12/17/2020
Robert Harrison on Separation
Songs featured in this episode: “We Used To Know” by Jethro Tull” “We’re Going Wrong” by Cream “Handful of Hair” by Alex Rex “Annabel Lee” by Glass Wave
12/17/2020
Robert Harrison on Separation
Songs featured in this episode: “We Used To Know” by Jethro Tull” “We’re Going Wrong” by Cream “Handful of Hair” by Alex Rex “Annabel Lee” by Glass Wave
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This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions coming to you from our hibernation on the verge of a winter solstice
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in a year that has brought us heavy losses
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of family members, fellow citizens, livelihoods, of community and the public sphere, and much else besides.
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The lucky among us have been segregated from friends, co-workers and relatives,
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while the less fortunate have heard the fading sirens of an ambulance,
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rushing a loved one to an isolated unit in intensive care,
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never to be seen again except maybe in a coffin or an urn of ashes.
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The least we can say is that the year 2020 has seared the feeling of separation into our collective psyche.
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And I for one have happy descended on its way to usher it out into the dark, into the annals of history.
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That said, there's always something sad about a year's end, even a year like this one.
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It reminds us of the remorseless flow of time with its power to tear us away from what we love the most.
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This endless leave taking and fading away of things makes blood mule for the plant that's plowed.
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And as his year of separation runs out on us, it leaves us looking back at what we used to know.
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When I get to feel this way, I can find words to say, I think about the penalty.
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We use the norm, not just winter, turn it be cold, rain to die, get it low.
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We're on the ice, the race was won, but running slowly.
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We're being still in real systems and slowly upstairs, past the dawn.
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That's a verse you may want to inscribe in your heart.
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We ran the race and the race was won by running slowly.
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When you run the race slowly, you take loss as a given and you're less likely to trample over other people's bodies to reach your own shallow grave.
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My topic on this winter solstice is separation and why not start with a 13th century Persian poet,
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Rumi, whose sprawling poem, Masnavi, begins with the song of the read flute.
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Listen to the read, Rumi writes, "How it tells the story of eternal separations."
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And then the read speaks in its own voice. "Ever since they cut me from my read bed,
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men and women have been mown my laments. I want a heart torn with a passion for return,
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so I could describe the pain of my longing." Anything removed from its source
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seeks to return to the time of union with it.
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And that is in the beautiful translation by Aksa Ila's, a long time devotee of entitled opinions by the way.
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And if she weren't so far away and if the studios of KZSU weren't closed down,
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we could maybe get her onto the show to talk about Rumi's theories of cosmic separation and
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reunionsism. Question, what do or would or will we reunite with if and when we could return to the
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origin? It depends on who one asks. An axamander, who is maybe the greatest ancient Greek cosmologist
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and philosopher, unfortunately only one intriguing fragment of his has come down to us. An axamander
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coined a word for what he conceived of as the primal origin that all entities separate from
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when they surge into being, "I paid on the boundless, the unlimited."
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The apion is the R.K. or original principle of everything. When something erupts into existence,
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it breaks away violently and transgresively from an originary matrix. In the only fragment of his
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in his own words at least that remains to us, an axamander declares the following.
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"When things have their origin, there too they must pass away according to necessity,
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for they must pay recompense and penalty to one another for their reckless injustice,
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according to the order of time."
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From this wondrous sentence, we can infer that for an axamander, all things exist in a state of
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errancy, of error, of Hamartia, as the Greeks called it, Hamartia meaning missing the mark,
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going astray. In other words, we veer into existence within a day of hatching ducklings are called
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by their mother to jump from the nest into the water and paddle behind her as best they can.
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Few of them will ever make it to her age.
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Stellar debris accretes to form a planet, which gets bombarded by other bodies so frequently
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that it develops a molten core. And let s recall that the word planet comes from the Greek
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planet to wander. We live on a planet s, a wanderer. Our earth strays through the universe.
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At that universe is our theater of aberration where, according to necessity, entities must pay
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penalty to one another for their defection from the origin. Outside of the sheltering matrix of
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the boundless, everything remains open to contact, impact, violation, and annihilation.
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Adams, asteroids, animals, and whatever else exposes itself to being, knows the error and terror of
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errancy.
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[Music]
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For an axamander, we're always going wrong. We're always in a state of reckless injustice,
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and that is why we, along with whatever else, broke away from the well spring of nothingness,
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must eventually return to the aperon.
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Rumi had a more hopeful notion of what it means to reunite with the origin,
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quoting again from the Maznavi, over earth and air and ocean zone in a new birth I
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dived and flew, I crept and ran, and my whole secret essence I drew within a form that brought
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them all to view, and lo, a man, and then my goal beyond the clouds, beyond the sky,
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in realms where none may change or die, in angel form, and then away beyond the bounds of night and day,
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and life and death unseen, or seen, where all that is have ever been as one and whole.
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This longing for some ultimate reconnection with the one and whole comes in many different versions
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throughout human culture, and it's not only an idle longing, for some people on some occasions it
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actually becomes a lived experience of mystic unity. In a famous letter he wrote a Freud in 1927,
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the Frenchman Romain Hollong referred to what he called an oceanic feeling of belonging to a greater
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boundless whole, a feeling he thought lies behind all mysticism and world religions.
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While Freud did not doubt that it exists, he found this oceanic feeling incomprehensible
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having never himself experienced any such yearning or sentiment. In his perplexity, Freud proceeded
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to reduce it to what he called an enduring primitive ego feeling of oneness with the mother during
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the breastfeeding stage of infancy. Clearly Freud was no mystic, nor was cocaine the right sort of drug
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to induce in him a psychedelic feeling of oneness with an all enveloping transcendence.
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I prefer not to speculate about whether the oceanic feeling has an objective reality.
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Instead, let me share with you an extraordinary first person account that comes from an interview
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that the French philosopher Pierre Adot gave shortly before he died in 2010.
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where he speaks about a transformative experience he underwent in his adolescence. I quote,
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"Night had fallen, the stars were shining in an immense sky, one could still see them at the time.
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I was filled with an anxiety that was both terrifying and delicious, provoked by the sentiment
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of the presence of the world, or of the whole, and of me in that world. I was incapable of formulating
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my experience, but after the fact I felt that it might correspond to questions such as,
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"What am I? Why am I here? What is this world I am in?"
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I experienced a sense of strangeness, of astonishment, of wonder at being there. At the same time,
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I had the sentiment of being immersed in the world, of being a part of it, the world extending
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from the smallest blade of grass to the stars. This world was present to me intensely present.
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Much later, I would discover that this awareness of my immersion in the world,
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this impression of belonging to the whole was what Hormécholá called the oceanic feeling.
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I think I have been a philosopher since that time. I began to perceive the world in a new way,
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the sky, the clouds, the stars fascinated me. This experience considerably influenced my conception
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of philosophy. I have always conceived of philosophy as a transformation of one's perception of the world.
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This heightened sense of immersion Hadoj describes here, brings with it a counter-sentiment of a
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strange man, very bizarre, weird. The awakening creates a tear in the fabric of the everyday self,
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and through that tear the world is overbearing presence, overwhelms the self.
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In the sudden exposure of one's first person singular to the surrounding immensity,
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the oceanic feeling catapults the self into a kind of a strange ecstasy,
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where immersed in immensity it stands weirdly outside of itself and the world around it.
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In her memoirs of an idealist, Malvita von Meisenberg, who was a friend of Nietzsche's,
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describes her own experience of the oceanic feeling in somewhat similar terms, like quote.
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I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling,
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and now again as once before in distant days I was in peril to kneel down,
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this time before the illimitable ocean symbol of the infinite.
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I felt that I prayed as I have never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is,
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to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is,
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to kneel down as one that passes away and to rise up as one imperishable.
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Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world and circling harmony.
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Here too, as in had those case, the oceanic feeling arises in, or maybe we should say it arises from
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the presence of the natural world. Nature after all was there before and will be there after us,
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so it's almost as if the enduring permanence of the setting of earth, heaven, and sea
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is what gives rise to this sense of personal immortality.
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Again, I won't presume to speculate on the objective reality of this subjective feeling of triumph over death.
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I will remark, however, that Malvita von Meisenberg is buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.
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I came across her grave by chance the last time I was there.
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What part of her, the grave, contains is anyone's guess,
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at the very least it contains the part that shares in the organic afterlife of the dead,
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that recomposes in the earth, or to speak with words worth, rolls round in earth's
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diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees.
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Dylan Thomas tells us that death shall have no dominion.
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Under the windings of the sea, they lie long shall not die, windily.
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Though they go mad, they shall be saying, though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again.
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Though lovers be lost, love shall not.
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And yet death too has its own kind of infinity.
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And since we're talking here about feelings of infinity, the most moving testimony I know
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comes from a friend of mine, Kelly Zinkowski, who was a long time night of the entitled
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"Pinience Brigade." And when I mentioned him that I was preparing to do a show on this topic,
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he wrote me the following, I quote, "My own desperate glance with infinity was after my mother died,
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and I had a sense of my heart's imploding into infinite space, and then I had to go to work."
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I had a way for my love to build a man's special shares with each home stone,
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but I kept it when full of air you gave me.
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I'll be for the pain for the earth.
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I've been writing this diary, but hope.
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I have thrown away all our love tokens, the pilgrim bells, the speckled shells,
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the beachcombed stones, but I kept and ate the handful of hair you gave me.
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Alchemy for the Painfully Alone.
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That's a song called a handful of hair from the album Andromida by the band Alex Rex.
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The singer and songwriter, Alex Nielsen, tunes into this show from time to time.
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He's another night of our brooding brigade.
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The lyrics of the song go on to mention, I quote, "that phone call from my father on that April
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day that shattered my London dream."
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I'm assuming, but of course I can't be sure that the call from his father informed him of his
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mother's death, and that because of that call he left London and thereby lost his lover as well
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as his mother. At least that's how I understand the verse that ends this song, which says,
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"I asked you for the time to grieve. You said that it was my decision to leave,
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but to lose you both was too much to bear, left me eating handfuls of hair."
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If nothing else, the song reminds us that separation comes in many modes and guises,
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and that by the time were adults, most of us have navigated the waters of loss and mourning.
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Who has not lost a childhood after all, or a hope, or a dream, we are all veterans of separation.
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It's a condition we share not just with one another, but with all creation.
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Everything is born into separation, including the universe itself.
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In fact, the universe originated in an inconceivable event of separation
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to begin with the separation of being from nothingness. All of a sudden, there was a separate
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this and a separate that, as well as aware and a when for them to take place in.
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Proton's and neutrinos pre-looting the formation of light elements, quarks, and electrons
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flitting into and out of existence, matter and antimatter mutually annihilating one another,
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all within the first millionth of a second after the inaugural now, before which there was nothing,
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and after which there was a universe. Where there is a thing, however atomic or quantistic,
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there is separation. Here is how physics describes for us lay people what took place in the singularity,
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otherwise known as the Big Bang. I quote from Maria Temmings, the origin of the universe,
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"The immediate fractions of a second following the Big Bang, known as the Plank Era,
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are not well understood. From the moment of initial expansion to 10 to minus 43 seconds afterwards,
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cosmologists suspect that the four fundamental forces at work in the universe today,
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strong, weak, electromagnetism, and gravity were combined into a single unified force."
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The Grand Unification Era followed the Plank Era taking place between 10 minus 43 seconds,
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and 10 to the minus 35 seconds. The era began with gravity's separation from the other three forces
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and ended with the separation of the strong force from the Electro-Week force.
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At the beginning of the Electro-Week era, 10 to the minus 35 to 10 to the minus 10 seconds,
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the strong force decoupled from the Electro-Week force, releasing a tremendous amount of energy
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and triggering a sudden rapid expansion known as inflation. As space expanded more rapidly
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than the speed of light, extremely energetic interactions created elementary particles,
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such as photons, gluons, and quarks. The era ended with the separation of Electro-Weekitism
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from the weak force. And so it goes on, the sprawling epic of cosmogenesis that takes place
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between time 0 and 10 to the minus 10 seconds. 10 to the minus 10 seconds means 0.000000001
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of a second. By that time, the four forces had already separated.
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Now I say by that time, but it's 10 minus 10 to the second, or 10 minus 43 of a second,
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a duration that we can comprehend. What quantity of time? And more importantly, what kind of time
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elapsed between time 0 and the beginning of this cosmogony with a splank era,
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atom era, electro-week era, etc. Given that time, as we know it, presumably begins only after
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these immediate fractions of a second following the Big Bang. Nothing in our human experience
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of time bears any relation to the time equations of classical physics or quantum mechanics.
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If there was any primal unity before separation, it did not pertain to space and time.
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I don't have any reason to believe that the American poet Marie Howe listens to the show,
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but just in case she does, I'd like her to know that I do not share her nostalgia for the singularity.
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My allegiance is to the space-yotemporal world of individual and differentiation
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of entities and appearances in some of distance, where there is no distance, there is no world,
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no phenomena, no silken weavings of our afternoons, as while as Stevens puts it.
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That said, I truly admire Marie Howe's poem that goes by the title Singularity After Stephen
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Hawking's. In this poem, she imagines a return to time zero.
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Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?
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So compact nobody needed a bed or food or money. Nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone,
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pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good
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belongs to you, remember, there was no nature, no them, no tests to determine if the elephant
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grieves her calf, or if the coral reef feels pain. Trashed oceans don't speak English or
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Farsi or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean? And before that,
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to when sky was earth and animal was energy and rock was liquid and stars were space and space was
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not at all nothing. Before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness
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can molecules recall it? What once was before anything happened? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb,
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no noun only a tiny, tiny dot brimming with is is is is is. All of everything home.
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Those last three words all everything home speak of this human longing for a source from which
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we feel that we have been distanced or estranged. But what if there is no prior unity of being?
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What if there is no before this awful loneliness of separation? What if there is no is before the is of
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ontological difference? I for one prefer to think of separation as primordial rather than
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exilic since it makes possible relations. It makes possible bonding and makes possible togetherness.
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The first atoms did not separate from molecules. They formed the first molecules precisely because
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in the beginning they were differentiated and divergent. We affiliate in separation. We come together
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in separation. We love in separation. While how runs the story backward to time zero,
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the 19th century French poet on Tuane Vassant at no has left us with a different kind of poem.
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It's called latheri, the leaf, which speaks of our ongoing errandsy as we move in our singular identities
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towards some indeterminate destination. I'll read the French original first.
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to the ateeja de tezeche, pouveho furi de surché ubatui.
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Shuno ci'errir, l'orage a trape le shen, quisilété mo soun c wicked.
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The soun en constanta l'in lose a fear o la que llar, de prisro j'u, m'pre men, de La forea
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ala plan, de la mond tain or valeau.
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Shouveho le valeau, l'vomemen, soun m'prejé, shouveho valeau, valeau, l'valeau, d'orage,
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de la furi de l'orage.
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Detached from your stem, poure desechele l'if, where do you go?
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The l'if responds, "I don't know."
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The storm battered the oak that was my soul support.
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With its incant breath, the zephyr, or north wind, has led me since that day,
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from the forest to the plain, from the mountain to the valley,
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"I go where the wind leads me without complaint or fear.
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I go where all things go, where the rose leaf goes, and the l'orro leaf too."
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We'll never know whether the leaf of the universe once had an oak tree from which it detached.
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All we know is that the same wind that carries this poem's leaf to its final destination,
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carries the year 2020 and every other year to its terminus.
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And it carries us along as well on our journey through the errancy of time.
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I'm Robert Harrison for this special edition of Entitled Opinions.
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Stay well. Peace out.
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