i think the most enchanting part of the of the play for me is
the overhearing of these dreams many of them uh...
uh... have having to do with the relations between the living in the dead
and the voices of the dead that are speaking
in the minds of the sleepers whose
voices are presumably heard by a poet
uh... who is the only one who is awake
at this pre-don hour
uh... in this little town
where
if you're in touch
in close touch enough
with the uh...
the primordial source
you do hear this
ongoing
converse between the living in the dead
so uh...
i would like to conclude by reading a poem which i believe
uh... i never had read it this way it's one of my favorite dillentama's
poems is and death shall have no dominion
and uh...
i never realized
to what extent it is actually uh... very sympathetic with
this
beginning of under milkwood
that i've just read for you were it has to do with
captain cat in the drowned uh... see fairs
but it does seem like this is a poem that captain cat himself
could have uh...
been the one to write
in so far as it
does seem to
refer to
those who died at sea
in this primordial element
uh...
and death shall have no dominion
dead men naked
they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon
when their bones are picked clean in the clean bones gone they shall have
stars at elbow and foot
though they go mad they shall be sane
though they sink through the sea
they shall rise again
though lovers be lost lost love shall not
and death shall have no dominion
and death shall have no dominion under the windings of the sea they lying
long shall not die windily
twisting on racks when sinews give way strapped to a wheel yet they shall
not break
faith in their hands shall snap into and the unicorn evils run them through
split all ends up
they shan't crack
and death shall have no dominion
and death shall have no dominion no more may gulls cry at their ears or
waves break loud on the seashores
where blue a flower
may a flower no more lift its head to the blows of the rain
though they be mad and dead as nails heads of the characters hammer through
daisies
break in the sun
still the sun breaks down
and death shall have no dominion
very happy to
entertain your questions now because i
believe that we can
go in any direction from this poem and from everything that uh...
i tried to lay out in terms of
beginnings and ends and
middles
in dolan tomah thank you
[applause]
(upbeat music)
♪♪
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