May 11th, 1980, Serial No. 01814

00:00
00:00
Audio loading...

Welcome! You can log in or create an account to save favorites, edit keywords, transcripts, and more.

This talk will not appear in the main Search results:
Unlisted
Serial: 
SF-01814
AI Summary: 

-

Photos: 
Notes: 

Recording is a portion of a longer event.

Transcript: 

They just cut down all the timber in sight, and so their big deal of selling the timbers is they'll sell it to Japan, so Harvey would get in between there, and they sell off to the point where they don't even have it, they're finished in Japan. So while everybody's running around with our myth about, I've always pointed out about Indians, since they're the same species we are. I've got great doubts about their being great different kinds. So Jewish, Duncan, and everybody, since they are the same species, we can get back to the spirits at evening and day and find out, we have to be just as careful. My point about evening and day, and how do we read a poem with wariness is that we don't get to be the same species, so we watch. And Freud and I won't do the whole trip, because as a matter of fact, it seems to have been the easiest in Rome, to the things that can be betrayed about us. The most acceptable, I think, to the entire community that Freud was approaching when

[01:06]

he wanted to approach the dream, although he found it a great struggle, because he was shocked by what he found patients telling him. And so the sexual approach to the dream, he did see that possibly it was universal, but of course it proves to be also a whole multitude of possibilities unfolding from the dreamer. But there are other things in the dream, and Freud does not really approach, and certainly Jung doesn't with archetypes, and Jung would have been stymied, as I would read it, when somebody asked, do you have spirits in you? Because it must mean spirits, not archetypal images, because they have a sense of divided soul. And the Eskimo has to a great degree, these were of course men who had, this particular man was quite brilliant and successful. After one period in prison, when he was released, he went in as a secretary or something to

[02:13]

somebody in the government, in the high level. But what happens to him is that if he reaches an emotional crisis, in this case his wife or girlfriend leaving him, he drinks and then he has a passion rage, and a passion rage makes sense to Indians and Eskimos, that's exactly what they did with it. But immediately it involves him in the law here, and so he went back into the slammer. But his question had to do with something more interesting than the passion rage. He said, the reason for his question about spirits, did not let anyone know, do you feel it, anger and jealousy, all sorts of things, could be spirits too, in addition to being feelings. And I said, it seemed to me, yes, that my poetry, I mean while I myself, thinking rationally

[03:13]

and so forth, would want to do as Europe increasingly does, and that is to name, to dispossess us ourselves of feelings that we feel possess us, that it seemed, my poetry had no difficulty at all about having a duality in which you have feelings, but feelings have you, and because you, when they're called compulsions. And the poetry keeps producing spirits for a person. Then I said, okay, why are you asking? And he said, well, he said, I have a kind of writing that I don't show at all, and that I don't really want to show to myself. He says, it pours out, and I feel it's not me. So we spent almost an hour talking about what the you and not you, and how we, and I said, well, things like that happen, although I no longer tend to pour writing, let writing pour forth that way, because I'm bold because I'm afraid of having it pour that way.

[04:19]

As, for instance, when concrete poetry appeared, and fascinated me, the area of concrete poetry, or single word poems, for instance, on the page, that was not clever, or wasn't amusing, 95% of it was merely clever or amusing. Well, the part that was mysterious, and I sat with a blank paper in front of me, and found I was afraid, or was pure sound poetry. Since I, that's why I said, well, equations, no wonder I'm afraid of pure sound poetry. But I can't commit it. I said, well, there are some things I can't commit, but I have a great barrier to. But I have, but I, but I have had times when I would have seizures, and, and, and, and a text would pour forth. And sometimes in that, I have found texts like those, like an afterbirth of something in it, and, and, and, and for the public to see. But, and that's not, in fact, I like to think that all, if you want to say, if you want

[05:20]

to think about what goes into a text, you may want to say it was something that wasn't in it. It's not hard for us to develop a way to think about the text. But it's not easy to develop a way to think about the text. I don't know that it's a very good thing. It's not a good thing. It has to take a lot of time and a lot of practice to develop a way to think about it. And it's not easy to develop a way to think about the text. ...

[06:53]

... [...] I'd like to know if it's a long time,

[09:06]

if it's a little bit longer. If it's a little bit longer. And that's what we're curious about. It's not the current. It's not the period. It's the effect. But that's what we're interested in. That's what we're interested in. The impact of the coronavirus on us. That's what we're interested in. And the current. That's what we're interested in. And the current.

[12:03]

And the current. Are there any other follow-up questions that you want to share with us? Well, one of the reasons is that there's a big divide in science and medicine. We have to put shields on the following kinds of things. And that is, we want to correct the loss of all that we have. And that is also to allow us to recover. Also, that we have to correct the loss of all that we have. And that's up to you. And that's up to your understanding. That's up to you. And for Donald, that means both of you. And for me. And for you.

[13:06]

And for us. We're a small team of scientists. We've got a lot of things to say. But that's a big part of what we're doing. And so we're going to have to do that. We're going to have to fight for what we have to say. And that's a big part of what we're doing. The whole of the sixth book after Sordello

[15:29]

has been suddenly projected not only as the not only as Salaguera's heir and lost son. Another fiction. Because Sachi wasn't set in history. So this is another necessity of the poem. In which Salaguera is proposed as action and strength. A series of terms that come up. And actually is thought There's two halves of Sordello. And an early one. I'll just give these lines. Remember how much I talked about fancy. And how strikingly fancy is projected here. And the term imagination. Not at all. This heir of Coleridge's division of fancy.

[16:30]

And Browning comes in very strong on fancy. And it looked to me when I was beginning the poem like it was a very strong statement for fancy being the ground. And I think in a way I would still keep this. Because when I talk about the magic ground the one that Escobar and I have our troubles with Do you have spirits? This would be not imagination but fancy. It has been relegated to fancy. Where imagination has straightened it out somewhat. There's a oneness about imagination. Remember Coleridge's division is that imagination is identical with the mind of God. As a matter of fact thinks with the mind of God. So there's but one. And fancy is multitudinous. And that's our opposition of the multitude. So the question the Escobar is asking me is Do you have a host of spirits inside you? Or are you one? And he's not one. And he's not a dualist at all. He says that it's not me but they are not me. It's a very different statement from if or he is not me. In Europe

[17:32]

the dualism will come forward repeatedly in the Judeo-Christian Islamic religion. Don't you think that imagination is something that involves contradictions and you have to have the dualism in order to resolve it? Well, I'm thinking of what Coleridge did with it right now. I wouldn't take Coleridge's imagination with the thinking with the mind of God. But when that was introduced into poetry and Browning chooses fancy there's a kind of poetry thing. If we went back to my picture of imagination it would still be the faculty to image something and the way in which we resolve and find out how things belong together is to imagine them belonging together in various ways. So I would have no trouble at all. And my answer to Eskimo was yes, I often experience things I don't want to be me but I view them all as members

[18:36]

of some kind of unity so the work within me is to have them all there. And I said part of it is very clear to me. The best of me is anger and rage and so forth and it is to come to the place where anger and rage speak truly. I said but love can also not speak truly and we feel pretty rotten when that happens and goodness can sometimes speak to the heavens so you can't tell what it is you're going to not be you. You can't divide it into a set of vices and virtues and you're not looking for the virtues and vices but you're looking for how they all fit together and that is the imagination and the confidence in the back of that is a thing. So I said there is a difference but talking with this man however I didn't dream he was different I said I understand why you want lots of it not to be you but that view is really not

[19:37]

the one that I think the poem is going toward I think the poem is going toward a bigger view that it tries to imagine in which they will all be members everything that appears will be members of a community and the present time but we've already had enough announcements to get a little like a squirrel cage except my squirrel cage was suddenly not a squirrel cage when I was talking to Eskimo I think that community more and more I think that community likes intention in us and likes intentions in us and that was that was I don't know if that was after or before seeing a truly marvelous wall of Eskimo masks in the Juneau museum, this was in the Juneau jail I can't remember what the first day or second day I went out of the jail and Eskimos are particularly fascinated by schizophrenic masks by masks in which one half is a man's face

[20:37]

or a woman's face and the other half is an animal but an animal in conflict so it's not the story of a were-bear or were-wolf there's no totality of the form they co-possess the face they're fascinated by split faces and one of the first things they'll remember that wasn't even there and the the twinget said to me you're balanced and I said never in a million years and then actually these are actually dumb twingets and dumb Eskimos otherwise they don't get caught up well anyway they're caught up and the twinget said no balance I don't mean like that but I mean balance means you always find you've got your balance you always move from balance doesn't mean well here we think balance would be like that and that is not at all what a twinget or an Eskimo think balance is balance means that's the reason the message doesn't get through

[21:38]

when they commit acts of violence and go into rage but the common means by balance the ability to move yeah it's to move and move back back and forth and not be lost but these would be amazing shots because they have to know you right away and you have to know them right away because it's important how to use the two or three yards let me read the shot I wanted to get to and I must have been bored have I lost it no we'll go back to 145 I had a fleeting thing but I'll not worry about it it fleeted me

[22:38]

ok Sardello has gone through a talk with himself and brought up Eglemore again that one that is quoted earlier or that I read earlier it's Browning's great war with making mankind look small against immense things in which he finds a very false move in other words it makes us worse than humble it makes us look like we can hardly do anything although this is what Sardello is worried about the task looks immense, overwhelming and there's nothing he can do so in the sixth book, his main one he almost disarms himself that you can't take a mere step because you don't even know how far you have to go and Eglemore is the just poet part of a person

[23:40]

of this composite person of the poet that's projected on Sardello and not always the one who has judgment but Eglemore is almost without judgment and the poem of Eglemore that's quoted is man shrinks to naught if matched with symbols of immensity must quail forsooth before a quiet sky or see too little for their quietude and it says and truly somewhat in Sardello's mood confirmed its speciousness I'll read this passage in the opening this is the opening of book six simply because I pointed out before that this is the one place that for evening and so forth he uses Eve and then she's turned in later so I think we've got presence of Eve in the passage confirmed its speciousness while Eve slow sank down the near terrace to the farther bank and only one spot left from out the night livered upon the river opposite a breath of watery heaven like a bay

[24:43]

a skylight space of water ray for ray and star for star one richness where they mixed as this and that wing of an angel fixed to multuary splendors bolded in to die let's go back over this because he's already he's already said man shrinks to naught if matched with symbols of immensity must quail forsooth before a quiet sky or see too little for their quietude but the other symbol that moves through this and comes in book six very strongly is the need of the man and especially the need of the man for a moon that would move him as the moon moves the sea so in a curious way this immensity proves to be him which Browning also polemics against elsewhere the whole idea this is almost the germ of a curious idea and yet he will come in with all strength to respond but it's almost like one of the arguments

[25:44]

is it proper to have the immensity of the heavens and the immensity of the sea in a poem as something we would answer to and in this one the moon has become very clear confused when moon and sun both come in because they're also moving through the sky but it begins to seem as if remember it isn't Palma Palma turns out to be different than the poem just before this we have this Eve's maiden this Eve is Eve or is the woman and turns to be an immensity but an immensity that is somehow an immensity that is defined, a breath of water in heaven like a bay defined by giving a local, an absolutely local immensity and the same, a sky like space of water, right? at the same time unmeasured ocean

[26:44]

and unmeasured sea he would again tell you something about these couplets, there's another passage in 5 where Sordello with some reference to, double reference to Sordello in the first whole poem written in couplets a couplet makes localities within a poem makes little bays so the immensity of the movement of the poem it makes the poem almost hobble, I mean the movement of syntax in this is absolutely bewildering but so would be designing inner bays and being sure you didn't have immensity where you do actually have immensity so if you think about it a confined immensity is the trouble of the syntax of Robert Franklin he's not going to make a step without contrasting with Whitman for instance where there's no confine where vertically there's no confine and in Robert Brown the syntax

[27:46]

is really in binding the threat of the immensity and the spirit counter spirit and spirit counter spirit I think stems off, remember the multitude that he proposes, don't break up in this poem and we have only certain emotions, he's the opposite of the man or the woman who's filled with a whole bunch of personalities let me read this through then and truly somewhat in Sardello's mood confirmed its speciousness while eve's slow sank down the near terrace to the farther bank and only one spot left from out the night delivered upon the river opposite a breath of watery heaven like a bay, a sky-like space of water, ray for ray and star for star, one richness where they mix as this and that wing of an angel fixed to multuary splendors folded in to die nor turn he till Ferrar's

[28:47]

gin, say the monotonous speech from a man's lip who let some first and eager purpose slip in a new fancy's birth, the speech keeps on, though elsewhere a conforming soul be gone aroused in surely awkward succor, faith paused with this eve, ere she but she refers to faith, but we've still got this word eve, faith paused with this eve, ere she precipitates herself best put off new strange thoughts awhile, that voice whose large hands, that portentous smile, what helped to pierce the future as the past lay in the plaining city at last, and so that double reference to to fate and with this eve, so that the she encompasses both seemed even more to bring forward the point that I had made, I think almost the second time thinking of the same passage, and now we find that united with truth's self

[29:48]

and at last the main discovery and prime concern, all that just now imported him to learn, truth's self, like yonder slow moon to complete heaven rose again, and naked at his feet lighted his old life's every shift and change, effort with counter-effort, nor the range of each looked wrong, except wherein it checked some other, which of these could he suspect prying into them by the sudden blaze. The real way seemed made up of all ways, mood after mood of the one mind in him, tokens of the existence, bright or dim of a transcendent, all-embracing sense, demanding only outward influence, a soul with palm and spray above his soul, power to uplift his power, such moon's control over such sea depths, and their mass had swept onward from the beginning and still kept its course, but years and years the sky

[30:48]

above held none, and so unpacked of any love his sensitiveness idled, now amort, alive now, and to sullenness or sport given wholly up, disposed its avenue at every passing instigation, grew and dwindled as decreased, in foam showers spilt, wedge-like insisting, quivered, now a gilt shield of the sun shining, all ocean, all sea, now a blinding ray, the whitest ripple toward the reef, found place for much dislike, not gathered up and hurled right from its heart and comfort in the world. And again he sees that Sardello in this condition is an ungoverned sea, yet had some core within, submitted to some moon, or he would have been, as some men are, have had a short course, and this would define it all. okay, let's get back

[31:49]

to 145 and go with the, where his why he switches, when he switches from this state in which the, in which we're at a deeper emotional level and one that seems to have to do with apprehended disclosure between the man and the woman and this is Browning, as we explained in the first place, before he's met Elizabeth Barrett Browning one of the side places of this is that I've been reading Chesterton's really delightful book on Robert Browning and Chesterton's picture of that marriage he's he would shatter forever the conventional picture of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which is evidently quite easy to do by simply reading her. And we presume because our century presumes our century is floundered in the picture of a ladylike poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning did not feel

[32:49]

called upon to be ladylike although the novelist perhaps Jane Austen, but with a cruel hand had drawn the picture of this gentile the brief life of in which the women upheld gentility in the, majorly in the small town so that the women and foe contrast with the women. Kindness and other things in Dickens, I'm hard to think of gentility he's cruel at gentility and so is Jane Austen, but it had reared its ugly head. And so there was an expectation of some kind of a gentile lady who would write poetry. There was nothing gentile about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's mind and she was different from Robert Browning and surely as passionate as Robert Browning and also viewed with some

[33:50]

alarm by her own contemporaries because it was unladylike poetry Chesterton points out she really is more like Elizabethans than she is like Victorians and of course it's a strong a strong measure of Elizabethan drive in Browning, she's a dramatic poet goes back to that drama, but he has her in separate portraits and in the story Robert Browning became fascinated with the idea of Elizabeth Barrett Browning before he met her at all and in their correspondence Chesterton points out that she responds to his with a good deal of understanding and forbearance a little alarmed when in the state he's in, he wants to meet her, not only because of the tyrannical fathers making it

[34:52]

quite difficult, but at the same time one would apprehend right away that as she must have, here is a fancy passion that is about to come in and she's a real person she has at least that gesture that his idea has been formed by other people's admiration of her and by her work better known, I take it than his and in his own mind, by the way as I said, it becomes quite clear and more and more so in Browning's later years that with this picture that comes in Sardello about the people and speaking to the people he thought of Elizabeth Barrett as being more lasting than himself as speaking more surely to a larger populace both he and Elizabeth Barrett found that this the very thing that marks him

[35:53]

with this rugged kind of strength that it's almost impossible for him to write a straight sentence and the debility, the kind of debility that he didn't have and I would it would be an open question to then determine is Robert Browning in his admiration for her describing what we call a facility I'm not sure because I haven't gone into reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning can't find out although I'm beginning to be quite interested in finding out what kind of a portrait there was no question but what contemporary thought of the two of them as equal and Robert Browning thought of her as co-equal with a plus that is with the fact that her thought was not dim and confused but was clear and that she spoke very surely to a much larger much more lasting audience

[36:54]

Alright in his conflict the poet here has been thinking about how hopeless it is to speak for the people and after a soliloquy then the person of by now almost dissolved lecturer the one who entered the poem in the beginning and who was pointing out what's going on and still not totally resolved because Browning can lie back of that lecturer and let him project ideas that would not be the poet's directly I rally people, urge or claim this is clearly those exclamations and so forth are addressed almost to the audience that's hearing this as the story of Sardella being told for thus he ventured to the verge push a vain mummery which

[38:01]

perchance distrust of his fast-flipping resolution thrust likewise accordingly the crowd as yet he had unconsciously contrived forget in the hall to dwell of the points one might assuage the signal horrors easier than engage with a dim vulgar vast unobvious grief not to be fancied off nor gained relief in brilliant fits cured by happy quirk but by dim vulgar vast unobvious work very fun so what Sardella faces when he even comes to think about the hall about answering it all is first a dim vulgar vast unobvious grief all of those are actually telling words vulgar means absolutely to the crowd and in a way strong enough that these seem valiantly to describe one's relation if one's going to be answerable

[39:03]

to mankind as such and only by dim vulgar vast unobvious work was answered and it's before that that somehow that Sardella actually does huh in a poem, remember, this is again a fiction, he's a fiction he dies if he didn't die and he dies hard really before the proposition this crowd then, forth they stood and now content thy stronger vision, brood on thy bare want, uncovered turf by turf, studied a corpse space through the tainted wood's turf down sank the people then, up rose their now the people's then, up rose their now, these sad ones render service due, and how piteously little must that service prove, had surely proved in any case, for move each other's obstacle away

[40:03]

let youth become aware, it had surprised at truth, to our service to impart, can truth be seized, settle forthwith and of the captive ease it's captured upon fresh prey since this alits so happily, no gesture luring it the earnest of a flock to follow vain, most vain a life to spend, ere this he claimed change of the poor crowd's complacence, ere the crowd pronounced it captured he describes a cloud, its kin of twice the plume which he in turn, if he shall live as many lives, may learn how to secure, not else so a picture raises in the poem of the need of many lives, and we're back at the part that I the most sage statement of this dimension of the immensity of lives now our immensity of sea and our immensity

[41:03]

of sky, has got another thing that he faces, which is the immensity of species, from which we speak, to which we speak, and thinking about time and the erasure of poems, the futility if you were to brew upon it however you go, and more than that, Sarnel is dying because of the futility of living within this, because as ceased by now to be would a poem reach it, it becomes now almost waking up in the day reach it, and hours, yes we come to that right we come to that right and then comes a passage in which there's a statement I looped out left for Dante there, hanging fire, Dante comes back to to Browning's mind but not, it would seem that Dante's Browning knew is the Dante of the poem of the Divine Comedia

[42:04]

and he does not know the Dante of the Dei Monarchia in which that passage that I'll recite over and over again comes, and that is God needs every event everything and every being throughout time to complete the statement, so your own rising or your own step is needed and as a matter of fact you are the unique, each event that you're in, not only is it needed as it is, and you do it as best, but to come to the consciousness of its being needed would be your alive sense of your being alive, yet you're never merely alive. This would be apparent because in the novelist it's where it's seen that people who are not aware of how essential they are to the novel, within the novel, are they move the plot and if we were to increase their awareness, the awareness alone would not change the novel the awareness would tell them where they

[43:04]

are, I mean awareness in a novel it can profoundly inform the novel but the essential novel is still there, to be aware because it's what you just did that you are aware so the awareness I think is an invention, it's not that you don't change things and so forth in the complexity but he needs your awareness but he also must need its intention and when that thing the trouble here is that I took that tricky turn and went back on that term, God needs what happens needs I mean we can put is, we can put all these things each single thing going on so the picture needs it the picture of the whole needs it the picture of what's happening right now needs every part, and we have a great confusion of how informed, what's most interesting is how

[44:05]

much more and then how anxious we are when we crave that more, we want to know what's happening throughout the world our newspapers look insane when you turn around and yet so large things disappear and the murder around the corner must be known, the gospel of a town the eagerness of the town and its gospel to know every single thing that took place, and the speculations about it, but that's within a small area of bay, and we now have a principle in which we have a right to know but no head to know or anything else to know but a right to know, marvelously provocative and we're coming almost into that because now in a passage here around 185 in Sardau after with need he shall live as many lives if he shall live as many lives, may learn how to secure, which he in turn could live all those lives, and yet

[45:07]

the mind, what clearly Browning knows is the imagination rushes forward to live lives most remarkable thing is that we read to live lives uh and so that the most, the strangest statement and one of the most pitiable statements of a dismay or despair is the remark of that's not relevant, because what it means is a closing off from living lives I mean, relevance the demand for relevance is to contract the bay, and it means a fear somewhere, that if you were to know about lives, know about more and more lives, your knowledge about yourself in the first place would change, and so there would be a good deal of acknowledging as you know more lives, and I'm thinking of the frequently experienced of the people teaching who meet and often in college will meet the first generation when they want to cease to read

[46:07]

when they want to cease to read novels and cease to read poems, cease to read biographies, cease to come into contact with life, to acknowledge because it's not just novels and poems we're talking about, but fascination with people and lives around and there also are Eskimos question about do you have emotions are emotions spirits in you okay, then he didn't want to read what poured out so in a sense he wanted to start he would have liked to have been cured of the pouring out of this ugly matter, this matter that it was not he and he would like and at the same time he did so luckily we didn't have to decide what he was saying and my whole thing was that no, the same things would happen to me, this is the interior

[47:08]

that also can't be encompassed so you could also despair simply because you're swamped by this multiplication inside there's another quarrel I have with the and I have no great difficulties with Freud because he keeps drawing and redrawing his picture so he breaks every closure and reopens it with new terms and moves on to other pictures, but the anxiety throughout Jung which comes from his from the fact that Freud had in formula, Freud intimately knew about neuroses, is successful with neurotics, and had very little was sort of maybe afraid of yes afraid of, because it was always with great warning of psychotic disorders and he had no success at all with psychotic disorders, in general psychoanalysis was shamed and he made very strong

[48:11]

his mind of division, as if they were opposites and one excluded the other in one striking place that says, much the same thing he says about homosexuality and heterosexuality and he is not talking about male or female gender in that, he thinks that there's something abnormal about having an exclusive heterosexuality or an exclusive homosexuality, but what becomes striking is, he also finds that it's abnormal to have an exclusive neurosis and an exclusive psychosis, nothing at all so normality is the co-existence of neurosis and psychosis and he uses the definition in that that when I'm talking to you, I'm psychotic enough to think there's a you over there hearing me and actually knows all and more of what I'm saying, when I myself barely grasp what I'm saying, or psychotic enough to presume there's a me who knows what I'm saying, when I'm barely chasing after my words to figure out

[49:11]

what do you say with that, with what I've just said, and in that other operation, which is absolutely necessary in order to have speech that goes on like this, the neurotic is the one who's saying, what do I say with that, that thing I just said and that one, Freud knew, beautifully, he writes, what do you say with that, that you just said, but the other one, boxing completely, although he believed in thought transference which would be his definition of psychosis he was fascinated with fascinated with Franci who actually ends up a thorough psychotic by many more terms because, and he ended up in a wonderful psychoanalysis with a lady in New York who was being carried on by ESD between Vienna and New York, now that would be the ultimate there's no neurotic boundaries to that in the world and it's glorious, okay, but the in Freud Freud's idea was a mixture of two things in the Jungian picture you build

[50:14]

a system and you integrate it with the center and that's largely because, I mean, one understands the life message in it when you read more on Jung and you begin to realize that Jung had schizophrenic troubles so he was centering and holding himself in the center and he became very interested in tribal arts that all have very intense schizophrenic troubles well if you're a tribe all the tribes outside, you were outside that you catch right away the heider to the tlingit today the tlingit they know they get their totem poles from the heider but the heider are crazy people who make crazy things and the tlingit almost protect themselves against outside crazy people who might also the way the tlingit the Russians really managed to have a short and merry war with the tlingit because the tlingit were at war with each other because all those other tribes were also crazy people

[51:15]

for those who have hopes of matriarchies, these were matriarchal tribes and all those other matriarchies they're outside, who knows what goes on they're bat-bats and so one sees the totem poles as lines of protection and when you see them standing in the forest as at Sitka I saw them you see that because in the what's called the southeast that's two weeks in Alaska and I'm a super authority but the first thing you have your head removed because you realize you're in the southeast and the states are outside there's the southeast and there's outside to the north is the arctic circle and then there's the north of the arctic circles, the north slope really racing down

[52:17]

to where and so we've got a circle, we've got a real boundary that's not of that absolute cold and you've got Alaska and then you've got the southeast and you've got outside now that outside thing is the Jungian solution of the center and the circle no matter how you increase that circumference, the picture still has an outside and then the effort to divide it into quarters and so forth is all a series of symmetrical fortresses and balances within this that hold one personality intact and that now the co-existence of these two systems, actually if you're fascinated by psychoanalysis both systems fascinate because they co-exist and yet my hint is that I think they open up to much more if they return let's say to the ground of dream or the ground of psyche and to the

[53:18]

multitudinous which neither one really, I mean they don't have to provide for it but both of them have ways of insuring themselves against the immensity that also we find grounding against. The crowd or the multitude as he names it or here when Sardello is even thinking about mankind at large and we thought about life is if you thought about rescuing, now psychoanalysis is a rescuing operation and Sardello interestingly enough entirely poses once he leaves the early poetry of fantasy which is nature poetry that the mature, the young he's only a young man, right he dies at 30 which is just before, just at the age really that Browning is at when he's writing Sardello I'll venture but I think he's a little younger but it's his picture it's really, Sardello's written in the late 20s and unlike the historical

[54:20]

Sardello who doesn't have a poem from his late 20s that remains and all of whose work belongs to his 40s and 50s that we have this Sardello dies in that very early period and he's faced with, and he poses poetry as an immense task to be the change in men's minds that would make would make it all change and comes up against deeds in the scene of Song of Growl. Well let me go here, return to this passage then when Sardello was picturing what is happening in poetry in its relation now with truth or supplying a whole story just the story or the whole matter of the poem because he reiterates here what Milton in his Erechogenica proposes and that is that we must

[55:22]

know absolute publication of everything and especially pornography and so forth we must know the entire all the mind of mankind because truth in the first place is distributed throughout. Essentially that's what I'm saying when the Eskimo says do you have spirits in you and I say no they're also true so I could also, I said I see them as something like, I see them as a democracy in which they also live so the picture we're arriving at and that's exactly what to be Miltonic in this he speaks of Osiris distributed throughout mankind but also not only now the events means Dante says nothing about the evils and goods of those events but events are the events they are and the truth of an evil or the truth of a good is what Milton addresses himself to and he says we must know the truth so we can't select the truth of goods against the truth of evils because truth is wherever

[56:23]

and it is everywhere the truth of every single thing it is and he says moreover though he's thinking now of ills he says not to know the truth of an ill is to have a secret that is destructive of the total society and of course we return again to the other driving psychoanalysis which is not to know the truth of an ill of your own inner feeling ill not to want to know about it not to want to know who you are and that stance eats away at life. Well okay in this passage though remember he's got he's just come to a sort of a despair of how he so the crowd's really him interior and outside and the minute he might conquer something he sees a much bigger cloud there so he's got that I can't possibly encompass it all then Matthew had called back to his mind how certain bars were thralled buds blasted

[57:27]

but a breath more like perfume than not a staring nose gaze carrying bloom what he remembers if you remember when we read the passage of when he stands forward Alimantua is virtual and his sardella identity this is the one why Dante brings sardella forward and the thrall of the poet here is also the one that we found sardella in in the beginning enthralled by Matthew by Coetho itself by Matthew and enthralled by birds enthralled by stream and enthralled by what we discover to be his mother's tomb in book five the great disclosure is not only that sardella is the child of San Aguero who had been presumed dead but that sardella is

[58:29]

the child of Retrude and that more than that Retrude who is the daughter of Constance and in a matriarchal line brings sardella into being the very emperor that in other words to being in an imperial position so he is king potentially king in poetry and Browning writes Alimantua he fails that Dante has to come forward and be that and he's potentially something beside because the child who crouched beside that fountain with its figures remember contrasted with the fountain in San Aguero's palace where the figures are liberated and moving in a backy kind of dance the circle of women on that fountain which is

[59:29]

actually the tomb of Retrude that's disclosed in this book they are all enthralled in another sense they're slaves but they're slaves sorrowing grieving and they seem to be accused they seem to be virgins accused of some crime virgins accused of losing their virginity and hope the dedicated virgins the festal virgins accused and so the sardella also had long before he had the idea in poetry of redeeming the mankind but there was the earlier one of going each day and moving from from figure to figure on the sarcophagus fountain and somehow consoling and redeeming that figure praying for the figure okay then Mantua called back to his mind how certain

[60:31]

bards are thralled butts blasted but a breath more like perfume than that of staring nose gazed carried blue not always our judgment in poetry and the entire craft of this matter of fact writing the couplets that we are reading not as the one who also gives both the matter both matter but also is the conscience the poet has to perform the measure and meet the demand that these be that way some insane rose that burnt some insane rose that burnt heart out in sweets a spendthrift in the spring no summer greets this is the most marvelous little I love impossible to read straight sentences some there are no commas so it's fine some insane rose that burnt heart out in sweets and then some insane rose that burnt but it is some

[61:32]

insane rose isn't it because but a breath more like perfume some insane rose that burnt heart out in sweets a spendthrift in the spring no summer greets some dularity drunk with trues and wine grown bestial dreaming how become divine marvelously charged wine yet to surmount this obstacle commence with the commencement merits crowning hence must truth be casual truth elicited in sparks so mean at intervals disspread so rarely that is life to no one time of the world story has not truth the prime of truth the very truth which loosed had hurled the world's course right been really in the world content the while with some mean spark by dint of some chance blow

[62:34]

the solitary hint of buried fire which rip earth's breast with stream skyward that the magnificent passage it's been stored up so long and yet it's actually the anxiety of the poet of the poet coming in the late twenties coming to the period that I'm not I wouldn't check out the one my one magic offer for this is Stine's No American Knows what he's doing until he's 28 and and that I harbored again so much when I was 27 hoping that I'd know the next year but my general impression is that I watch when they're between 30 and 35 to see if if both their duties of a period both the sense of what they have to do and what they have to pay and there is a curious there is a curious coexistence of this and this is what Sardello

[63:36]

faces in this Sardello dies in it he gives up he gives up his ghost into it but it all comes forward to him what do I have to pay what do I owe and what is it I have to do and he has already set of course a conflict between thought and deed it's curious to me because I think I thought about early although it was not easy at all to do in the 30's what all one needed was a happy bunch of either a vicious little bunch of Stalinists but even a happy little bunch of socialists and then anarchists could turn and tell you you had duties to do in the world. Deeds and you vaguely aware that when you were writing that looked like an act too there's no way to take your pencil and take a piece of paper and start making a poem without acting that's an action when you finish the poem anybody can see it anybody can do it you can pay no attention to it but you've done some and it is not automatic like breathing and so forth

[64:39]

and anybody who's labored on a poem doesn't really think it's not an act and so a lot of energy has gone in there and more than that once it's loose it's a Sardello almost gets that clear in his mind Salenguera interestingly enough when you turn to five you'll find a Salenguera who's been a man of many deeds and a man of war all the way through and is posed throughout the poem of deeds versus act versus thought or fantasy. Actually all those acts added up to nothing because Salenguera had a deep despair. There was no sum to carry on his house and so he's fighting for a house he's fighting for excellent and for the Romanos something that didn't mean anything to him and it turns out that he's a mere general who actually is the one who can act when the ones he's acting for can't but it is a very empty historical bag and he has almost no way of making, he makes on a sudden

[65:40]

impulse he has been given the right to he's been given the insignia of the House of Romano to place on Echelon's son one of Echelon's sons but even that instruction is not clear and he has full right, he was partnered with Echelon and he simply hands it across to Sardello of the House of Romano and hangs it around his neck the insignia and it's in that movement that Palma is able, she had promised never to disclose except to the House of Romano and now she can disclose that that Sardello is son crazy enough plot but I'm thinking right now of Malame's lifelong plan for the book he was going to write and one of the plots he had for the book, I couldn't believe it if you think of Malame, I thought of Malame

[66:40]

as a dreamy kid somewhere but the plot in the dream is that there would be a turn, another one of these wonderful turns in which the oh, in which the poet, who is sort of a troubadour, takes a vow that he will not that if he falls in love he will not eat in his beloved's presence and that leaves him in starvation because he will never leave her and he won't eat in her presence, so in order to perform a suicide, and it gets solved because he eats her I mean, this is Jonathan Dunbar-Malame well, I actually proved a little more than you could do in a poem, but imagine if he launched up and your first approach is how subtle, I mean Malame is so subtle I can hardly grasp what, it's like Robert Brown, you don't know what's going on

[67:40]

here, and then you find out that the shape, no wonder you don't know what's going on there, you'd hardly get out with your face hanging out in front and do what he drops down as a plot Robert, where is this? It's in a thing called Le Livre de Malame because he's in notes left with his massive poem yeah, I'll key you in on that because it's all these plots and plans, and in the plots and plans are numbers throughout and mostly he's planning how many people should be present when he reads particular parts because it's one of the first propositions that the audience is actually the poem remember in this one the audience is the poem we're a funny double-take of the audience that's in here that gets addressed back and forth, but Malame himself, in this same century, he had designed sets of 22, or 22 times 22, and carefully how many chairs would be present, and all of them into numbers that would be reproduced throughout this is exactly like Jungian integration

[68:42]

of the whole situation so it becomes a limited edition begins to really mean something, this is a limited number of people would be in the audience, and they find they're not in the audience because they're the same number of verses as they are people, and the chairs are in a certain order and the next time there'll be another set of people who will also be numbered to the number of lines at one point I had an idea that carried out, was to write a party play in which there were lines for everybody, and everybody had 10 lines and 10 cues that they were to listen for, and when your last cue came up and you gave your last line your exit line there was a cue for your exit line and when the cue came up for your exit line you had to leave the party there'd be no way of telling which you can make up lines in between but if you got a clue, cue, you had to give your next line for that cue and and of course

[69:42]

at the end there would be some people who wouldn't get any exit line, I mean the last people would never get out of there because if you'd left if you'd left before you had arrived and a cue for somebody oh well what are those lines you just read? what? these lines are in book six, and they're lines, I'll re-read them because it's a passage I marked yup, yup, like very fire things like this I marked it's 185 then Mantua called back to his mind how certain bards were thralled butts blasted but a breath more like perfume than not-o'-staring nose-gazed arian bloom some insane rose that burnt hard out in sweets a spendthrift in spring no summer grease some dulorete drunk with truth does somebody have a scholarly edition here to explain we don't have to know who this guy is

[70:44]

some dulorete drunk with truth and wine grown bestial dreaming I'll become divine yet to surmount this obstacle commence with a commencement merits crowning hence must truth be casual truth elicited in sparks so mean at intervals dis-spread so rarely that his life at no one time of the world's story has not truth the prime of truth the very truth which had hurled the world's course right been really in the world I think we can remember a spot then why Browning with this strong feeling that's here, this Sordello-Browning feeling that there's no one time at all, not even the commencement but any other time has this truth that was my quarrel with Olsen who always had the idea that first things must have a lot of power that's the golden age argument and also I saw this very strongly in this very very strongly

[71:46]

fall and damnation of a man which is enormously enlarged in the Christian religion and within the Catholic Church with its original sin doctrines the first act before Charles always trying to find in history the original sin, it would be Christianity or it would be something else if it was the original sin, if you got back to 1500 I mean it's actually if you get far enough back, you'd be back to this original sin, and then all the rest is wrong, I mean Plato's wrong, everything else is wrong, and you make a great big huge map, and maps all over the world talk about anxieties and there must, well and I would say, my God original sin must be there throughout because if it came up as a subject, I'm going to believe it's there, but it's always everything else there, so your first event I don't see why firstness gets to be what you call first, firstness seems to me throughout, and I then I would point out, as I told you in the very beginning, what am I doing when I go back to Sardella to read this in depth my very first decision in election to poetry was when

[72:49]

in high school we read Robert Browne's dramatic monologues, and I felt, not only is this, is this absolutely what I'm more wonderful, I certainly don't want to be an actor, I thought, this is it, but I also felt there's some disclosure, with not only Robert Browne, and probably more out of D. H. Lawrence in this regard, there was some way in which there was a disclosure about what one was that was more than one knew, and that lay in language, but I also am in a strange way, when I read, here I can read for double it, and and get and as usual crown myself, which I do over and over again, either hitting myself on the head or building a crown for myself, and either dies, but you see that to commence at the commencement but to surmount this obstacle, the obstacle of bestiality and the divine commence with a commencement merits crowning but I am, in going

[73:51]

back to Browne, commencing with commencement in 17th century suite, I went back to the 17th century poems that dominated the period of the 30s, and that we struggled with, or I struggled with, and so forth, and struggled with a good deal of blame because the same political people who were accusing us found us only to be conforming to T. S. Eliot's snow job about Dunne and the metaphysicals, but we wouldn't have gone into the we didn't go into Dunne and the metaphysicals because of that, we went into Dunne, maybe we started reading it, but we continued and went into it because again, it had lure of truth I mean we can go into lots of lies that's the other thing I would say, you don't actually, you go into the multitude of lies you search, because you've got curiosity and Mr. Pound writes big, but the other thing is, absolutely what makes for a very keen selection is how is that you're searching for something, not that's going to be true tomorrow, but right at that

[74:53]

moment, you come across what opens up for you a way through the ice, to use my way off and while we're waiting at the ice in the north this is a reference to my glorious absolute glorious last experience in the Alaskan scene where here we go for another digression, but it's worth it for here, because waiting for the ice I had only two I just did a tour of Alaska and they're all small, they were all small towns, the largest was Juneau which is 20,000, but the rest were 2,000 we have 2,000 people or like Nome we have I think a couple thousand people maybe over the well, okay so I read it at at Ketchikan and the library had gotten in copies of my books people had a very hurried view just before I arrived, what poetry is like and I gear the reading around that

[75:53]

a bit, I mean as kindly as I can telling them it's even which is quite too hard for me to read it's harder for them to keep up with it, they've only just noticed it and then I come to Sitka where I read at Presbyterian Missionary College and think oh my god how am I going to get across, well alright I'll get across and then I begin to realize I've got a little core there and especially there's one absolutely dazzlingly beautiful young Eskimo woman in the front row who is beaming, so I go on that beam and I start and I go right into the current work and all on that beam I feel like I'm in a San Francisco reading and up she comes on Eskimo land with Robert Duncan with the English volumes of Benny DeVoe and Roots and Branches and gets him autographed and then what unfolds is she's connected to Calhoun with this whole they've got a lot of connections that come down to our area

[76:56]

but in one that I don't usually associate myself with although I have a peer to Calhoun I think because of the interview on the subject anyway, so they got known and Eskimo certainly knows all the books and beams all the way through alright, I get to Juno poets I find in Juno, none of them have read me before at all, they ask what do you think of Richard Hugo they say, oh I think that Philip Who is the greatest living American poet if I'm going to Africa trying to pretend I was white I couldn't have done a harder job and then up to Haynes where, okay just the same, at Haynes there's some there was an English, poor English teacher up at Haynes who had taken the assignment of taking a correspondence course beginning to read my work

[77:56]

and then I would arrive so I get part of it, to be part of it and so forth and she, well okay, she's listening carefully but it's not the same when I get to Nome I come to my reading and there's a company of about 8 people and I begin to realize gee, I mean, here are 7 bewildered faces and one, so I go on my way up, and when I finish my reading the one, a guy, a poet by the name of David McElroy comes up and says I've read your work for 10 years and so on so on, tomorrow morning I'm a pilot, a bush pilot tomorrow morning, would you be, would you like to come with a group, they're a group of marine biologists who are going to be um taking movies and photographs of whale and and also they send a they have a whole, they drop a line down in the sea so they're also we're recording the whale well

[78:57]

a 3 hour, yes, so there's going to be a 3 hour, the biggest the biggest it's the biggest mass of walrus they've ever seen walrus have been protected for 2 years or so, and all of these mammals were up 200 miles north of Nome up above the Diametes so we're within 25 miles of the Siberian shore, we have seen Siberia, we're cutting back, we ride from the American line across the ice this way around and circle and circle photographing the whales and photographing them so that's what I, that's what my little casual reference to the Nome Sea was multitudes did I see yet and well let me return here to our picture here about, because it becomes quite striking about life's work

[79:59]

and day's work Sardello's miserable gleam was looked for at the moment, he would dash this badge, and all it brought to earth, a badge Torello thus perhaps persuading rest the Kaiser from his purpose would attest his own belief in any case so he wavers, he's going to, the badge he's going to dash is his Romano, that he's Romano and that he should go now, this is that he should be of use in Polamon's plans and so on, whereas to answer to the immediate political situation before he dashes it, however, think once more for it were for were that little truly service I, in the end, no doubt but meantime plain you spy its ultimate effect, but many flaws of vision blur each intervening

[81:01]

cause. So along with this what interests me is how much when I return to this remember it's not this was my ground in Browning, but with some sureness if I had my first clues in the standard dramatic monologues that we read I never went back to them by the time I got to college and so forth, modern set me in another path discoveries of Milton and Elizabethan set me in another path but if this were path at the beginning it eventually, I'm coming closer into its key, and I find hidden here part of the I've been quite strong in my own prose and often in the poem coming forth the idea that has its prime in Milton, the one that we discussed about, not only is truth dispersed, but it's always

[82:02]

the very truth that's there and that we struggle to come to but in this one the flaw in vision, of course the many flaws of vision blur each intervening cause, I can almost come off my references to the crossed eyes they serve me for the double vision that Blake talks about double vision and he emerges as a visionary and he does not have a concept of the flaw in vision I mean, had Blake, he has a humor but had he had a concept of the double flaw in double vision or the quadruple flaw in quadruple vision, we're almost coming close, and hence in this, of lifting certain bounds of what we can imagine, because Blake, having double vision and no concept of the double flaw in double vision sees, he thinks as Titian doesn't see, or Rembrandt doesn't see, so he

[83:04]

can curse the, I mean you cannot believe as Blake curses the chorists but they, as a matter of fact, we know do see that way through a flaw in vision flaws remember the theme all through in the very beginning in Sardella the fault that you said you were thinking of veins and fault lines as well as faults and so forth where we picked it up next time and found it in the bank, our flaw in vision is again, actually I'm defaulting myself here because I've got references to faults in the long poem called An Essay of War, it built one of the major points that fascinated me in that

[84:05]

period was a show of Hapsburg's treasures, and I realized that the crystal pictures that were there, had their real marble marble because of the flaw in the crystal and the flaw in the crystal seemed to me, absolutely in a sense, I wondered how did you how could you get such a sense of the rift and flaw in things in a work so we're back at the question we're back at a question that might be interesting to look at, because we know what has happened, it becomes interesting, what happened to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's reputation? It's clear that because we find out that Browning was fascinated by her before he met her, so it wasn't that she was going to be Mrs. Browning that made her seem a wonder of the world, and it was her poetry that drew him and all accounts of her accounts of her mind.

[85:06]

Chesterton's quite appreciative of her character, that she was in no way broken at all by one of the most fiendishly demented tyrannical fathers ever invented out of space. Brooding over her, he would, he would, what does he say? I mean, Chesterton's one of the wits. Yes, it isn't that he, it isn't, the horror was not that he expected her always to succumb to his irritability, but he expected her also always to succumb to his inability. Yes, one of the marvelous descriptions of what a real tyrant is. As only some of us who were once children, those of you who were never children will never remember this duality, but any of us who were once children, I don't want to coin it,

[86:11]

but the alternatives that are given. But, could it be that in some sense the flaw that runs through Browning is the one that we come up against something, I don't know, was there a possibility of facility, and was it pure superstition that I haven't looked at? There's a larger chance that she simply erased, and one went through to her contemporary, two things that would tell us to look at it, her contemporary reputation in her period, and among the people that, because the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century did not have our way of excluding women, and the, the, didn't have massive arguments against a woman even thinking about the impropriety that a really woman might come up with an animus and so on, that that wasn't there, so they could actually admire

[87:12]

this is the same one that after all, George Eliot is going to dominate that whole century as an intellectual. The other one is Browning's own sense, which I think is a political sense, and her sense of Robert Browning, thinking of him, her sense of that it wouldn't have been marvelous if he could have thought more clearly. Well, I think that his dim thought, we can see that he, that when he came to those lines that I lined and underlined about the work, about that dim, dim was one of those terms, wasn't it? Unobvious, dim, vulgar, a series of things that intensely felt when he was young, and it was grief first and then it was work. It tells us something about the rightness about dim procedures, and then right, how to stay by it if it's dim. I don't mean inventing it. Try inventing a dimness in Bravo. I mean,

[88:12]

every invention's interesting, but if it's dim, then don't bewail that you're working dimly. But it's miserable, gleam, because misery is a term that runs through this whole last book. Mankind's misery and the misery of working dim. Okay, but many flaws of vision were each intervening cause. Were the day's fraction clear as the life's sum of service, now as filled as teams to come with evidence of good, nor too minute a share to buy with evil. No dispute toward fitliest to maintain the wealth's in rule. That makes your life's work, but you have to school your day's work on these nature's circumstance, thus variously, which yet, as each advanced or might impede the wealth rule, must be moved now for the then's sake, hating what you love, loving

[89:13]

old hatreds. Nor if one man bore brand upon temples while his fellow wore the oriole, would it task you to decide, but portion duly out the future by never with the unparcelled present. So, there's a one of the densities in Sordello is that, I've got pages and pages here of noting how he comes up with opposing forces, now and then, crowd, multitude and one, thought, and constantly producing, this is a long one where we go through permutations of of knowledge, some knowledge that gives strength, let's see when we get these terms of strength, the particular almost the use of strength, but there's another that's the

[90:15]

end of the permutation, so they're actually one of the things here is that they are so, it's so dense that these are inner orchestrations become lost, my notes are again, we just read that life's work and day's work and here we have one, the whole work and the minute's work, that haunts book five, just a little passage, yeah, one of man's whole men's, God has conceded two sites to a man, Sordello awake, God has conceded two sites to a man, one of men's whole work, time's completed plan, the other of the minute's work, man's first step to the plan's completeness, what's dispersed, say, hope of that supreme step, but that's very early before we find that it is dim, vulgar, unobvious, and so forth, and it's grief, so the steps don't get to be, but I want to find this

[91:17]

right now, where this theme, oh yes, here's a picture, strength by stress of strength comes of that forehead confit, that's describing, that's describing Salenguera, but then we come, strength by stress of knowledge, knowledge by stress of knowledge, he runs a series of almost as if you're taking a theme, turning it, trying to see what it'll say when the turn comes, although they're thematic and announcements. There's another, 105-107, I certainly want to pick up, which is again the Browning's question, of his own art described here as Sordellos. Okay, let me, it begins with that very one, what is gone except Rome's

[92:23]

airy magnificence, that last step you take first? This is the, we're back in book five, and Sordello has an imagination of reconstructing Rome by turning to the people and the Pope as the people, but Rome, so it comes before the disclosure that he's Romano, and so the Roman Romano has a role here, but this Rome minds Rome, the same one Freud identifies so strongly with and wants to make his trip to Rome with each layer within. What is gone except Rome's airy magnificence, that last step you take first, an evidence you are God. Be man now. That comes, a very decisive inner dialogue here. Let those glances fall, the basis, the beginning step of all, which proves you just a man. Is that gone too? Pity to disconcert one versed as you in fate's ill nature, but

[93:24]

its full extent eludes Sordello even. The veil rents to whom? Is this going back to Browning himself? Does it elude Sordello even? The veil rents, read the black writing. That collective man outstrips the individual. Whitman, this is of course in the forties, Whitman after Darwin, oh no

[93:52]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ