07/22/2021
What do Bridges do? With Thomas Harrison
A conversation with Professor Thomas Harrison on the topic of his new book: Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Thomas Harrison is Professor of Italian at UCLA. Outro song: “Bold As Love” by Jimi Hendrix
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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[MUSIC]
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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[MUSIC]
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The reductionists in Congress think they know what infrastructure is, roads, highways, and bridges.
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They also think they know what a bridge is, but that's because they haven't read the book
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that we're going to be discussing on entitled opinions today.
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Of bridges, a poetic and philosophical account by Thomas Harrison,
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brother of yours truly and a frequent guest of this program.
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Open this book can you read about sky bridges, rainbow bridges, supernatural rock bridges,
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underworld bridges, sound bridges, musical bridges, word bridges.
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And more, angel bridges, rope bridges, sword bridges, metaphysical bridges,
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disappointed bridges, and yes, a lot of river bridges, but also sea bridges and man bridges.
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Here's a quote from Comrade Nietzsche, "Man is a rope tied between beast and over man.
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A rope over an abyss, what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal."
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Take note of that, Congressmen and women, if man is a bridge, why not allocate some resources
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to repair the infrastructure of our spiritual and cultural lives.
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Namely, the bridge that human existence always already finds itself on.
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[Music]
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[Music]
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One thing you'll realize if you start thinking seriously about bridges is that whoever and wherever you are,
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you find yourself on some sort of bridge, moving across some sort of expanse or abyss
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between different ontological domains.
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The visible and the invisible, the terrestrial, and the celestial,
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the mystery of birth and the inscutability of death.
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As Nietzsche reminds us, our human crossing does not reach a destination but finds its end
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in every step of the way over a chasm. To be is to span, to traverse, to pass over.
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In that sense, man is a metaphor in the etymological sense of mitta forra from the Greek
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mitta féro to carry over. We are a suspended movement between, between what, who knows, who can say.
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But before I get carried away with my own bridge speculations, let me welcome to the program,
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the author of the book that inspires them. Of bridges was published this past April by
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the University of Chicago Press, author Thomas Harris, and again, Tom, welcome back to entitled
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opinions. Thank you, pleasure to be here. The last time you were with us, it was, I believe, to
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discuss the great albums of 1967 with our friend and fellow band member, Jay Cadus. In fact,
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one of the albums released in 1967 was Jimmy Hendrix's "Axis Boldest Love" and in your book,
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you write that Hendrix's lyrics have a number of terrestrial and spiritual reference to rainbows.
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Let me quote you on that. The seven colors of the song "Boldest Love" are personified as separate
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human emotions that keep me from giving my life to a rainbow like you. The term "Axis"
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designates an all-knowing mystic who provides a bridge between the real and spiritual worlds.
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See end quote. I don't know why I'm starting with Jimmy Hendrix, but I think that what you write in
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that section is directly related to some of the major themes of your whole book. Is that correct to
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say? Well, yeah, no question. I was happy to be able to put Jimmy into this book as a matter of fact,
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twice because I also put him later when I referenced him as a bridge between blacks and whites in the
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rock blues rock scene. He came up for me right at the beginning of the book with these associations
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with the rainbow. You might remember that he titled his band, he had a big band at Woodstock and
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he titled them "The Gypsy Sun and the Rainbows" and in July of 1970, some three months or so before
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dying. He performed a film concert called Rainbow Bridge at a volcano in Maui, which was the
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house of the sun, and therefore the entry point of the gods beyond the abode of this sun on earth.
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Hendrix was always very interested in connecting the life here with the spirit world, which
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sometimes he saw in science fiction terms. And which he associated often with extraterrestrial life.
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Correct. And forces. So that point of encounter, rainbow bridges of volcano and so forth, that
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is a common motif of bridges going all the way back to antiquity I gather. And I would say that
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having read the whole book that the main, let's say, center of gravity for your thinking about bridges is
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one of them is the relationship between the mortal and the terrestrial, the human and the divine.
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In other words, visible and invisible as well, spirit and matter if you like, but two completely
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different ontological realms, whose connections is not the easy kind of interconnectivity that you get
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here in Silicon Valley between the things that belong to the same sort of plane. So what are some
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of the foundational stories on which the whole notion of the bridging of these two realms is
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based? Well, as you, you know, suggesting the rainbows probably their typical bridge and the first time
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it occurs to the human mind, the idea of something that joins two things that are almost infinitely
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separated like the sky in the earth. So all those dualities you're talking about life and death,
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matter and spirit, the rainbow seemed to be a miraculous joining of those two realms. And in the
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skies, of course, when imagined through the stars and other occurrences, the spirits,
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so that all sorts of cultures attribute to the rainbow a communicative function between the
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those who are beyond and presumably responsible for this terrestrial life and us, it becomes the
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messenger, the iris of the Greeks was the goddess of the rainbow on which messages were sent
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down from the gods to us. And Norse mythology has a rainbow, which they call as blue, rainbow of the
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gods or befrost, the shimmering way, on which presumably the gods wrote their horses down daily.
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And then they took up when heroes would die in warfare. They'd take them up through the rainbow
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to Valhalla, the great palace where they would be immortalized and made to find themselves.
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There's the Navajo rainbows, rainbow bridge, for instance, in Utah as an Iraq arch bridge,
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which the Navajo nation sees as the the house of the holy people,
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there where the holy people being the divinities come to earth and commune with with mortals.
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So wherever you look, you'll find the rainbow fulfilling that function, even in the story of
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Noah because it becomes the covenant between God and human. So this connection couldn't be forged
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any other way in a physical world except presumably through this rainbow.
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Going back to the Hendrix album called Access Boldest Love, the notion of the axis is extremely
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important there too, because it's not only in that album, you talk about the Axie Smoothie
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in different sections of the book and it is also another kind of bridging note that Axie Smoothie.
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Yeah, because this axis which really was not anything that somebody sees with their eyes
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would be an axis that goes from the center of the earth all the way through it at the top
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and the bottom. So it goes through the poles from the physical world to the spiritual world,
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around which the whole universe was thought wants to revolve. So that the union, as I say,
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the these metaphysical dualities humans have been trying to unify them since they
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they started to think and so the there's an intuition that there is an axis that unifies everything
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and the bridge becomes one of its fundamental images which carries through into real bridges too
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because you can't really see a bridge without somehow unconsciously reflecting on how it's joining things
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that are naturally separate. And speaking of real bridges, one place where the axis
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Axie Smoothie appears is you say in the Golden Gate here in San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge
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where you say that I'm going to read from the book, the tall reach of the bridges red pylons,
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the word deriving from the Greek word "pule" gate creates a ladder like ascension into the heavens
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often receding invisibly into the clouds. These pylons create the impression of an Axie Smoothie
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joining heaven and earth they are combining with the horizontal axis of the bridges platform
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to overcome a primordial strife between land, water and earth. So there you get this,
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it's true the Golden Gate is at once extremely vertical and horizontal no and it's at the
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creates a cross in that sense. It creates a cross which is an incredible symbol of you know two axes
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and two bridges meeting. Plus the Golden Gate is at the further most extremity of
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the land mass I don't know if it's the biggest the North American continent but it's where the land
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reaches the water so the horizontal bridge unifies land and water but those fantastically tall pylons
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which almost regularly reach into the cloud so you can't even see the tops form this joint unity
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that's really quite sublime. Yeah and you say that there where the great star sinks into the
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water is Greek and near eastern mythology situated the transitional point between life and death
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the turn from the ordinary world to the imaginary lands that's invariably at the western most
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the Hesperides and the western point where the sun goes down that's where the Golden Gate is
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facing there. So that two things about the Golden Gate come to mind one is the extremity and therefore
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it's ideally situated to bridge whatever is on the other side of where we find ourselves.
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And the other is this you know sorry grim statistics of continuous suicides where you have
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a bridge that has a pedestrian walkway that is on the side the spacing the city of San Francisco
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in the Bay of San Francisco and you write that there is some kind of strange attraction to the idea of
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throwing oneself into the water and somehow in that gesture if the hope of overcoming the condition of
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separation, individualization, differentiation that we all embodied life forms you know live with
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and it kind of returned to a primordial oceanic oneness with all of creation and you say that
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it's impossible to account for the spell such a site can cast over those in a condition of spiritual
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turbulence a site alluding to the source of life, slight and the universe beyond and you go on
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to write about these people who jump that it's related for a search for rebirth embedded in the
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word bedlamite which comes from a poem hard crane no the bridge poem the word itself evokes not
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only the famous asylum of bedlam in England but also Bethlehem and the birth of the word made flesh
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to be drowned in order to be born again and so you suggest that there might be a way in which some
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of these people who jump are looking for a rebirth in the Pacific Ocean.
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Well yeah I mean one can only speculate but it's clear that they're choosing death but the point
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at which they're choosing death which is that point in the case of the Golden Gate but by extension
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any bridge over water in a Golden Gate's case it's very clearly the place where the sun sets
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and ancient mythologies always saw the sun as being reborn every day coming up in the east
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and we've always seen life is coming from the waters and returning to the waters often the dead
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you know we're putting canoes and let to go folks downstream and many cemeteries were placed on
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islands over beyond water so so waters the place also purity where you subconsciously you're trying
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to go back to where you came from obviously because this individuated life as you put it
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on earth it didn't prove too well so it's an effacement of individual identity
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with this kind of very sacred mythological symbolic return which other types of suicide don't
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don't have the same way you see right but as you say it's not only the Golden Gate you have a
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whole chart of how many suicides take place on bridges it's quite astonishing you have
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is all over the world not just in the west I think some of the highest rates are in China the Wuhan
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Yangzi River Bridge 1,500 suicides in 1957 2,300 in the year 1968 on well that's when it was
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when the bridge was made yes but since then they've been yeah so bridges you know there's
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something anxiety provoking about a bridge because it's suspended over a castle right exactly
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it there's a way in which you feel you can feel a virtitianist right virtue of being on it and it is
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and I'm persuaded that it figures as it's a primary figure for a human condition which is
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always suspended between one thing and another multi where always on multiple bridges we're at any
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moment in our lives so on the one hand there are these suicide bridges but there's also going back
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now to the Hendrix album and the title Access Bold is Love this idea that love is itself
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a bridging and how many bridges serve as sites for kind of romantic encounters and unions
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well that's right and the link between one and the other that is between the tremendous anxiety the
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almost metaphysical unnaturalness of walking over water on a platform without ground under your
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feet that anxiety which which visits us all in life the connection between that and the bridge is
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the place of love is absolutely logical and the bridge is used as the site of love and all sorts of
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films and all sorts of poems the way the two are linked in at least the way I link them in the
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composition of the book at the beginning chapters two is that there's an inscription attributed to
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Jesus on the Fatep or Seacley which is a city of victory made by the Mughal Emperor back in 15th
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something in which Jesus is attributed the saying life is a bridge and it only lasts a very short
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time don't build any houses on it prepare for the next life that's where it seems to me that
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since we're on a precarious bridge for a short time people are prompted to form unions with each
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other and also of course unions with those who have passed before seem you're as familiar with
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as anyone because you're you know the dominion of the dead the idea that the loved ones have died
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that you're going to die and hopefully might unite with them so the bridge becomes a place of union
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because of the precariousness of the life that it also symbolizes and in fact in in our city where
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we grew up in Rome there's a bridge of Pont de Mirevio which they started the lovers started this
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putting the lock custom of putting locks on the bridge and they were it would got so weighed down that they
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had to start removing them cutting up in these locks night by night but that's where the union of
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the lovers was symbolized right on the bridge now right exactly and that took off and it went to
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the pond design in France and all over the place and I think it's very appropriate because the
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waters are moving and life's moving you can't step in a stream twice so you make a bond of love
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but then ironically you read the press I think that 80% of the lovers who leave the locks on the
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bridge within six months have split up right there's 17 18 year olds you know and so life is a
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stream in which we humans try to make something that that's solid in we try to lock it right
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yeah i could up and the bridge is that way of having the firm the firm surface over the
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the change of the uncertain foundation right so there are all sorts of other bridges that you know
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your book deals with and and I'm particularly interested in the relationship between bridges and
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sound there are actual literal bridges in the sense of the structural bridges architectural
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bridges that do have a sonority you know a deliberate in built sonority right whether they want
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to or not yeah bridges sound because they're played by the wind so they're like harps with their
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cables and all of these narrow fragile structures you know these poles and things which vibrate
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like the strings of guitar so they seem to be ringing type of celestial music if you have an
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ear for that and and there are many sound artists most famous of which is Bill Fontana who
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put microphones on bridges different spots and then sometimes it's just they play naturally sometimes
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they edit the sounds together and they make these sound compositions Bill Fontana has done
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them on the golden gate and mix them with sounds of the natural reserves nearby so you know sound
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sound is always a bridge of sorts and so far as it brings to you what you often cannot see
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and suggests the life of the voice I don't know if you hear a bird chirping or an animal in that voice you
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hear the life of the animal you can't see so the invisibility of the thing that's communicated by
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sound underscores your distance from another creature in a way that sight doesn't you know sight
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you're already unified within the same scene so sound I see that as a bridge too as opposed to sight
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and then I look at organized sound which is the the compositions I'm mentioning but also
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music in the more traditional sense matter fact that chapter which is called musical bridges
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focuses on the blues and tries to claim that music is always a bridge between at least two subject
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activities if not many because there's one performer typically and many audience members
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and the blues because they're enigmatic about how how it can unify different types of people
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because first it was it was black for black audience then it became much embraced by white
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white Englishmen more than white Americans then it came back through this modified British you know
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blues rock next thing you know many waters and John Lee Hooker and all these people
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had a primarily white audience in the US within a few years so it bridged continents and races
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music has that but in music the bridge is also a very technical term so it's not just metaphorical no
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that's right there's a bridge passage yeah typically in composition so there's a bridge passage
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in a composition but there's also the if you take a guitar you have the bridge of the guitar which
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and literally you have to elevate something so that this string is suspended right
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and over an emptiness without which it would not sound right exactly so that's what the real literal bridge
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of the of instruments is all about right which is why they you know architectural bridge
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it's going to be musical whether it wants to be or not because it's going to vibrate like the strings
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and they had an alien harp that the romantic poets used to use as an image for the poet
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they said the poet is played like the alien harp by the wind alone through the inspiration the flowing of
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the wind so yeah wherever you look at bridges even the little wooden structure on the guitar you
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find all sorts of symbolic connotations sure and then of course the going back to the religious
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history cultural history of bridges it's really quite fascinating and you reference here a
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Muslim legend narrated by the evil and reach these Nobel prize winning Serbian authorizing believe his
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Serbian know well he's Serbian crow at he went from one to the other but certainly he's really
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Bosnian to be honest yeah so in terms of the geographic provenance that's just call him Yugoslav
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but he's interesting well first thing let you're reminding me that that region in the Balkans is
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one that you talk about quite extensively because i'm rich for the book of the bridge over the river
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or dream of dream now and so maybe before we go to that legend maybe you can share with us some
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thoughts about what that book and what the dream of river is where is it and what is that bridge
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what's the history of that bridge is so the story that evil andage tells is true which is that
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there was a boy who was abducted by the Ottoman Turks in Bosnia they used to do this
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regularly they used to take boys from their families around h-101 and bring them to
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Constantinople Istanbul and make them janissaries that is they would convert to Islam and they became
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functionaries in the Ottoman Empire so so collove each was his name his
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Mehmet so collume Mehmet in Turkish he became the grand vizier eventually of the Ottoman Empire
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which was the de facto ruler and i think he might have ruled 10 or 20 years but he was very
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important and very enlightened but this being abducted which the story and the
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and the tells of it is very moving because all the mothers are chasing their children who are
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crossed over the Drena river which is a major river in Bosnia, Herzegovina it was so painful to him
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that when he became grand vizier he said i'm going to build a bridge over that river to repair
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the rupture inside my breast which is also the rupture in a sense between Islam of the
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Ottomans and the Christian world across the river you know of those as you say Serbs, Croats the
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ones of Europe so he builds this fantastic bridge at Visigrad's got 11 arches it still stands
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it's built around 1560 perhaps and he hoped that that would help mend the political divisions
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of the Balkans but of course the Balkan you know Balkanization already means to be to divide the
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interests into fragments the Balkans never after the Turks and after World War I especially never
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never did get unified and so those bridges which were originally meant to unite ended up being
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killing zones especially in these wars in the 1990s that unfortunately followed the
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followed Soviet Union and the fall of the and the Yugoslav there are also places of ritual killings and
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hangings no yeah in wartime bridges you might remember Fallujah and the Iraq war where they
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killed I think they strung up four or five Americans but there's a story by Ambrose Beerswear a
|
| 00:27:10.560 |
confederate soldier is hung on a bridge by the Union army in Alabama and these were ritual sites
|
| 00:27:19.600 |
because there were at points these kind of metaphysical points of division and difference right
|
| 00:27:26.400 |
so the bridge is always divisive at the same time that it's it's unifying right and that's
|
| 00:27:32.400 |
that's something to keep in mind because it would be very easy to just assume bridging is
|
| 00:27:37.600 |
about all about connection but bridges also maintain separation at the same time as they create
|
| 00:27:46.240 |
connection otherwise you would have a collapse of diversity into homogeneity you know well yeah
|
| 00:27:52.800 |
exactly I mean the difference in the separation is taken for granted and a bridge doesn't
|
| 00:27:57.520 |
does not homogenize it just allows for limited and even controlled passage from one to the other
|
| 00:28:04.560 |
so it puts them in relation and is dialogical it accepts duality and it feels it has to negotiate
|
| 00:28:12.720 |
duality as opposed to believing that duality doesn't exist or can simply be erased so the whole
|
| 00:28:19.200 |
globalization question comes up in the end of my book in a chapter called bridge disconnection whereby
|
| 00:28:27.280 |
the idea that we can just bridge the whole world and we do with these mega bridges which are 100
|
| 00:28:32.480 |
miles long but they become tentacles of empire whether states like China or you know multinational
|
| 00:28:41.120 |
corporations that are able to get inroads this way so the bridge should not be seen differently
|
| 00:28:48.960 |
from what it is and it respects the difference and keeps them apart so that we negotiate when we
|
| 00:28:56.240 |
want to come together and how good and that's where Andrij I'm just going to read what that myth
|
| 00:29:03.520 |
he said when Anla the merciful and compassionate first created the world the earth would smooth
|
| 00:29:07.760 |
and even as a finally engraved plate this displeased the devil who envied man this gift of god and while
|
| 00:29:14.000 |
the earth was still just as it had come from god's hand damp and soft and as unpaid clay he stole
|
| 00:29:20.160 |
up and scratched the face of god's earth with his nails as much and as deeply as he could and in this
|
| 00:29:26.400 |
act of scratching he creates ravines and he creates rivers and where the rivers flow and that in response
|
| 00:29:34.880 |
god sent down angels to spread their wings over these chasms allowing you Mr. Cross them and live in
|
| 00:29:41.280 |
harmony so I'm quoting Andrij and so men learn from the angels of god how to build bridges
|
| 00:29:47.760 |
though this would be an origin story about the there's something angelic about bridges but as you
|
| 00:29:55.120 |
say there's also this counter tradition where bridges are also demonic and diabolical
|
| 00:30:01.200 |
quite interesting though well that's the duality of the bridge and you're absolutely right they
|
| 00:30:05.760 |
the great effects of love and unification and so on bringing together that undish talks about
|
| 00:30:13.040 |
is very full of pathos and it's certainly what a bridge wants to accomplish but then there are
|
| 00:30:20.320 |
others who see bridges as demonic many bridges in Europe are called the devil's bridge because
|
| 00:30:26.400 |
there's so perilously you know, hoisted over these mountain passes that people are terrified they
|
| 00:30:32.560 |
said it must be the devil who made this bridge and John Milton himself literally
|
| 00:30:37.760 |
it goes out of his way to talk about the first cosmic bridge ever made and it was made by Satan
|
| 00:30:45.120 |
connecting hell to earth because once god created earth that earth was attached to heaven
|
| 00:30:53.040 |
like a pendant on a chain says Milton and it was all harmony and the devil who had been at this point
|
| 00:31:01.360 |
cast into hell was very envious of the situation so he Satan found his way over chaos infinite chaos
|
| 00:31:09.520 |
in the night and he kind of left the tracks that he made at this road and had a bridge that was built
|
| 00:31:18.480 |
from from health there over which he sent his children sin and death to the earth and therefore he
|
| 00:31:29.040 |
interfered with God's order so that bridging is always also a risk that's why a lot of them are
|
| 00:31:36.400 |
associated with you know collapse and death but they're also associated with the potential to be
|
| 00:31:42.320 |
invaded by the other and threatened by immigrants by even wanted immigrants right and that's why
|
| 00:31:49.440 |
the opposite movement is that of building walls yeah so for sure so I began with a quote from
|
| 00:31:59.680 |
Nietzsche there in the intro where Nietzsche was very well aware of the extent to which
|
| 00:32:08.800 |
the church even the church Roman Catholic church is built on a notion of bridging heaven and earth
|
| 00:32:15.760 |
you know he affects Maximus the Pontifex Maximus the maker of bridges is what Pontifex means
|
| 00:32:22.880 |
and it's a name for the Pope no they the supreme the supreme bridge builder because he builds the
|
| 00:32:30.560 |
bridge between earth and heaven right exactly and of course Nietzsche wants to preserve the
|
| 00:32:38.400 |
concept of the bridge the whole dynamic of the bridge but to redefine what the terms of in the literal
|
| 00:32:48.000 |
sense of terminals the terminal ends of the bridge it's not no longer in Nietzsche the earth
|
| 00:32:55.120 |
and heaven but it's a being stretched between a present humanity and a future humanity so how do
|
| 00:33:04.240 |
does Nietzsche horizontalize this history of a more vertical bridge building in the religious tradition
|
| 00:33:13.200 |
that he was attacking well yeah I think he does but you know it's a bit like the golden gate
|
| 00:33:21.520 |
because he has a lot of verticality too he always talks about self overcoming and so he has these
|
| 00:33:27.040 |
images of ascension so there are souschres on the mountain peak and so on it's about being eye
|
| 00:33:32.080 |
over man but if you see life as a bridge which he did or as a Jesus presumably did between point A and
|
| 00:33:41.440 |
point B but one no longer believes in the no ability of point B what's going to happen after life
|
| 00:33:47.360 |
nor do you know where your origin was that's where Nietzsche existentializes the bridge so that
|
| 00:33:54.960 |
life is a bridge but you're over a perilous ravine or body of water you don't know where you've
|
| 00:34:01.440 |
come from you don't know where you're going and you're terrified that you might lose your footing
|
| 00:34:04.880 |
that for him is life in a projectile trajectory towards human goals which are constantly being
|
| 00:34:14.160 |
involved so that man overcomes himself in the overman and then that over man keeps going
|
| 00:34:20.560 |
so that you're right it's a sort of continuous transcendence of humanity but every human being
|
| 00:34:28.400 |
goes through that or should go through that if you follow an each and ethic and it's it's very
|
| 00:34:35.120 |
disconcerting you know so he writes in the gay science the old humanity and animality the collective
|
| 00:34:41.680 |
primeval age and the past of all sentient being continues to meditate love hate and reason in me
|
| 00:34:47.840 |
I have suddenly awoken the midst of this dream and I must dream on in order not to perish
|
| 00:34:54.880 |
just like the sleepwalker must dream on in order not to fall the connectedness of all branches of
|
| 00:35:00.560 |
knowledge is the best means for maintaining the universality of the dreaming and thereby the
|
| 00:35:06.320 |
continuation of the dream so it's almost like being finding yourself reminds me of Emerson actually
|
| 00:35:13.360 |
I'm quite convinced that he had Emerson's essay experience in mind when Emerson says we awake
|
| 00:35:20.960 |
and find ourselves on a stair we don't know how we got there and we find ourselves in a series of
|
| 00:35:26.640 |
which we do not know the extremes and that the oblivion somehow we got into this world and we had to
|
| 00:35:32.560 |
drink a cup of lethé in order to forget and therefore we're in a dream state and we just keep
|
| 00:35:38.240 |
dreaming in order not to fall and this is also related to Nietzsche's experience at Venice a city
|
| 00:35:47.600 |
that he really loved and found to be a city of dreams in many ways certainly a city of music
|
| 00:35:54.000 |
and you reference his his beautiful poem about Venice that he published in H.A.O.M. over included in his book
|
| 00:36:02.720 |
H.O.M. but that's a poem about him being on a bridge in Venice and hearing a song come from afar
|
| 00:36:11.200 |
and it's a response to the gondola song and he asks he sang silently secretly to himself
|
| 00:36:18.640 |
his own gondola song in the invisible realm maybe the unheard realm of the soul and then he asked
|
| 00:36:25.040 |
did anyone hear it a lot of bridging taking place there and he also refers to I don't have the quote
|
| 00:36:34.560 |
underhand about Venice being a manifold of solitude's multiplication of solitude's
|
| 00:36:40.960 |
yeah that are connected you know with all these bridges you know it's so it's like a figure of our
|
| 00:36:46.960 |
human condition where we're separate and yet because we are ontologically separate we do have
|
| 00:36:52.960 |
channels of communication with yeah he says it's an image for future humanity
|
| 00:37:00.640 |
where 100,000 souls are you know together but future humanity and since his self-underbridge
|
| 00:37:08.160 |
a solitary and he hears the song of another of a gondola year and sings a song back the niche
|
| 00:37:14.560 |
himself is always in relation but in in these multiple solitude's which he felt the future of politics
|
| 00:37:25.280 |
needed to make possible that is a collectivity of individuals as opposed to what you called
|
| 00:37:33.280 |
homogenization before where the differences are leveled out so that these solitude's would be
|
| 00:37:39.920 |
bridged and they would be monological in in essence but the monologues would be in dialogue so it's
|
| 00:37:46.800 |
a fantastic sort of parable that he gets from Venice it's got multiple bridges and you can't see
|
| 00:37:53.040 |
much you hear all these single voices so it's quite beautiful if not only individuals I imagine
|
| 00:38:00.880 |
you probably even had a political vision of nations preserving a certain degree of their own
|
| 00:38:07.840 |
you know particularly and diversity but being in relation no of course we're living right in the
|
| 00:38:15.360 |
midst of this whole vault line between you know the the globalists and the and the reactions and
|
| 00:38:22.560 |
the Brexiteers and so forth but I know that this idea of Venice as this collection reminds one of the
|
| 00:38:31.440 |
archipelago no yeah exactly that's and that's the image that Venice is one time mayor two-time mayor
|
| 00:38:40.240 |
Masimo Katshadi the philosopher King if you will use that image of the archipelago as
|
| 00:38:48.560 |
as an image for the union of Europe whereby these different countries would be seen as islands and connected
|
| 00:38:55.280 |
by the sea the sea which in Greek in any case comes from bridge as the pontos and the ponsas the bridge
|
| 00:39:02.320 |
so on the other hand Nietzsche was opposed to the state and he he satirizes the state so I don't
|
| 00:39:09.200 |
know that he he liked the idea of nation states as much as he might have preferred even a more postmodern
|
| 00:39:15.200 |
collectivity right where you know the citizens are individualized and in fact you it's very interesting
|
| 00:39:23.120 |
quote from Nietzsche that you invoke where where the state ceases there the unsuperfluest person
|
| 00:39:33.120 |
begins there the song of necessity begins where the state ceases look there my brothers do you
|
| 00:39:39.920 |
not see them the rainbow and bridges to the more than man you right so the liberation of the self
|
| 00:39:48.400 |
from the state makes that self necessary or unsuperfluest and that individual can be
|
| 00:39:56.240 |
becoming individual as opposed to a conformist right the sheep everyone's the same as everyone else
|
| 00:40:01.280 |
and then you can have bridges and rainbows to the overman or the more than man
|
| 00:40:08.080 |
humanity can get about its business better that way right
|
| 00:40:11.440 |
I'd like to take just a few moments to talk about people living on bridges because that's a
|
| 00:40:19.200 |
there's something paradoxical there's something problematic there no and you have a whole chapter
|
| 00:40:24.480 |
devoted to inhabited bridges almost as if it were a paradox because you're not supposed to live on
|
| 00:40:30.320 |
a bridge no right right so why do you devote so many pages to these bridges that are actually
|
| 00:40:39.680 |
places of human habitation well again I guess I do it because I I see that the terminals of A and B
|
| 00:40:49.280 |
beginning an end I've always been unclear to everybody so at a certain point you say okay well
|
| 00:40:54.400 |
let's make the best of life on this bridge and sure enough people live around rivers and waters
|
| 00:41:00.720 |
and they cross them and then they build on on top of them so you get this paradoxical
|
| 00:41:06.080 |
situation the fixed city on top of the flux and you have these covered bridges
|
| 00:41:13.200 |
Pontevecchio London Bridge was I don't know how many hundreds of people lived on it it was at
|
| 00:41:18.400 |
massive buildings were they on it or under it no they were on it they were on and I have an
|
| 00:41:23.120 |
illustration in the book of London Bridge in 1700s and then people would live under them you know the
|
| 00:41:30.080 |
house the houseless the homeless would take refuge under the bridge so the bridge becomes
|
| 00:41:35.520 |
place of those who are not socially taken care of including prostitutes so the lonely go to
|
| 00:41:44.560 |
bridges some jump off obviously but some hook up with prostitutes many of them live there under
|
| 00:41:50.640 |
and so the bridge has got the sanctifying effect you know for the transients and precarity of life
|
| 00:41:57.600 |
so that's why I I was actually surprised to learn how many bridges are inhabited
|
| 00:42:06.080 |
and only lately they started demolishing them taking off the structures
|
| 00:42:11.440 |
so what just see your last chapter since we're getting to the end of our time so what sort of
|
| 00:42:18.640 |
conclusion do you come to and and if there's something that I mean we've talked a lot about
|
| 00:42:27.120 |
the various existential political and cultural aspects of it but
|
| 00:42:33.520 |
phenomenologically speaking I would expect that the highest ambition of a book of any kind of
|
| 00:42:39.920 |
book is to make you see something very differently after you've read it no so do you see bridges
|
| 00:42:47.680 |
and would you expect your readers to see physical bridges that they would reveal themselves
|
| 00:42:55.120 |
phenomenologically and differently than before I had? Well yeah that's exactly my goal and also
|
| 00:43:03.440 |
to give as many associations to these bridges as possible and also that one sees when normal
|
| 00:43:09.840 |
doesn't think about the lands that are united by a bridge so you look at a bridge you say that's
|
| 00:43:14.480 |
a nice bridge if it's if it is indeed nice but you don't think about the the lands that it
|
| 00:43:19.920 |
unifies the waters that separate the lands the the way life used to be where people in different
|
| 00:43:25.760 |
sides of a river might have very different cultures for that matter sometimes the Buddha and
|
| 00:43:31.520 |
past or some of the rivers as you mentioned in Drena which would separate cultures in Ireland
|
| 00:43:38.560 |
Northern Ireland their stories about Protestants on one side and Catholics on the other so my
|
| 00:43:44.720 |
you're one of my goals I couldn't unify all the meanings and associations of bridges because there's
|
| 00:43:51.040 |
literally hundreds but was to make us mindful of the division and the differences which are
|
| 00:43:58.800 |
precisely what makes life so rich and therefore to appreciate these differences and the way we are in
|
| 00:44:05.680 |
control of connecting them but also how that control can be dangerous if we don't if we're not mindful
|
| 00:44:13.120 |
of what we're doing so we don't want to erase difference on the contrary I would like to see a
|
| 00:44:18.480 |
world where all the differences are preserved and then one can bridge them or one can choose also
|
| 00:44:26.560 |
not to but the bridging is our doing so finally this goes back to the question of style because
|
| 00:44:34.320 |
your book clearly is not a typical academic book that is targeted to a you know specialized audience
|
| 00:44:41.920 |
like a handful of people or at most 100 or 200 you know fellow specialists of of your field but is
|
| 00:44:49.840 |
seems to open itself up to a broader broader leadership inside and outside of the academy
|
| 00:44:58.560 |
and that do you also aspire did you aspire to enact the bridging dynamic in the way that you wrote
|
| 00:45:09.920 |
the book well I did and I even worried that it's not going to have any clearly defined audience at
|
| 00:45:16.320 |
all so that a publisher wouldn't even know how to market it fortunately university Chicago
|
| 00:45:21.920 |
press said they they're going to market it precisely to to general public because it's all over the
|
| 00:45:28.640 |
place both historically from you know many centuries before you know Jesus as well as geographically
|
| 00:45:36.160 |
from from China and Japan to South America so the the readers I'm aware of having read it so far
|
| 00:45:44.480 |
almost all are non-academic and I think despite the fact that it's a little bit demanding they
|
| 00:45:51.280 |
get through it because each of those little stories is interesting in itself and so you get two, three,
|
| 00:45:59.680 |
four pages on one story than another and yet they're unified in the theme that the chapter is
|
| 00:46:05.920 |
focused on so yeah it's a kind of more than it's maybe a more of a labyrinth than a bridge the book
|
| 00:46:15.040 |
or it says there's so many bridges being cast that one likes of them what one will I would
|
| 00:46:22.240 |
define the genre as kaleidoscopic yeah it's a kaleidoscope of bridges and sometimes it can be
|
| 00:46:30.000 |
dizzying because there's so many and and simultaneously one adjacent to the other in very close
|
| 00:46:36.320 |
proximity kaleidoscopic or even psychedelic if you prefer but I think kaleidoscopic is
|
| 00:46:44.400 |
the word that I would I would favor so we're gonna leave our our audience with the Jimmy Hendrix song that
|
| 00:46:51.840 |
we started out referencing namely boldest love from the album axis boldest love is there anything
|
| 00:46:57.120 |
that you would invite them to a paid particular attention to as we play it to end our show
|
| 00:47:03.280 |
and well the last time I looked at it I was struck by the fact that he he personifies each of
|
| 00:47:10.400 |
these seven colors which are unusual colors for that matter not the normal ones that are rainbow
|
| 00:47:14.640 |
purple and yellow and so on and each one of these seems to have an animical that is there's a
|
| 00:47:22.560 |
war going on and these are you know the Mars is an envy and so on so forth and love is not one of
|
| 00:47:31.200 |
them and he says that one can be he wants to be as bold as love but these colors within him
|
| 00:47:37.200 |
which are stopping him from giving himself to presumably this woman he has in mind a rainbow like you
|
| 00:47:43.840 |
yeah he wants to be able to but he has to be as bold of as love as the axis of love so it's as
|
| 00:47:50.000 |
if these colors are are working against that unity that's one reading I don't know I haven't studied it
|
| 00:47:57.520 |
online well as one tends to do nowadays well then we'll just invite every listener to you know a
|
| 00:48:05.680 |
study it themselves and and let it resound you know in that invisible realm that gets bridged every time
|
| 00:48:14.640 |
music you know produces those sounds and to produce a rainbow in them exactly so we've been speaking
|
| 00:48:22.480 |
with Thomas Harris an author of of bridges of poetic and philosophical account here on entitled
|
| 00:48:27.360 |
opinions thanks for listening and here we go with Jimi Hendrix boldest love
|
| 00:48:31.680 |
and this my story shining metallic purple armor green jealousy and weight behind him
|
| 00:48:42.880 |
her fiery green downstairs at the grass the ground you all the life giving wonders take the
|
| 00:48:50.160 |
branded the quietly understand what's happening to the time is the opposite but wonder why the fight is on but the oh
|
| 00:49:03.920 |
the oh just ask the answer is my list so confident he flashes trooked to war and ribbons
|
| 00:49:32.960 |
oh
|
| 00:49:34.960 |
just young for the different
|
| 00:49:37.120 |
but very unsteady for the first go round
|
| 00:49:40.160 |
my yellow in this case is not so mellow
|
| 00:49:44.000 |
in fact i'm trying to say it's fighting like me and all these emotions in mind keep
|
| 00:49:50.080 |
told him it from giving my life to a rainbow like you when i'm a yeah I fall in love
|
| 00:50:09.840 |
oh just ask the answers you know everything yeah yeah
|
| 00:50:26.160 |
[Music]
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| 00:50:50.160 |
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[BLANK_AUDIO]
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