Today begins the Nativity Fast. And so, a little verse from Auden. This is taken from the opening sections of “For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio”.
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.
1
Scribe out of work
At a loss for words
Not his to begin with,
The man life passed by
Stands at the window
Biding his time
2
Time and again
And now once more
I climb these stairs
Unlock this door—
No name where I live
Alone in my lair
With one bone to pick
And no time to spare
Do I teach to lend an ear (Samuel to God) or lend an eye (Saul to David)
obey or suspect, exhort or dehort, build or burn
I prophesy a new hearkening or
I chant the gassing of structures of air.
Chalk in hand I am poised to move on, to talk more
To ask questions whose answers I do not know but
Whose interrogation of myself I cannot resist, students wonder
But I cannot help asking: I have time to fill
(Monday Wednesday Friday at 2—post meridian)
And I have to fill time—bruise eternity but leave it living.
“If you cannot cover a question with words
You let it ask you too much”
Out of what dustbin of mine draw I fresh water
Out of what fancy of mine produce I plain help
To insist on the difference between me and them:
Me, not young but clever
Them, not clever but young:
Insisting on this would be wrong, but worse treats an accident
As fated, as if learning weighed a few ounces
In the balance of a New Testament.
Simple faith simply is the only faith there is
And whatever tincture of complication or sophistication
Enters into it denates it completely, even if it seems natural still
Students wonder faithfully and I am finical over that faith
Fearful that I only complicate or sophisticate, sophists’ accomplice.
To teach is to unlearn, forget, desert
What I have it in me to teach
I do not know, I know, I do not know
But known ignorance is not my Socratic crux
Not my particular poison.
“M’occorreva il coltello che recide
La mente che decide e si determina”
I dust chalky hands against pants and worry
Students wander at their desks
Chalk in hand I am poised to move on.
We don’t know the ins and outs
how should we? how could we?
It’s not for the likes of you and me to cogitate high policy or to
guess the inscrutable economy of the pontifex
from the circuit of the agger
from the traverse of the wall.
But you see a thing or two
in our walk of life
walking the compass of the vallum
walking for twenty years of nights
round and round and back & fro
on the walls that contain the world
You see a thing or two, you think a thing or two, in our walk of
life, walking for twenty years, by day, by night, doing the rounds
on the walls that maintain the world
Muddy waters hide creatures beneath. We know this because
Turtles spy on us from nearby, black heads breaking the surface.
Each of us, book in hand, sits and reads. We were here last night
When a knot of toads and an army of frogs barked at us, each other.
Bats frantic twilight butterflies.
I think of Modern Love, egoist that I am. I drink the pale drug of
Silence, a junky. Forty-one and tongue-tied I have words only
Of quotation. Thoreau. Nature exhibits herself to us by turns and
The ice in your pint jar of water falls forward in a clump
Against your lip as you drink.
No one disturbs us here, although I did hear voices—over there,
By the waterfall. I circle words on the page. ‘Mystics’, ‘depths’,
‘Under’. I etch marginalia: “The holiness of what ought to be?”
Warm in the sun I shut the book. Walk? Yes. We walk in Love’s
Deep Woods. I would talk, but the weight of my bag, with our books,
And the warmth of the air, shorten my breath.
From where this long silence, this big quiet? Who set this watch
On my lips? Will no angel roll back the stone? What seek the speaking
With the dead? The tongue no man can tame time has.
We were here last night. We are here today. We are walking, now
Past the waterfall and the knee-high longleaf pines. Trees that have
Evolved fire proof. The Barn Trace our path and we end among stones
Once a walkway. The house is gone but the barn stands. Silence
Is broken by passing cars. We are out of the woods.
My son just finished starring in La Bête here at AU. He was terrific; the whole cast was great. –The play revels in language and is a sustained meditation on language. The two central characters, Valere and Elomire, represent two radically different ways of using and inhabiting language. Elomire is a kind of Karl Kraus–without the humor: he is deeply concerned for “moral discourse”, for language properly used. Valere uses langauge–in a way that is beyond, or at least careless of, usage and abusage. At the heart of the play is this contrast and the contrast between the two men.
It is easy, I think, to see the play as championing Elomire’s side, but that would be a mistake. Part of the reason the mistake is easy is that Valere is a reductio (if I may put it this way) on himself. He shows himself ridiculous in all that he says. Elomire is no reductio on himself. Even more, Elomire is championed by a young woman in the play, Dorine. She is a teenager who has a disturbed relationship with language. During the play, she refuses to speak except in monosyllabic words rhyming with “do”. But at one crucial moment, when Elomire is pleading unsuccessfully for understanding from his acting troup, she is the only one who seems to understand. She marks her understanding with a violation of her own rule. When Elomire asks, in effect, “Does anyone understand?”, Dorine says, “I do.” (The constative/performative ambiguity in this line is worth reflection.) –Her willingness to take his side, his relative lack of ridiculousness compared to Valere, these can together make it seem that Elomire is in the right. But after wondering about that for a while, I realized that the young woman is the reductio of Elomire’s view. To see how, consider her in relation to Cratylus, the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues. The tradition has it that Cratylus was convinced by Heraclitus, but that Cratylus thought Heraclitus had not sufficiently radicalized his own doctrine. So Cratylus emended “We cannot step into the same river twice” to “We cannot step into the same river once”. Eventually, his embrace of Heraclitean principles led Cratylus away from words altogether; he spends his last years foregoing speech and simply wiggling a finger (fluxily). While Elomire is no Heraclitean, he does so raise the stakes in speaking and writing that it can come to seem impossible properly to use language. And I think Dorine is the victim of his view. Her desire to speak in a properly moral discourse has robbed her of words.
Valere inhabits a language without rules. All that matters is what he can press it into doing for him. He rules language. (And he is largely the sort of clueless despot you would expect.) Elomire inhabits a language with more rules than Calvin’s Geneva. Doing anything in it requires a sensitivity and skill that seem to exceed human capacities. It strikes me that the beast of the title is not so much Valere, although he is referred to in that way by Elomire; no, the beast is language itself, wild and tame, uncontrollable and compelling, infinitely jesting and deadly serious.
Owe, do not own
What you can borrow
Live on each loan
Forget tomorrow
Why not be in debt
To one who can give
You whatever you need
It is good to abet
Another’s good deed
(1) How to read TLP? –One proposition at a time, like a logiholic.
(2) TLP is a prose poem of logic–it complicatedly inherits a literary tradition inaugurated by Parmenides.
(3) Wittgenstein (from Culture and Value) around 1930, but apropos of TLP (and, mutatis mutandis, of PI):
Each of the sentences I write is trying to say the whole thing, i.e., the same thing over and over again; it is as though they were all views of one object seen from different angles.
(4) Wittgenstein considered titling TLP something else–Der Satz, The Proposition. The book isolates the look, the physiognomy, the sound, the structure of the proposition–a literary and a logical task. It prioritizes the proposition stylistically and philosophically.
(5) Ronald Gregor Smith wrote of Martin Buber’s I and Thou:
To the reader who finds the meaning obscure at the first reading we may say that I and Thou is indeed a poem. Hence it must be read more than once, and its total effect allowed to work on the mind; the obscurities of one part…will then be illumined by the brightness of another part. For the argument is not as it were horizontal, but spiral; it mounts, and gathers within itself the aphoristic and pregnant utterances of the earlier part.
Just so, exactly just so, of TLP too. I have been stressing the necessity of allowing the total effect of TLP to work on your mind.
Judas puckered up then plunged down
to potter’s field, Aceldama
Hail, Master
Master, Master
the price of blood
left hanging, not for long, he fell headlong
(rope snapped?)
desolated his habitation
by transgression fell
the lot fell, not Judas, on Matthias, who was numbered
twelfth (eleventh and then one)
while Judas hit bottom, no bounce, burst
burst asunder in the midst
(middle popped?)
his bowels moved unmercifully
gushed out
reward of iniquity
was his guilt heavy
did it account for his headlong fall, his bursting, his gushing?
he was thirty pieces of silver lighter
but that pucker
that kiss
that kiss was weighty
weightier than the silver that bought it
he died (fell headlong)
kissed the dirt
dirt he bought
for kissing
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 