[Music]
That's more like it. Agri-cantus on entitled opinions.
With the studios of KZSU shut down for almost a year now,
we haven't been able to bring you the in-depth conversations
that make up our usual fare on this program.
Instead, we've posted a few monologues to keep the fire going,
to let you know that we're still ticking and still thinking,
and that you're not alone in your dread of these
dour faces, leering at us from the post-human future
in our cybernetic present.
We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men,
leaning together.
I have a few thoughts to share with you today about the word "and,"
the most innocent sounding monocilable in everyday speech.
And, "und kai et et o wah."
I've checked over 25 different languages,
including Cantonese, Korean, Indonesian, and Swahili.
And, with the exception of Japanese, the word for "and" is invariably monocilabic.
So, let us go, then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky,
and ask about the "and" that comes between you and I,
and much else besides.
As Heidegger once said about his book being in time,
it's all in the "and."
In our last confession a few weeks ago, I addressed the topic of separation.
Those of you who tuned into that show may remember that I invoked some
verses from Dylan Thomas' poem, and death shall have no dominion.
That mantra and death shall have no dominion.
A curse six times in the poem, seven, if you include the title.
Question? What is the "and" doing there?
Well, the verse does need an unaccented syllable before the word death
to set up the first two "I"ams, so that the word no can receive such a heavy stress
in the middle of the line.
And death shall have no dominion.
Without the monocilabic and, the death negating no would lose a lot of
its accent and effect.
Yet there is more to the conjunction than its prosodic function of setting up the central stress.
The "and" stands at the beginning of this poem as an
"appophantic assertion" condensing within its monocilable,
the poem's declarative statement that death is non-terminal,
that is, is followed by a thereafter, a "thereupon" and afterwards.
What follows upon death is a reconfiguration of life's elements.
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 and the clean bones gone,
they shall have stars at elbow and foot.
In that sense, this poem's "and" is recombinant.
A recombinant, apophantic "and" is quite rare.
Far more frequently, the "and" is relational,
as in any number of paired phrases like space and time,
nature and culture, faith and reason, facts and values,
self and other, sensibility and understanding.
Or else in books with titles like "being and nothingness," "totality and infinity,"
"writing and difference," "mind and cosmos."
Here, the "and" tells us that a relation of identity and difference
obtains between the paired terms,
or that they entail, need or presuppose one another.
Space and time, for example,
modern physics has pushed its spatial understanding of time
and its temporal understanding of space to such a point
that it collides the word "and" referring instead to space time.
Of course, the suppressed "and" remains implicit in the term
if only because the relation between duration and extension lies
at the core of our present understanding of space time.
In the domain of philosophy, Martin Heidegger did something equally radical
when he thought "being" in terms of time and vice versa,
revealing something essential about them both in the process.
By opening the realm of being,
temporality allows beings to emerge into presence.
Simply put, that's what Heidegger means by being "emergence" into presence.
Like the physicists, he tried in his later thought to dispense with the "and"
and find a word that would include being "and" time in their primordial belonging together.
Hence, we get those obscure terms in the later Heideggerian lexicon,
like a rigness and lique-tum and de-cure.
Now, all of that sounds horribly abstract,
but let's remember that you and I and everyone else is in being
and that are being in being unfolds in time, call it a lifetime.
Thus, the relational and relates to the core of personal identity as well.
We all find ourselves in the relational field of the "and".
If you want to know who you are or discover the meaning of your existence,
you have to identify your essential relations or better your essential relativity.
Where is my "and"?
What is my "and"? Who is my "and"?
Here's some Peter Green to help you think your "and".
[Music]
Everything that's in time is finite and where there's finitued, there's death.
Even if it has no dominion, the connective tissue of the "and"
is spun from the womb of death as our hours and days fall away from us.
But Beth grasped this quite lucidly in the end, albeit in the mode of despair.
That's why his last testament speaks from within a deep dread of the implacable
drive of the "and".
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day
to the last syllable of recorded time, and all our yesterday's have lighted fools,
the way to dusty death.
This is not the relational "and", but the additive "and" of Hegel's bad infinity,
where you can always add on another day, year or number to the sequential series of the idiots tail,
with its sound and fury signifying nothing.
Signifying nothing because it has lost its center of gravity and become indifferent.
and become in different.
I love you tomorrow.
Why can't I say you're loving all of this?
Well, I'm loving all of this.
I love you now.
Where are my friends on my own?
I'm going down.
Tomorrow and tomorrow.
Compare that degenerative additive and to the regenerative hand that opens as repounds
condos.
And then went down to the ship.
Why would you begin your attempt at a sprawling modern epic like that?
And then went down to the ship.
Where is the ship taking us?
Why do we go down to it?
The And here situates the cantos in the middle of an interrupted journey,
the middle of a literary tradition gone astray.
That's where the divine comedy begins after all.
In the middle of a lost way.
Just as Dante set out to regenerate an epic tradition in a hundred cantos,
a tradition that had gone silent with the death of Virgil 1300 years earlier,
pounds sought to resurrect the epic journey in a modern idiom.
The inaugural and of the cantos signals not a beginning, but a continuation,
a move forward by way of a return to the source.
In this case, a return to book eleven of the Odyssey,
which poun sets out to rewrite.
And then went down to the ship, set keeled a breakers forth on the godly sea,
and we set up sail and mast on that swart ship,
bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also heavy with weeping.
Cierces this craft, the trimmed coiff goddess.
This ship is heading to Hades to commune with the shades of the dead,
and reanimate voices that have become hoarse through long silence as Dante put it.
We bore sheep aboard her.
Bores sheep aboard her because that's how Odysseus summoned the shades from the underworld,
by pouring the blood of slaughtered sheep into a ditch at the entrance of Hades.
Only after they drink of this blood to the dead, hold converse with him.
And then went down to the ship.
We're dealing here with the regenerate and of legacy,
a legacy, a word that goes all the way back to the proto-European root leg,
which meant to collect, together, to bind together.
Leg may well have been the very first hand.
I'll mention here another poem that begins with the word "and."
It's by the Irish poet Desmond O'Grady,
and it won't be the first time I've cited it here on entitled opinions.
It has a different tone and context,
and a completely different magnitude than Ezra Pound's Kantos.
Yet this poem, too, retrieves a Homeric legacy.
But in this case, it does so by recasting in a condensed lyric,
the reunion of Odysseus with his wife, Penelope.
And out of the light sagony, leaving behind all past destruction.
Let's lie us down again on that old bed, steadfast under the bamboo and seaweed ceiling,
opening glad white arms to one another.
While I watch over you, let down your long hair to shadow your shoulders before sleep,
for all this place shall break and fall apart.
Should you go absent.
This is the end that turns two people into life companions under the same roof.
In this case, a bamboo and seaweed ceiling.
Before he left Ithaca, Odysseus had carved his matrimonial bed into an old olive tree,
whose roots lie in the foundation of the house.
As solid as that foundation is, the whole place will break and fall apart.
Should the marriage go to pieces.
For the primary dwelling here is not so much the room or the house,
but the conjugal end.
And then there are ends that defy all classification.
It takes a genius of the caliber of Shakespeare to turn the conjunction into something disjunctive and insurgent.
That's what he does in King Lear in the last words uttered by Lear in Act 5, Scene 3.
They come in response to Albany, who now that the battles are over promises Lear and the other victorious Lords,
that things will go back to the way they were before the great upheavals that have left Cordelia dead and Lear a living wreck.
Albany proclaims, "You Lords and noble friends, no are intent.
What comfort to this great decay may come shall be applied.
For us we will resign during the life of this old majesty to him our absolute power."
And then he turns to Edgar and Kent and says, "You, to your rights with boot and such addition as your honors, have more than merited,
all friends shall taste the wages of their virtue and all foes the cup of their deserveings."
To which Lear declares, "And my poor fool is hanged."
Whether the reference is to Cordelia or to Lear's fool or to both remains unclear, and my poor fool is hanged.
The most powerful and in all of literature.
It neither can joins nor relates nor does it re-aggregate or transcend.
It mutinies against Albany's words, disjointing his speech act from its promise of restitution.
It is a third hand without a their upon or a their after or a thenceforward.
Pray you undo this button.
I would like to mention one more hand for which I can think of no appropriate category.
It occurs in the last verse of a short poem by the Italian poet Salvatorte Quazivo,
a poem that speaks of a being in time that we all share in common,
although we live it separately and individually.
On Uno Stas solo su quour de la terra trafito d'Aunrodro de solé, e de subito sera.
Each one stands alone on the heart of the earth, pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and its suddenly evening.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
[Music]
It looks so good, it looks so cool, you punch your lips into the pool, don't give in,
don't be a boy, tell you about our waters, cool.
[Music]
Turn your eyes away, before you wake somewhere, you want it here,
and I want it here, too.
[Music]