03/24/2022
In The Flow: A Brief Monologue
This episode is a brief monologue by our host, Professor Robert Harrison. Songs in this episode: “Voodoo Child” by Jimi Hendrix “Present Tense” by Radiohead
03/24/2022
In The Flow: A Brief Monologue
This episode is a brief monologue by our host, Professor Robert Harrison. Songs in this episode: “Voodoo Child” by Jimi Hendrix “Present Tense” by Radiohead
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[APPLAUSE]
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This is KZSU.
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[MUSIC PLAYING]
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I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions,
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coming to you from the Stanford campus,
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honor around the spring equinox of the year 2022.
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It's not the most propitious moment in world history
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to say the least, not with that small, evil, feral,
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eyed man in Moscow, lugging his id across the world stage
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while the rest of us watch and disbelief.
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If I could, I would give you all a magic carpet ride
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to the methane sea on the outskirts of infinity.
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But alas, we're stuck here on earth,
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which really would be a beautiful place
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where it not for the psychopaths that have always held us
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hostage to their lunacy.
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However, Victoria and I did not come down
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to the bunker of KZSU today to propose an owed to dejection,
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but to revive the intellectual sanity of entitled opinions
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and to share with you some thoughts about life.
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This is our first salvo after a couple of months of hiatus
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here on entitled opinions, a few brief thoughts about life
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in the face of death.
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The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges often
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wondered whether our reality is something
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that is being dreamed by another entity.
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And who knows?
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Maybe life is the generic thought of primordial matter.
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What kind of thing thinks into being
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the Amazon jungle or thinks up the wild array of ichtheological
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and animal life forms all across the globe,
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many of which seem to emerge from a disordered psyche.
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Our own human species, with its sanguinary history
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and fits of delirium, resembles nothing, if not a bad dream.
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The first thing to note about life
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is that where it exists, nothing comes easy.
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Life's initial struggle to break into existence
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from inanimate matter and to maintain itself
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in existence thereafter is beyond our imagination.
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The sheer determination and tenacity,
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the stubborn will and resilience that allowed life
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to face up to the overwhelming odds that were
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arrayed against it in the earliest stages of its history
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really do boggle the mine.
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Given the enormous suffering that life entails,
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where did that drive and resolve come from?
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It probably came from the overwhelming fury and passion
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of our planet's origins.
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In the beginning was a deep black infernal earth
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with arkuit red cracks where immense,
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fountaining volcanoes broke the Hideo N.
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Arkei and surface.
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Jets of dirty white ash laden steam obscured the globe.
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meteors incessantly bombarded the surface,
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showering shattered rocks and agglomerations
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of magma across the plains.
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Countless volcanic cones grew to heights of many thousands
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of feet, their magma fountains powered
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by the explosive release of steam and other volatiles
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that would eventually, very eventually,
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cool enough to become the Earth's ocean and atmosphere.
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But meanwhile, no trace of oxygen to be found only toxic
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sulphurous compounds, venting steam and noxious hot gases.
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At life, dared stray into being under such conditions
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tell us something about its genesis in shock and trauma.
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It also tells us something about its long or deal
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of acclimatization in the most literal sense of the term.
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It took a very long time not to mention effort and ingenuity
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for primitive life to gradually transform land,
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sea, and air into elements hospitable to life.
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It was thanks to the discreet, yet relentless metabolism
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of microorganisms over untold millions of years
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that an atmosphere, rich with oxygen and carbon dioxide
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slowly formed around the Earth.
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That atmosphere in turn made possible the process
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of photosynthesis, which in turn transformed the planet
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as a whole into a living organism.
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In some, it was life itself that first brought about the conditions
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that favor life on Earth today.
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If Earth has become a thriving garden over time,
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archaic bacteria were the first gardeners.
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The first terraforming agents who generated a biosphere
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fit for complex organisms and the proliferation of species.
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We humans are the belated and mostly ungrateful beneficiaries
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of their heroic labor of domestication.
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And since I've invoked the image of a garden,
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let me quote one of the writers who my Moses' team
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among the 20th century tribes of Scriveners.
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I mean the check author Carl Chapek.
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I may have mentioned Chapek once or twice
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on entitled opinions, or maybe I haven't.
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I don't remember.
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But for the record, I regard him as highly
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as any of the other trustees of this radio program.
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Chapek was in many respects the founder of Modern Check
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Literature, a fantastically rich tradition
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that remains way too much under the radar in my view.
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I'm a big fan of Chapek Literature in general
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and of Carl Chapek in particular.
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And before I quote him, let me mention
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that Chapek was a gardener, both literally and figuratively.
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He cultivated and transformed a wide variety of genres,
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plays, novels, short stories, pamphlets,
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political discositions, newspaper columns,
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and unclassifiable testaments, such as his book,
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The Gardeners Year.
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It's a passage from that short and marvelous book,
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The Gardeners Year, that I'd like to quote from.
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The quote comes from a section where Chapek is reflecting
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on the humus or soil in which gardeners plunge their hands
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as they go about their business of cultivating
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and nurturing plant life.
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In so doing, they discover that soil is in fact a battleground
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where the forces of life confront the merciless resistance
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of the lifeless and inanimate.
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I tell you, to tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory.
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That's a quote.
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To tame a couple of rods of soil is a great victory.
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You probably need to be a gardener
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to fully appreciate that statement.
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It's because gardening is fraught with so many risks
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of failure that its victory is afford a singular satisfaction
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to those who engage in that activity.
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Only by participating in the domestication process that created
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our biosphere in the first place,
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only by witnessing close up the adversities that life
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at its most fundamental level has to deal with.
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Does one come to realize what plant life is up against
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in its struggles to secure a place in the ground we tread upon
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for the most part mindlessly?
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At this late stage in Earth's geological history,
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the ground we walk on is rich and promising,
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but the gardener is someone who knows first hand
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the extreme poverty in which it all began.
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Quoting topic.
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And if you have no appreciation for this strange beauty,
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let fate be still upon you a couple of rods of clay,
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clay like lead,
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squelching and primeval clay
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out of which coldness oozes,
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which yields under the spade like chewing gum,
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which bakes in the sun and gets sour in the shade,
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yield-tempered, unmaliable, greasy,
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and sticky like plasters of pears.
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Slippery like a snake and dry like a brick,
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impermeable like tin and heavy like lead.
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And now smash it with a pickaxe,
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cut it with a spade, break it with a hammer,
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turn it over and labor,
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cursing aloud and lamenting.
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Then you will understand the animosity and callousness
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of dead and sterile matter,
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which ever did defend itself and still does
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against becoming a soil of life.
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And you will realize what a terrible fight
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of life must have undergone,
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inch by inch to take root in the soil of the earth,
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whether that life be called vegetation or man.
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Cultivating is garden plot somewhere in a corner
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of the city of Prague.
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Chapek came to understand intuitively what science
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now knows with relative theoretical certainty,
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namely that the first primitive cells with membranes
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containing RNA occurred within phyllo silicate clay minerals,
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which provided the basic platforms for the formation,
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growth, and division of some of the earliest living cells
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on earth.
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In the beginning, there was clay.
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It was the labor of living organisms,
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fighting every inch of the way that turned it
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into the soil of vital generosity.
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Again, the human gardener is a late comer
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and a late participant in, as well as a beneficiary
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of the chemistry of vitalization that the primitive
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bacteria of an inhuman earth brought about over deep time.
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I don't mean to ascribe care in the human sense
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of primitive microorganisms.
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I would say rather that human care in its self-transending
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character is an expansive projection
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of the intrinsic ecstasy of life.
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What distinguishes life from unliving matter
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is the continuous self-exceeding by which it bursts forth
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from the lifeless and extatically maintains itself
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and being through expenditures that increase rather
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than deplete the reserves of vitality.
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Life is an excess and overflow.
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If I had to offer a definition of it,
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I would call it the self-extricacy of matter.
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That self-extricacy has one defining feature, defiance.
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Life begins in defiance and perpetuates itself in defiance.
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This is as true today as it was back when,
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every living thing suffers the consequences
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of its insolence.
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To quote an axamander, they must pay recompense and penalty
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to one another for their reckless injustice.
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And that goes for you and me, as well.
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Our constant struggle to precariously stand outside
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or just beyond the condition of lifeless matter keeps us
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and everything else that lives in a permanent state of anxiety
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and, yes, even of terror.
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Since entitled opinions as a show devoted to thinking,
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I would like to ask by way of conclusion how thinking
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relates to life.
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Is thinking merely a specialized activity of one life form
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among others on earth, or does nature,
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does matter itself, think?
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Does matter, think life and its species into being?
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When asked certain questions, not because they have answers,
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but because they lead you to the edge of a chasm
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where you can hear something flowing both into
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and out of the abyss below.
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An abyss for which a determined concept is lacking.
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That is the sound of life flowing into thought and thought
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flowing into life.
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85% of our lungs are water after all,
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and 73% of our brains are water, so yes,
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life and thought flow into one another.
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Thinking is something that wells up in me and streams.
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I don't know whether this flow has its source in being or in non-being,
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but it does have a source, and I have to assume it has its estuaries.
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Whatever is alive in me moves along with it.
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If life indeed is the self-extricity of matter,
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the flow of thought is one of the forms it takes.
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To modify very slightly the epitaph on the tombstone of
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the beet-poet Gregory Corso in Rome,
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thought is life, it flows through the death of me endlessly,
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like a river unafraid of becoming the sea.
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I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions. Thanks for listening.
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