06/05/2020
Dead Voices
This week we offer a recording of a talk that was originally given by professor Robert Harrison in 2014, for the Stanford lecture series “Memory and the Arts”. Topics of discussion include: cultural memory, the enigma of beginnings, and special reference to Dylan Thomas' play “Under Milk Wood”.
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[Music]
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This is your host Robert Harrison alongside Victoria Molo for entitled opinions.
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As the studios of KZSU continue their shutdown,
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entitled opinions, continues to find ways to keep its flickering flame alive.
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Today we're dipping into our reserves to offer you a show about dead voices,
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memory, and the enigma of beginnings. It's the recording of a talk I gave in 2014
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for a Stanford lecture series called Memory and the Arts. The director Rush Rem had invited
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me to speak about cultural memory with special reference to the Dylan Thomas Play under Milkwood,
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a reading of which was performed a few days after my lecture. We don't have a recording of the
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reading, but here are the thoughts I offered my audience on that occasion. Enjoy.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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Good evening. My name is Rush Rem and it's my pleasure as the Artistic Director of Stanford
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Summer Theater to welcome you tonight to the inauguration of our memory play festival.
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A collaboration between Stanford Summer Theater, the Continuing Studies program and Stanford's
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Institute for Creativity in the Arts. I want to thank Charlie Youngkerman, who is the Dean of Continuing
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Studies and also is Dean Mazuti, the Public Events Coordinator for CSP, whose vision and support
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have made this evening and the festival possible. Over the next few months we will be presenting a
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series of plays dealing with memory, nostalgia, personal recollection, conflicting accounts of the past,
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poetic memory, historical remembrance, and, if you're as old as me, it's shadow, historical amnesia,
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and what we might call archetypal cultural memory. There's information about the season in
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a handout that you perhaps were given and if not you can pick it up outside. But I wanted to just
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announce the one event that is upcoming and that is Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood, which is a
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masterful recollection of life in a small Welsh town by Dylan Thomas with a splendid professional
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cast. Some of you may know the actors from past summer theater seasons, but Jeffrey Burr,
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K. Gustavo Lewis, Courtney Walsh, Rosie Hallat, Tom Freeland, and others. The show is free,
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it is our spring gift to you, but we do encourage you to make reservations because if you come
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the house may be full and you won't be able to get in. And even information about that,
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and also our production of George Packer's Betrayed, which happens in May, May 20th,
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in Annenberg Auditorium, about Iraqi translators who have been forgotten by the Americans,
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and George will actually be in the audience and answer questions after the show. You may know
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his work from the New Yorker. He wrote the best-selling book, Assassin's Gate. Then we follow with a 13th
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annual, well 13th anniversary season of Stanford Summer Theater, in which we're producing two
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full productions. The first is Harold Pinter's Old Times. You don't know Harold Pinter's work. He's
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won a Nobel Prize for Literature a few years ago, and to play Old Times is a remarkable
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erotic, scintillating excursion into what memory is, and if we are to believe ourselves or anybody
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else who tells us about the past. We follow that with the archetypal cultural memory of edipus,
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in this case, a version by Seneca, in the Great English poet Ted Hughes' translation,
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an amazing piece of writing like nothing I know, and an event the events for Stanford
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Summer Theater in the summer will take place in July and August. In addition to that, there are
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the continuing studies course on memory, continuing studies symposium, and a free film series.
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We're extremely fortunate tonight to have Robert Harrison inaugurate our memory play festival.
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Robert Poe Harrison holds the Rossina Parati chair of Italian Literature, and I believe he currently
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chairs the Division of French and Italian, and in my view, most importantly, I guess. I think he
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is the most valuable humanist at this university. Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of
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Bay of Future, and examination of Dante's La Vite in Newover, was published by Johns Hopkins University
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Press in 1988, and later translated into Japanese. His next book, Forest, The Shadow of Civilization
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published in 1992 by the University of Chicago, appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian,
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and German, and then later was translated into Japanese and Korean. The Dominion of the Dead
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published in 2003, also by the University of Chicago Press, deals with a relationship that the living
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maintained with the dead, and that we also maintained with the earth, the humus underneath our
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humanity, out of which we come and to which we return. Since translated into German, French,
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and Italian, the Dominion of the Dead made a great impact on me personally, and it had much to do
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with the idea of the memory play festival. Professor Harrison's recent book, Gardens and Essay on the
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Human Condition appeared in 2008, and I encourage you to read it for Harrison combines wide reading,
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poetic imagination, and deep understanding of the link between ourselves and the world we inhabit.
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In addition to his books, Robert hosts a one of its kind radio show entitled "Dependence on KZSU,"
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the show features of hour-long conversations with scholars, writers, and scientists,
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and artists, and via internet and podcasts as developed in international audience.
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Moreover, Robert is also the founder and lead guitarist of Glass Wave, a progressive rock band,
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whose songs reinterpret literary characters with intelligence and really great rock music.
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As some of you may have heard for yourselves, last spring in this very auditorium,
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I was happy to be in the audience as we would say a night to remember.
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In the Dominion of the Dead, Robert writes the following,
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"The genuinely modern does not chase after the new. It makes the old new again."
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Perhaps that's what memory does as well. In Dylan Thomas's "Under Milkwood,"
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in George Packer's "But Trade," and Harold Pinter's "Old Times," in Seneca's "Eddipus,"
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and perhaps in all of us, when we are at our bravest or at our best, we make the old new again.
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Please join me in welcoming Robert Harrison, who inaugurates our memory play festival with a talk
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entitled "Speak Memory," "Dead Voices."
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[applause]
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Thank you very much. I can only disappoint after an over-generous introduction like that from Rush.
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And thank you very much, Rush, for the invitation. Thank you all for coming to
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this talk which I deliberately left vague in its title. I would have enough leeway when the time came to
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follow my Itadam as I say in French, my state of soul. I warned Rush that I'm not a Dylan Thomas expert,
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and therefore I would talk really about the theme of memory and try to relate my remarks as much
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as I can to Dylan Thomas. I read a lot of Dylan Thomas in the past few weeks in preparation for tonight,
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and I got completely engrossed in him, so it turns out that I will probably speak a lot more
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about Dylan Thomas than I intended to. But first let me share with you a quandary I have when
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when I was trying to determine how to begin, because the way you begin will often
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pre-determined where you're going to end up, and the very first words of under milkwood
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are to begin at the beginning. And this puts me in a kind of dilemma because I wrote a book
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referenced by Rush called Dominion of the Dead, in which I claim that in so far as we are human,
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we never really have access to beginnings in any substantial sense that to be
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human means to always be the descendant of those who came before, and that there are no first
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men or women, there's no first words, all the words that I will use tonight and that we'll use in our
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discussion period come down to us from those who spoke them before, the dead, if you want to give
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them a name, and insofar as we traffic in this medium we call language, we are in a certain sense
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reanimating dead words or dead voices if you like it. And therefore when Dylan Thomas has to begin at the
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beginning, I find it doubly problematic because I also will reference something a bit further on in
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my talk where I believe that Dylan Thomas doesn't believe that there's a true beginning as such
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we always find ourselves in the middle of the story. And this might have something to do with the
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fact that I began as a Dante scholar and I'm intensely aware of the way the divine comedy which
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wants to tell a totalized story of the soul, the state of the soul after death and integrated to
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the personal biography and autobiography of its author begins right in the middle of the way,
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in the middle of our life's way I find myself in a dark wood and that middle is something that
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I believe Dylan Thomas is one of the most eloquent spokespersons for. Now the idea for this series here
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about memory and the arts I think is a crucial one in the humanities today we can never tire of
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recalling that the nine muses, the muses of literature and the performing arts, their mother was
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memory and even when we tell stories to ourselves about origins and this is something that the Greeks did
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with particular relish, they believed that they were telling stories that began at the beginning
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and I'd like to just begin by referencing something that Plato narrates in at the beginning of the
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time years his dialogue where it's very interesting because at the here it's crity as a character named
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crity as who tells Socrates an old world story that he heard from his grandfather on the day of the
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Apaturia or the registration of youth when crity as was ten years old and his grandfather was over 90
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and the grandfather had heard it in his youth from his father who had heard it in turn from
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Solon the sage the logiverthianian who had heard it from an old priest during his visit to the
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Egyptian city of Says and we in turn hear crity as is the count to Socrates from Plato
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an abbreviated version of which I will now retell so that this river of cultural memory might
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flow on so this is what happened during his visit to say Solon was asked by his Egyptian hosts
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to speak about Greek antiquity and so crity has began to tell his Egyptian hosts about the first
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human being for ronius and about dukaelion and pyra and so forth and then he was promptly interrupted
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by a venerable old priest who declared oh Solon Solon you Greeks are never anything but children
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and there is not an old man among you in mind you are all young and there is no opinion handed
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down among you by ancient tradition nor any science which is hory with age
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and then the priest goes on to explain why the Greeks are so young in mind and spirit or sika
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in their souls and he says that Athens is even more ancient in his founding than the city of
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Says but the Greeks have no memory of its origins due to the annihilation of its former civilizations
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and these annihilations are brought on by what the priest calls periodic declinations of the
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heavenly bodies that unleash a quote great conflagration of things upon the earth
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that's somewhat vague but we have to imagine cataclysm in the form of floods and probably volcanoes
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and it was one of these conflagrations says a priest that destroyed Atlantis an ancient civilization
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of which Solon's Greeks have no memory even though it was their forefathers who thwarted the trans
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oceanic at Atlantean conquest of Europe so this is the part of the time he is where we get the
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story of Atlantis this fabled ancient civilization that actually is told in a way that still has
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people looking for the actual Atlantis somewhere in the Pacific oceans so thanks to the flatness of
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the Nile Delta Egypt manages to weather these cosmic upheavals without fatal consequences whereas
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the mountainous terrain of Greece causes Athens and its neighboring cities to get devastated and washed
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away into the sea by these cataclysmic floods so let me quote the priest whereas in this land in
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Egypt neither then nor at any other time does the water come down from above on the fields
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having always a tendency to come from below for which reason the traditions preserved here
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are the most ancient whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters
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and the other prerequisites of life after the usual interval the stream from heaven like a pestilence
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comes pouring down and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education
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and so you have to begin all over again like children and know nothing of what happened in
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ancient times either among us or among yourselves so I'd like to draw attention to the
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sickness of the priests distinction between Greek youth and let's call it Egyptian senility as
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long as we understand the word senility not in the sense of decrepitude but something that is
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hory with age that has a long age so although the goddess Athena founded Athens 1000 years before
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she founded Says the Egyptians possess an unbroken memory of and maintain a strict continuity with their
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deep past whereas the Greeks keep losing their memory and starting all over again and that's why I
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would venture to say that the symbol of Egyptian senility is the river of Greek youth of volcano
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and in its evocation of the several lost antiquities of Athens because these cataclysms are
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recurrent Plato's myth points I believe to a law of catastrophism that would continue to dominate
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Western civilization for centuries and millennia to come because like the Hellenes Western
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civilization as a whole would subsequent to Plato himself be destined to periodically lose its memory
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it disinherited its past and surrender its achievements to ruin ours is a civilization that for
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some reason cannot hold on to its legacies that falls into dark ages of destitution and oblivion
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and must quote begin all over again like children and know nothing of what happened in ancient times
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it's always astonishes me that the first literary work in Western canon is about the destruction
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and not the foundation of a city destruction of the city of Troy and we know that when Homer was
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writing or when the Homeric tradition of these poems was originating in the dark it was the dark ages
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of Greek times and he was looking back to a lost civilization of the Mycenaeans now and whereas for us
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Homer is the beginning of a civilization that we take to be an hour antiquity it actually begins
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with the loss of a prior act antiquity because the events that are under description in the Homeric
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epics are some 500 years before Homer was writing and I would suggest that today we have the
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privilege of seeing this volcanic process at work up close in technicolor as it were
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as the entire Christian humanist civilization that slowly consolidated itself in the wake of
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Rome's collapse unravels before our eyes it was said of president Garfield late 19th century
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that in moments of boredom or to amuse his friends he would take a pencil in each hand and
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compose sentences in Greek and Latin at the same time and if one considers that as a student
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Thomas Jefferson used to translate the Greek Bible into Latin and vice versa one realizes to
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what extent the heavenly declinations have unleashed their fury upon the American presidency
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it was not so long ago that a university professor in the classroom would typically leave Greek and
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Latin quotes untranslated then he began to provide a translation for the Greek but not for the
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Latin nowadays he or she must tell his students or her students that there was such a thing as the
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Greek and Latin tongues that there was once a place called Athens and so forth shortly the professor
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won't know even that much oh he or she will know it in a way but will not know what to make of it
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and we don't know what to make of something you eventually forget about it
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Aristotle has an interesting version of a similar sort of idea of catastrophism in the
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metaphysics where he Aristotle did not believe in beginnings and he believed in a kind of continuous
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an eternal world but he did believe that there were periodic catastrophes that wiped out the memory
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of the Greek civilizations and he had this teleological view of all things natural as well as
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cultural and he thought that the ultimate purpose of human society was to create the conditions for
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philosophers you know that the few philosophers who would use their minds in the philosophical way
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were the ultimate golden objective and telos of a human society and he says somewhere in the
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metaphysics I believe it's in book 12 that after these sorts of calamities take place flood
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volcanoes and so forth people will lose their memory and then they will retell in the form of myth
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doctrines that the philosophers had themselves articulated philosophically in the prior age
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and this is very interesting because we usually tend to think that myth proceeds philosophy that
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mythos proceeds logos and that the logos then abstracts it Aristotle gives a version where actually
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it's the memory of philosophical logos that the early myths are actually referring to
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and now that I've invoked this word logos I'd like to go from the Greek and Roman
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civilization to the Christian very briefly to talk about how things stand with the concept of beginnings
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and memory there at least invoking the beginning of the gospel of John which famously begins with the
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the verse that in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and in Greek of course it's
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in the beginning was the logos now even if we take it on faith that in the beginning was the logos
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no one really knows what logos meant in the beginning because by the time our words begin to mean
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something they already have a past they already reach us by way of our four mothers and four fathers
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regardless of our dialect we speak with the words of the dead and that in a special sense is how and
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why we speak at all just as humanity begins where there is all ready an ancestor language begins
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where it has already begun and there's a poem in Dylan Thomas's collection
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called from loves first fever to her plague where Dylan Thomas confirms this where he says and from the
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first declension of the flesh I learned man's tongue to twist the shapes of thoughts into the
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stony idiom of the brain to shade and knit anew the patch of words left by the dead
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so I think this is evidence enough that Dylan Thomas was acutely aware that he
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had inherited the very tools of his trade namely words and language from the dead and that his
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vocation as a poet was to make sure that that legacy is reanimated in the voice of the living poet
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and of all the 20th century poets known to me Dylan Thomas is the most orific of poets in the sense
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that he said quintessential the lyrical poet and his poetry works I believe by a magic of
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incantation it really is a poetry that should be heard aloud even much more than just being read
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because it has a magical power in its music that he is the one person if I had to choose one poet
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of the 20th century that I would send down into the underworld to placate the god of the dead
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Pluto and to entreat the powers of the underworld to allow him to bring back his dead wife Ehridysse
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from the realm of the dead it would really be Dylan Thomas because I think that more than anyone
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else he would be able to enchant through the music of his lyrical voice the rocks the animals
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and of course all the dead the way Orpheus in the Greek myth does so in the episode when he actually
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descends into the realm of the dead in order to retrieve his his dead wife he is given permission
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to take her back into the world of the light on one condition of course which is that he never
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looked back at her until they have reached the world but Orpheus being a typical nostalgic poet
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poet is always bound to memory in a way and it's because he's bound to the image and the memory
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of his wife that he undertakes his journey into the underworld in the first place it's beyond him
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to actually not turn around and look and therefore lose his wife Ehridysse for the second time because
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that's what there's a certain way in which the lyric poet is wedded to the afterlife or is sings
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through the inspiration of the dead before I go on to say a few more remarks about Dylan Thomas
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I would like to take the occasion to remark that if he is the quintessentially orific poet who descends
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into the underworld with his liar and in chance beasts and gods alike there is another
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vocation of epic poetry which is equally related to the underworld of the dead and that I believe is
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the epic tradition and I don't believe that it's by chance that the great epics whether we're dealing
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with the Odyssey or the Anirid or Dante's divine comedy that they all have as one of their central
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features a descent of a hero into the underworld to commune with the dead and it's not just the scene
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where the hero or the protagonist goes and is represented as speaking with the dead I believe that
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epic poetry had as its primary purpose in the societies in which it originated to serve as a
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medium of communication or of communion let's say between the living and the dead and I think that
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we must never fail to appreciate the degree to which there was a need that was extremely intense
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among the ancients to hear themselves spoken to by the dead to receive commandments
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from their ancestors to be reassured that they were not abandoned and fore-lorn
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as a society of the living because nothing was quite as nothing would fill them as much
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as much dread as the notion that the connections between the living and the dead were somehow
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severed you know and in those days they did not have recording technologies or video technologies
|
| 00:29:11.120 |
as we enjoy an art day and age where we can actually listen to the dead speak in their own voices
|
| 00:29:18.720 |
at least up until a certain point we can see images of the dead it's a JFK we can hear Martin Luther
|
| 00:29:30.880 |
King into speeches we have the extraordinary and quite unique privilege of hearing the
|
| 00:29:40.960 |
dead in their own voices for the first time now prior to the invention of these recording technologies
|
| 00:29:46.320 |
it was the poets and the poets alone whose voices served as the medium of communion
|
| 00:29:54.640 |
between the living and the dead and it was through their poetry that this converse was maintained
|
| 00:30:07.280 |
so in the beginning was the logos but no one really knows what the logos meant because
|
| 00:30:13.440 |
there's always a prior speaker in this case
|
| 00:30:19.120 |
linguists however tell us that the word logos harkens back to the proto-Indo-European root leg
|
| 00:30:25.040 |
which meant to gather to collect and to bind together or so they gather because like
|
| 00:30:33.120 |
for no one has actually seen or heard this fossil tongue from which all Indo-European languages
|
| 00:30:39.920 |
supposedly derive this is also another fact that we should not fail to be astonished at that
|
| 00:30:50.800 |
all of the languages that belong to the Indo-European family have a proto-language which is a dead
|
| 00:31:00.800 |
language that of which there is only conjectural evidence it survived only in its descendants
|
| 00:31:08.640 |
and to that degree I would say that a truly dead language is one that has no dead language at
|
| 00:31:19.520 |
its core it was one that was never born in the first place hence an artificial language grounded
|
| 00:31:28.080 |
not in the logos of legacy but in a merely formal logic and that it's by constantly retrieving
|
| 00:31:35.760 |
the priority from which they arise that are words retained their capacity to bind,
|
| 00:31:41.680 |
gather, collect and mean that is why we speak of natural languages
|
| 00:31:46.480 |
a language is natural to the degree that its native speakers are born into the generative source
|
| 00:31:53.040 |
from which the saying power of its words ultimately spring and that means that the origin of our
|
| 00:32:00.880 |
words lies not so much behind them that's in them which in turn means that they contain within them
|
| 00:32:07.840 |
humic underworlds where the dead holds sway over the very means of speech
|
| 00:32:19.600 |
and I believe that one of the vocations of poetry in the modern era is an ongoing effort to
|
| 00:32:25.760 |
reanimate the words that have come down to us in that way and to prevent them from degenerating
|
| 00:32:34.480 |
into mere denotative terms and in that regard the poetry of Dylan Thomas I think is emblematic
|
| 00:32:45.040 |
and quintessential when it comes to the way in which words in his poems as well as the play that
|
| 00:32:56.640 |
is under discussion here under milkwood it come alive in a very special way now one
|
| 00:33:11.440 |
other problem that I alluded to earlier that I have what when it comes to to begin at the beginning
|
| 00:33:17.600 |
and how does one begin at the beginning when dealing with Dylan Thomas is the fact that
|
| 00:33:22.720 |
Dylan Thomas throughout his corpus seems to suggest that once you are born
|
| 00:33:40.320 |
you are right in the thick of things in such a way that to talk about a beginning and an end is really to
|
| 00:33:49.440 |
mislead one's conception of where one is because let me read something that he has in his autobiography
|
| 00:33:58.720 |
portrait of the artist as a young dog it's called and he's talking about when he was a young boy
|
| 00:34:07.840 |
playing an imaginary game with a friend when they were playing Indians and he says on my haunches
|
| 00:34:15.120 |
eager and alone casting an ebony shadow with the gores hill jungle swarming the violent impossible
|
| 00:34:21.680 |
birds and fishes leaping hidden under four stem flowers the height of horses in the early evening
|
| 00:34:29.360 |
in a dingle near car marthon my friend Jack Williams invisibly near me I felt all my young
|
| 00:34:37.600 |
body like an excited animal surrounding me the torn knees bent the bumping heart the long heat and
|
| 00:34:44.800 |
depth between the legs the sweat prickling in the hands the tunnels down to the eardrums the
|
| 00:34:51.840 |
little balls of dirt the eyes in the socket the tucked up voice the blood racing the memory around
|
| 00:34:58.560 |
and within flying jumping swimming and waiting to pounce their playing Indians in the evening
|
| 00:35:06.480 |
I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living story and my body was my adventure and my name
|
| 00:35:16.640 |
that's why I believe dill and tommy is the poet of the middle
|
| 00:35:27.120 |
they're playing Indians in the evening I was aware of me myself in the exact middle of a living
|
| 00:35:33.840 |
story and unlike his near fellow compatriot Samuel Beckett who was convinced that we
|
| 00:35:42.240 |
come at the end of the story and sometimes even beyond the end of the story for dill and tommy's life
|
| 00:35:48.880 |
was always right in the middle of things and this middle was himself and his own body and it's
|
| 00:35:58.640 |
to that extent that I believe that there is a sense in which consciousness body and cosmos
|
| 00:36:07.280 |
and the words which express all three at once constitute what he means by the middle or the center
|
| 00:36:18.480 |
and at this center is me myself he says and he also speaks in the same text about in the safe center of
|
| 00:36:33.040 |
my own identity the familiar world about me like another flesh and it's that body that is around him
|
| 00:36:40.880 |
that is in there is no separation between subject and object in at this state it's a body which is
|
| 00:36:50.080 |
his adventure and I would like to maybe I'd like to read a poem of he is a famous well-known poem
|
| 00:36:57.680 |
which describes the way in which this being in the middle of a story is being in a connection with
|
| 00:37:09.120 |
the entire world and the cosmos in a way that is perhaps pre-linguistic but the job of the poet is to find
|
| 00:37:17.840 |
words to speak about this thing that is ultimately unspeakable and this is a poem the force that
|
| 00:37:24.400 |
through the green fuse drives the flower so the force that through the green fuse drives the
|
| 00:37:31.120 |
flower drives my green age that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer and I am dumb to tell the
|
| 00:37:40.400 |
crooked rows my youth is bent by the same wintry fever the force that drives the water through the
|
| 00:37:48.800 |
rock strives my red blood that drives the mouthing streams turns mine to wax and I am dumb to
|
| 00:37:57.680 |
mouthed under my veins how at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks the hand that
|
| 00:38:05.120 |
whirls the water in the pool stirs the quick sand that ropes the blowing wind hauls my shroud sail
|
| 00:38:12.400 |
and I am dumb to tell the hanging man how of my clay is made the hang man's lime
|
| 00:38:20.800 |
the lips of time leech to the fountain head love drips and gathers but the fallen blood
|
| 00:38:27.600 |
shall calm hersoars and I am dumb to tell a weather's wind how time has ticked a heaven round the stars
|
| 00:38:35.120 |
and I am dumb to tell the lovers tomb how at my sheet goes the same crooked worm
|
| 00:38:42.720 |
this identity of the self the body with creation is one that is perhaps impossible to put into
|
| 00:38:57.280 |
words but it is what the center and the middle of the story is for dill and thomas and
|
| 00:39:04.320 |
from that point of view to ask the question what does dill and thomas mean at the beginning of
|
| 00:39:18.080 |
under milkwood when he begins at play to begin at the beginning what can that possibly mean
|
| 00:39:25.840 |
and this is something that has consternated me a great deal in the last few days
|
| 00:39:31.520 |
troubling my own sense of how to make make this intelligible to me
|
| 00:39:40.480 |
but I think one of the ways I can proceed is maybe by referring to the texts here
|
| 00:39:50.800 |
and suggesting that if there is a beginning in dill and thomas's vision it's a beginning which
|
| 00:40:00.960 |
always brings one back to a source which is the source that one is most immediately in touch with
|
| 00:40:10.480 |
when one is right in the very middle of the story and therefore that we should reconceive the
|
| 00:40:16.400 |
beginning not as something that begins on a linear trajectory from point A that will end up in point Z
|
| 00:40:23.520 |
but rather this kind of recancy beginning that dill and thomas has in mind at the beginning of his
|
| 00:40:30.640 |
played under milkwood is finding oneself again at the very center of things so I don't know how
|
| 00:40:39.760 |
many of you have this play well in mind but let me just read a little bit of the beginning of it
|
| 00:40:48.960 |
for you to begin at the beginning it is spring moonless night in the small town starless and
|
| 00:40:57.200 |
Bible black Bible black is interesting because the Bible does begin with genesis begins with the
|
| 00:41:06.560 |
creation of the world and it begins with the notion that it was all chaos before god actually
|
| 00:41:14.080 |
begins his work of creation Bible black the cobblest streets silent and the hunched quarters
|
| 00:41:21.680 |
and rabbits would limp invisible down to the slow black slow black crow black fishing boat
|
| 00:41:30.400 |
bobbing sea that's beautiful the fishing boat bobbing sea black and slow the sea is another place
|
| 00:41:39.040 |
of beginnings it would seem the houses are blind as moles or blind as captain cat there in the
|
| 00:41:48.400 |
muffled middle by the pump and the town clock the shops in morning the welfare hall in widows
|
| 00:41:56.800 |
weeds and all the people of the lulled and dumb found town are sleeping now
|
| 00:42:02.480 |
then he goes on to say hush the babies are sleeping the farmers of fishers the tradesmen and he
|
| 00:42:10.000 |
gives a whole list of people the characters are 69 of them in this play they're all going to be
|
| 00:42:16.080 |
represented by these rubrics that he enumerates here and then he goes on to say you can hear the
|
| 00:42:23.600 |
do falling and the hushed town breathing only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded
|
| 00:42:31.680 |
town fast and slow asleep and you alone can hear the invisible starfall the darkest before dawn
|
| 00:42:43.200 |
minutely do gay stir of the black dab filled sea where the aruthis a kirlou and skylark
|
| 00:42:51.520 |
zanzibar rean on the rover the cormorant and the star of whales tilt and ride listen
|
| 00:42:57.280 |
it is night moving in the streets the professional salt slow musical wind in coronation street
|
| 00:43:04.720 |
and cockle row it is the grass growing and so forth there is this constant
|
| 00:43:15.920 |
invocation to listen and it goes on time passes listen time passes first remark about listening
|
| 00:43:24.480 |
this dark in which the play begins where the town is all asleep and where you cannot see anything
|
| 00:43:37.440 |
because it's a moonless night and where everything seems blind everything is black and that would
|
| 00:43:46.640 |
seem to be the origin the source it's actually a series of images for what dillantomas conceived of
|
| 00:43:59.520 |
as god i could draw attention to a number of places in his poetry where god is associated with
|
| 00:44:08.640 |
a primordial dark which is a source from which things are born and it is a source which is also as
|
| 00:44:16.720 |
soon as things are born is holds sway over their death and their destruction and they're undoing
|
| 00:44:25.040 |
and i believe that you are you got an intimation of that in the poem i read for you about the the shroud
|
| 00:44:31.440 |
the the worm the death that creation and destruction are inseparable
|
| 00:44:38.720 |
in this phenomenon known as life and the dark or what he calls in one of his poems this kind of
|
| 00:44:48.720 |
eternal town is the dark of a god who is a totality of all that is and that the mode of
|
| 00:45:00.320 |
allowing that darkness to overcome one at the beginning of milkwood is really through the sense of
|
| 00:45:10.640 |
hearing the sense of vision is also comes into play because he'll say if you listen closely enough
|
| 00:45:18.960 |
to this silence you will be able to see things near mine no and hearing a certain kind of hearing as
|
| 00:45:28.400 |
a precondition for a seeing is interesting because well i don't want to get too botanic here but
|
| 00:45:38.560 |
it it does seem to invoke a all-testamental god who communicates with humans through the sense of
|
| 00:45:48.400 |
hearing more than through vision it's a god of commandments a god who one who speaks but is not
|
| 00:45:57.360 |
seen very different from the Greek conception of the divinity where Greek for the Greeks knowledge
|
| 00:46:04.080 |
and the ultimate a news is that of an intuition that sees things and the Greeks privilege vision over
|
| 00:46:12.720 |
hearing for a very simple reason is that in our lived experience of vision we can take in a
|
| 00:46:19.840 |
great plurality of things in one instant no what comes into our field of vision has a multiplicity
|
| 00:46:27.520 |
of coordinates but we don't need we don't not need time in order to synthesize them together hearing
|
| 00:46:34.800 |
is a little bit different whatever we hear takes place in real time and it takes place in a kind
|
| 00:46:46.400 |
of sequential diachronic time hearing is also the most passive of senses certainly vis-a-vis
|
| 00:46:55.760 |
vision you we are free to close our eyes at any time but we cannot really close off our sense of hearing
|
| 00:47:04.960 |
so it's a it's it's where a certain passion is at its most intense and it's where time in its
|
| 00:47:13.920 |
sequentiality is measured because before you can make sense of what i'm going to say in this
|
| 00:47:23.200 |
sentence by the time it's over you're going to have to bear with me in time and get to the end of it
|
| 00:47:29.120 |
very different than what you understand when you see something no so for the narrator of under
|
| 00:47:35.760 |
milk would to begin this play with an invocation to listen hush do you hear time passes listen time
|
| 00:47:48.400 |
passes this kind of listening i think is what puts the narrator in and the i want to say reader but
|
| 00:47:58.240 |
i don't want to say reader because we have to remember that this play began as a radio play
|
| 00:48:03.280 |
that dillantomas was the first version of it came to him under another title early one morning
|
| 00:48:14.800 |
in nineteen forty four forty five it was broadcast on the b_b_c_ and i think that we have to appreciate what
|
| 00:48:21.520 |
the role of hearing meant during those circumstances historically where on the one hand you are listening
|
| 00:48:30.000 |
to a radio and you are actually in touch with that one sense of hearing and anything that you
|
| 00:48:38.400 |
can see in your mind's eye you have to imagine through what it you are hearing in terms of a voice
|
| 00:48:46.320 |
in the medium of the radio
|
| 00:48:50.720 |
the radio was something that people during the war in england
|
| 00:48:54.720 |
were of course always uh... attuned to because it was the source of the news
|
| 00:49:01.200 |
the day it was also through the sense of hearing that uh... you heard
|
| 00:49:07.440 |
the uh...
|
| 00:49:09.680 |
sirens to get into your shelters
|
| 00:49:13.200 |
and hide from the bombs
|
| 00:49:15.200 |
save your life
|
| 00:49:16.720 |
it was through hearing that you heard the airplanes come in it was certainly through hearing that you
|
| 00:49:21.120 |
heard the bombs going off
|
| 00:49:23.680 |
and therefore
|
| 00:49:26.240 |
there is a very rich
|
| 00:49:28.880 |
context
|
| 00:49:30.720 |
for
|
| 00:49:33.840 |
tomah says
|
| 00:49:35.040 |
uh... calling for a particularly heightened sense of hearing
|
| 00:49:39.680 |
when we think of the listener
|
| 00:49:42.000 |
of this play
|
| 00:49:43.360 |
radio play
|
| 00:49:44.960 |
listening to it over the ways during a war
|
| 00:49:48.160 |
where uh...
|
| 00:49:49.960 |
what you heard was taking place in real time
|
| 00:49:56.960 |
as this dark
|
| 00:49:59.360 |
uh... gets thicker
|
| 00:50:01.600 |
through
|
| 00:50:03.080 |
hearing
|
| 00:50:05.400 |
it also liberates uh... the
|
| 00:50:08.000 |
vision of the imagination
|
| 00:50:10.320 |
and
|
| 00:50:14.080 |
tomah says come closer now only you can hear
|
| 00:50:17.600 |
the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black
|
| 00:50:23.120 |
bandage
|
| 00:50:26.040 |
only you can see in the blinded bedrooms the calms and pedicodes over the
|
| 00:50:30.680 |
chairs the jugs and basins the glasses of teeth
|
| 00:50:34.300 |
thou shalt not on the wall and the yellowing dicky bird watching pictures of
|
| 00:50:38.840 |
the dead
|
| 00:50:41.120 |
only you can hear and see behind the eyes of the sleepers
|
| 00:50:44.740 |
the movements and countries and mazes and colors and dismays and rainbows and
|
| 00:50:49.360 |
tunes and wishes
|
| 00:50:50.880 |
and flight and fall and despair
|
| 00:50:53.440 |
and big seas of their dreams
|
| 00:50:56.480 |
from where you are
|
| 00:50:58.280 |
you can hear their dreams
|
| 00:51:03.640 |
and this is what the first part of the play will uh...
|
| 00:51:07.120 |
trace the dreams of the townsfolk in the small wellish town
|
| 00:51:14.000 |
and
|
| 00:51:15.080 |
the first character whose dream we are going to over here
|
| 00:51:19.760 |
is captain cat
|
| 00:51:22.400 |
the retired blind sea captain
|
| 00:51:26.880 |
main character in this play he's blind
|
| 00:51:30.200 |
and he's a sea captain
|
| 00:51:31.680 |
and that puts him
|
| 00:51:33.040 |
close to the very source no
|
| 00:51:37.680 |
source of the sea
|
| 00:51:38.960 |
and this absolute dark
|
| 00:51:40.720 |
which is a uh...
|
| 00:51:42.480 |
a kind of god that
|
| 00:51:44.360 |
tomah
|
| 00:51:45.640 |
can see the best source
|
| 00:51:47.320 |
uh... from which things arise into which they uh...
|
| 00:51:50.280 |
continuously return in death
|
| 00:51:53.040 |
so captain cat the retired blind sea captain asleep in his bunk in the sea
|
| 00:51:57.120 |
shelled
|
| 00:51:58.120 |
ship in bottled
|
| 00:51:59.840 |
ship shape best
|
| 00:52:01.280 |
cabin of scooner house
|
| 00:52:03.440 |
dreams of
|
| 00:52:05.040 |
never such sees as any that swamped the decks of his s_s_ kid welly bellying
|
| 00:52:10.120 |
over the bed clause
|
| 00:52:12.000 |
and jellyfish slippery sucking him down salt deep into the day he dark
|
| 00:52:17.960 |
so in his dream he is sinking into this element of the sea of the dark black
|
| 00:52:24.160 |
but
|
| 00:52:26.200 |
unfathomable sea
|
| 00:52:28.720 |
and we follow with him
|
| 00:52:32.680 |
where the fish
|
| 00:52:34.640 |
combining out
|
| 00:52:36.320 |
and nibble him
|
| 00:52:37.680 |
down to his wishbone
|
| 00:52:39.880 |
and the long drowned
|
| 00:52:42.440 |
nuzzle up to him
|
| 00:52:45.560 |
and here in that moment is where
|
| 00:52:48.360 |
we have the first dialogue
|
| 00:52:51.000 |
but it's on a dialogue between two people
|
| 00:52:53.040 |
it's a dialogue
|
| 00:52:55.520 |
all the drowned
|
| 00:52:57.920 |
uh...
|
| 00:52:59.240 |
sea fellows
|
| 00:53:02.240 |
captain cat remembers
|
| 00:53:05.400 |
in his sleep
|
| 00:53:08.440 |
remember me captain says the first round
|
| 00:53:13.040 |
you're dancing Williams
|
| 00:53:16.080 |
i lost my step in and tuck it
|
| 00:53:19.400 |
second round do you see me captain
|
| 00:53:21.880 |
the white bone talking
|
| 00:53:25.160 |
i'm tom fred the donkerman
|
| 00:53:27.400 |
we shared the same girl once
|
| 00:53:29.760 |
her name was mrs probert
|
| 00:53:33.440 |
and throughout the play mrs probert is rosy probert is his long uh... lost
|
| 00:53:38.080 |
love
|
| 00:53:38.960 |
that he constantly dreams of uh... she's dead
|
| 00:53:43.000 |
and a woman's voice
|
| 00:53:46.760 |
rosy probert thirty three duck lane come on up boys
|
| 00:53:50.840 |
i'm dead
|
| 00:53:55.040 |
third round hold me captain i'm jonah jarvish come to a bad end
|
| 00:54:00.120 |
very enjoyable
|
| 00:54:02.880 |
fourth round alfred pomeroy jon sea lawyer born in mumbles sung like a
|
| 00:54:07.680 |
linnick crowned you with a flag and tattooed
|
| 00:54:10.440 |
with mermaids thirst like a dredger died of blisters
|
| 00:54:15.040 |
first round
|
| 00:54:16.120 |
this skull at your ear hole
|
| 00:54:19.640 |
so do you see captain cat
|
| 00:54:22.360 |
in the water and you see these things floating up to
|
| 00:54:25.880 |
this skull at your ear hole is
|
| 00:54:28.840 |
fifth round curvy bevin tell my auntie it was me that palm the or moly
|
| 00:54:33.840 |
clock
|
| 00:54:36.360 |
captain cat eye-eye curly second round tell my missus no my never
|
| 00:54:41.840 |
third round i never done what she said i never
|
| 00:54:44.880 |
fourth round yes they did fifth round and who brings coconuts and
|
| 00:54:49.040 |
shawls and pairs to my gwen now first round how is it above second round is
|
| 00:54:54.200 |
their rama and lava bread
|
| 00:54:56.280 |
third round bosoms and robin's fourth round
|
| 00:54:59.280 |
concertina's
|
| 00:55:01.080 |
uh... first round fighting an onion second round and sparrows and daisies and so on
|
| 00:55:05.680 |
and so forth and at at the end of this captain cat says oh my dead
|
| 00:55:10.240 |
dears
|
| 00:55:14.080 |
and then the narrator takes over from where you are you can hear
|
| 00:55:17.880 |
in cocco row in the spring moonless night miss price and then we move on to
|
| 00:55:21.720 |
another dreamer
|
| 00:55:22.840 |
and another dreamer and another dreamer and we have as i've mentioned before
|
| 00:55:25.760 |
sixteen nine characters in all
|
| 00:55:27.960 |
and uh...
|
| 00:55:29.320 |
i think the most enchanting part of the of the play for me is
|
| 00:55:32.600 |
the overhearing of these dreams many of them uh...
|
| 00:55:35.560 |
uh... have having to do with the relations between the living in the dead
|
| 00:55:39.480 |
and the voices of the dead that are speaking
|
| 00:55:41.960 |
in the minds of the sleepers whose
|
| 00:55:46.200 |
voices are presumably heard by a poet
|
| 00:55:49.400 |
uh... who is the only one who is awake
|
| 00:55:52.800 |
at this pre-don hour
|
| 00:55:54.680 |
uh... in this little town
|
| 00:55:57.560 |
where
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| 00:55:59.360 |
if you're in touch
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| 00:56:00.800 |
in close touch enough
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| 00:56:03.040 |
with the uh...
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| 00:56:08.560 |
the primordial source
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| 00:56:11.640 |
you do hear this
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| 00:56:13.040 |
ongoing
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| 00:56:14.480 |
converse between the living in the dead
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| 00:56:18.800 |
so uh...
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| 00:56:22.480 |
i would like to conclude by reading a poem which i believe
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| 00:56:26.120 |
uh... i never had read it this way it's one of my favorite dillentama's
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| 00:56:29.720 |
poems is and death shall have no dominion
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| 00:56:32.920 |
and uh...
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| 00:56:34.200 |
i never realized
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| 00:56:35.680 |
to what extent it is actually uh... very sympathetic with
|
| 00:56:39.680 |
this
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| 00:56:40.680 |
beginning of under milkwood
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| 00:56:42.360 |
that i've just read for you were it has to do with
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| 00:56:45.280 |
captain cat in the drowned uh... see fairs
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| 00:56:48.800 |
but it does seem like this is a poem that captain cat himself
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| 00:56:53.920 |
could have uh...
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| 00:56:55.720 |
been the one to write
|
| 00:56:57.000 |
in so far as it
|
| 00:56:58.280 |
does seem to
|
| 00:57:01.280 |
refer to
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| 00:57:02.560 |
those who died at sea
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| 00:57:04.800 |
in this primordial element
|
| 00:57:07.160 |
uh...
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| 00:57:15.280 |
and death shall have no dominion
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| 00:57:26.320 |
dead men naked
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| 00:57:28.440 |
they shall be one with the man in the wind and the west moon
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| 00:57:33.560 |
when their bones are picked clean in the clean bones gone they shall have
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| 00:57:37.440 |
stars at elbow and foot
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| 00:57:40.160 |
though they go mad they shall be sane
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| 00:57:43.080 |
though they sink through the sea
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| 00:57:45.160 |
they shall rise again
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| 00:57:47.080 |
though lovers be lost lost love shall not
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| 00:57:50.400 |
and death shall have no dominion
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| 00:57:53.720 |
and death shall have no dominion under the windings of the sea they lying
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| 00:57:57.640 |
long shall not die windily
|
| 00:58:00.760 |
twisting on racks when sinews give way strapped to a wheel yet they shall
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| 00:58:05.200 |
not break
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| 00:58:06.560 |
faith in their hands shall snap into and the unicorn evils run them through
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| 00:58:11.800 |
split all ends up
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| 00:58:13.280 |
they shan't crack
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| 00:58:14.960 |
and death shall have no dominion
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| 00:58:18.000 |
and death shall have no dominion no more may gulls cry at their ears or
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| 00:58:23.160 |
waves break loud on the seashores
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| 00:58:25.720 |
where blue a flower
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| 00:58:27.560 |
may a flower no more lift its head to the blows of the rain
|
| 00:58:31.560 |
though they be mad and dead as nails heads of the characters hammer through
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| 00:58:36.160 |
daisies
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| 00:58:37.160 |
break in the sun
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| 00:58:38.640 |
still the sun breaks down
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| 00:58:40.800 |
and death shall have no dominion
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| 00:58:45.480 |
very happy to
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| 00:58:46.760 |
entertain your questions now because i
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| 00:58:49.800 |
believe that we can
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| 00:58:51.640 |
go in any direction from this poem and from everything that uh...
|
| 00:58:55.320 |
i tried to lay out in terms of
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| 00:58:57.880 |
beginnings and ends and
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| 00:58:59.720 |
middles
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| 00:59:00.600 |
in dolan tomah thank you
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| 00:59:02.320 |
[applause]
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| 00:59:09.320 |
(upbeat music)
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| 00:59:11.900 |
(upbeat music)
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| 00:59:14.480 |
(upbeat music)
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| 00:59:17.060 |
(upbeat music)
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| 00:59:19.640 |
♪♪
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| 00:59:30.500 |
♪♪
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| 00:59:39.960 |
♪♪
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| 00:59:49.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:00:00.960 |
♪♪
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♪♪
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| 01:00:52.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:01:03.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:01:13.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:01:24.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:01:34.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:01:45.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:01:55.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:02:06.960 |
♪♪
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♪♪
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| 01:02:27.960 |
♪♪
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♪♪
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♪♪
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| 01:02:58.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:03:09.960 |
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♪♪
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| 01:04:01.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:04:12.960 |
♪♪
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| 01:04:33.960 |
[BLANK_AUDIO]
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