This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions coming to you from our hibernation on the verge of a winter solstice
in a year that has brought us heavy losses
of family members, fellow citizens, livelihoods, of community and the public sphere, and much else besides.
The lucky among us have been segregated from friends, co-workers and relatives,
while the less fortunate have heard the fading sirens of an ambulance,
rushing a loved one to an isolated unit in intensive care,
never to be seen again except maybe in a coffin or an urn of ashes.
The least we can say is that the year 2020 has seared the feeling of separation into our collective psyche.
And I for one have happy descended on its way to usher it out into the dark, into the annals of history.
That said, there's always something sad about a year's end, even a year like this one.
It reminds us of the remorseless flow of time with its power to tear us away from what we love the most.
This endless leave taking and fading away of things makes blood mule for the plant that's plowed.
And as his year of separation runs out on us, it leaves us looking back at what we used to know.
When I get to feel this way, I can find words to say, I think about the penalty.
We use the norm, not just winter, turn it be cold, rain to die, get it low.
We're on the ice, the race was won, but running slowly.
We're being still in real systems and slowly upstairs, past the dawn.
That's a verse you may want to inscribe in your heart.
We ran the race and the race was won by running slowly.
When you run the race slowly, you take loss as a given and you're less likely to trample over other people's bodies to reach your own shallow grave.
My topic on this winter solstice is separation and why not start with a 13th century Persian poet,
Rumi, whose sprawling poem, Masnavi, begins with the song of the read flute.
Listen to the read, Rumi writes, "How it tells the story of eternal separations."
And then the read speaks in its own voice. "Ever since they cut me from my read bed,
men and women have been mown my laments. I want a heart torn with a passion for return,
so I could describe the pain of my longing." Anything removed from its source
seeks to return to the time of union with it.
And that is in the beautiful translation by Aksa Ila's, a long time devotee of entitled opinions by the way.
And if she weren't so far away and if the studios of KZSU weren't closed down,
we could maybe get her onto the show to talk about Rumi's theories of cosmic separation and
reunionsism. Question, what do or would or will we reunite with if and when we could return to the
origin? It depends on who one asks. An axamander, who is maybe the greatest ancient Greek cosmologist
and philosopher, unfortunately only one intriguing fragment of his has come down to us. An axamander
coined a word for what he conceived of as the primal origin that all entities separate from
when they surge into being, "I paid on the boundless, the unlimited."
The apion is the R.K. or original principle of everything. When something erupts into existence,
it breaks away violently and transgresively from an originary matrix. In the only fragment of his
in his own words at least that remains to us, an axamander declares the following.
"When things have their origin, there too they must pass away according to necessity,
for they must pay recompense and penalty to one another for their reckless injustice,
according to the order of time."
From this wondrous sentence, we can infer that for an axamander, all things exist in a state of
errancy, of error, of Hamartia, as the Greeks called it, Hamartia meaning missing the mark,
going astray. In other words, we veer into existence within a day of hatching ducklings are called
by their mother to jump from the nest into the water and paddle behind her as best they can.
Few of them will ever make it to her age.
Stellar debris accretes to form a planet, which gets bombarded by other bodies so frequently
that it develops a molten core. And let s recall that the word planet comes from the Greek
planet to wander. We live on a planet s, a wanderer. Our earth strays through the universe.
At that universe is our theater of aberration where, according to necessity, entities must pay
penalty to one another for their defection from the origin. Outside of the sheltering matrix of
the boundless, everything remains open to contact, impact, violation, and annihilation.
Adams, asteroids, animals, and whatever else exposes itself to being, knows the error and terror of
errancy.
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For an axamander, we're always going wrong. We're always in a state of reckless injustice,
and that is why we, along with whatever else, broke away from the well spring of nothingness,
must eventually return to the aperon.
Rumi had a more hopeful notion of what it means to reunite with the origin,
quoting again from the Maznavi, over earth and air and ocean zone in a new birth I
dived and flew, I crept and ran, and my whole secret essence I drew within a form that brought
them all to view, and lo, a man, and then my goal beyond the clouds, beyond the sky,
in realms where none may change or die, in angel form, and then away beyond the bounds of night and day,
and life and death unseen, or seen, where all that is have ever been as one and whole.
This longing for some ultimate reconnection with the one and whole comes in many different versions
throughout human culture, and it's not only an idle longing, for some people on some occasions it
actually becomes a lived experience of mystic unity. In a famous letter he wrote a Freud in 1927,
the Frenchman Romain Hollong referred to what he called an oceanic feeling of belonging to a greater
boundless whole, a feeling he thought lies behind all mysticism and world religions.
While Freud did not doubt that it exists, he found this oceanic feeling incomprehensible
having never himself experienced any such yearning or sentiment. In his perplexity, Freud proceeded
to reduce it to what he called an enduring primitive ego feeling of oneness with the mother during
the breastfeeding stage of infancy. Clearly Freud was no mystic, nor was cocaine the right sort of drug
to induce in him a psychedelic feeling of oneness with an all enveloping transcendence.
I prefer not to speculate about whether the oceanic feeling has an objective reality.
Instead, let me share with you an extraordinary first person account that comes from an interview
that the French philosopher Pierre Adot gave shortly before he died in 2010.
where he speaks about a transformative experience he underwent in his adolescence. I quote,
"Night had fallen, the stars were shining in an immense sky, one could still see them at the time.
I was filled with an anxiety that was both terrifying and delicious, provoked by the sentiment
of the presence of the world, or of the whole, and of me in that world. I was incapable of formulating
my experience, but after the fact I felt that it might correspond to questions such as,
"What am I? Why am I here? What is this world I am in?"
I experienced a sense of strangeness, of astonishment, of wonder at being there. At the same time,
I had the sentiment of being immersed in the world, of being a part of it, the world extending
from the smallest blade of grass to the stars. This world was present to me intensely present.
Much later, I would discover that this awareness of my immersion in the world,
this impression of belonging to the whole was what Hormécholá called the oceanic feeling.
I think I have been a philosopher since that time. I began to perceive the world in a new way,
the sky, the clouds, the stars fascinated me. This experience considerably influenced my conception
of philosophy. I have always conceived of philosophy as a transformation of one's perception of the world.
This heightened sense of immersion Hadoj describes here, brings with it a counter-sentiment of a
strange man, very bizarre, weird. The awakening creates a tear in the fabric of the everyday self,
and through that tear the world is overbearing presence, overwhelms the self.
In the sudden exposure of one's first person singular to the surrounding immensity,
the oceanic feeling catapults the self into a kind of a strange ecstasy,
where immersed in immensity it stands weirdly outside of itself and the world around it.
In her memoirs of an idealist, Malvita von Meisenberg, who was a friend of Nietzsche's,
describes her own experience of the oceanic feeling in somewhat similar terms, like quote.
I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling,
and now again as once before in distant days I was in peril to kneel down,
this time before the illimitable ocean symbol of the infinite.
I felt that I prayed as I have never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is,
to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is,
to kneel down as one that passes away and to rise up as one imperishable.
Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world and circling harmony.
Here too, as in had those case, the oceanic feeling arises in, or maybe we should say it arises from
the presence of the natural world. Nature after all was there before and will be there after us,
so it's almost as if the enduring permanence of the setting of earth, heaven, and sea
is what gives rise to this sense of personal immortality.
Again, I won't presume to speculate on the objective reality of this subjective feeling of triumph over death.
I will remark, however, that Malvita von Meisenberg is buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.
I came across her grave by chance the last time I was there.
What part of her, the grave, contains is anyone's guess,
at the very least it contains the part that shares in the organic afterlife of the dead,
that recomposes in the earth, or to speak with words worth, rolls round in earth's
diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.
Dylan Thomas tells us that death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea, they lie long shall not die, windily.
Though they go mad, they shall be saying, though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again.
Though lovers be lost, love shall not.
And yet death too has its own kind of infinity.
And since we're talking here about feelings of infinity, the most moving testimony I know
comes from a friend of mine, Kelly Zinkowski, who was a long time night of the entitled
"Pinience Brigade." And when I mentioned him that I was preparing to do a show on this topic,
he wrote me the following, I quote, "My own desperate glance with infinity was after my mother died,
and I had a sense of my heart's imploding into infinite space, and then I had to go to work."
I had a way for my love to build a man's special shares with each home stone,
but I kept it when full of air you gave me.
I'll be for the pain for the earth.
I've been writing this diary, but hope.
I have thrown away all our love tokens, the pilgrim bells, the speckled shells,
the beachcombed stones, but I kept and ate the handful of hair you gave me.
Alchemy for the Painfully Alone.
That's a song called a handful of hair from the album Andromida by the band Alex Rex.
The singer and songwriter, Alex Nielsen, tunes into this show from time to time.
He's another night of our brooding brigade.
The lyrics of the song go on to mention, I quote, "that phone call from my father on that April
day that shattered my London dream."
I'm assuming, but of course I can't be sure that the call from his father informed him of his
mother's death, and that because of that call he left London and thereby lost his lover as well
as his mother. At least that's how I understand the verse that ends this song, which says,
"I asked you for the time to grieve. You said that it was my decision to leave,
but to lose you both was too much to bear, left me eating handfuls of hair."
If nothing else, the song reminds us that separation comes in many modes and guises,
and that by the time were adults, most of us have navigated the waters of loss and mourning.
Who has not lost a childhood after all, or a hope, or a dream, we are all veterans of separation.
It's a condition we share not just with one another, but with all creation.
Everything is born into separation, including the universe itself.
In fact, the universe originated in an inconceivable event of separation
to begin with the separation of being from nothingness. All of a sudden, there was a separate
this and a separate that, as well as aware and a when for them to take place in.
Proton's and neutrinos pre-looting the formation of light elements, quarks, and electrons
flitting into and out of existence, matter and antimatter mutually annihilating one another,
all within the first millionth of a second after the inaugural now, before which there was nothing,
and after which there was a universe. Where there is a thing, however atomic or quantistic,
there is separation. Here is how physics describes for us lay people what took place in the singularity,
otherwise known as the Big Bang. I quote from Maria Temmings, the origin of the universe,
"The immediate fractions of a second following the Big Bang, known as the Plank Era,
are not well understood. From the moment of initial expansion to 10 to minus 43 seconds afterwards,
cosmologists suspect that the four fundamental forces at work in the universe today,
strong, weak, electromagnetism, and gravity were combined into a single unified force."
The Grand Unification Era followed the Plank Era taking place between 10 minus 43 seconds,
and 10 to the minus 35 seconds. The era began with gravity's separation from the other three forces
and ended with the separation of the strong force from the Electro-Week force.
At the beginning of the Electro-Week era, 10 to the minus 35 to 10 to the minus 10 seconds,
the strong force decoupled from the Electro-Week force, releasing a tremendous amount of energy
and triggering a sudden rapid expansion known as inflation. As space expanded more rapidly
than the speed of light, extremely energetic interactions created elementary particles,
such as photons, gluons, and quarks. The era ended with the separation of Electro-Weekitism
from the weak force. And so it goes on, the sprawling epic of cosmogenesis that takes place
between time 0 and 10 to the minus 10 seconds. 10 to the minus 10 seconds means 0.000000001
of a second. By that time, the four forces had already separated.
Now I say by that time, but it's 10 minus 10 to the second, or 10 minus 43 of a second,
a duration that we can comprehend. What quantity of time? And more importantly, what kind of time
elapsed between time 0 and the beginning of this cosmogony with a splank era,
atom era, electro-week era, etc. Given that time, as we know it, presumably begins only after
these immediate fractions of a second following the Big Bang. Nothing in our human experience
of time bears any relation to the time equations of classical physics or quantum mechanics.
If there was any primal unity before separation, it did not pertain to space and time.
I don't have any reason to believe that the American poet Marie Howe listens to the show,
but just in case she does, I'd like her to know that I do not share her nostalgia for the singularity.
My allegiance is to the space-yotemporal world of individual and differentiation
of entities and appearances in some of distance, where there is no distance, there is no world,
no phenomena, no silken weavings of our afternoons, as while as Stevens puts it.
That said, I truly admire Marie Howe's poem that goes by the title Singularity After Stephen
Hawking's. In this poem, she imagines a return to time zero.
Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
So compact nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone,
pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good
belongs to you, remember, there was no nature, no them, no tests to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf, or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don't speak English or
Farsi or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean? And before that,
to when sky was earth and animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was
not at all nothing. Before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness
can molecules recall it? What once was before anything happened? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb,
no noun only a tiny, tiny dot brimming with is is is is is. All of everything home.
Those last three words all everything home speak of this human longing for a source from which
we feel that we have been distanced or estranged. But what if there is no prior unity of being?
What if there is no before this awful loneliness of separation? What if there is no is before the is of
ontological difference? I for one prefer to think of separation as primordial rather than
exilic since it makes possible relations. It makes possible bonding and makes possible togetherness.
The first atoms did not separate from molecules. They formed the first molecules precisely because
in the beginning they were differentiated and divergent. We affiliate in separation. We come together
in separation. We love in separation. While how runs the story backward to time zero,
the 19th century French poet on Tuane Vassant at no has left us with a different kind of poem.
It's called latheri, the leaf, which speaks of our ongoing errandsy as we move in our singular identities
towards some indeterminate destination. I'll read the French original first.
to the ateeja de tezeche, pouveho furi de surché ubatui.
Shuno ci'errir, l'orage a trape le shen, quisilété mo soun c wicked.
The soun en constanta l'in lose a fear o la que llar, de prisro j'u, m'pre men, de La forea
ala plan, de la mond tain or valeau.
Shouveho le valeau, l'vomemen, soun m'prejé, shouveho valeau, valeau, l'valeau, d'orage,
de la furi de l'orage.
Detached from your stem, poure desechele l'if, where do you go?
The l'if responds, "I don't know."
The storm battered the oak that was my soul support.
With its incant breath, the zephyr, or north wind, has led me since that day,
from the forest to the plain, from the mountain to the valley,
"I go where the wind leads me without complaint or fear.
I go where all things go, where the rose leaf goes, and the l'orro leaf too."
We'll never know whether the leaf of the universe once had an oak tree from which it detached.
All we know is that the same wind that carries this poem's leaf to its final destination,
carries the year 2020 and every other year to its terminus.
And it carries us along as well on our journey through the errancy of time.
I'm Robert Harrison for this special edition of Entitled Opinions.
Stay well. Peace out.
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