You are currently logged-out. You can log-in or create an account to see more talks, save favorites, and more.
Dreams, Duality, and Poetic Truths
The talk explores concepts of dreams, poetry, and duality through the lens of Zen philosophy and Western thought, particularly focusing on the works of Freud, Jung, and poets like Robert Browning. It discusses the distinctions between imagination and fancy, the complexity of the self, and the struggle of poets to capture profound truths through language. The discussion extensively examines Browning's "Sordello" as an intricate interplay between personal and universal truth, imagination, and the role of the poet in society.
- "Sordello" by Robert Browning: Explored as a work that delves into human duality, imagination versus reality, and the poet's role in understanding collective versus individual experience.
- Freud's Dream Theory: Discussed as a significant framework for understanding dreams' universality and subconscious revelation, albeit incomplete compared to the multiplicity of human experience.
- Jung's Archetypes: Analyzed in contrast to Freud, emphasizing the collective unconscious and the archetypal images that may hinder a deeper understanding of personal spirituality.
- Coleridge's Imagination and Fancy: These concepts are referenced regarding Browning's text to delineate between oneness and multiplicity in human perception and creativity.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetry: Highlighted as an example of unconventional feminine expressions of the time, challenging Victorian norms and exploring deep emotional landscapes.
This summary gives academics a precise understanding of the central themes and references discussed, allowing them to decide on engaging more deeply with the talk in context with their studies on Zen philosophy and Western literary traditions.
AI Suggested Title: Dreams, Duality, and Poetic Truths
Side: 1
Speaker: Robert Duncan
Location: 1 of 3
Additional text: Avery #5250
Side: 2
Speaker: Robert Duncan
Location: 2 of 3
Additional text: Avery #5250
@AI-Vision_v003
Recording is a portion of a longer event.
all a different bite. They just cut down all the timber inside. And so the big deal of selling the timber, they'll sell it to Japan. So well, hardly would get it in between there. And they sell off to the point where they don't even have what they're fixing to Japan. So while everybody's running around with our myths about, I've always pointed out about Indians, since they're the same species we are, I've got great doubts about their eating. So, okay, we get back to, so Jewish, African, and everybody, since they are the same species, we can get back to the spirits at evening and day and find out, we have to reach up to careful. My point about Evening and Day and how do we read a poem with wariness is that we don't get to be the same species, so we watch. And Freud and I won't do the whole trip because, as a matter of fact, it seems to have been the easiest inroad into the things that can't be betrayed about us. the most acceptable, I think, to the entire community that Freud was approaching when he wanted to approach the dream.
[01:08]
Although he found it a great struggle because he was shocked by what he found telling him. And so the sexual approach to the dream, he did see that possibly it was universal. But of course, it proves to be also a whole multitude of possibilities, hopefully from the dreamer But there are other things in the dream, and the poet does not really approach, and certainly Jung doesn't, because archetypes, Jungian would have been stymied when I would, as I would read it, when somebody asked, do you have spirits in you? Because they must mean spirits, not archetypal images, or, because they have a sense of divided soul. And the Eskimo has, to a great degree, these were, of course, men who had, this particular man was quite quite brilliant and successful he he after one uh period in prison when he was released.
[02:10]
He went in as a secretary of company to somebody in the government at a high level. But what happens to him is that if he reaches an emotional crisis, in this case, his wife or girlfriend hitting him, he drinks it. Then he has a passion rage, and a passion rage that makes sense to Indians and Esmots. That's exactly what they did with it. But immediately, involving the law here. And so we went back into the slamming there. OK. But his question had to do with something more interesting than the fashion rage. He said that the reason for his question about spirits did not go in any one of you feel that anger and haughty name. Jealousy also could be spirits, too, in addition to being feelings. And I said, it seemed to me, yes, that my poetry, I mean, while I myself, thinking rationally, would want to do as Europe increasingly does, and that is to name, to dispossess us, ourselves, a feeling that we feel possesses, that it seemed my poetry had no difficulty at all about having a duality, in which you have feelings, but feelings have you.
[03:35]
And because you when I felt propulsion. And the poetry keeps producing spirits for her. Then I said, OK, why are you asking? And he said, well, he said, I have a kind of writing that I don't show at all, and I don't really want to show it myself, because it pours out, and I feel it's not me. So we spent almost an hour talking about what the you and not the you, and how we know. I said, well, things like that happen, I no longer tend to pour writing, let writing pour forth that way, because I'm bold because I'm afraid of having it pour that way. As, for instance, when concrete poetry appeared, and fascinated me, in the area of concrete poetry, or single-word poems, for instance, on the page, that was not clever or wasn't amusing, 95% of it was merely clever music.
[04:36]
Well, the part that is mysterious, and I sat with a blank paper in front of me and found I was afraid, or was pure sound poetry. That's why I think of equations and wonder if it's pure sound poetry. But I can't commit it. I said, well, there's something that I can't commit, but I have a great barrier to. But I have had times when I would have a fever and a headache. and end of my textbook work for it. And sometimes in that, I have found that, like, like, like an afterbirth of something, you know, and, [...] white [...] Thank you.
[06:11]
Thank you. All right. [...] I am happy to be here with you today.
[07:38]
I am happy to be here with you today. I am happy to be here with you today. Thank you for watching. But I found a friend.
[08:55]
A long time ago, a [...] long time ago, The water of the world is strong. The water of the world is strong. The water of the world is strong. Thank you.
[10:34]
What's that? [...] All right. All right. All right. The best way to help them is to ask for help.
[12:49]
Ask for help. [...] We're going to have a party. We're going to have a party. We're going to have a party. We're going to have a party. What?
[13:52]
What? [...] Thank you. Thank you. The whole of the sixth book, Agnes Ordello, has been suddenly projected not only as the
[15:26]
as not only as Salenguera's heir and lost son, another fiction, because it's actually Western history. So this is another necessity of the poem, in which Salenguera is proposed as action straight the three terms come up and and uh and actually his thought there's a two hands with sardella and an early one up i'll just give these lines because you see remember how much i talked about fancy and how strikingly fancy is projected here and the term of imagination not at all so there's air of boulders it's division of fantasy and browning up they're very strong and fancy and it looked to me like beginning the poem like It was a very strong statement for fancy being the ground.
[16:38]
And I think, in a way, I would still keep this, because when I talk about the magic ground, the one the Eskimo and I have our troubles with, do you have spirits? This would be not imagination, but fancy. I mean, it had been relegated to fancy, where imagination has straightened out somewhat. There's a oneness about imagination. Remember, Coleridge's division is that imagination is identical with the mind of God. It's a matter of things with the mind of God, so there's but one. And fancy is multitudinous, and that's our opposition of the multitude. So the question they ask the most after me is, do you have a host of spirits inside you, or are you one? And he says he's not one. And he's not a dualist at all. He says, that's not me, but they are not me. It's a very different statement from it where he is not me. I mean, in Europe, the dualism will come forward repeatedly.
[17:39]
in the Judeo-Christian Islamic religion. But this is... Well, I'm thinking of what Coleridge did with it right now. I wouldn't take Coleridge's imagination with the thinking of the mind of God, but when that was introduced into poetry and Browning chooses fancies, There's a kind of portrait thing. If we went back to my picture of imagination, it would still be the faculty to image something, and the way in which we resolve and find out how things belong together is to imagine them belonging together in various ways. So I would have no trouble at all, but my answer to the Eskimo was, yes, I often experience things I don't want to be me, but I view them all as members of some kind of unity, so the work within me is to have them all there.
[18:43]
And I said, Parker, it's very clear to me. The best of me is anger and rage and so forth, and it is to come to the place where anger and rage speak truly. I said, but luck can also not speak truly, and we feel pretty rotten when that happens, that piety cannot speak, and goodness can sometimes speak to the heavens. So you can't tell what it is you're going to not be you. You can't divide it into a set of vices and virtues, and you're not looking for the virtues and vices, but you're looking for how they all fit together, and that is the imagination. And the confidence in the back of that is, so I said, there is a difference, but I ended up talking with this man, however, I didn't dream he was different. I said, I understand why you want lots of it, not fear. But that you is really not the one that I think the poem's going for. I think the poem's going for a bigger you that they tried to imagine in which they will all be members again.
[19:45]
Everything that appears will be members of a community. And and the present time, but we've already had announcements to get a little like a squirrel cage, except my squirrel cage was suddenly not a squirrel cage when I was talking to Eskimo. I said that I think that community, more and more I think that community likes intention in us and not any of us intentions. And that was, I don't know if that was after before, seeing a truly marvelous, wall of Eskimo masks in the Juneau Museum. And this was in a Juneau jail. I can't remember what it was, but I went out to the jail. And Eskimos are particularly fascinated by schizophrenic masks, by masks in which one half is a man's face or a woman's face, and the other half is an animal, but an animal of conflict, not Not a, so it's not the story of a werebear or werewolf.
[20:46]
They're known for touting the form. They co-possess the face. They're fascinated by split faces. And on the first thing you know, that will be there. Right. And the plaintiff said to me, you're balanced. And I said, oh, never, many years. And then actually, now these are actually dumb plaintiffs and dumb animals. Otherwise, they don't get caught up. You could say, well, anyway, they're caught up by the spirit. And the plaintiff said, no, balance does, I don't mean like that, but I think balance means you always, you always find, you've got your balance. You always move from it. Bounce doesn't mean... Well, here we think of bounce as being like that, and that is not at all like when they cling it right after when they bounce. Bounce means that... Bounce for them, that's the reason the method doesn't get through when they commit active violence and go into rage. Yeah, to move and move back and forth and not be lost. Right, right.
[21:46]
But these would be amazing shots coming because they have no time. They have to know you right away. You have to know that right away because it's important how to use the two or three hours. Let me read the shot I wanted to get to and I must have been avoiding because I haven't looked at nothing. Well, we'll go back to 145. I have fleeting thinking. But I'm not worried about it. Fleeting. OK. Sardello has gone through sort of a talk with himself and brought up Iglamore again. That one that I read earlier, it's Browning's great war with making mankind look small against immense things, at which he finds a very false move.
[23:07]
In other words, it makes us worse than humble. It makes us look like we can hardly do anything. Although this is what Sordell is worried about. The task puts immense, overwhelming, and there's nothing he can do. So in the sixth book, it's mainly one of the... He almost disarms himself, but you can't take a mere step because you don't even know how far you're going. And Eglemor is the just poet, a part of a person, this composite person of the poet that projected on Sordello, and not only the one who had judgment, but Eglemor was almost without judgment, And the poem of Aguilar that quoted is, man shrinks to naught if matched with symbols of immensity, must quail forsooth before a quiet sky or see too little for their quietude. And it said, and truly somewhat in Sordello's mood confirmed its speciousness.
[24:11]
I'll read this passage in the opening, and this is the opening of book six, simply because I pointed out before that this is the one place that for evening and so forth he uses Eve. And then she's turned in later, so I think we've got presence of Eve in the passage. Confirmed its speciousness while Eve slow sank down the near terrace to the farther bay, and only one spot left from out the night glimmered upon the river opposite. A breath of watery heaven like a bay, a skylight space of water, ray for ray and star for star, one richness where they mixed as this and that wing of an angel fixed tumultuary splendors folded in to dive. Let's go back over this, because he's already, he's already said, man strength to not, it's massive symbol of immensity, must quail pursuit before a quiet sky or sea, too little for their quietude. But the other symbol that moves through this and comes in book six very strongly is the need of the man, and especially the need of the man, for a moon would move him as the moon moves the sea.
[25:26]
So in a curious way, it's immensely true to be him But Brantley also polinates against elsewhere. The whole idea, he's got, I mean, this is almost the germ of a curious idea, and yet he will come in with all strength to respond, but it's almost like one of the arguments, what, is it proper to ask the immensity of the heavens and the immensity of the sea in a poem as something we would answer to? And in this one, the moon, the moon becomes very clear, confused when moon and sun both come in. because they're also moving to this guy. But it begins to seem as if, remember, it isn't Palma. Palma turns out to be different than Poem. Just before this, we have this Eve's maiden. This Eve is Eve, or is the woman, and turns to be an immensity. But an immensity that is somehow, an immensity that is... Defined, a breath of water in heaven like a bay.
[26:30]
defined by giving a absolutely local immensity. And the same, a skylight space of water. Well, at the same time, so unmeasured ocean and unmeasured sea would again tell you something about these couplets. There's another passage in 5 where Sordello, where there's some reference to, double reference to Sordello in this whole poem written in couplets. A couplet makes localities with a poem. It makes a little bay, so the immensity of the movement of the poem, it makes the poem almost topple. I mean, the movement of syntax in this, it's absolutely bewildering. But so will it be designing the inner bay. It means, sure, you didn't have immensities, where you do actually have immensities. So if you think about it, it confined immensity is the trouble of the syntax of Robert Brown. He's not going to make a step without contracting with Whitman, for instance, where there's no confining, or vertically there's no confining at all.
[27:42]
And in Robert Brown, the syntax is really in binding the threat of the immensity, and a spirit-counter-spirit, and spirit-counter-spirit, I think, stems off remember the multitude that he proposed that don't break up in this poem and we have only certain emotions these are the authors that are the manner that one is built with a whole bunch of personality Let me read this through then. And truly somewhat, in Sardella's moon confirmed its speciousness, while Eve flowed thanks down the near terrace to the farther bank, and only one spot left from out the night glimmered upon the river opposite, a breath of watery heaven like a bay, a sky-like space of water, ray for ray and star for star, one richness where they mixed as this and that wing of an angel. Fixed, tumultuary splendors folded in to die. Nor turns he till for hours to interstate the monotonous speech from a man's lip who lets out first an eager purpose slip in a new fancy burst.
[28:54]
The speech keeps on, though elsewhere its informing soul be gone. Aroused in, surely offered succor, fate paused with its ease. ere she, but she refers to fate, but we've still got this word, Eve. Fate paused with this Eve, ere she precipitate herself. Beth would often do strange thoughts awhile, that voice whose large hands, that portentous smile, what helped to pierce the future as the past lay in the flaming city at last. And so that double reference to fate and with his Eve. So the she encompassed both seemed even more to bring forward the point that I had made, I think, on the second time, thinking of the same passage. And now we find that united with truth's self, and at last the main discovery and prime concern of all that just now recorded him to learn. Truth's self, like yonder slow moon to complete heaven, rose again.
[30:02]
and naked at his feet lighted his old lights every shift and change effort with counter effort nor the range of each looked wrong except wherein it checked some other which of these could he suspect prying into them by the sudden play The real way seemed made up of all the ways, mood after mood, of the one mind in him. Tokens of the existence, bright or dim, of a transcendent all-embracing sense, demanding only outward influence, a soul in palmless grace above his soul, power of uplifted power, such moon's control over such sea depths. and their advance had swept onward from the beginning and still kept its course but years and years the sky above held none and so unpacked of any love his sensitiveness piled now aboard alive now and to sullenness o'erpork give him only up disposed its avenue, and every passing instigation grew and dwindled at the crease.
[31:05]
In foam showers spilt, wedge-like and cystic, quivered now a gilt shield of a sun shining all oceans, not all seas. Now a blinding race of white rippled toward the reef, funneled place for much display, not gathered up and hurled right from its hard-accompanied world. Again, he sees that Sardau in this condition is an ungoverned sea, yet had some core with him submitted to some moon, he would have been, as some men are, have had a short course, and this would define it all. Okay, let's get back to 145 and go with the, where he is. What he switches, when he switches from this state in which we're at a deeper emotional level and one that seems to have to do with this apprehended disclosure between the man and the woman, and this is Browning as we explained in the first place.
[32:12]
Before he met Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the side issues of this is that I've been reading Chesterton's really delightful book on Robert Browning, and Chesterton's picture of that marriage, he would shatter forever the conventional picture of Elizabeth Browning, which is evidently quite easy to do by simply reading her. And we presume, because our century presumes, our century has floundered in the picture of a ladylike poet. Elizabeth Barrett Brownlee did not feel called upon to be ladylike, although the novelist, perhaps Jane Austen, but the cruel hand, had drawn the picture of this gentility, the brief life in which the women upheld gentility majorly in the small town so that the women would follow
[33:15]
contrast with the women well uh kindness and other things in dickens i'm trying to think of gentility he's cruel at gentility and so is jay austin but it had reared its ugly head and so there was an expectation of some kind of a gent uh uh genteel uh lady who would write poetry there was nothing genteel about this with barrett browning uh fine and and and uh she was uh different from Robert Browning, and surely as passionately as Robert Browning. And also, filled with some alarm by her own contemporaries, because it was an unladylike portrait. She chapters and points out she really is more like Elizabethan than she is like Victorian. And of course, a strong nature of her. of the Elizabethan tribe in practice. The dramatic poet goes back to that trap.
[34:16]
But yet, they're separate portraits. And in the story, Robert Browning became fascinated with the idea of Elizabeth Barrett Browning before he met her at all. And in their correspondence, Chesterton points out that she responds to his with a good deal of understanding and forbearance, a little alarmed when, in the state he's in, he wants to meet her, not only because of the theoretical bothersome, maybe quite difficult, but at the same time, one would apprehend right away, as she must have, here is a fancy passion that is about to come in. And she's a real person, she struck, she had at least that gesture, that his idea had been formed by other people's admiration of her, and by her own work that was published, and we'd better know when to take it than his.
[35:19]
And it is online, by the way, as I said, it becomes quite clear, and more and more so in Browning's later years, that with this picture that comes in Sordello about the people and speaking to the people, he thought of Elizabeth Barrett as having a, as being more lasting than himself, as speaking more surely to a larger populace. Both he and Elizabeth Barrett found that this, the very thing that marks him with this rugged kind of strength that it's almost impossible for her to write a straight sentence and the debility, the kind of debility that she didn't have and I would it would be an open question to then determine is Robert Browning in his admiration for her describing what we call a facility I'm not sure because I haven't gone into reading Robert Browning
[36:24]
find out, although I'm beginning to be quite interested in finding out what kind of a portrait. There was no question that what contemporary thought of the two of them is equal, and Robert Browning thought of her as co-equal with a plus, that is, with the fact that her thought did not dim and confused what but was clear and that she spoke very surely to a much larger, much more lasting audience. All right. In his conflict, the poet here has been thinking about how hopeless it is to speak for the people. And after a soliloquy, he then and the person of the, by now almost dissolved lecturer, the one who entered the poem in the beginning and who was pointing out what's going on.
[37:31]
So it's still not totally resolved because Browning can lie back at that lecturer and let him project ideas that would not be the poet directly. I rally mock, O people, urge or claim. This is clearly those exclamations that are further addressed almost to the audience that's hearing this, as the story cordially told. For thus he ventured to the verge, pushed a vain memory which perchance distrust of his past flipping resolution thrust likewise, accordingly the crowd, as yet he had unconsciously contrived forget in the whole, to dwell the points one might assuage the signal horrors easier than engaged with a dim vulgar vast unobvious grief not to be fancied off nor gained relief in brilliant fits cured by a happy quirk but by dim vulgar vast unobvious work very fun so we what sardella faces when he even comes to think about the hall
[38:36]
answering it all with the whole is first a dim vulgar vast unobvious grief all of those are actually telling words vulgar means absolutely to the crowd and in a way strong enough that these seem valiantly to describe what's related what's going to be actual to mankind and such And only by dim, vulgar, vast, unobvious work was answered to that. And it's before that that somehow Sardau aggrieved us. And a poem, remember, this is again a fiction. It's a fiction. He died, but he didn't die. And he died hard, really, before the proposition. This crowd then, forth they stood, and now content thy stronger vision, brewed on thy fair want, uncovered turf by turf, studied a corpse space through the taint wood skirt.
[39:45]
Down sank the people then, uproar there now, the people then. up rose there now these sad ones rendered service to and how piteously little must that service prove had surely proved in any case for moved each other obstacle away let youth become aware it had surprised the truth to her service to impart can truth be seized settled forthwith and of the captive is captured by fresh prey, since this'll it so happily, no gesture luring it, the earnest of a flock to follow. Vain, most vain, a life to spend ere this he play, change of the poor crowd's complacence, ere the crowd pronounce it captured, he describes a cloud gets kin of twice the plume, which he in turn, if he shall live as many lives, may learn how to secure, not else. So a picture races in the fall of the need of many lives.
[40:48]
And we're back at the part that I the most safe statement of this dimension of the immensity of life. Now our immensity of sea and our immensity of sky has got another thing which is the immensity of species from which we speak to which we speak. And thinking about time and the erasure of poems, the futility, if you were to root upon it, And more than that, Sernell is dying because of the futility of living. Because as ceased by now to be would a poem reach it, it becomes now almost waking up in the day, reach it an hour. Yes, we come to that, right? We come to that right. And then comes a passage in which In which there's a statement by, well, I looked up, left for Dante there, hanging fire.
[41:51]
Dante comes back to Browning's mind, but not, it would seem that Dante, Browning knew is the Dante of the poem, of the Divine Comedia, and he does not know that Dante is the De Monarchia, in which that passage, if I'll recite over and over again, comes, and that is, God needs Every event, everything, and every being throughout time to complete the statement. So your own rising or your own step is needed. And as a matter of fact, you are the unique each event that you're in. Not only is it needed as it is, and you do it as that, but to come to the consciousness of it being needed would be your alive sense of your being alive. Yet you're never merely alive. This would be apparent because in the novelist term, that's where it's seen that people who are not aware of how essential they are to the novel within the novel are.
[42:54]
They move the plot. And if we were to increase their awareness, the awareness alone would not change the novel. The awareness will tell them where they are. I mean, awareness in a novel, it can profoundly inform the novel, but the essential novel's still there, to be aware, because it's of what you just did that you are aware. So the awareness, I think, is an invention. It's not that you don't change things and so forth in the complexity, but it needs your awareness, but it also needs its intention. And when that thing... The trouble here is that I took that tricky turn and went back on that turn God needs. What happens... needs, I mean, we can put is, we can put all three things, each single thing going on. So the picture needs it.
[43:55]
The picture of the whole needs it. The picture of what's happening right now needs every part. And we have a great confusion of how informed. What's most interesting is how much more and then how anxious we are when we crave that more. We want to know what's happening throughout the world. Transpapers look insane when you turn around, and yet so large things disappear, and the murderer around the corner must be known. The gospel of a town, the eagerness of the town in its gospel to know every single thing that took place, and the speculation about it, but that's within a small area of faith, and we now have a principle in which we have a right to know. but had to know or anything else to know that I write to know. It's marvelously preposterous. And we're coming almost into that, because now in a passage here around 185 of Sardau, chapter with me, he shall live as many lives.
[45:01]
If he shall live as many lives, may learn how to secure, which he in turn could live all those lives. And yet the line, what's clearly grounding now is the imagination rushing forward to live lives. The most remarkable thing is that we read to live lives And so the strangest statement and one of the most pitiable statements of a dismay or despair is the remark of that's not relevant, because what it means is the closing off from living lives. I mean, relevance. The demand for relevance is to contract the bay, and it needs to appear somewhere, that if you were to know about lives, know about more and more lives, you'd know about yourself in the first place, the church. And so there'd be a good deal of acknowledging, as you know, more lives. And I'm thinking of the frequently experienced people teaching who meet
[46:03]
And often the college will meet the first generation when they want to cease to read, when they want to cease to read novels and cease to read poems, cease to read biographies, cease to come into contact with life, to acknowledge. Because it's not just novels and poems we're talking about, but fascination with peoples and lives around. And they are also, our Eskimos question about, do you have emotions? Are emotions spirits in you? And OK, then he didn't want to read what poured out. So in a sense, he wanted to start, he would have liked to have been cured at the pouring out of this ugly matter, this matter that was not he. And he would like, and at the same time he did. So he was, luckily we didn't have to decide what it was saying this way. And my whole thing was that no, the same things would happen to me.
[47:07]
This is the interior multitude that also can't be encompassed. So you could also despair simply because you're swamped by this multiplication in thought. There's another quarrel I have with the And I have no great difficulty with Freud because he keeps drawing and redrawing his picture. So he breaks every closure and reopens it with new terms and moves on to other pictures. But the anxiety throughout Jung, which comes from the fact that Freud had in formula, Freud intimately knew about neuroses, is successful with neurotics, and had very little, was sort of, may be afraid of, yes, afraid of, because it was only with great warning, of psychotic disorders. And he had no success at all with psychotic disorders. In general, psychoanalysis was shaped for, and he made very strong in his mind, the division, as if they were opposites and one excluded the other.
[48:15]
In one striking place, it says, much the same thing he says about homosexuality and heterosexuality, and he is not talking about male and female gender in that. He thinks that there's something abnormal about having an exclusive heterosexuality or an exclusive homosexuality, but what becomes striking is he also finds that it's abnormal to have an exclusive neurosis and then exclusive psychosis. Nothing at all. So normality is the coexistence of neurosis and psychosis. And he uses the definition in that, that when I'm talking to you, I'm psychotic enough to think there's a you over there who's hearing me. and actually knows all of what I'm saying when I myself barely grasp what I'm saying, or psychotic enough to presume there's a me who knows what I'm saying when I'm barely chasing after my words to figure out what do you say with that, what I've just said. And in that other operation, which is absolutely necessary in order to have speech that goes on like this, the neurotic is the one who's saying, what do I say with that, that thing I just said?
[49:25]
And that one Freud knew beautifully. He writes, what do you say with that that you just said? But the other one boxed in completely, although he believed in thought transference, which would be his definition of psychosis. He was fascinated with it. fascinated with Frank C, who actually ends up a thorough psychologist by any terms, because he ended up in a wonderful psychoanalysis with a lady in New York, where he was being carried off by ESD between Vienna and New York. Now, that would be the ultimate. There's no neurotic boundaries to that in the world. It's glorious. OK. Freud's idea was a mixture of two things. In the Jungian picture, you build a system and you integrate it with the center. And that's largely because, I mean, one understands the life message in it when you read more on Jungian, you begin to realize that Jung had schizophrenic trouble, so he was centering and holding himself in a center.
[50:30]
And he became very interested in tribal arts that all have very intense schizophrenic trouble. Well, if you're a tribe, all the tribes outside, you were outside. That you catch right away. The Haida, the Tlingit today, the Tlingit, they know they get their total goals from the Haida, but the Haida are crazy people. who make crazy things. And the Tlingit almost protect themselves against outside crazy people, who might also, by the way, the Tlingit. The Russians really managed to have a short, merry war with the Tlingit, because the Tlingit were at war with each other, because all those other tribes were also crazy people. For those who have hopes of matriarchy, these were matriarchal tribes. And all those other matriarchies, they're outside. Who knows what goes on here? They're bat bats.
[51:31]
And one sees the totem poles as lines of protection. And when you see them standing in the forest, as Sitka, I saw them, you see that because in what's called the southeast, that's two weeks in Alaska, and I'm a super authority. But the first thing, you have your head removed because you realize you're in the southeast. And the states are outside. There's the southeast, and there's outside. To the north is the Arctic Circle. And then there's the north of the Arctic Circle, the north slope, as if it were really racing down to where? And so we've got a circle, we've got a real boundary that's not of that absolute cold. And you've got Alaska, and then you've got the southeast, and you've got outside.
[52:31]
Now that outside thing is the Jungian solution of the center and the circle. No matter how you increase that circumference, the picture still has an outside. And then the effort to divide it into quarters and so forth is all a series of symmetrical fortresses and balances within this that hold one personality intact. And now, the coexistence of these two systems, actually, if you're fascinated by psychoanalysis, both systems fascinate because they coexist. And yet, my hint is that I think that they open up to much more if they return, let's say, to the ground of dream or the ground of psyche and to the multitudinous, which one really, I mean, they don't have to provide for it, but both of them have ways of of assuring themselves against the immensity that also we find Browning against.
[53:33]
The crowd, or the multitude as he names it, or here when Sordell's even thinking about mankind at large, And if we talk about life, it is, if you thought about rescuing, now we've come, Sacco announces the rescuing operation, and Sardau, interestingly enough, entirely opposes, once he leaves the early poetry of fancy, which is nature poetry, that the mature, the young, he's only a young man, right, he dies at 30, which is just before just at the age, really, that Browning is at when he's writing Sardello. I'll venture, but I think he's a little younger, but it's his picture. It's really, Sardello's written in the late 20s, and unlike the historical Sardello, who doesn't have a poem from his late 20s that remains, all of whose work belongs to his 40s and 50s that we have, This Sardella dies in that early period, and he's basically, and he poses poetry as an immense task to be the change in men's minds that would make a whole change in species, and comes up against deeds in the scene of Solemn Girl.
[54:56]
Well, let me go here, return to to this passage, then, when Sardello was picturing that what is happening in poetry in its relation now to truth or supplying the whole story, just the story or the whole matter of the poem. Because he reiterates here what Milton in his Erikojetika proposes, and that is that we must know absolute publication of everything. and especially pornography and so forth. And we must know the entire, all the mind of mankind, because truth in the first place is distributed throughout. Essentially, that's what I'm saying when the Eskimo says, do you have spirits in you? And I say, no, they're also true. So I could also, I see them as something like, I see them as a democracy in which they also live, so the picture we're arriving at. And that's exactly what would be Miltonic in this.
[55:57]
He speaks of Osiris distributed throughout mankind, but also not only now the events being, Dante says nothing about the evils and goods of those events, but events are the events they are. And the truth of an evil or the truth of a good is what Milton addresses himself to. And he says, we must know the truth, so we can't select the truth of goods against the truth of evils, because truth is where it's not. And it is everywhere, the truth of every single thing. And he says, moreover, though, he's thinking now of ills. He says, not to know the truth of an ill is to have a secret. that is destructive to society. And of course, we return again to the other drive of psychoanalysis, which is not to know the truth of an ill, of your own inner feeling ill, not to want to know about it, not to want to know who you are in that stance, it eats away at life. Well, okay, in this passage though, remember he's got
[57:00]
He's just kind of a sort of a despair, so the crowd's really him, interior and outside, and the minute he might conquer something, he sees a much bigger cloud there, so he's got that one. I can't possibly encompass it all. Then Mantua called back to his mind how certain bards were thralled. Buds blasted, but a breath more like perfume than Notto's staring nosegaze carrying gloom. And what he remembers, if you remember, when we read that passage, when he stands forward, Out in Mantua is Virgil and his Sardella identity. This is the one that Dante, why Dante brings Sardella forward. And the thrall of the poet here is also Sardella. the one that we found Sardalo in in the beginning, enthralled by .
[58:02]
Enthralled by birds, enthralled by stream, and enthralled by what we discovered to be his mother's tomb. In book five, the great disclosure is not only that Sardalo is the who had been presumed dead, that Sordello is the child of Rectrude, and that more than that, Rectrude, who is the daughter of Constance, and in a matriarchal line, brings Sordello into being the very emperor, in other words, to being in an imperial position. So he is king. potentially Kenyan poetry. And Browning writes a lament that he fails that. Dante has to come forward and be that. And he's potentially something beside.
[59:04]
Because the child who crouched beside that fountain with its Figures, remember, contrasted with the fountain in Salanguera's Palace, where the figures are liberated and moving in a Bacchic kind of dance. The circle of women on that fountain, which is actually the Tomb of Retribution, that's disclosed in this book, they are all enthralled in another sense. They're slaves, but they're slaves, sorrowing, grieving, and they seem to be accused, they seem to be virgins accused of self-pride. Virgins accused of losing their virginity of hope. I mean, the dedicated virgin, the festival virgin is accused. And so that Sardello also had, long before he had the idea in the poetry, of redeeming the mankind.
[60:05]
But there was the earlier one with a boy each day and moving from a figure to figure on the sarcophagus fountain. And somehow consoling and redeeming that figure, praying for that figure. Okay, then Matthew will call back in his mind how certain bards are thrall, but blasted by a breath more like perfume than notto's steric nosegays carry blue. Notto is our judgment in poetry and the entire craft of it. As a matter of fact, writing the couplets that we are reading. Notto is the one who also gives both the matter, both matter, but also is the conscience the poet has to perform the measure and meet the demand that these be that good. Some insane rose that burnt, some insane rose that burnt hard out its sweets, a spendthrift in the spring, no summer greens.
[61:16]
This is the most marvelous little, I love, It's impossible to read straight sentences. Some insane rose that burnt heart out in sweets. And then some insane rose that burnt out. But it is some insane rose, isn't it? Because, but a breath more like perfume. Some insane rose that burnt heart out in sweets. A spent brick did a spray, no summer creeps. Some duality, drunk with trues and wine, grown bestial, dreaming how become divine, to mark the charged wine. Yet to surmount this obstacle, commence with the commencement, merits crowning. Hence must truth be casual truth. elicited in sparks so mean, at intervals dispread so rarely, that tis like to know one time of the world's story has not truth, the prime of truth, the very truth which loosed had hurled the world's course right, been really in the world.
[62:29]
content the wild with some mean spark by dint of sunshine's blow, the solitary dint of buried fire, which rip earth's breast with stream sky. That's a magnificent passage. It's been stored up so long, and yet it's actually the anxiety of the poet coming in the late 20s, coming to the period that I'm not, I wouldn't check out My one magic walk for this is Stein's No American Knows What He's Doing Until He's 28, and that I harbored against so much when I was 27, hoping that I'd know the next year. But my general impression is that I'd watch when they're between 30 and 35 to see if both their duties have appeared. both the sense of what they have to do and what they have to pay.
[63:33]
There is a curious coexistence of this, and this is what Sardella faces in this. Sardella dies, and he gives up. He gives up his ghost into it. But it all comes forward to him. What do I have to pay? What do I owe? And what is it I have to do? And he has already set, of course, a conflict between thought and deed. It's curious to me because I think I thought about it early, although it was not easy at all to do. In the 30s, what all one needed was a a happy bunch of, either a vicious little bunch of Stalinists, but even a happy little bunch of socialists, and then anarchists could turn and tell you you had duties to do in the world. Deeds, and you're vaguely aware that what you were writing, that looked like an act too. There's no way to take your pencil and take a piece of paper and start making a poem without acting. That's an action. When you finish the poem, anybody can see it, anybody can do it, you can pay no debt to do it, but you've done something.
[64:34]
And it is not automatic like breathing and so forth, and anybody who's labored on a poem doesn't really think it's not an act. And so a lot of energy's gone in there, and more than that, once it's loose, it's a... Chardello almost gets that clear in his mind. Salanguera, interestingly enough, when you turn to find, you'll find a Salanguera who's been a man of many deeds and a man of war all the way through and is posed throughout the form of deeds versus act versus thought or fancy. Actually, all those acts added up to nothing, because Salingrad had a deeper despair. There was no sun to carry on his house. And so he's fighting for a house. He's fighting for Echelon and for the Romanos, something that didn't mean anything to him. And it turns out that he's a mere general who actually is the one who can act when the ones he's acted for can't. But it is a very anti-historical fact.
[65:36]
And he has almost no idea. He makes a sudden impulse. He had been given the right to, he's been given the insignia of the House of Romano. It took place on Echelon's son, one of Echelon's sons, but even that instruction is not clear. And he has full right, he was partnered with Echelon, and he simply hands it across to Sardella of the House of Romano. He hangs it around his neck, the insignia. In that movement, that Palma is able, she had promised never to disclose except to the House of Romano, and now she can disclose that, that sort of down low his son where his son. Crazy enough plot, but I'm thinking right now of Mallarmé's lifelong plan for the book he was going to write, And one of the plots he had for the book, I couldn't believe it.
[66:38]
If you think of Mallarmé, I thought of Mallarmé as a dream kid somewhere. But the plot in the dream is that there would be a turn, another one of these wonderful turns, in which the poet, who is sort of a troubadour, takes about that he will not that if he falls in love, he will not eat in his beloved's presence. And that leaves him in starvation, because he will never leave her and he won't eat in her presence. So in porn, the form is suicide, and it gets solved because he eats her. I mean, this is chopping down my memory. Well, I actually proved a little more than you could do in a poem, but imagine if he launched up and he... I think you have to, your first approach is how subtle, I mean, Malamay is so subtle, I can hardly grasp what, it's like Robert Cronin.
[67:39]
Look at what's going on here. And then you find out that the shape, you don't know what, you don't know what's going on there. You hardly get out with your face hanging out front. And the people, when they drop down on the clock, it's Robert Cronin. Where is it? It's in a thing called Le Livre de Malamay, because there's notes left of this massive poem. I'll key you in on that. It's all his plots and plans. And in the plots and plans are numbers throughout, and mostly he's planning how many people should be present when he reads particular parts. It's one of the first propositions that the audience is actually the poem. Remember, in this one, the audience is the poem. We're a funny double take for the audience that's in here that gets addressed back and forth. But Mallarmé himself, in this same century, he had designed sets of 22 or 22 times 22, and carefully how many chairs would be present. and all of them into numbers that would be reproduced throughout. This is exactly like the union of integration of the whole situation.
[68:43]
So it becomes a limited edition begins to really mean something. This is a limited number of people would be in the audience and they find they're not in the audience because they're the same number of verses as they are people and the chairs are in a certain order and the next time they'll be Another set of people who will also be numbered to the number of lines. At one point, I had an idea that carried out, is to write a party flight in which there were lines for everybody. And everybody had 10 lines, 10 queues that they were to listen for. And when your last queue came up and you gave your last line your exit line, there was a queue for your exit line. And when the queue came up for your exit line, you had to leave the party. There'd be no way of telling which issue. You can make up minds in between. But if you got a cue, you had to give your next line to that cue. And of course, at the end, there would be some people who wouldn't get any exit line.
[69:47]
I mean, the last people would never get out of there, because if you left before you had arrived at a cue for somebody, oh, well, . These lines are in book six, and they're lines, I'll reread them because it's a passage I'm like, yup, yup, like buried fire and things like that. It's 185. Then Mantua called back to his mind how certain bards were thralled, butts blasted, but a breath more like perfume than not a staring nose, gaze buried blue. Some insane rose that burnt heart out in sweets, a spendthrift in spring, no summer greets. Some dularete drunk with true, did somebody have a discoloring edition here to explain it? We don't have to go over the discolory of dularete at all. Some dularete drunk with truths and wine, grown bestial, dreaming I'll become divine.
[70:51]
Yet to surmount this obstacle, commence with the commencement, merits crowning. Hence must truth be casual truth, elicited in sparks so mean at intervals to spread so rarely, that tis like at no one time of the world's story has not truth. the prime of truth, the very truth which loosed and hurled the world's course right than really in the world. I think we can remember a spot then why Browning with this strong feeling that's here, this Sordello Browning feeling that there's no one time at all, not even at commencement, but any other time has this truth. That was my quarrel with Olson, who was always having the idea that first things must have a lot of power. I mean, that's the golden age argument. And also, I saw it very strongly in this, very, very strongly, fall and damnation of a man that's enormously enlarged in the Christian religion.
[71:54]
and within the Catholic Church with its original sin documents. The first act before, Charles was always trying to find in history the original sin. It would be Christianity, or it would be something out of his original sin. If you got back to 1500, I mean, it actually bugs you. If you get far enough back, you'd be back with this original sin, and then all the rest is wrong. I mean, Plato's wrong, everything else is wrong. You make a great big huge map, And maps all over the wall talk about anxieties. And I would say, my god, original sin must be there throughout, because if it came up as a subject, I'm going to believe it's there. But so is everything else there. So your first event, I don't see why firstness gets to be what you call first. Firstness needs to be throughout. And then I would point out, as I told you in the very beginning, What am I doing when I go back to Sordello to read this in depth? My very first decision in election poetry was when in high school we read Robert Brown's dramatic monologues, and I felt not only is this absolutely what I...
[72:58]
more wonderful. I certainly don't want to be an actor. I thought, this is it. But I also found there's some disclosure with not only Robert Browning, probably more out of D.H. Lawrence in this regard. There was some way in which there was a disclosure about what one was that was more than one knew, and that lay in language. But I also am in a strange way when I read, here I can read for double and get And as usual, crown myself, which I do over and over again, either hitting myself on the head or building a crown for myself. It either dies, but you see the commence of the commencement. But to surmount this obstacle, the obstacle of bestiality of the debacle. Commencement of the commencement merits preeminence. But I am then going back to Browning commencing with commencement. In 17th century sweet, I went back to the 17th century poems that dominated the period in the 30s and that we struggled with, or I struggled with, and so forth, and struggled with a good deal of blame because the same political people that were accusing us found us only to be conforming to T.S.
[74:12]
Eliot's snow job about these, about Dudley and metaphysicals. But we wouldn't have gone into the, We didn't go into Dunn and the metaphysicals because of that. We went into Dunn, maybe started reading it, but we continued and went into it because, again, it had lure of truth. I mean, we go into lots of lies. That's the other thing I would say. You don't actually go into multitude of lies. You search because you've got curiosity and Mr. Pound rides big. But the other thing is absolutely what makes for a very keen selection is how is that you're searching for something, not that's going to be true tomorrow, but right at that moment, you come across what opens up for you a way to the ice. Excuse my accent. And we're waiting at the ice in the north. This is a reference to my glorious, absolute glorious last experience in the Alaskan Sea, where Well, here we go for another digression, but it's worth it for here, because waiting for the ice.
[75:15]
I had only two, I just did a tour of Alaska, and they're all small, they were all small towns. The largest was Juneau, which is 20,000, but the rest were 2,000. We have 2,000 people. Or like, no, we have, I think, a couple thousand people, maybe over the, and, well, okay. So I read it at Ketchikan, And the library got me copies of my books. People had a very, very view just before I arrived what poetry was like. And I geared the reading around that a bit. I mean, as kindly as I can, telling them it's even, which is quite true, hard for me to read, but harder for them to read. It's harder for them to keep up with it. They've only just noticed it. And then I come to... to Sitka, where I read at Presbyterian Missionary College, and think, oh my God, how am I going to get across? Well, all right, I'll get across as best goes.
[76:19]
And then I begin to realize I've got a little core there, and especially there's one absolutely dazzlingly beautiful young basketball woman in the front row who is beaming. So I go on that beam, and I start, and I go right into current work. And all on that theme, I feel like I'm in a San Francisco reading. And up she comes out of Eskimo land with Robert Duncan with the English volumes of Benny LeBeau and Roots and Branches to get some autographs. And then what unfolds is she's connected to Callahan with this whole, and they've got a lot of connections that come down to our area, but it's one that I don't usually associate myself with, although I have appeared in Callahan. Thank you for the tiny down below interview on the subject there. Anyway, so they've got an Eskimo that certainly knows all books and beats all the way through. All right, I get to Juneau. Poets I find in Juvenile, none of them have read me before at all, they ask, what do you think of Richard Juvenile?
[77:22]
They say, oh, I think that Philip Booth is the greatest Bolivian American poet. If I'd gone to Africa and tried to pretend I was white, I'd have done a hard job. And then up at Haynes, where, okay, just to say, at Haynes, there was a poor English teacher up at Haynes who had taken the assignment of taking a correspondence course, beginning to read my work, and then I would arrive, so I'd get part of it. to be part of it and so forth, and she, well, okay, she's listening carefully, but it's not safe. When I get to Nome, I come to my reading, and there's a company of about eight people, and I begin to realize, gee, I mean, here are Seven we will repeat, and one, so I go on. And when I finish my reading, the one, a guy, a poet by the name of David McKay, well, he comes up and says, I read your work for 10 years, and so on and so on.
[78:28]
Tomorrow morning, I'm a pilot, a bush pilot. Tomorrow morning, would you like to come with a group, they're a group of marine biologists who are going to be taking movies and photographs of whale And also, they drop a line down in the sea, so they're also recording oil. Three hour, yes. So there's going to be a three hour. It's the biggest mass of walrus they've ever seen. Walrus had been protected for two years or so. And all of these mammals were up 200 miles north of Nome, up above the Diomedes. So we were within 25 miles of the Siberian shore. We kept seeing Siberian. We're cutting back the ride from the American line across the ice this way around and circle and circle, photographing the whales and photographing it.
[79:35]
And so that's what I, that's what my little casual reference to the north. Well, let me return here to our, to our picture here about because it becomes quite striking about life's work and today's work. Tardello's miserable gleaming was looked for at the moment. He would dash this badge and all it brought to earth. Abashed Torello thus, perhaps persuading Rastakaiser from his purpose, would attest his own belief in any case. So he wavers. It's like the badge he's going to dash is his Ramona, that he's Ramona and that he should go now. This is that he should be abused in columnist plans and so on, whereas to answer to the immediate political situation.
[80:39]
Before he dashes it, however, think once more. For were that little truly service, I, in the end, no doubt, But meantime, plain use by its ultimate effect, but many flaws of vision blur each intervening cause. So along with this, What interests me is how much when I return to this, remember it's not this with my ground in Browning, but with some sureness, if I have my first clues in the standard dramatic monologues that we read, I never went, back to them, by the time I got to college and so forth, moderns set me on another path. Discoveries of Milton and Elizabethan set me on another path, but if this were a path at the beginning, eventually I'm coming closer into its key, and I find hidden here part of the... I've been quite strong in my own prose, and often in the poem coming forth, the...
[81:52]
idea that has its prime in Milton, the one that we discussed about not only is truth dispersed, but it's always the very truth that's there and that we struggle to come to. But in this one, The flaw in vision, of course, the many flaws of vision were each intervening cause. I can almost come off my a million references to the crossed eyes. I mean, they served me for the double vision that Blake, Blake talks about double vision, and he emerges as a visionary, and he does not have a concept of the flaw in vision. I mean, had Blake, he has a humor. But had he had a concept of the double-claw and double-vision or the quadruple-claw and quadruple-vision, we're almost coming close and hints at this of lifting certain bounds of what we can imagine. Because Blight, having double vision and no concept of the double flaw in double vision, sees, he thinks, as Titian doesn't see or Redbrack doesn't see.
[83:04]
So he can curse them. I mean, you cannot believe as Blight curses the colorists. But they, as a matter of fact, we know do see that way through a flawed vision. flaws. Remember the theme all through, in the very beginning in Sardella, the fault that you said you were thinking of veins and fault lines as well as faults and so forth, where we picked it up next time, found it in the vein. Our flawed vision is again, actually I'm defaulting myself here because I've got references to faults. In the long poem, called An Essay at War, it built one of the major points that fascinated me in that period was a show of the Habsburg treasures, and I realized that the crystal pictures that were there had their real marble because of the flaw in the crystals.
[84:18]
And the flaw in the crystal seemed to me absolutely, in a sense, I wondered how did you, how could you get such a sense of the rift and flaw in things in a word? So we're back to the question about, and we're back to the question that might be interesting to look at because we know what has happened. It becomes interesting. What happened to Elizabeth Barrett Brunning's reputation? It's clear that because we find out that Browning was fascinated by her before he met her, so it wasn't that she was gonna be Mrs. Browning that made her seem a wonder of the world, and it was her poetry that drew him, and all accounts of her were accounts of her mind. Chesterton's quite appreciative of her character, that she was in no way broken at all by one of the most fiendishly demented tyrannical fathers ever invented out of space.
[85:23]
Brooding over her, he would, what does he say? All the other chapters, it was one of his wits. Yet it isn't that he, it isn't, the hard work was not that he expected her always to succumb to his irritability, but he expected her also always to come to . One of the marvellous descriptions of what a real tyrant is. As only some of us who were once children. Those of you who were never children will never remember this duality. Any of us who were once children, as I would acquaint you with it, the alternatives that are given. But could it be that in some sense the flaw that runs through Browning is the one that we come up against something? I don't know to guess.
[86:25]
Was there a possibility of facility in the live with Vera Browning? Pure superstition that I haven't looked at. There's a larger chance that she's simply erased and one went through to her contemporary, two things that would tell us to look at it, her contemporary reputation and her purity. and among the people that... Because the intellectual world of the early 19th century did not have our way of excluding women. And the... but didn't have the massive arguments against the womanly thinking. We've got the propriety, is it really womanly? Come up with an analyst and so on. That wasn't there, so they could actually admire, this is the same one that after all, George Eliot didn't dominate that whole century in the middle of that. The other one is Browning's own sense, which I think is a political sense, and her sense of Robert Browning, thinking of him, her sense that it wouldn't have been marvelous if he could have thought more clearly.
[87:32]
Well, I think that it's Jim's thought. We can see that when he came to those lines that I lined and underlined about the work, about that Dim was one of those terms, wasn't it? An obvious dim, vulgar, a series of things that intensely felt when he was young. And it was grief first, and then it was work. It tells us something about the rightness, about dim procedures, and then right about staying by it, if it's dim. I don't mean inventive. try embedding the dimness and bravo, I mean every invention's interesting, but if it's dim, then don't bewail that you're working dim. But it's miserable glee, because misery is the term that runs through this whole book. Mankind's misery and the misery we're working in. Okay, but many flaws of vision blur each intervening cause.
[88:34]
Were the day's fraction clear as the life's sum of service, now as filled as deems to come with evidence of good, nor too minute a share to violate evil. No dispute toward fitness to maintain the Guelph's rule. That makes your life's work, but you have to school your day's work on these nature's circumstance, thus variously, which yet as each advanced or might indeed the Guelph rule must be moved now for the then same, hating what you love, loving or hate, nor if one man bore brand upon temples while his fellow wore the aureole would it task you to decide but portion duly out the future by never with the unpartial present so there's there's a one of the densities in in sordello is that i've got pages and pages here of knowing how he comes up with the posy forces now and then
[89:43]
crowd, multitude, and one thought. And constantly producing is a long one where we go through permutations of knowledge, some knowledge that gives strength. Let's see when I get these terms of strength. It's a particular almost formula, the use of strength. But there's another. Well, that's the end of the permutation, though. Actually, one of the things here is that they are so, it's so dense that these inner orchestrations become lost. My notes are, for instance, again, we just read that life's work and day's work, and here we have one, the whole work and the minute's work that haunts book five, just a little passage. Yeah, one of man's whole, God has conceded two sights to a man.
[90:50]
For no way, God has conceded two sights to a man, one of man's whole work, time's completed plan, the other of the minute's work, man's first step to the plan's completeness. What's dispersed, say, hope of that supreme step, but that's very early before we find that it is dim, vulgar, unobvious, and so forth, and it's great that so the steps don't get beat. But I want to find out this right now for this theme. Where the, oh yes, here's a picture. Strength by stress of strength comes of that forehead content. That's describing, that's describing Salenguera. But then we come strength by stress of knowledge, knowledge by stress of knowledge. He runs a series of almost as if you're taking a feed, turning it, trying to see what it'll say when the turn comes, although they're thematic and announcements.
[91:54]
There's another 105, 107 I certainly want to pick up, which is again the Browning's question of his own art described here as Sordello's. Okay, let me read. It begins with that very one. What is gone except Rome's airy magnificence, that last step you take first? We're back at book five, and Sardello has an imagination of reconstructing Rome by turning to the people, both people. but Rome. So it comes before the disclosure that he's Romano. And so the Roman Romano has a role here. But this Rome of mine is Rome with this layer. Same one Freud identifies so strongly with the wants to make his trip to Rome with each layer being
[92:58]
What is gone except Rome's airy magnificence, that last step you take first, and evidence you were God. Be man now. That comes with a very decisive inner dialogue here. Let those glances fall, but face us the beginning step of all, which proves you just a man. Is that gone too? Pity to disconcert one versed as you in fate's ill nature, but its full extent eludes Sordello even. The veil rents out. Is this going back to Browning himself? Does it elude Sordello even? The veil rents read the black writing. That collective man outstrips the individual. Whitman, this is, of course, in the 40s, Whitman after Darwin. Oh, no.
[93:52]
@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_77.96