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This is KZSU's Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison,
and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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The summer solstice is almost upon us, and most of you out there know what that means for entitled opinions.
It means that time of year thou mayest in us behold when yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang upon the bows,
bear-rowing choirs where the sweet birds sang of late.
That's right, entitled opinions hibernates in the summer,
and we probably will remain in our dormancy until March of next year.
So hang in there, all of you devoted listeners,
the entitled opinions brigade, don't give up on us.
Now on this last show of our tenth season, I'd like to leave you with some thoughts about lightness and heaviness
as they make their presence felt in literature, music, and thought itself.
I've been pondering this theme for a while now, especially since I taught a course,
this past semester on the Italian writer, Italo Calvino,
and also helped organize a conference inspired by Calvino's book Six Memos for the next millennium.
That conference, by the way, took place at Stanford this past May,
and we gave it the title "Will Literature Survive the Present Millennium."
That's an ominous question to be sure, "Will anything survive the present millennium?"
No one can say what the future holds in store, and we have no desire on this show to be either false prophets or visionary prophets.
We just try to keep the story going one day and one year at a time, in any case.
Six Memos for the next millennium was a series of lectures that Italo Calvino was working on during the last year of his life.
He was scheduled to deliver them as part of the Charles Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1985,
but he died very suddenly just before his departure to the United States,
died of a brain hemorrhage. And this book, which represents his last testimony, as it were,
in this book, "Calvino discusses his hopes for the future of literature,
and he identifies six literary qualities or values that he believes will enable literature to survive
into the next millennium." That is to say, "Our millennium."
Now, the six literary values that Calvino's focused on are one, lightness,
two, quickness, three, exactitude, four, visibility, five, multiplicity, and six,
he gave the title consistency, although he had not written the six memo at the time of his death.
And most of what I'm going to say about lightness in the next hour is going to come from
Calvino's first memo on lightness because I think he makes the best possible case for the
literary value of lightness. And I will follow that up with my own apollogea for the spirit of
heaviness. But let me read you what Calvino said in his prologue to the six lectures,
where he writes that, "Perhaps it is a sign of our millenniums and that we frequently wonder
what will happen to literature and books in the so-called post-industrial era of technology."
Oh, my. If you only knew what that era was going to rapidly become in the next few decades.
I don't feel much like indulging in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of
literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us by
means specific to it. I would therefore like to devote these lectures to certain values, qualities,
or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart trying to situate them within the
perspective of the new millennium. And the first memo is that of lightness which begins with
Calvino recollecting and reconstructing his literary career that had gone on for some 40 years at that
time. He says in his first opening salvo that after 40 years of writing fiction after exploring
various roads and making diverse experiments, a time has come for me to look for an overall
definition of my work. And I would suggest this, my working method has more often than not involved,
the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight sometimes from people. Sometimes from
heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities, above all, I have tried to remove weight from the structure
of stories and from language. And those of you who know anything about Calvino's fantasy fiction
and his work as a novelist will recognize a portrait of him, very good portrait of him in that statement.
And then he goes on to say that he came of age as a writer at a period when
writers were expected to be directly relevant to the sociopolitical reality of their times.
Full of good intentions, I tried to identify myself with the ruthless energies
propelling the events of our century. He began his career as a writer right after the Second World War.
And he says that he tried to find some harmony between the adventurous picorec inner rhythm that
prompted me to write and the frantic spectacle of the world, sometimes dramatic and sometimes grotesque.
And then confesses that at certain moments, I felt that the entire world was turning into stone,
a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places,
but one that spared no aspect of life. It was as if no one could escape the inexorable
stare of Medusa. And here is where he gives us the compelling image from Greek mythology of Perseus.
The only hero able to cut off Medusa's head is Perseus. We talked about him in an earlier show.
We did about a month back with David Lummis on mythology. You may want to listen to that show if
you haven't heard it already. In any case, Perseus is the hero who manages to cut off the Medusa head
by looking at her reflection in his shield rather than looking at her directly. Therefore,
he avoids petrification. And Colveno points out to us that Perseus is also
the one who flies with winged sandals. And he supports himself on the very lightest of things,
the wind and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision,
an image caught in a mirror. And therefore, Perseus becomes a kind of hero of lightness in
Colveno's first memo, especially because rather than escape from reality, he manages to overcome
its heaviness through indirect means and brings about a triumph of the spirit of lightness over that
of heaviness. And after discussing Perseus's strength, which is to not look at reality directly,
he goes on to declare his allegiance to certain writers in the Western literary canon. And he makes
strong cases for heroes like Avid, who wrote the metamorphoses in which, as he says, in Avid,
everything can be transformed into something else. And knowledge of the world means dissolving
the solidity of the world. And also for Avid, there is an essential parity between everything that
exists as opposed to any sort of hierarchy of powers and values. He also exalts Lucretius,
who was the author of the book De Rarum Natura, which was a philosophy of atomism. And he
admires the fact that this atomizing of all things that you find in Lucretius's book extends to
the visible aspects of the world. And that it is here, right, Colveno, that Lucretius is at
his best as a poet, the little moats of dust swirling in a shaft of sunlight in a dark room.
The miniscule shells all similar, but each one different that waves gently cast up on the
Bebula Haddana, the imbibing sand or the spider webs that wrapped themselves around us
without our noticing them as we walk along, all these very light, weightless phenomena that you
find in Lucretius and that had enormous resonance for the writer, Ethel Colveno.
I'll mention just a few other of his heroes. I can't go through all of them because it's a very rich
lecture that he had written as his opening lecture for the Harvard lectures. But let me just mention that
Guido Cabal Canti is an Italian poet who was contemporary with Dante and he juxtaposes Guido
Cabal Canti as a poet of lightness, two Dante, and in Vaux a story about Guido Cabal Canti that
we find in Bauchos de Cameron. I did a whole monologue on Bauchos in which most of the hour was taken
up in an analysis of the story that Bauchos writes about Guido Cabal Canti. And let me just mention
that in that story, Cabal Canti is walking in a cemetery, in a graveyard, and he's approached by
brigade of upper-class noble Florentines, young men on their horses who are a little bit resentful of
him because although Guido was rich and came from a magnate family, he refused to socialize with them and
was very given to philosophical reflection and heterodox doctrines. And so they see him there in the
graveyard and they go and charge him with their horses and taunt him. And let me read what the
Misser Beto tells Guido. He says, Guido, you refuse to be of our company, but look, when you have
proved that there is no God, what will you have accomplished? Guido had a reputation for
having some rather heretical doctrines, especially regarding the existence of God and the immortality
of the soul. Anyway, Pauchos says, Guido seeing himself surrounded by them answered quickly,
gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home. Then, resting his hand on one of
the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and landing on the other side, made off,
and rid himself of them. And then, Colvino writes, "We're right to choose an auspicious image for
the new millennium. I would choose that one. The sudden agile leap of the poet philosopher who
raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the secret of
lightness and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times, noisy, aggressive,
revving and roaring belongs to the realm of death like a cemetery for rusty old cars."
Then he goes on to speak of the kind of poetry that Guido wrote, and he compares one verse in one of
Guido's sonnets to an almost identical verse that you find in Dante's divine comedy. Guido's comes first
and the verse is, "A bienca neves shender senceventi and white snow falling without wind."
And this line, as I mentioned, is taken up by Dante in Inferno 14, where Dante gives it a little
twist and he writes, "Comedinéve in alpez sencevento as snowfalls in the mountains without wind."
According to Galvino, now the two lines are almost identical, but they express two completely different concepts.
In both the snow on windless days suggests a light silent movement, but here are the resemblance ends,
indented the line is dominated by the specification of the place in the Alps, which gives us a
mountainous landscape whereas in Cavacanti the adjective "bienca" or "white," which may seem
pleonastic together with the verb "fall," also completely predictable, dissolve the landscape into an
atmosphere of suspended abstraction. But it is chiefly the first word that determines the difference
between the two lines. In Cavacanti the conjunction "a" and puts the snow on the same level as the
other visions that proceed and follow, a series of images like a catalog of the beauties of the world,
indented the adverb "comé" as, in closes, the entire scene in the frame of a metaphor. But within this
frame, it has a concrete reality of its own. In Cavacanti everything moves so swiftly that we are
unaware of its consistency, only of its effects. In Dante everything acquires consistency and stability.
The weight of things is precisely established. Even when he is speaking of light things,
Dante seems to want to render the exact weight of this lightness. Let me mention one more of Cavacanti's
privileged figures of lightness. And that is Mercusio, a character in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
And Mercusio, he says, "Every time he arrives on the scene, that's when I pay attention.
You are a lover, borrow Cupid's wings and soar with them above a common bound." Mercusio answers
"Mercusio is the hero of lightness." And on their way to the party at the
Capulates, an octurnal scene where Mercusio engages in a kind of little fable about Queen
Mab, the fairy's midwife, who appears in a chariot made of empty hazelnut. And the quote that
Colvino provides there is, "Her wagon spokes made of long spinners legs, the cover of the wings of
grasshoppers, her traces of the smallest spider web, her colors of the moon shines, watery beams,
her whip of cricket spones, the lash of film." And we should remember that this coach is drawn
with a little team of atimes. Colvino writes, "I would also like Mercusio's dancing gate to come
along with us across the threshold of the new millennium." And those of you who have seen Zefiedelie's
movie of Romeo and Juliet will remember that Zefiedelie, the director, communicates that gate
beautifully and brilliantly. Well before Colvino wrote this memo by the way, and he is indeed
a very light-footed aerial sort of spirit. I'm not going to go on to review all the other heroes that
populate this memo. There are people like Siedano de Bérzurac, a long kind of discussion of him. There's
Antoine Galon's French translation of the thousand and one knights, which opened up the imagination
of the west to the eastern sense of marvel with its flying carpets and winged horses and genies
merging from lamps and so forth. He has some beautiful pages on the Italian poet Leopad,
the who every time Leopad de Envux, the moon, there's a very special quality of lightness
in the verses. And he also speaks about Vladimir Props morphology of the folk tale and ends his
memo with a evocation of one of Kafka's very short stories. The knight of the bucket
about someone who goes out looking for coal with an empty bucket which turns into his so light
that he's able to ride it, let's try the bucket. So if you read Colvino's memo on lightness,
you'll be so enchanted by the time you get to the end of it that you are going to say, well,
he's right. It is this value of lightness which is where we want to be. It's the value that we want
to carry with us over the threshold of the next millennium and it's the one that has the best chance
of enabling literature to survive into the next millennium. And there's an effect of
utter enchantment. In the discourse on the very light touch with which Colvino himself
goes through this mini history of the canon from the point of view of that value of his.
And when we come back very very shortly, we'll try to talk about the other side of it.
[Music]
Jimmy, the archangel of rock aerial spirit like no other, but as I said in the Jimmy Hendrix show we did
four or five years ago, Jimmy was also volcanic, deeply bound to the earth, though his primary
element was the air. Now let me make it clear that I admire Colvino greatly and that I
understand the enormous appeal of lightness. Yet my temperament tends toward the opposite
qualities of those that he champions in the six moments. Slowness, heaviness, vagueness,
These are the artistic and even existential qualities that if I had to I would choose over
quickness, lightness, and exactitude. Fortunately we don't have to choose we can embrace the whole
spectrum without prejudice. But by way of response to Colvino's memo about lightness,
Let me for the rest of this hour make a case in favor of heaviness.
I'll begin by remarking that contrary to Colvino's claim that we live in an age that would
petrify us with its Medusa head, our age in fact sponsors and exalts all that is light,
quick, exact, visible, and multiple. Our reality is determined more and more by weightless bits
and bites of software and by the aerial vectors of information. The massive mainframe computers
that Atlas himself couldn't carry on his shoulders a few decades ago have become so light and fast
that nowadays we carry their equivalent around in our shirt pockets. Soon they will fit into
the queen mabs little hazelnut. So I don't agree with Colvino that our world is threatened by the
petrifying weight of reality. I believe if anything that is more threatened by the increasing
irreality of the spirit of lightness. Above all it is threatened by the irreality of the virtual
and the indirectness of the screen. Perseus's shield has become the cell phone screen.
Its magic has been transformed into immigestic wizardry, miniaturized gadgetry, and two-dimensional
escapism. I'll leave aside here things like nanotechnology, genetics, and neuroscience
which are further miniaturizing and verifying the real. The point is that from a certain perspective
Colvino has written more of a tribute to the ascendant spirit of our time rather than an admonition.
So let me make my counter case by returning for a moment to Dante.
Colvino is right about Dante being the poet of weight in whom I quote him, "Everything acquires
consistency and stability and where the weight of things is precisely established."
And that's why I would call Dante a thinking or pensive poet. But more about that later.
Let's remember that in the Inferno Dante descends to the center of the earth where all the
weight of the world collects. He has to pass through this center or midpoint of all weight in order to
get out of hell and onto the shores of the mountain of purgatory. Thus weight is in some
essential sense, the essence of Inferno, and yet Dante feels the pull of gravity even more forcefully
in purgatory than he does in hell since the pilgrim has to strain against it as he climbs up
the mountain's seven terraces where the seven deadly sins are purged.
The pilgrim feels lighter and lighter as he goes from one terrace to the next.
And by the time he reaches Eden at the summit of the mountain of purgatory,
he has overcome that weight of sin that had dragged him down at the beginning of his journey.
And once in Eden, he's ready now to follow his bliss in and around what Eden's
ancient forest as he calls it, offers him. This place where humankind was once perfectly innocent
and happy. Now, Dante's Eden amazingly enough is not a garden, but a forest whose dense canopy of
leaves keeps the place covered with perpetual shade. Here is how Dante describes it near the beginning
of purgatory 28. I'll read the first two torsets in Italian and then the English translation.
Now, radolches, santamu tamento averin se miféri aper la frón te non depuccól por que sauave viento per cuille
frón de tremolando frón te tú tic quan te pégavano a la parte, ovil a prima ombre jita el santomante.
Here we go, a sweet breeze unchanging in itself struck my brow with no greater force than a gentle
wind by which the plant branches trembling were bent all of them toward where the holy mountain
cast its earliest shadow. But not parted so much from their straightness that the little birds
and the treetops left off their exerting their every art. But with gladness they welcomed the first
hours singing among the leaves which kept the base note to their rhymes like the note that gathers
from branch to branch in the pine forest on the shore of Classe where aiolis looses the chiroco.
What interests me here is that constant base note, Dante calls it a bordone, which underlies the
birds high-pitched melodies and rhymes. Dante compares it to what one hears in the pine forest of
Classe, which is near Ravenna where he spent the last years of his life under the patronage of Guido
la Polenta. Aiolis, of course, is the wind god and the chiroco is the southeast wind that Dante would
have heard in this pine forest as it blew through the leaves creating this base note or bordone.
The proper English term for it is a drone.
It's typical of Dante, who is the poet of weight, that he would counterbalance the light,
various and cheerful sounds of birdsong with this bordone. Now technically the bordone is the
deepest note of a bag pipe or viola, which is the medieval ancestor of the viola,
and it was a frequent feature in medieval music. This drone is the sound the force of Eden makes
as a steady perpetual breeze moves through its leaves. Now that breeze is not a meteorological
wind since Eden is located on the highest mountain on earth in the southern hemisphere beyond the
reach of meteorological disturbances. The summit of the mountain is in that portion of the sphere
of air that prolongs the motion imparted to it by the daily revolution of the heavens.
In other words, it's the constant orderly and perfect rotation of the heavenly spheres that causes
this wind. That's why Dante says it's unchanging. So this bordone, this steady base note that Dante
hears in Eden, I imagine it as heavy, deep full of gravity, yet perfectly serene, the sound of a
primordial earth prior to the shrieks of human history. What does the earth sound like beneath or beyond
the commotions that we humans have introduced into its atmosphere? It might well sound something like this.
I'm playing you the overture to Wagner's opera, De Sringold. One harmony, one chord, the
flat major, goes on for four minutes. You're evoking the elemental timelessness of nature
and the Rhine River prior to the advent of gods and humans.
One can hear in this overture what I would call the geoconstancy of a primeval earth
in all its placidity. I'm tempted to call it the sound of the earth's a priority,
the primordial drone of the planet.
I would also say that this drone is still all around us, but for the most part we drown it out
because we're all caught up in the drama taking place on the stage of history with its conflicts
and operatic passions. The earth's a priority doesn't disappear when we enter the stage, it
continues to be the heavy element that holds everything within its gravitational field.
But our human presence now introduces a suspenseful tension into that otherwise placid feel.
Let me play another piece of music where we can hear the accents of such tension. Samuel Barber's
Adagio for Strings, it begins on a single note, B flat, played by the violins, two beats later
the lower strings enter, creating a feeling of unsettleness as the melody begins, a swaying, ascending
motion.
[Music]
Barber creates tremendous suspension over the bar lines, maintaining it by changing harmonies,
allowing dissonance to form and momentarily resolve and then form again.
This piece has what I would call a molten foundation, a molten foundation is heavy but not stable.
On our planet, the heaviest and densest materials exist within the earth's molten core, not its surface.
This combination of heaviness and fluctuation gives Barber's Adagio the sound of longing,
a longing for something that one cannot seize hold of or come to rest in what T.S. Eliot called,
"The Still Point of the Turning World."
[Music]
In his lightness memo, Calvina quotes only five lines from Mercusio's Long Speech and Act 1 of Romeo
and Juliet. It's a scene where the group of Montague youngsters are heading toward the capitalist costume
ball where Romeo will meet Juliet for the first time. What Calvino doesn't mention is that Mercusio's
speech is over 90 lines long and by the end of it the metaphors and conceits are spinning out of
control. There is really no consistency in his rave and his manic flight of fancy comes dangerously
close to leaving the orbit of the earth altogether. It takes Romeo to return Mercusio to his senses
and to bring him back down to earth. "Peace, peace Mercusio peace," he says as he grabs hold of him.
"Peace, peace Mercusio peace thou talkest of nothing. Now talkest of nothing, and that's the
trouble with lightness, it can easily whisk away into nothing, defecting from the real."
Mercusio confirms as much in his melancholy, dejected response to Romeo,
which he utters in a completely different deflated, depressed kind of tone.
And the movie director Zefidelli, I think, gets this scene exactly right in his film version of
Romeo and Juliet when he has Mercusio almost whimper the lines. Mercusio true, I talk of dreams,
which are the children of an idle brain begout of nothing but vain fantasy,
which is as thin of substance as the air and more in constant than the wind."
"This following song has something of the light-footedness of Mercusio's gate,
this California called it. It's called Black Cat by the Progressive Rock Band Gentle Giant,
which was one of mine and my brother's favorite bands in the 70s."
"Here's the song, "Space Line."
The foundation consists mostly of the rhythm, the unusual seven-four-time signature with his
heavy emphasis on the downbeat.
The lyrics and the music conspire to create a vivid picture of a sinuous, prowling cat.
Music has a unique power to foster imagery, by the way, to enable us to see things with our eyes
closed and is strange that Colvino has nectar. Next to nothing to say about music in his six memos,
above all in his visibility memo."
So here's that interlude, much like Mercusio's flight of fancy,
and act one of Romeo and Julia.
The piece scrambles his time signature,
a band in space line.
It levitates whimsically in a way, Colvino probably would have applauded.
Light, precise, quick, and various.
Music
Great deal of musical virtuosity here. Yet to me this interlude smacks of the gamemanship of the
Uli Post School, interesting in his formal experimentations, but lacking existential weight and consistency.
Music
Now we're back on solid ground. I always get a sense of relief when the
song returns to that baseline.
And I guess what I'm trying to suggest is that Colvino's literary values and six memos
are mostly a posteriori. What do I mean by that? I mean that they presuppose the primacy of their
opposites, especially when it comes to the value of lightness.
Lightness comes into its own only thanks to the heavy elements that keeps it grounded.
Or I could put it this way, there is no levity without gravity, but there is, or can be,
gravity without levity.
Lightness without heaviness floats away into irrelevancy, whereas heaviness without lightness
can be sublime, matricial, and even foundational.
Let me play a song that has a very strong center of gravity and that hardly ever strays away from it.
The center of gravity in this case is the tonic denote repeatedly strapped by the lead guitar,
like the baso-contino of a propeller jet engine.
We hear here the elemental power of the tonic, which keeps everything closed within its
precincts. The relentless insistence on the same note makes any departure from the home key,
dramatic, and deviant. Return to the tonic seems almost like a law of nature.
"That augmented third strains against the fierce resistance of the tonic, but it doesn't take long,
for the denoted to reassert its supremacy."
That's the alpha note, the home key, the power cord, and its tonic sovereignty, heavy, foundational.
Reassuring.
I say reassuring because this strafing of the tonic note conveys the steady drone of an airplane's
propellers. Daddy's flown across the ocean in a war plane, leaving just a memory.
It also conveys the rhythm of our own heartbeats.
The ultimate center of gravity for human beings and the foundation of all rhythm
is the pulse of our blood after all.
If you listen there to Roger Waters, you can hear that diastolic bass.
That's the heartbeat. Roger Waters is a master at getting his base to sound,
like our heartbeat, diastolic and systolic.
The paradoxical thing about this song is that it's about a young father who, during the Second
World War, crosses the ocean in an RF-RAF plane, never to come home again and yet musically,
the song stays at home, stubbornly remaining in the home key, evoking a propeller
airplane gradually distancing itself from the homeland across the In English Channel.
So far, I relied on music to convey the essential points I wanted to make about the counter-value
to Galvino's lightness, namely heaviness, which I associate with gravity, stability,
geoconcency and the rhythm of our bodily being. You'll have noticed maybe that I've talked
mostly in terms of the elements, earth, its molten core, or fire, and wind and air.
The one element I haven't talked about yet is water. Now water is present implicitly in our
heartbeats, which are the time signature of the circulation of our blood throughout our bodies.
But there's another more elemental version of this circulation in the steady rhythms of the sea
with its relentless sequence of waves, one following upon the other.
Waves too are determined by the laws of gravity. A breaking wave is one whose base can no longer
support its top, causing it to collapse. Individual waves in deep water break when the ratio of the wave
height to the wave length reaches a critical limit. And when the slope or steepness ratio of a wave
is too great, it breaks, and this stochastic process of the waves generation, growth, and breaking
is one of the accents of the ocean's primordial rhythms. If there was anyone who incorporated the
rhythm of the seas into the cadences of his sentences, it was Herman Melville. Let me read for you
the final scene of Moby Dick, which brings together so many of the motifs I've been insisting
on today, especially regarding the primacy of weight. Speaking of an Indian shipmate,
who is stuck on the main mast as the ship goes down, the narrator declares,
"But as the last well-mings, enter mixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the
Indian at the main mast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible,
together with long, streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated over the destroying
billows they almost touched. At that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly,
uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar.
A skyhock that tauntingly had followed the main truck downwards from its natural home among the
stars, pecking at the flag, and in promoting Tashtego there, this bird now chance to intercept its broad,
fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood, and simultaneously feeling that ethereal thrill,
the submerged savage beneath in his death grasp kept his hammer frozen there. And so the bird of heaven,
with archangelic shrieks and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded
in the flag of a-hab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had
dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
I'm going to play one last piece of music, and this one takes its cue precisely for Moby Dick,
and in particular the ending I just read aloud. The song is Moby Dick by the band Glass Wave.
That's right, yours truly. You can watch the Glass Wave video of Moby Dick on YouTube if you're
interested. Anyway, this song has a heavy insistence on the tonic note, somewhat like the Pink Floyd
song we heard earlier. Yet in this case it's not a strafing, but rather a crashing or falling effect
on the tonic note, a falling that evokes the heavy heave of ocean waves.
I'm starting this some two minutes into the song itself.
I should mention that most of the Glass Wave song takes place in the aftermath of the disaster,
namely the sinking of the Peekwad by the Great White Whale.
The songs lyric "Speak in the Voice of the Whale" and the immediate wake of the Peekwad's descent.
The Sea, God, Loved, they cried and cried.
There's obviously something dirged full here, like the tolling of a church bell,
but I prefer to hear in it a kind of slow swelling mics ration, away from the tonic,
before a crashing return to it, like an ocean billow.
With that sound, they can't be found.
All the ascending notes of this guitar melody are struck together with the tonic E string.
I know believe me, I'm the one who's playing it, and as a guitar notes ascend, the bass notes
descend, and then the pattern reverses.
Here you can hear the ancient serenity of the sea beyond human history's loud lamentations.
I quote the very last sentence of Moby Dick, "Now small fouls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf,
a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides, then all collapsed,
and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled 5,000 years ago.
5,000 years ago means at the very beginning of biblical time."
I'm tempted to speak here of the buoyancy of the heavy.
The heavy doesn't always sink, sometimes it rises to the surface and floats on the water.
I'm thinking of that empty coffin that the carpenter of the Peekwad had made for Ahab.
As the ship goes down, this coffin juts up from the deep.
It's thanks to that coffin that Deeshmael is able to save himself, the sole survivor of the disaster.
I read from the novel's epilogue.
And now liberated by reason of its cunning spring and owing to its great buoyancy,
rising with great force, the coffin life-boy shot length-wise from the sea,
fell over and floated by my side.
Boyed up by that coffin for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and
dirge like me.
"The
The record I think literature will survive as long as it continues to find ways to gather our
lamentations around the elemental center of gravity, which is the earth in its geo-bioconcency.
By earth I mean the planet itself and all of its elements light and heavy.
That elemental ground on which we found our cities and social relations and assume the burdens of
mortality, I also mean the vital pulse and pulsations of our bodily being.
So to wrap up this show, I would like to go back a minute to Dante and clarify
something I said earlier when I remarked that his poetry
by giving things their proper weight is a kind of thinking or better
a pensive poetry.
Pensive that word pensive comes from the Latin pensade, which means to think.
The etymology of pensade goes back to the verb pended it away.
And Dante was well aware of the connection between thinking and weight.
And in fair enough five, for example in the circle of lust, after he hears the moving words of
Francesca darimini, he writes, "Quandillo entes, equiliano, meo, fensade, quinale, viso,
etanto, y ltendi, baso, vincale, poetamidise, kippensi."
When I understood those injured souls, I bent my face downward and I held it down so long.
That the poet said, "What are you thinking?"
Kippensi, what are you thinking?
Thought two has its weight, or I should say thinking is a weighing, or better a pondering,
"pondu samodis, the weight of love," as a guston call it.
There's a certain kind of thinking that we're fond of on this show,
which seeks to get to the bottom of things.
Henry David Thoreau practiced it, and it's with Thoreau that I would like to end this
season-ending monologue. You all know who Thoreau was. He's the one who in 1845 went to the
Walden Woods near Concord, Massachusetts, and built himself a cabin there by Walden Pond,
where he lived for two and a half years. Why did he go there? He tells us,
I quote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life."
What is an essential fact of life?
Thoreau again, I quote, "If you stand right, fronting and face to face with a fact,
you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces as if it were a similar,
and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude
your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality."
Walden is a written testimony of the craving for reality, a testimony based on facts and a precise
account of how its author went about verifying for himself, what is real and not real about life.
Each one of us needs to verify the facts for oneself. The book Walden becomes just another rumor,
the moment we let Thoreau do our thinking for us. The moment, say, that we take Thoreau at his word
when he declares that Walden Pond is approximately 107 feet deep.
The bottom of Walden Pond is the ground that we're free either to sound for ourselves or to leave
bottomless. In a passage that is at once literal and allegorical and which recapitulates the experiment
of his life in the woods, Thoreau describes how we went about sounding the depth of his pond
in the winter of 1846. He had a particular interest in the matter of fact,
for by that time Walden Pond had become his life. As I was delirous to recover the long,
lost bottom of Walden Pond, I surveyed it carefully long before the ice broke up early in
46 with compass and chain and sounding line. There have been many stories told about the bottom
or rather no bottom of this pond, which certainly had no foundations for themselves.
It is remarkable how long men will believe in the bottomlessness of a pond without taking the
trouble to sound it. But I can assure my readers that Walden has a reasonably tight bottom
at a not unreasonable, though at an unusual depth. I fathom it easily with a codline and a stone
weighing about a pound and a half and could tell accurately when the stone left the bottom
by having to pull so much harder before the water got underneath to help me.
The greatest depth was exactly 102 feet, to which may be added the five feet it has risen since
making 107. This is a remarkable depth for so small in area, yet not one inch of it can be
spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men?
I am thankful that this pond was made deep and pure for a symbol, while some men believe in the
infinite, some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.
A bottomless pond is one that has no depth. A life without ground is lost to reality.
Imagination discovers its real freedom in the measured finitude of that which is the case,
not one inch of which can be spared. The sounding of the pond or the pondering of life in its depth,
that's the kind of thinking that goes to the bottom of things and that's the kind of weight
that all great works of art have at their core. No matter how high they may soar, how
nimbly they may move, and how successfully they succeed in overcoming what Nietzsche called the
Spirit of heaviness. In the final analysis we're all bound to the earth's gravitational field,
or as Ham tells Clove in Beckett's endgame, you're on the earth, and there's no cure for that.
That'll do it for entitled opinions. It's time for this show to sink into its heavy,
regenerative sleep so that we can come to life again next year and keep this program going.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
I hear what's the face that ended the world, and there's no trace of that pretty girl.
Life was such a bore. So I started war.
In the last day, the stars started again.
Now time has come. Every power once it's out, we'll end the sun.
And the heart stays. All over again, life is through.
It's on the shrub. Everything is through.
All because of you.
I need it something new.
But now it's through. But it could be you.
What's left was stories.
May it's our history. I need something new.
I thought it was you. I couldn't stand the way the day is burning to one.
Life was such a bore. But it's really through.
I need it so much more.
All because of you.
I started war.
Life is through.
All because of you.
(upbeat music)
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