This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The reductionists in Congress think they know what infrastructure is, roads, highways, and bridges.
They also think they know what a bridge is, but that's because they haven't read the book
that we're going to be discussing on entitled opinions today.
Of bridges, a poetic and philosophical account by Thomas Harrison,
brother of yours truly and a frequent guest of this program.
Open this book can you read about sky bridges, rainbow bridges, supernatural rock bridges,
underworld bridges, sound bridges, musical bridges, word bridges.
And more, angel bridges, rope bridges, sword bridges, metaphysical bridges,
disappointed bridges, and yes, a lot of river bridges, but also sea bridges and man bridges.
Here's a quote from Comrade Nietzsche, "Man is a rope tied between beast and over man.
A rope over an abyss, what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."
Take note of that, Congressmen and women, if man is a bridge, why not allocate some resources
to repair the infrastructure of our spiritual and cultural lives.
Namely, the bridge that human existence always already finds itself on.
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One thing you'll realize if you start thinking seriously about bridges is that whoever and wherever you are,
you find yourself on some sort of bridge, moving across some sort of expanse or abyss
between different ontological domains.
The visible and the invisible, the terrestrial, and the celestial,
the mystery of birth and the inscutability of death.
As Nietzsche reminds us, our human crossing does not reach a destination but finds its end
in every step of the way over a chasm. To be is to span, to traverse, to pass over.
In that sense, man is a metaphor in the etymological sense of mitta forra from the Greek
mitta féro to carry over. We are a suspended movement between, between what, who knows, who can say.
But before I get carried away with my own bridge speculations, let me welcome to the program,
the author of the book that inspires them. Of bridges was published this past April by
the University of Chicago Press, author Thomas Harris, and again, Tom, welcome back to entitled
opinions. Thank you, pleasure to be here. The last time you were with us, it was, I believe, to
discuss the great albums of 1967 with our friend and fellow band member, Jay Cadus. In fact,
one of the albums released in 1967 was Jimmy Hendrix's "Axis Boldest Love" and in your book,
you write that Hendrix's lyrics have a number of terrestrial and spiritual reference to rainbows.
Let me quote you on that. The seven colors of the song "Boldest Love" are personified as separate
human emotions that keep me from giving my life to a rainbow like you. The term "Axis"
designates an all-knowing mystic who provides a bridge between the real and spiritual worlds.
See end quote. I don't know why I'm starting with Jimmy Hendrix, but I think that what you write in
that section is directly related to some of the major themes of your whole book. Is that correct to
say? Well, yeah, no question. I was happy to be able to put Jimmy into this book as a matter of fact,
twice because I also put him later when I referenced him as a bridge between blacks and whites in the
rock blues rock scene. He came up for me right at the beginning of the book with these associations
with the rainbow. You might remember that he titled his band, he had a big band at Woodstock and
he titled them "The Gypsy Sun and the Rainbows" and in July of 1970, some three months or so before
dying. He performed a film concert called Rainbow Bridge at a volcano in Maui, which was the
house of the sun, and therefore the entry point of the gods beyond the abode of this sun on earth.
Hendrix was always very interested in connecting the life here with the spirit world, which
sometimes he saw in science fiction terms. And which he associated often with extraterrestrial life.
Correct. And forces. So that point of encounter, rainbow bridges of volcano and so forth, that
is a common motif of bridges going all the way back to antiquity I gather. And I would say that
having read the whole book that the main, let's say, center of gravity for your thinking about bridges is
one of them is the relationship between the mortal and the terrestrial, the human and the divine.
In other words, visible and invisible as well, spirit and matter if you like, but two completely
different ontological realms, whose connections is not the easy kind of interconnectivity that you get
here in Silicon Valley between the things that belong to the same sort of plane. So what are some
of the foundational stories on which the whole notion of the bridging of these two realms is
based? Well, as you, you know, suggesting the rainbows probably their typical bridge and the first time
it occurs to the human mind, the idea of something that joins two things that are almost infinitely
separated like the sky in the earth. So all those dualities you're talking about life and death,
matter and spirit, the rainbow seemed to be a miraculous joining of those two realms. And in the
skies, of course, when imagined through the stars and other occurrences, the spirits,
so that all sorts of cultures attribute to the rainbow a communicative function between the
those who are beyond and presumably responsible for this terrestrial life and us, it becomes the
messenger, the iris of the Greeks was the goddess of the rainbow on which messages were sent
down from the gods to us. And Norse mythology has a rainbow, which they call as blue, rainbow of the
gods or befrost, the shimmering way, on which presumably the gods wrote their horses down daily.
And then they took up when heroes would die in warfare. They'd take them up through the rainbow
to Valhalla, the great palace where they would be immortalized and made to find themselves.
There's the Navajo rainbows, rainbow bridge, for instance, in Utah as an Iraq arch bridge,
which the Navajo nation sees as the the house of the holy people,
there where the holy people being the divinities come to earth and commune with with mortals.
So wherever you look, you'll find the rainbow fulfilling that function, even in the story of
Noah because it becomes the covenant between God and human. So this connection couldn't be forged
any other way in a physical world except presumably through this rainbow.
Going back to the Hendrix album called Access Boldest Love, the notion of the axis is extremely
important there too, because it's not only in that album, you talk about the Axie Smoothie
in different sections of the book and it is also another kind of bridging note that Axie Smoothie.
Yeah, because this axis which really was not anything that somebody sees with their eyes
would be an axis that goes from the center of the earth all the way through it at the top
and the bottom. So it goes through the poles from the physical world to the spiritual world,
around which the whole universe was thought wants to revolve. So that the union, as I say,
the these metaphysical dualities humans have been trying to unify them since they
they started to think and so the there's an intuition that there is an axis that unifies everything
and the bridge becomes one of its fundamental images which carries through into real bridges too
because you can't really see a bridge without somehow unconsciously reflecting on how it's joining things
that are naturally separate. And speaking of real bridges, one place where the axis
Axie Smoothie appears is you say in the Golden Gate here in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge
where you say that I'm going to read from the book, the tall reach of the bridges red pylons,
the word deriving from the Greek word "pule" gate creates a ladder like ascension into the heavens
often receding invisibly into the clouds. These pylons create the impression of an Axie Smoothie
joining heaven and earth they are combining with the horizontal axis of the bridges platform
to overcome a primordial strife between land, water and earth. So there you get this,
it's true the Golden Gate is at once extremely vertical and horizontal no and it's at the
creates a cross in that sense. It creates a cross which is an incredible symbol of you know two axes
and two bridges meeting. Plus the Golden Gate is at the further most extremity of
the land mass I don't know if it's the biggest the North American continent but it's where the land
reaches the water so the horizontal bridge unifies land and water but those fantastically tall pylons
which almost regularly reach into the cloud so you can't even see the tops form this joint unity
that's really quite sublime. Yeah and you say that there where the great star sinks into the
water is Greek and near eastern mythology situated the transitional point between life and death
the turn from the ordinary world to the imaginary lands that's invariably at the western most
the Hesperides and the western point where the sun goes down that's where the Golden Gate is
facing there. So that two things about the Golden Gate come to mind one is the extremity and therefore
it's ideally situated to bridge whatever is on the other side of where we find ourselves.
And the other is this you know sorry grim statistics of continuous suicides where you have
a bridge that has a pedestrian walkway that is on the side the spacing the city of San Francisco
in the Bay of San Francisco and you write that there is some kind of strange attraction to the idea of
throwing oneself into the water and somehow in that gesture if the hope of overcoming the condition of
separation, individualization, differentiation that we all embodied life forms you know live with
and it kind of returned to a primordial oceanic oneness with all of creation and you say that
it's impossible to account for the spell such a site can cast over those in a condition of spiritual
turbulence a site alluding to the source of life, slight and the universe beyond and you go on
to write about these people who jump that it's related for a search for rebirth embedded in the
word bedlamite which comes from a poem hard crane no the bridge poem the word itself evokes not
only the famous asylum of bedlam in England but also Bethlehem and the birth of the word made flesh
to be drowned in order to be born again and so you suggest that there might be a way in which some
of these people who jump are looking for a rebirth in the Pacific Ocean.
Well yeah I mean one can only speculate but it's clear that they're choosing death but the point
at which they're choosing death which is that point in the case of the Golden Gate but by extension
any bridge over water in a Golden Gate's case it's very clearly the place where the sun sets
and ancient mythologies always saw the sun as being reborn every day coming up in the east
and we've always seen life is coming from the waters and returning to the waters often the dead
you know we're putting canoes and let to go folks downstream and many cemeteries were placed on
islands over beyond water so so waters the place also purity where you subconsciously you're trying
to go back to where you came from obviously because this individuated life as you put it
on earth it didn't prove too well so it's an effacement of individual identity
with this kind of very sacred mythological symbolic return which other types of suicide don't
don't have the same way you see right but as you say it's not only the Golden Gate you have a
whole chart of how many suicides take place on bridges it's quite astonishing you have
is all over the world not just in the west I think some of the highest rates are in China the Wuhan
Yangzi River Bridge 1,500 suicides in 1957 2,300 in the year 1968 on well that's when it was
when the bridge was made yes but since then they've been yeah so bridges you know there's
something anxiety provoking about a bridge because it's suspended over a castle right exactly
it there's a way in which you feel you can feel a virtitianist right virtue of being on it and it is
and I'm persuaded that it figures as it's a primary figure for a human condition which is
always suspended between one thing and another multi where always on multiple bridges we're at any
moment in our lives so on the one hand there are these suicide bridges but there's also going back
now to the Hendrix album and the title Access Bold is Love this idea that love is itself
a bridging and how many bridges serve as sites for kind of romantic encounters and unions
well that's right and the link between one and the other that is between the tremendous anxiety the
almost metaphysical unnaturalness of walking over water on a platform without ground under your
feet that anxiety which which visits us all in life the connection between that and the bridge is
the place of love is absolutely logical and the bridge is used as the site of love and all sorts of
films and all sorts of poems the way the two are linked in at least the way I link them in the
composition of the book at the beginning chapters two is that there's an inscription attributed to
Jesus on the Fatep or Seacley which is a city of victory made by the Mughal Emperor back in 15th
something in which Jesus is attributed the saying life is a bridge and it only lasts a very short
time don't build any houses on it prepare for the next life that's where it seems to me that
since we're on a precarious bridge for a short time people are prompted to form unions with each
other and also of course unions with those who have passed before seem you're as familiar with
as anyone because you're you know the dominion of the dead the idea that the loved ones have died
that you're going to die and hopefully might unite with them so the bridge becomes a place of union
because of the precariousness of the life that it also symbolizes and in fact in in our city where
we grew up in Rome there's a bridge of Pont de Mirevio which they started the lovers started this
putting the lock custom of putting locks on the bridge and they were it would got so weighed down that they
had to start removing them cutting up in these locks night by night but that's where the union of
the lovers was symbolized right on the bridge now right exactly and that took off and it went to
the pond design in France and all over the place and I think it's very appropriate because the
waters are moving and life's moving you can't step in a stream twice so you make a bond of love
but then ironically you read the press I think that 80% of the lovers who leave the locks on the
bridge within six months have split up right there's 17 18 year olds you know and so life is a
stream in which we humans try to make something that that's solid in we try to lock it right
yeah i could up and the bridge is that way of having the firm the firm surface over the
the change of the uncertain foundation right so there are all sorts of other bridges that you know
your book deals with and and I'm particularly interested in the relationship between bridges and
sound there are actual literal bridges in the sense of the structural bridges architectural
bridges that do have a sonority you know a deliberate in built sonority right whether they want
to or not yeah bridges sound because they're played by the wind so they're like harps with their
cables and all of these narrow fragile structures you know these poles and things which vibrate
like the strings of guitar so they seem to be ringing type of celestial music if you have an
ear for that and and there are many sound artists most famous of which is Bill Fontana who
put microphones on bridges different spots and then sometimes it's just they play naturally sometimes
they edit the sounds together and they make these sound compositions Bill Fontana has done
them on the golden gate and mix them with sounds of the natural reserves nearby so you know sound
sound is always a bridge of sorts and so far as it brings to you what you often cannot see
and suggests the life of the voice I don't know if you hear a bird chirping or an animal in that voice you
hear the life of the animal you can't see so the invisibility of the thing that's communicated by
sound underscores your distance from another creature in a way that sight doesn't you know sight
you're already unified within the same scene so sound I see that as a bridge too as opposed to sight
and then I look at organized sound which is the the compositions I'm mentioning but also
music in the more traditional sense matter fact that chapter which is called musical bridges
focuses on the blues and tries to claim that music is always a bridge between at least two subject
activities if not many because there's one performer typically and many audience members
and the blues because they're enigmatic about how how it can unify different types of people
because first it was it was black for black audience then it became much embraced by white
white Englishmen more than white Americans then it came back through this modified British you know
blues rock next thing you know many waters and John Lee Hooker and all these people
had a primarily white audience in the US within a few years so it bridged continents and races
music has that but in music the bridge is also a very technical term so it's not just metaphorical no
that's right there's a bridge passage yeah typically in composition so there's a bridge passage
in a composition but there's also the if you take a guitar you have the bridge of the guitar which
and literally you have to elevate something so that this string is suspended right
and over an emptiness without which it would not sound right exactly so that's what the real literal bridge
of the of instruments is all about right which is why they you know architectural bridge
it's going to be musical whether it wants to be or not because it's going to vibrate like the strings
and they had an alien harp that the romantic poets used to use as an image for the poet
they said the poet is played like the alien harp by the wind alone through the inspiration the flowing of
the wind so yeah wherever you look at bridges even the little wooden structure on the guitar you
find all sorts of symbolic connotations sure and then of course the going back to the religious
history cultural history of bridges it's really quite fascinating and you reference here a
Muslim legend narrated by the evil and reach these Nobel prize winning Serbian authorizing believe his
Serbian know well he's Serbian crow at he went from one to the other but certainly he's really
Bosnian to be honest yeah so in terms of the geographic provenance that's just call him Yugoslav
but he's interesting well first thing let you're reminding me that that region in the Balkans is
one that you talk about quite extensively because i'm rich for the book of the bridge over the river
or dream of dream now and so maybe before we go to that legend maybe you can share with us some
thoughts about what that book and what the dream of river is where is it and what is that bridge
what's the history of that bridge is so the story that evil andage tells is true which is that
there was a boy who was abducted by the Ottoman Turks in Bosnia they used to do this
regularly they used to take boys from their families around h-101 and bring them to
Constantinople Istanbul and make them janissaries that is they would convert to Islam and they became
functionaries in the Ottoman Empire so so collove each was his name his
Mehmet so collume Mehmet in Turkish he became the grand vizier eventually of the Ottoman Empire
which was the de facto ruler and i think he might have ruled 10 or 20 years but he was very
important and very enlightened but this being abducted which the story and the
and the tells of it is very moving because all the mothers are chasing their children who are
crossed over the Drena river which is a major river in Bosnia, Herzegovina it was so painful to him
that when he became grand vizier he said i'm going to build a bridge over that river to repair
the rupture inside my breast which is also the rupture in a sense between Islam of the
Ottomans and the Christian world across the river you know of those as you say Serbs, Croats the
ones of Europe so he builds this fantastic bridge at Visigrad's got 11 arches it still stands
it's built around 1560 perhaps and he hoped that that would help mend the political divisions
of the Balkans but of course the Balkan you know Balkanization already means to be to divide the
interests into fragments the Balkans never after the Turks and after World War I especially never
never did get unified and so those bridges which were originally meant to unite ended up being
killing zones especially in these wars in the 1990s that unfortunately followed the
followed Soviet Union and the fall of the and the Yugoslav there are also places of ritual killings and
hangings no yeah in wartime bridges you might remember Fallujah and the Iraq war where they
killed I think they strung up four or five Americans but there's a story by Ambrose Beerswear a
confederate soldier is hung on a bridge by the Union army in Alabama and these were ritual sites
because there were at points these kind of metaphysical points of division and difference right
so the bridge is always divisive at the same time that it's it's unifying right and that's
that's something to keep in mind because it would be very easy to just assume bridging is
about all about connection but bridges also maintain separation at the same time as they create
connection otherwise you would have a collapse of diversity into homogeneity you know well yeah
exactly I mean the difference in the separation is taken for granted and a bridge doesn't
does not homogenize it just allows for limited and even controlled passage from one to the other
so it puts them in relation and is dialogical it accepts duality and it feels it has to negotiate
duality as opposed to believing that duality doesn't exist or can simply be erased so the whole
globalization question comes up in the end of my book in a chapter called bridge disconnection whereby
the idea that we can just bridge the whole world and we do with these mega bridges which are 100
miles long but they become tentacles of empire whether states like China or you know multinational
corporations that are able to get inroads this way so the bridge should not be seen differently
from what it is and it respects the difference and keeps them apart so that we negotiate when we
want to come together and how good and that's where Andrij I'm just going to read what that myth
he said when Anla the merciful and compassionate first created the world the earth would smooth
and even as a finally engraved plate this displeased the devil who envied man this gift of god and while
the earth was still just as it had come from god's hand damp and soft and as unpaid clay he stole
up and scratched the face of god's earth with his nails as much and as deeply as he could and in this
act of scratching he creates ravines and he creates rivers and where the rivers flow and that in response
god sent down angels to spread their wings over these chasms allowing you Mr. Cross them and live in
harmony so I'm quoting Andrij and so men learn from the angels of god how to build bridges
though this would be an origin story about the there's something angelic about bridges but as you
say there's also this counter tradition where bridges are also demonic and diabolical
quite interesting though well that's the duality of the bridge and you're absolutely right they
the great effects of love and unification and so on bringing together that undish talks about
is very full of pathos and it's certainly what a bridge wants to accomplish but then there are
others who see bridges as demonic many bridges in Europe are called the devil's bridge because
there's so perilously you know, hoisted over these mountain passes that people are terrified they
said it must be the devil who made this bridge and John Milton himself literally
it goes out of his way to talk about the first cosmic bridge ever made and it was made by Satan
connecting hell to earth because once god created earth that earth was attached to heaven
like a pendant on a chain says Milton and it was all harmony and the devil who had been at this point
cast into hell was very envious of the situation so he Satan found his way over chaos infinite chaos
in the night and he kind of left the tracks that he made at this road and had a bridge that was built
from from health there over which he sent his children sin and death to the earth and therefore he
interfered with God's order so that bridging is always also a risk that's why a lot of them are
associated with you know collapse and death but they're also associated with the potential to be
invaded by the other and threatened by immigrants by even wanted immigrants right and that's why
the opposite movement is that of building walls yeah so for sure so I began with a quote from
Nietzsche there in the intro where Nietzsche was very well aware of the extent to which
the church even the church Roman Catholic church is built on a notion of bridging heaven and earth
you know he affects Maximus the Pontifex Maximus the maker of bridges is what Pontifex means
and it's a name for the Pope no they the supreme the supreme bridge builder because he builds the
bridge between earth and heaven right exactly and of course Nietzsche wants to preserve the
concept of the bridge the whole dynamic of the bridge but to redefine what the terms of in the literal
sense of terminals the terminal ends of the bridge it's not no longer in Nietzsche the earth
and heaven but it's a being stretched between a present humanity and a future humanity so how do
does Nietzsche horizontalize this history of a more vertical bridge building in the religious tradition
that he was attacking well yeah I think he does but you know it's a bit like the golden gate
because he has a lot of verticality too he always talks about self overcoming and so he has these
images of ascension so there are souschres on the mountain peak and so on it's about being eye
over man but if you see life as a bridge which he did or as a Jesus presumably did between point A and
point B but one no longer believes in the no ability of point B what's going to happen after life
nor do you know where your origin was that's where Nietzsche existentializes the bridge so that
life is a bridge but you're over a perilous ravine or body of water you don't know where you've
come from you don't know where you're going and you're terrified that you might lose your footing
that for him is life in a projectile trajectory towards human goals which are constantly being
involved so that man overcomes himself in the overman and then that over man keeps going
so that you're right it's a sort of continuous transcendence of humanity but every human being
goes through that or should go through that if you follow an each and ethic and it's it's very
disconcerting you know so he writes in the gay science the old humanity and animality the collective
primeval age and the past of all sentient being continues to meditate love hate and reason in me
I have suddenly awoken the midst of this dream and I must dream on in order not to perish
just like the sleepwalker must dream on in order not to fall the connectedness of all branches of
knowledge is the best means for maintaining the universality of the dreaming and thereby the
continuation of the dream so it's almost like being finding yourself reminds me of Emerson actually
I'm quite convinced that he had Emerson's essay experience in mind when Emerson says we awake
and find ourselves on a stair we don't know how we got there and we find ourselves in a series of
which we do not know the extremes and that the oblivion somehow we got into this world and we had to
drink a cup of lethé in order to forget and therefore we're in a dream state and we just keep
dreaming in order not to fall and this is also related to Nietzsche's experience at Venice a city
that he really loved and found to be a city of dreams in many ways certainly a city of music
and you reference his his beautiful poem about Venice that he published in H.A.O.M. over included in his book
H.O.M. but that's a poem about him being on a bridge in Venice and hearing a song come from afar
and it's a response to the gondola song and he asks he sang silently secretly to himself
his own gondola song in the invisible realm maybe the unheard realm of the soul and then he asked
did anyone hear it a lot of bridging taking place there and he also refers to I don't have the quote
underhand about Venice being a manifold of solitude's multiplication of solitude's
yeah that are connected you know with all these bridges you know it's so it's like a figure of our
human condition where we're separate and yet because we are ontologically separate we do have
channels of communication with yeah he says it's an image for future humanity
where 100,000 souls are you know together but future humanity and since his self-underbridge
a solitary and he hears the song of another of a gondola year and sings a song back the niche
himself is always in relation but in in these multiple solitude's which he felt the future of politics
needed to make possible that is a collectivity of individuals as opposed to what you called
homogenization before where the differences are leveled out so that these solitude's would be
bridged and they would be monological in in essence but the monologues would be in dialogue so it's
a fantastic sort of parable that he gets from Venice it's got multiple bridges and you can't see
much you hear all these single voices so it's quite beautiful if not only individuals I imagine
you probably even had a political vision of nations preserving a certain degree of their own
you know particularly and diversity but being in relation no of course we're living right in the
midst of this whole vault line between you know the the globalists and the and the reactions and
the Brexiteers and so forth but I know that this idea of Venice as this collection reminds one of the
archipelago no yeah exactly that's and that's the image that Venice is one time mayor two-time mayor
Masimo Katshadi the philosopher King if you will use that image of the archipelago as
as an image for the union of Europe whereby these different countries would be seen as islands and connected
by the sea the sea which in Greek in any case comes from bridge as the pontos and the ponsas the bridge
so on the other hand Nietzsche was opposed to the state and he he satirizes the state so I don't
know that he he liked the idea of nation states as much as he might have preferred even a more postmodern
collectivity right where you know the citizens are individualized and in fact you it's very interesting
quote from Nietzsche that you invoke where where the state ceases there the unsuperfluest person
begins there the song of necessity begins where the state ceases look there my brothers do you
not see them the rainbow and bridges to the more than man you right so the liberation of the self
from the state makes that self necessary or unsuperfluest and that individual can be
becoming individual as opposed to a conformist right the sheep everyone's the same as everyone else
and then you can have bridges and rainbows to the overman or the more than man
humanity can get about its business better that way right
I'd like to take just a few moments to talk about people living on bridges because that's a
there's something paradoxical there's something problematic there no and you have a whole chapter
devoted to inhabited bridges almost as if it were a paradox because you're not supposed to live on
a bridge no right right so why do you devote so many pages to these bridges that are actually
places of human habitation well again I guess I do it because I I see that the terminals of A and B
beginning an end I've always been unclear to everybody so at a certain point you say okay well
let's make the best of life on this bridge and sure enough people live around rivers and waters
and they cross them and then they build on on top of them so you get this paradoxical
situation the fixed city on top of the flux and you have these covered bridges
Pontevecchio London Bridge was I don't know how many hundreds of people lived on it it was at
massive buildings were they on it or under it no they were on it they were on and I have an
illustration in the book of London Bridge in 1700s and then people would live under them you know the
house the houseless the homeless would take refuge under the bridge so the bridge becomes
place of those who are not socially taken care of including prostitutes so the lonely go to
bridges some jump off obviously but some hook up with prostitutes many of them live there under
and so the bridge has got the sanctifying effect you know for the transients and precarity of life
so that's why I I was actually surprised to learn how many bridges are inhabited
and only lately they started demolishing them taking off the structures
so what just see your last chapter since we're getting to the end of our time so what sort of
conclusion do you come to and and if there's something that I mean we've talked a lot about
the various existential political and cultural aspects of it but
phenomenologically speaking I would expect that the highest ambition of a book of any kind of
book is to make you see something very differently after you've read it no so do you see bridges
and would you expect your readers to see physical bridges that they would reveal themselves
phenomenologically and differently than before I had? Well yeah that's exactly my goal and also
to give as many associations to these bridges as possible and also that one sees when normal
doesn't think about the lands that are united by a bridge so you look at a bridge you say that's
a nice bridge if it's if it is indeed nice but you don't think about the the lands that it
unifies the waters that separate the lands the the way life used to be where people in different
sides of a river might have very different cultures for that matter sometimes the Buddha and
past or some of the rivers as you mentioned in Drena which would separate cultures in Ireland
Northern Ireland their stories about Protestants on one side and Catholics on the other so my
you're one of my goals I couldn't unify all the meanings and associations of bridges because there's
literally hundreds but was to make us mindful of the division and the differences which are
precisely what makes life so rich and therefore to appreciate these differences and the way we are in
control of connecting them but also how that control can be dangerous if we don't if we're not mindful
of what we're doing so we don't want to erase difference on the contrary I would like to see a
world where all the differences are preserved and then one can bridge them or one can choose also
not to but the bridging is our doing so finally this goes back to the question of style because
your book clearly is not a typical academic book that is targeted to a you know specialized audience
like a handful of people or at most 100 or 200 you know fellow specialists of of your field but is
seems to open itself up to a broader broader leadership inside and outside of the academy
and that do you also aspire did you aspire to enact the bridging dynamic in the way that you wrote
the book well I did and I even worried that it's not going to have any clearly defined audience at
all so that a publisher wouldn't even know how to market it fortunately university Chicago
press said they they're going to market it precisely to to general public because it's all over the
place both historically from you know many centuries before you know Jesus as well as geographically
from from China and Japan to South America so the the readers I'm aware of having read it so far
almost all are non-academic and I think despite the fact that it's a little bit demanding they
get through it because each of those little stories is interesting in itself and so you get two, three,
four pages on one story than another and yet they're unified in the theme that the chapter is
focused on so yeah it's a kind of more than it's maybe a more of a labyrinth than a bridge the book
or it says there's so many bridges being cast that one likes of them what one will I would
define the genre as kaleidoscopic yeah it's a kaleidoscope of bridges and sometimes it can be
dizzying because there's so many and and simultaneously one adjacent to the other in very close
proximity kaleidoscopic or even psychedelic if you prefer but I think kaleidoscopic is
the word that I would I would favor so we're gonna leave our our audience with the Jimmy Hendrix song that
we started out referencing namely boldest love from the album axis boldest love is there anything
that you would invite them to a paid particular attention to as we play it to end our show
and well the last time I looked at it I was struck by the fact that he he personifies each of
these seven colors which are unusual colors for that matter not the normal ones that are rainbow
purple and yellow and so on and each one of these seems to have an animical that is there's a
war going on and these are you know the Mars is an envy and so on so forth and love is not one of
them and he says that one can be he wants to be as bold as love but these colors within him
which are stopping him from giving himself to presumably this woman he has in mind a rainbow like you
yeah he wants to be able to but he has to be as bold of as love as the axis of love so it's as
if these colors are are working against that unity that's one reading I don't know I haven't studied it
online well as one tends to do nowadays well then we'll just invite every listener to you know a
study it themselves and and let it resound you know in that invisible realm that gets bridged every time
music you know produces those sounds and to produce a rainbow in them exactly so we've been speaking
with Thomas Harris an author of of bridges of poetic and philosophical account here on entitled
opinions thanks for listening and here we go with Jimi Hendrix boldest love
and this my story shining metallic purple armor green jealousy and weight behind him
her fiery green downstairs at the grass the ground you all the life giving wonders take the
branded the quietly understand what's happening to the time is the opposite but wonder why the fight is on but the oh
the oh just ask the answer is my list so confident he flashes trooked to war and ribbons
oh
just young for the different
but very unsteady for the first go round
my yellow in this case is not so mellow
in fact i'm trying to say it's fighting like me and all these emotions in mind keep
told him it from giving my life to a rainbow like you when i'm a yeah I fall in love
oh just ask the answers you know everything yeah yeah
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