06/25/2018
A tribute to summer
In this final episode of the season, our host Robert Harrison reflects on summer, the seasons, and the poetry of life on planet Earth.
06/25/2018
A tribute to summer
In this final episode of the season, our host Robert Harrison reflects on summer, the seasons, and the poetry of life on planet Earth.
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[Music]
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Greetings and salutations to all you friends of entitled opinions,
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Vittori Amollo and I are in the studio of KZSU for the last time this season,
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before our program goes on hiatus for a few months.
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As many of you know, summer marks the beginning of our hibernation period,
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but before we go down under, I thought I would honor a request from our very good friend, Andrea
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Nightingale, who besieged me to end this season with some thoughts of my own,
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since she felt that I have been holding back on them somewhat this season.
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And you know me, I was educated at the school of the Dolce Chistilinova, a coterie of poets who
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called themselves the Cavallieri Damore, or Knights of Love, to whom our comrade Dante belonged,
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and among these Vittori, when a lady asks the Knight of Blajas, "Don nami Praga, a lady requests of me,
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is the title of Guido Cavacantes most famous poem."
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And since Andrea gave me permission to speak about anything I want, I thought I would take the
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occasion to say something about the summer season, that's upon us. We're recording the show
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on or around the summer solstice, and I want to think a little bit aloud with you about what is
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a summer solstice and draw some of the cosmic consequences of what we take for granted on a daily basis.
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Now, I don't need to tell you that the summer solstice is when the northern hemisphere
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is in the direct sunlight for longer than any other day of the year.
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It's the time when the sun rises the earliest and is the highest in the sky, and it's also the longest
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day of the annual year. And the reason we have a summer solstice, as well as a winter solstice,
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is because the earth does not spin upright. It actually leans 23.3 degrees or 23.5 degrees
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on its tilted axis, and that obliquity, believe it or not, is probably responsible for the fact that
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there is life on this planet. Holy contingent and accidental for sure. So let's think about this for a
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minute. A planetary body can have any amount of tilt. There are some, I think, Mars, for example.
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It's at Mars or no, it's Mercury. The planet Mercury has a tilt of 0.03 degrees, so it hardly
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tilts at all, while Uranus leads, you know, slouches at about 82.23 degrees. And it seems that these two
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extremes make life quite uninhabitable on either of those planets.
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Certainly when a planet that had no tilts like Mercury wouldn't have seasons, but not only that,
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it would be so cold at the poles of the planet that carbon dioxide would be pulled from the
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atmosphere or the sky, and this would cause the planet to lose its precious greenhouse gas so
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that liquid water could never form. And if liquid water could never form, it's highly unlikely that life
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would ever arise. If you take the other example of a planet that spins on its side, it's not impossible
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that life could arise, but certainly you would have a bizarre situation where for six months out of
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the year, if it's rotating at our rate, it would be blazing hot, and the other six months would be
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placed, you know, frigidly cold. So astronomers tell us that the optimal tilt runs from about 10 to 35
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degrees, and our Earth is kind of like in the middle of that sweet spot, and it enables not only
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the seasons to rotate as we're used to, but it also allows for life to arise in a way that might not
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be possible under other conditions. We know that the tilt of the Earth is an accidental contingent
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phenomenon. When Dante, our friend Dante, whom I mentioned already, has a canto in his padadizo,
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canto 10 of the padadizo, where he asks his reader to raise his and her eyes up to that point in
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the sky where the celestial equator intersects with the ecliptic, and there that point which he
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took to be this moment of the the not the summer solstice, but rather the spring equinox and the
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autumn equinox, there are two points in the year when the intersection occurs. For him,
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there was a way in which that evidenced the grand design of God who had created things in such a way
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that the Earth would have just the right tilt so that we could have a spring summer winter and autumn,
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and that had he not designed that universe in such a way than life on Earth as we know it would not
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occur. I'm going to read you canto 10 just so you can hear the man himself in his own original
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Italian guardando no no suafilio con la moric el uno el a lao trater en al maine des pira
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la primo de en fábile valor de quanto per meno e per loco cajera
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contanto organ a fé que ser non pót des sancagustar del lúi qui chó remira.
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So lift your eyes reader with me to those high wheels, gazed directly at that part where the one
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motion strikes against the other and there begin to look with longing at the master's art,
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which in himself he loved so much that his eye never parts from it.
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He's essentially addressing the same phenomenon that we've been talking about in terms of the
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tilt of the Earth. And when I say there's scientifically shown to be utterly accidental and not part
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of a grand design, we have to bring in another phenomenon into this. And that is our beloved sister
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moon. It seems that billions a few billion years ago,
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a heavenly body, the size of Mars crashed into the Earth and broke away a piece of the Earth that
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then subsequently became the moon. The moon is about a quarter of the size of the Earth.
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And that moon is what is responsible for the tilt or a bliquity of the Earth.
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And it's the gravitational forces between the Earth, the moon and the sun. But especially the moon
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is the gravitational force of the moon that really keeps the Earth's a bliquity at a kind of
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constant degree. And that constancy is what we take for the laws of nature and the unfolding of the
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seasons. Life on Earth owes more to the moon than you might suspect because we're at not
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obviously for those gravitational forces, it wouldn't favor the emergence of life.
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At the same time, we know that it's the tidal phenomenon of the ocean tides that are also caught up
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in the gravitational forces between Earth, moon and sun. And without the tides to create these pools
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in which life first originated according to our best guess, again, we have to thank the moon
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for the fact that it created certain conditions that enabled us to be where we are now here on Earth,
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on a planet that is totally and absolutely alive. So speaking of life and all that it owes both
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to the moon and to the tilt of the Earth and given that the fact that we are coming to you on
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on or around the solstice, let me say a word about life. Actually, a graduate student here at Stanford
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in our department of the DLCL, the Division of Literature, Language and Cultures,
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Pow Guinar, he went around asking a few faculty members from the DLCL to go on video and answer
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one simple question in about five minutes. The question is, what do I think about life?
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What do I think about life? So I sat in and allowed myself to be videotaped for that, but
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let me return to that question because the first thing I think about when I hear that question is,
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does thinking have something to do with life? And I raise this question here on this program because
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you know how committed I am to preserving the space of thought in our own lived worlds.
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So does thinking have something to do with life? Or what form of life
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thinks or better yet? What kind of life form can think about a question like what do I think about
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life? And the mystery here is that life happened once and once only in the whole history of the
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earth. And the initial spark of Genesis was never repeated. And this, despite the fact that the
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tilt of the earth has remained constant for a few billion years and we've had a moon and we've had
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tides and so forth, the actual spark of Genesis happened once and once only. And why is that?
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We live on a planet that is chock full of life for what Stephen J. Gould called a full house,
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a full house of endless organisms and different life forms that have populated the seas, the air,
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the earth, and it all has one common origin. And again, it only happened once. No one has ever been
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able to reproduce that moment of Genesis and no one has any truly definitive or perhaps even probable
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theory of how it all began. What we do know is that the planet was not hospitable to life
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in its early history far, far from it. We also know that the first sparks of life,
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the first primitive cells with membranes containing RNA occurred within common clay minerals,
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which provided the basic platforms for the formation, growth, and division of some of the earliest
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living cells on earth. In the beginning, there was clay. In the beginning, there was clay.
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You find that in Genesis, where the first human was made out of this clay, you find it in the
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Epic of Gilgamesh, you find it in all sorts of world myths. But it is actually scientifically
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true that in the beginning, there was clay and that it was the labor of living organisms fighting
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every inch of the way that turned that clay into humus, into the animate soil that sustains so much
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of the life on this planet. And with your permission, let me quote one of the writers and human beings
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who I most esteem among the moderns. I have in mind the 20th century Czech author, Karl
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Chapek. I don't know if I've ever mentioned him over the last 12 years of this show, but
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Karl Chapek, this Czech author, political activist, and profound Democrat Republican.
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He was in many respects the founder of Modern Czech Literature, which is an incredibly rich tradition
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that has not received anywhere near its proper due. And that's because the Czech Republican
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interwar period when he was writing. And subsequently was never a big powerful populist nation.
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But it's literary tradition in the 20th century is really quite almost incomparable, I would say.
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In any case, Chapek invented or refined a wide variety of genres. He wrote plays, novels,
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short stories, pamphlets, political discuisions, newspaper columns, and some other unclassifiable
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testimonies such as his little book called The Gardeners Year. And it's a passage from that book
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that is about gardening and about the meaning and philosophy of gardening that I'd like to quote
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from, because they're in a discussion about the humus or the soil in which gardeners immerse
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themselves as they go about their business of nurturing plant life. Chapek writes that soil
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is a battleground where the forces of life confront the merciless resistance of the lifeless and
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inanimate. I tell you, he writes, "To tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory."
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And he goes on to declare the following, "If you have no appreciation for this strange beauty,
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let fate be stole upon you a couple of rods of clay, clay like lead,
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squelching, and primeval clay out of which coldness oozes, which yields under the spade like
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chewing gum, which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade, ill-tempered, un-maliable greasy and
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sticky like plasters of Paris, slippery like a snake and dry as a brick impermeable like tin
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and heavy like lead, and now smash it with a pick axe, cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer,
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turn it over and labor, cursing aloud and lamenting. Then you will understand the animosity and
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callousness of dead and sterile matter, which ever did defend itself and still does,
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against becoming a soil of life. And you will realize what a terrible fight life must have
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undergone, inch by inch to take root in the soil of the earth, whether that life be called
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vegetation or man." So cultivating his garden plot somewhere in a corner of the city of Prague,
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Tropic came to understand intuitively what science now knows with theoretical certainly.
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Namely that in the beginning was an earth that aggressively resisted life's colonizing
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adventures, and it took the tremendous self-affirming struggles of life itself to transform the earth,
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see and air into elements hospitable to life. Life itself first brought about the conditions
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that favor life on the planet today. This is the great paradox, and this is the great miracle,
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like I said, it's life itself that actually transformed the earth into a planet favorable for life.
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Because it was thanks to the discrete and relentless metabolism, a primitive bacteria,
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over untold millions of years that allowed an atmosphere rich with oxygen and carbon dioxide
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to slowly form around the earth. That atmosphere in turn made possible the process of photosynthesis,
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which in turn transformed the planet as a whole into a living organism. So if over time
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earth became a thriving garden of sorts, primitive life was the original gardener who worked its
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soil and made it fit for growth. The human gardeners are late-coming participants in,
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as well as the beneficiaries of this primordial chemistry of vitalization.
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Now I don't want to ascribe care in the human sense to primitive organisms,
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I would rather say that care are human care that makes it matter that we are on the earth.
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That makes us gardeners or farmers or educators or cultivators of virtue and so forth.
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That human care in its self-transending character is an expansive projection of the intrinsic
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ecstasy of life. Why do I call it the ecstasy of life? Because what distinguishes life from the
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inanimate matter in which it has its origins is the continuous self-exceeding by which it bursts
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forth from the lifeless and extatically maintains itself in being through expenditures that increase
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rather than deplete the reserves of vitality. Life is an excess, call it, the self-exstacy of matter.
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And in that respect I'm convinced that our thinking minds participate in this excessive surplus
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that allows life to always precariously situate itself just beyond the condition of inanimate matter.
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It is this constant struggle that keeps us and everything else that is alive in a perpetual
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state of anxiety and even terror. That in itself is a thought-provoking matter and who knows maybe it's life
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itself that thinks through us when we think about a question like what do I think about life?
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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[Music]
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I've talked a lot about thinking in this regard but let me also say a word about sentiment and seasonality
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because I we're talking here about the summer and the spirit of the summer and there's
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a certain kind of music to each of the seasons and perhaps even our music owes something to the
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obliquity of the earth's axis and to all these forces that I was speaking about earlier.
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And I don't know why Virginia Woolf comes to mind in this regard. I think it's because
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I'm really very impressed by her book of room of one's own and something in that in the earlier
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pages that book has been kind of coming to my into my ear and it's really a passage in that book
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which is about things coming into the inner ear so that are somehow dependent on or correlated with
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the seasons and not only the seasons and the literal sense but also the seasons of history
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because history too it goes through its springs and summers and falls and so forth. And towards the end of this
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strange book a room of one's own which is about which is this kind of half fictional book about
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giving a lecture at a university called Oxbridge about women in fiction. Virginia Woolf is
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describing a luncheon that she was at with a lot of good food and it's a late October so we're talking
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about a fall season here. And she says if by good luck there had been an ashtray handy in the
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luncheon hall where she was dining with a number of other scholars and hosts and so forth.
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If by good luck there had been an ashtray handy if one had not knocked the ash out of the window
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in default so obviously she was putting her cigarette out the window to knock the ashes. If things
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had been a little different from what they were one would not have seen presumably a cat without a
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tail. The sight of that abrupt and truncated animal paddling softly across the quadrangle
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changed by some fluke of the subconscious intelligence the emotional light for me.
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It was as if someone had let fall a shade perhaps the excellent hawk was relinquishing its hold
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certainly as I watched the manks cat paws in the middle of the lawn as it too questioned the
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universe. Something seemed lacking something seemed different but what was lacking what was
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different I asked myself listening to the talk around me and to that question I had to think myself
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out of the room back into the past before the war indeed and to set my said before my eyes the model
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of another luncheon party held in rooms not very far distant from these but different.
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So let's pause there a moment. She's thinking about another time back in the past before the first
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war war had begun. She's writing this I think in the 1925 so we're talking about seven years after
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the war and that first war war of course had changed the entire mood it had changed the season of
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western history at that moment and she's evoking another luncheon party that would be more like a
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summer luncheon party and those of you who have read to the lighthouse know that that extraordinary
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novel is a summer story about lunchons and dinner parties and this kind of strange summer
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enchantment that takes place in part one of the book before the disasters of the first war war
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that are in the aftermath of that in the second part of the book so there's a number of
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indications that she's going back to a kind of summer season of the spirit so let me continue
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everything was different she says meanwhile the talk went on among the guests who were many and
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young some of this sex some of that it went on swimmingly it went on agreeably freely amusingly
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and as it went on I said it against the background of that other talk and I matched the two together
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and I had no doubt that one was the descendant the legitimate air of the other nothing was changed nothing
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was different save only here I listened with all my ears not entirely to what was being said
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but to the murmur or current behind it yes that was it the change was there
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before the war at a luncheon party like this people would have said precisely the same things
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but they would have sounded different because in those days they were accompanied by a sort of
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humming noise not articulate but musical exciting which changed the value of the words themselves
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could one set that humming noise to words
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perhaps with the help of the poets one could a book lay beside me and opening it I turned casually
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enough to Tennyson and here I found Tennyson that's Lord Alfred Tennyson was singing
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there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my
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dear she is coming my life my fate the red rose cries she is near she is near and the white rose
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weeps she is late the larkspur listens I hear I hear and the lily whispers I wait
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| 00:28:53.100 |
was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war and the women
|
| 00:29:02.780 |
my heart is like a singing bird whose nest is in a water chute my heart is like an apple tree
|
| 00:29:09.420 |
whose bows are bent with thick set fruit my heart is like a rainbow shell that paddles on a halkyon sea
|
| 00:29:17.180 |
my heart is clatter than all these because my love is come to me
|
| 00:29:22.780 |
was that what women hummed at luncheon parties before the war
|
| 00:29:31.740 |
I'm going to continue there was something so ludicrous in thinking of people humming such things
|
| 00:29:37.980 |
even under their breath at luncheon parties before the war that I burst out laughing and had to
|
| 00:29:42.700 |
explain my laughter by pointing at the manks cat who did look a little absurd poor beast without a
|
| 00:29:49.740 |
tail in the middle of the lawn pause and parentheses that cat without a tail seems highly symbolic
|
| 00:29:57.180 |
of something that has been lost between one season and another I would say no was he really
|
| 00:30:03.340 |
born so or had he lost his tail in an accident the tailless cat though some are said to exist
|
| 00:30:11.740 |
in the Isle of Man is rarer than one thinks it is a queer animal quaint rather than beautiful
|
| 00:30:17.580 |
it is strange what a difference a tail makes you know the sort of things one says at a lunch party
|
| 00:30:24.380 |
breaks up and people are finding their coats and hats it is strange she goes on how a scrap of
|
| 00:30:32.860 |
poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road those words
|
| 00:30:40.460 |
there has fallen a splendid tear from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my
|
| 00:30:46.140 |
dear sang in my blood as I stepped quickly along towards headingly and then switching off into
|
| 00:30:53.180 |
the other measure I sang where the waters are turned up by the rear my heart is like a singing bird
|
| 00:31:00.220 |
whose nest is in a water chute my heart is like an apple tree what poets I cried aloud as
|
| 00:31:08.620 |
one does in the dusk what poets they were in a sort of jealousy I suppose for our own age
|
| 00:31:16.860 |
silly and absurd though these comparisons are I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two
|
| 00:31:21.900 |
living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rosetti were then but why I continued moving on
|
| 00:31:29.900 |
towards headingly have we stopped humming under our breath at luncheon parties why has Alfred
|
| 00:31:36.620 |
ceased to sing she is coming my dove my dear why has Christina ceased to respond my heart is
|
| 00:31:44.780 |
glatter than all these because my love has come to me then she goes on to ask shall we lay the
|
| 00:31:52.220 |
blame on the war and the guns of 1914 and it goes on from there into a meandering kind of stream of
|
| 00:32:00.620 |
consciousness narrative that I could spend the next two and a half hours reading aloud to you
|
| 00:32:09.340 |
and that would probably be a welcome sort of strange episode of entitled opinions but I'd like to
|
| 00:32:17.660 |
just kind of wrap up some thoughts here about the humming inarticulate music that one can hear
|
| 00:32:27.420 |
in one's head that corresponds or resonates with or that is in some kind of sintany
|
| 00:32:35.420 |
with a season and how the poems that she chose to invoke in this part of her narrative were
|
| 00:32:47.580 |
clearly summer poems recalling some of the summer scenes of to the lighthouse and let me just
|
| 00:32:57.820 |
since I'm into reading from chapick and virginia wolf I'm just going to read you the whole section
|
| 00:33:05.180 |
of that poem from Alfred Lord Tennyson it's a long poem mod and this is part one and he calls it
|
| 00:33:14.060 |
a monodrama and it's a poem that is profoundly summarized like a sense of summer of the season
|
| 00:33:27.180 |
and it's there to remind us that were it not you know for the tilt in the earth's axis were it not for
|
| 00:33:36.380 |
the fact that the moon keeps the slouch of the earth constant through the millennia and the
|
| 00:33:45.980 |
millions of years if we were not for the fact that life had originated thanks to all these precarious
|
| 00:33:53.500 |
circumstances and accidents that happened once and once only on the planet then we might
|
| 00:34:01.820 |
never know what this kind of cosmic music that resounds in our minds if not our thinking
|
| 00:34:14.460 |
minds and our feeling minds and that has its most immediate sort of manifestation in this kind of
|
| 00:34:21.900 |
poetry summer poetry in this case come into the garden mod for the black bat night has flown come into
|
| 00:34:30.780 |
the garden mod I am here at the gate alone and the wood bind spices are wafted abroad and the
|
| 00:34:38.220 |
musk of the rose is blown for a breeze of morning moves and the planet of love is on high beginning
|
| 00:34:46.140 |
to faint in the light that she loves in a bed of daffodil sky to faint in the night of the sun
|
| 00:34:53.740 |
she loves to faint in his light and to die all night have the roses heard the flute
|
| 00:35:01.100 |
violin bassoon all night has the casement jessamine stirred to the dancers dancing in tune
|
| 00:35:09.980 |
till the silence fell with a waking bird and a hush with the setting moon I said to the lily
|
| 00:35:17.500 |
there is but one with whom she has heart to be gay when will the dancers leave her alone
|
| 00:35:25.340 |
she is weary of dance and play now half to the setting moon are gone and half to the rising day
|
| 00:35:34.140 |
low on the sand and loud on the stone the last wheels echo away I said to the rose the brief night
|
| 00:35:43.500 |
goes in babble and revel and wine oh young lord lover what societies are these for those that
|
| 00:35:52.300 |
will never be thine but mine but mine so I swear to the rose forever and ever mine and the
|
| 00:36:03.980 |
soul of the rose went into my blood as the music clashed in the hall and long by the garden lake I
|
| 00:36:11.820 |
stood for I heard your rivulet fall from the lake to the meadow and on to the wood our wood
|
| 00:36:19.980 |
that is dear than all from the meadow your walks have left so sweet that whenever a march wind
|
| 00:36:27.980 |
size he sets the jewel print of your feet in violets blue as your eyes to the woody hollows in which
|
| 00:36:35.340 |
we meet and the valleys of paradise the slender acacia would not shake one long milk bloom on the tree
|
| 00:36:43.660 |
the white lake blossom fell into the lake as the pimpurnal dewused into the lee but the rose was
|
| 00:36:53.740 |
awake all night for your sake knowing your promise to me the lilies and the roses were all awake
|
| 00:37:01.260 |
they sighed for the dawn and the queen rose of the rosewood garden of girls come hither the
|
| 00:37:09.340 |
dances are done in gloss of satin and glimmer of pearls queen lily and rose in one
|
| 00:37:15.500 |
shine out little head sunning over with curls to the flowers and be their son
|
| 00:37:22.860 |
from the passion flower at the gate she is coming my dove my dear she is coming my life my fate
|
| 00:37:30.940 |
the red rose cries she is near she is near and the white rose weeks she is late the larkspur
|
| 00:37:39.420 |
listens I hear I hear and the lily whispers I wait she is coming my own my sweet word ever so
|
| 00:37:50.540 |
area tread my heart would hear her and beat were at earth in an earthly bed my dust would hear her
|
| 00:37:59.900 |
and beat had I lain for a century dead would start and tremble under her feet and blossom in purple
|
| 00:38:09.180 |
and red as far as I'm concerned if all the wild accidents that gave us a moon and an earth that
|
| 00:38:17.420 |
tilts at twenty three point five degrees and the rise and fall of the sea levels caused by the
|
| 00:38:23.900 |
combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the moon and the sun and the rotation of the
|
| 00:38:29.900 |
earth if all these can create the conditions for the musical hum that tennis and poem transcribes
|
| 00:38:38.060 |
into words it will all have been worthwhile toward the end of his life Samuel Beckett was asked
|
| 00:38:46.700 |
whether any of it was worthwhile his answer precious little of those two words I would ask all of
|
| 00:38:57.180 |
you friends of entitled opinions to think about the word precious even a cat without a tail
|
| 00:39:04.380 |
is precious enough
|
| 00:39:19.660 |
I love you, the best, bettles at all, the rest.
|
| 00:39:46.600 |
I love you, the best, bettles at all, the rest.
|
| 00:40:08.540 |
But I'm mean, in the song, in the end, in the end song.
|
| 00:40:28.540 |
I'm mean, in the song, in the end.
|
| 00:40:56.540 |
In the end, in the end, in the end, in the end.
|
| 00:41:06.540 |
I love you, the best, bettles at all.
|
| 00:41:22.540 |
The rest.
|
| 00:41:37.540 |
[BLANK_AUDIO]
|