History 5
Presented on: Saturday, July 31, 1999
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is History Five and we come to a new set of books. And these sets of books are for us like the legs that allow us a syncopated motion, or like the two hands, they give us a focus. The pairing up of books is a technique which I've pioneered to get us away from the idea of a text. The text is a regressive use of the book and has been the curse of universities for a thousand years or more. Actually fifteen hundred years. The book as a form is about two thousand years old. The Greek word for book was codex, the Latin word libros, and before the Greek-Roman use of this particular form, written language was always on a kind of a scroll. So that, for instance, when they were discovered in 1945, the Dead Sea Scrolls were not books. They weren't libros, they weren't codex, they were scrolls. And the Dead Sea Scrolls are important because they are the last vestiges of the use of scrolls. And you have immediately after about 0 BC, you have the appearance of the book as a form. The first person to ever use the book professionally as a form was Cicero. And Cicero was one of Rome's greatest lawyers and he used tiny little books which he could tuck into his toga to quickly index points to make in legal cases. And he was a fantastic lawyer because he could marshal a whole raft of evidence quickly, through his use of the codex.
The next usage of the book was for visionary mystical writings about something new, something that had never been seen before. And so the book was the new visionary form. One of the first books to ever appear as a book was the New Testament. And so the New Testament was referred to as a book, it was put together in the second century AD by a man who was later thrown out of the Christian community. His name was Marcion. And his idea of a book was to put the four gospels, there were many gospels, but he selected four, put them together as a unity. So that there was a four part book. And ever after that the book became something which was always visionary; something which you would read out of and the classic Roman way was to read out loud from the book. You were punished in Roman schools if you read silently to yourself because it was a sign that you were a new religious person. Because the early Jewish and Christian communities that used the book would read silently so that the language would sound in the mind and not on the tongue. So that the Romans, in order to insure the tradition of mythic language, and tried to co-opt the book into mythic oral language, would punish students for reading silently. So you were supposed to read out loud. Because an oral language, traditionally has a mythos to it; it has a story line, beginning, middle and end. And that oral mythic tone, that narrative, tend to be traditional no matter what the content is. Whereas the book was a new form. And so language put into a book largely was visionary, rather than mythic. So that the statement later on is that when you have a vision, write down what you saw in a book. That kind of a thing.
But by the late six hundreds of the common era, 600AD, the book had become an academic frozen petrified artifice, supporting authority; it had been co-opted into imperial authority. So that the proof of someone fitting in was that you did what was written. And so the whole idea of a destiny that cannot be avoided, a kind of Islamic Kismet, is that "it is written". Whereas the later Sufi idea is that nothing is written. So the idea of a book of destiny is actually a regressive co-opting into authoritarian tradition of the new form of the book. And once that happened the book became increasingly a text, and the trouble with texts is that become more and more abstracted. So that for instance, the standard school book of about 600, 650 AD, was a book of quotations by sentences abstracted from all the classic and it was compiled by a scholastic academic named Peter Lombard. And Lombard sentences was the standard text school book for almost a thousand years in the Mediterranean West. And it completely petrified and ossified the mind so that the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, the Medieval mind is a mind who's language is freeze dried into sentence quotations from a text, and all of this was detrimental to everything.
The way in which that kind of form was cracked was the use, the bringing back of an oral language which was not based upon a text, not selected abstracted sentences, but was a language of theater, of drama; the dialogue. And so the dialogue, which is a spoken language between several people, it's not mythic, because for a myth one has to have the story line, one has to have the plot. In Greek the word for plot was mythos, hence myth; the narrative line. Whereas a dialogue does not have a narrative line, but it has a dramatic development. So that drama, the play, the dialogue, the conversation between human beings, tends to be oral but not at all mythic; it tends to be dramatic. And in fact the development of a theatrical orality (that doesn't mean pornography), the idea of a living dialogue dramatically is a visionary language rather than mythic. So that drama, theater, tends to be visionary in its very structure and nature and the philosophic dialogue is an example of a little bit more intellectual content to this kind of dramatic work. And it's meant to side step myth.
The first conscious development of this usage comes from the development of Greek Tragedy, which is contemporaneous as we saw with the historian that we took before, Thucydides, who's book on the History of the Peloponnesian War we paired up with Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. Pairing, to get away from the idea of the book as a text. Making a dialogue between Thucydides and Franklin in the form of their books. So that we created a dramatic structure across twenty-three, twenty-four hundred years of time, drawing a diagonal across the whole development of so called Western Civilization. And now we're going to take that dialogue, that dramatic conversation, which never took place in Thucydides' time, Franklin wasn't born, America wasn't discovered, nothing had happened. And it certainly didn't happen in Franklin's time. Almost none of those eighteenth century people would have read Thucydides for Historical wisdom. They read Romans. So that that dialogue between Franklin and Thucydides, that dramatic structure takes place here for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
So it was an original visionary creation on our part which we are now in a position, because we have done it ourselves, we personally have made this form, have created this drama, have generated this meaning, together. So that we are like a wisdom hunting group; like an ancient wisdom hunting group, we're a hunting group after wisdom. We're in a position now to see that the visionary language that we have developed in the conversation between Franklin and Thucydides can be raised to a higher level, and that higher level from Vision is History. Just like Vision is a language process. Perhaps the easiest way to envision what a visionary language is, is to call it a magic language. A magic language is remarkably different from a mythic language. A mythic language has a protean quality of morphing and so forth, but they're all variants on the narrative line, and what is archetypally engrossing about a myth is that it is a story which is so fundamental, so wide spread, so captivating that it contains you. A myth tends to swallow us, to absorb us so that we must participate in that mythic structure and we find ourselves acting out the meaning of the myth.
One of the best examples of this ever done is the film Black Orpheus. Shot in the slums of Rio de Janeiro about forty years ago; exquisite film. The only thing that links the Orpheus who's there who falls in love with Eurydice and both are killed, the only thing that links them with the new little boy who is the new Orpheus, the next Orpheus is the guitar. The guitar has inscribed on it 'Orpheus', 'Orphu', 'Orpheus is my master'. Which is a magical insight for a moment because if the guitar is mastered by Orpheus, Orpheus then is the story teller and instead of being in the myth himself, instead of being co-opted by the story all the time, he is the story teller. And the story teller commands a magic language. A magic language changes the world; it's alchemical. A magic word, when I was growing up the most well known magic word was abracadabra. 'Abracadabra' and something would happen. Or some of you are old enough, you remember in WW2 one of the great comic book heroes was Captain Marvel. And he would say the magic word 'Shazaam' and lightning would strike and he became Captain Marvel. A magic word changes time/space by the introduction of an intended conscious purpose, wrapped up in a word, a magic word. But we will see today that this is a very precarious procedure and in the film Black Orpheus, as soon as the new little boy takes up the guitar, his little friend urges him; says the sun will not rise because Orpheus is dead, and it rose because Orpheus always played his song of love and the sun would rise. So one little boy says to the other (two black little boys in the slums), one says "quick, play the guitar, make the sun rise". And he grabs it and as he plays it a little girl comes and starts dancing and the sun rises. And the director then has, in this beautiful scene of the sunrise, the slums of Rio de Janeiro are up on the mountain tops overlooking the whole bay and Sugar loaf and the whole thing. And as soon as that happens the film is over and the screen shows a sudden sculpture from antiquity of Orpheus and Eurydice. And the film began that way with on the screen of this classic Greek sculptural frieze of Orpheus and Eurydice which had exploded with the rhythm of the Brazilian samba and so forth and then the whole story, and then it was sealed again. So that the mythic in some deep fundamental way is anti-personal. The story is more important than the people. Whereas the whole point of Vision is that people are more important than the story.
And saying that, we come to understand that law is a form of Myth. One of the greatest poignant statements in planetary history was a statement that Robert Bolt put in his play and was put into the film, A Man For All Seasons, about Sir Thomas Moore, who is also St. Thomas Moore. And Bolt, in the screenplay has him say it, Paul Scofield, the actor, says "laws are more important than men, because who could survive the winds that would blow were the world denuded of the forest of laws that protect us". That is a Mythic conviction. It is a fear of Magic. It is a fear of conscious freedom and is part of the human condition which one of our books, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, points out again and again that this is exactly where we must be cautious, we must be critical and we must insist on the freedom of the person, especially in the wilds of Vision, but most precariously in the rough seas of History. That there is something that is archetypally dangerous to us as persons in, not in Myth in the tribal sense, but in Myth in the regressive sense of us having matured out of it and then having failed to meet the challenge of History, having failed to meet the challenge of Vision; regressed back and come back through a threshold, a layer, an objective barrier as it were, the objective barrier of Symbols, which again are a part of nature; the culmination of the integration. The way in which integration happens, Symbols are fine, Myths are fine, Rituals are fine. But in the regressive mode, coming back from a failure of nerve in History, from a failure of Vision in consciousness, one comes back regressively and it's rather like the phenomenon of sharks teeth. Sharks teeth don't bother you as long as you are going down their gullet, because the teeth all point towards keeping you in. It's only when you try to pull out that you get shredded.
And so the mind is like a shark. It's wonderfully beautiful when it's integrating. It is made to shred to regressive differentiation because it has no way in its structure to determine that that's anything other than madness, and the mind fears madness more than death. To the mind, it can understand that death is a part of nature, it's a part of the way that life is. But madness is a conscious chaos which is not, never permitted, unaccepted. So the mind shreds a regressive vision. And regressive vision becomes, in this shredded state, it becomes fodder for the mind using the only capacity that it has, it uses an imagination based upon mythic experience to reconstruct this into some kind of an idea. And this is where 'isms' come from. 'Isms', 'ideologies' are this regressive consciousness chewed up and shredded and re-spooled into an artificiality which then parades itself as if it were the law of life. And one thing about regressive forms is that they continue to regress, so it doesn't stop just in the mind. Once an artificial false radioactive energized regressive idea gains hold, the mind then looks to assert that in experience and that's where the problem comes from with the negative qualities of Mythology. Then Mythic language is truly false. It's no longer the beautiful stories, which on a tribal level were necessary and important to us because it gave us the nourishment of imagination. Now it's an 'ism', re-cutting, stamping out with its own shapes out of experience only what is permitted, only what is useful, only what should be allowed, and everything else must be atrophied, exiled, must go. But because experience, because the Mythic level, like Vision, like History, is a process, that regression doesn't stop there, it goes on to the next objective level which is Ritual.
And so the way in which things are done are codified. And we can see, the first written codes that we have in History are from about 1900 BC, more like 1800 BC, the 1770's BC, the Code of Hammurabi. And we still have it in translation. And when you read the Code of Hammurabi it specifies, if you do such and such you shall loose a hand. If you do such and such again you shall loose your life. It's a code of punishment and requirement which you must own up to, otherwise you are not permitted to live within the community, within the group, within the state, within the kingdom, within this form which is now, not at all a natural form, but is a regressed artificiality, a false world which has been imposed upon experience by the mind. Not the mind that is a part of the natural development of integration, but the mind turned saboteur, as if it had imbibed some kind of radioactive particle, a little kryptonite perhaps, who knows. So that the myths are all changed. You may only tell these versions of the myth. And so there are such things as mythologies of an ideological state. And in the twentieth century we saw too much of that; the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, communist China.
It's exactly the same form as when the book was ossified into the sentence of Peter Lombard, 1500 years ago. And so people have asked, people like Hannah Arendt have asked where the hell does this come from? What's going on here? Why does this happen? Why has this happened to us again and again? And especially in the twentieth century, where we should have been mature, where weren't we mature? People at the time of Benjamin Franklin and Goethe and so forth are extraordinarily mature. What happened? How does that maturity all of a sudden sour radically and dramatically plunge into a radioactive regressiveness that become an authoritarian, in fact becomes a totalitarian state. And one of Hanna Arendt's great books, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And the finger that points, the very vehicle that's used to bring this to people's attention, the book, the book trying to shy away from becoming a text, trying to become an independent personal Visionary language, is operative only so long as the person writing it and the person reading it are persons; are conscious of themselves and of each other, and the book is a dramatic conversation over time/space between them. So that there is a fine line between a text, which is dead and authoritarian and regressive, and a book which is like a living extension, a differential prism of a possibility of a person.
And one of the first people to explore this in the Renaissance was Cervantes. Cervantes who's exploits of Don Quixote, the book by Cervantes, Don Quixote is the knight of mournful countenance, recalled in his history. And Don Quixote is a conscious history of Cervantes of Don Quixote, of this figure. And we ask ourselves, well obviously he's not a real person is he? He is a fiction, a fictive character. All of that kind of language is a subversive sabotage of a mis-education. You never met anyone who lived in the 1500's. It's a bogus issue. Don Quixote is more real than anyone who lived in the 1500's as soon as you've read Don Quixote. One of the first existentialist authors to develop this, the great Spanish philosopher, Unamuno, who's very name means one world. Don Miguel de Unamuno, at the university of Salamanca in Northern Spain. He has a book, it's translated into English now, Meditations of Quixote. That there's something poignant about the fact that once a literary character is given the personality of the author who writes him, that figure lives. Conan Doyle used to receive letters about Sherlock Holmes all the time. Tens of thousands of Londoners at the time thought that there was a Sherlock Holmes. Tens of millions of readers now consider Sherlock Holmes as the quintessential Edwardian Londoner; has all of the qualities, embodies that. And so a literary figure becomes an indelible part of the artistic conscious time/space which is personal, which is part of the magic of language. Don Quixote and Sherlock Holmes are not mythic figures, they are magical creations. Part of the whole development of late twentieth century Latin American literature, like Marquez, is all about magic realism. That there is something here in literary figures who are once given personality, that art which has to do with person making, on its deepest denominator, also has to do with differential spirit objectivity, which is conferable to character and not limited to time/space by itself, not limited to blood. That spiritual creations can also be as real as blood creations.
So that there's such a thing, for instance, as spirit families. Not just people who are related by blood, but people who are related by spirit. They can adopt, they can marry, they can be together, not on the basis of blood and laws and time and space, but on the rainbowed ranges of conscious time/space which is much, much more capacious than simple time/space. That the Ritual objectivity and the mental objectivities are not the be all and end all of objectivity. There's such a thing as spiritual objectivity which is what art is all about. And just as the existential bodily objectivity of Ritual comportment has a relationship to the mind's objectivity, body and mind, both capable of making objectivity, not only does art make a personal objectivity in a differential way, but there's another objectivity that's kindred to the spiritual person, and that conscious objectivity in the larger sense is the Cosmos. The Universe brought to conscious life.
And the deep wisdom in antiquity and every single civilization was the awareness that consciousness embodies the celestial qualities of things. That there is such a thing, for instance, as the spirit of the Earth. There is such a thing as the spirit of Venus. The planets have their own spirits. The stars have their own spirits. So that things are not just limited to time/space, to geography, physicality, or even physicality plus mentality, but they have a transformed possibility in differential consciousness of having a spiritual objectivity also, which further projects out to a Cosmic objectivity. So that the spiritual person has, like one part of a tuning fork, has a deep sympathy with the emergence of a Cosmos. To then make a statement like the stupid "man is a microcosm" is actually a symbolic regression of a differential realization. Man is not a microcosm. Spiritual objective someone, a woman, a man, is resonantly related to the Cosmos. We're not a small Cosmos, we are in tune with the infinite, because the Cosmos turns out to be infinite, infinite and eternal. And so our quality, our objective personal quality is quite radically distinct from the body or the mind.
But notice, when a regressive consciousness doesn't find that focus in someone, in a person, so that there's no opportunity to find and discover the Cosmos, the living Cosmos, then in that regression there's a compensation that's made up, made up by a negative form of imagination. Perhaps the best kind of word to use for it is fantasization. Not beautiful like fantasy, but fantasization which becomes an 'ism'. And that compensatory false use of imagination creates false worlds. And those false worlds, when they become heavily integrated in the mind, become ideologies that are anti life, because life is subservient to the story that must be told right. And if you don't fit in to the way that we are telling the story, then you are out. The origins of totalitarianism. The fierce myth of the state.
And where does that come from? How does that still get here? Why would something so pernicious still be haunting men and women at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The answers, not only in Hannah Arendt, but in the book that we're pairing with her, Tacitus, The Annals of Imperial Rome. For our time, Hannah Arendt really, unrelentingly keeps pushing her finger into the issues that are important, they're still important, they're not going to go away. But Tacitus helps us to go back to Imperial Rome. Because of all the Empires that have existed on the planet, Imperial Rome was the most efficient at its ideological propagandizing.
Imperial Rome was, in fact, a cult and you'll find, if you had world enough and time to go into these things. . . . . . Here's a book published in Berlin 1936, Berlin and Stuttgart. It's translated into English here, The Imperial Cult Under The Flavians. The Roman Imperial Cult Under the Flavians. Who were the Flavians? Well the Flavians are the successors to the Caesars. The Caesars who made the Imperial Cult and the Flavians who took it over and expanded it so that it became larger than life. The Imperial Cult under the Caesars, Rituals and Power, The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. The Caesars beginning with Julius Caesar and especially Augustus Caesar and then Tiberius Caesar and finally Nero. The end of the Caesars is the beginning of the Flavians coming into power. And what's curious is that the Roman Empire, the Roman Imperial power is not made in Rome, it's made in Alexandria. Augustus Caesar, in order to tie the knot of his ideological power, assumed the magic of Alexander the Great in Alexandria. And by assuming that power, assumed that he had now the god given right to rule the world the way he saw fit. So when the Flavians displaced the Caesars, they displaced the Caesars not in Rome but in Alexandria. And the first Flavian, the first of three Flavians, three men who belonged to the same family which became the Flavian dynasty, Emperors of the Roman Empire. There're only three of them, a father and two sons. The father's name was Vespasian and the two sons are infamous in History. The first son, Titus, was the one who destroyed Jerusalem. And the second Domitian, who's reign was called The Terror. But it all began at the same place that Augustus Caesar got his magic vision from the dead ossified body of Alexander The Great. And Vespasian got it in the same place, sitting not where Augustus Caesar had sat. Augustus Caesar got it from sitting alone in this temple where the body, the preserved body of Alexander The Great, was kept. In fact Augustus broke the tip of the nose off the ossified dried out corpse of Alexander The Great, touching him to see if it was real. And of course he got from that touch, a kind of like a Michelangelo type of egomania that he was greater than this. He was the new Alexander The Great, he was Augustus.
When Vespasian took over, instead of getting it from the body of Alexander The Great, he went to the great temple of the god Sarapis and he sat on the throne of Sarapis and he became instantly much more powerful than Augustus Caesar, who got it from a conqueror, from a man who had become a world conquering feared military man. Vespasian got it from the god Sarapis, who's origins went all the way back into magical Egyptian Mythology. And when we return, we'll take a look at the way in which this has a lot to do with the way in which totalitarianism got an imperial cult foothold in Western History that has not been able to shake ever. And we'll come back to that.
BREAK
So our pair for the next month will be Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition and Tacitus' The Annals. I remember the two of these, seeing them for the first time together in 1959. The Human Condition was just new at that time and where I was, at the University of Wisconsin, we were always looking over the shoulder of the University of Chicago. The University of Wisconsin in the fifties was a very progressive school with radical thinkers and we were very far out. Our successors were Berkeley. But the University of Chicago was very uptight, very precise and they were philosophically hair splitters. So that if you were at the University of Chicago in the fifties you had to be intellectually precise about what you knew and what the other person didn't know, whereas Wisconsin was always a progressive sort of thing. And so when the book came out from the University of Chicago Press, we were suspicious about it. Wisconsin progressives looking at something that was intellectually suspect until you started to read it, and you realized what an incredible woman she was.
Tacitus, actually, I was given this in the most unusual circumstance to read. I had signed up for a Roman History course. I was only eighteen years old. And I had unknowingly signed up for a four credit course instead of the three credit course, which meant that you had to do a very large paper. And so when the time came for the end of the course, I had not done the paper because I hadn't realized that I was committed. So the teaching assistant said, well you have to go see the big professor. Who at that time was a man named Professor Edison. And he didn't want to be bothered with an undergraduate. So he said, here's my copy of Tacitus, The Annals, read it and send a paper to me, I'll be in Rome for the summer, and send it before the summer's over and I will read it personally (meaning that you better. . . . . .). So at that time I could still read Latin, because the copy was in Latin, not in English translation. So I spent that summer (I was the head porter at Sequoia National Park for many years) so I spent that summer reading Tacitus in Latin and puzzling over Roman History and the Caesars and trying to do this paper for somebody who was a professional historian. And so Tacitus Annals for me is always humorous because of those associations.
There's nothing humorous about the Annals for Tacitus' place in Western History. His Latin is not the beautiful flowing Latin of Livy or the well stylized Latin of Cicero or the great epic Latin of Virgil or the poetic beautifully crafted Latin of Horace. Tacitus is famous for blunt ill grammatical super radical statements and his Latin is like something that's cut into clubs and those clubs are thrown together constantly. So the Tacitean style is imitated best in some areas by Herman Melville, where he condenses language. And then later Faulkner too, where the language is so smashed together, that instead of getting the normal language, you get a highly stylized hybrid kind of a language.
The lecture language that I use here, the English that I'm using here is sort of a twenty-first century, my version, of English language. That's like the Tacitean style. The reason for this is to circumvent all of the habitual mental bad habits built into our psyches that do not allow us to learn. That do not allow us to generate a free consciousness. Because along with the development of the book, and then regressively brought into authoritarian use as the text, so that the book became the code of laws of how you will think, of how you will behave. The book became a tyrannical form by the six hundreds AD. Fifteen hundred years ago. And the way in which the book was used as a club, I mean club, to insure authority, was that spoken language was an exegesis of the text. So that you had, instead of the ability to read, you had the ability to pay attention to authoritarian footnotes, because it was the scholarly, the scholastic nit picking notes that were important, because if you didn't get each one of those right then you were totally wishy washy and unprofessional and un-scholastic and wrong. And the sabotaging of oral language by scholastic exegesis was used for so many centuries that after a millennia of that kind of bludgeoning, the entire use of Western languages became compromised by that.
And so the ability to freely read a book is a very rare capacity, and usually people who are able to do that have never gone to universities. Because the farther you go into the academic maw, the more you are trapped in the throat of the shark. Not you as a person, the person is always free, but you as the mental idea of yourself. Your identity as your idea of yourself, which enforces, like a tyrant, your behavior, your ritual comportment; what you are allowed to do. And no policeman is more tyrannical than your own self when it is fearful of making a transgression. And of course all of this is the list of ingredients on the bottle called neurosis. It's a neurotic temperament that lives this way; trained rats follow mazes in this way. But not only is the mind conditioned this way, but it's reinforced by a social cultural tradition which is embedded in the things, the buildings, the cities, houses, not just the architecture, the very geography has all been re-cut to support this. So the external world of human complication (?) reinforces the ideologically stylized mind. And in between, the poor body, fearfully going through its paces so that it will not transgress and incur punishment or banishment. It's an insanity that must stop, must end. But it cannot end with a punctuation mark. You cannot put a period to that. It's built to co-opt those kinds of things. It's been made for millennia to co-opt that kind of situation. But what it cannot handle, what the authoritarian structure cannot handle, is a transform that changes the very structure of the way in which language works. So I never use books as a text to give you an exegesis, never. I use the inside out version of that. I reach into that lion's mouth and grab its tongue and pull it inside out. So that lion of authority has to display its skeleton on the outside. So that you get, not the exegesis of the text, but you get a free language that makes resonances, not around some object of the mind, but resonances that allow you to navigate towards a variety of focuses were that language begins to have some kind of parenthetical temporary forming and happens so frequently that you come to a prismatic transcendental consciousness of form on you own. And that's why this language is so hard to hear at first, because it's not a language that's reinforcing any 'thing' that is identifiable. What's coming into focus with this kind of language is the drama of your freedom emerging in a Cosmic way.
English is a particularly interesting language for this, because we have had several epical waves of this kind of change already. We talked about how Shakespeare changed the English language. Shakespeare never wrote essays. There are no essays by Shakespeare. But there are dozens of plays. Because it's in the dramatic interplay that the resonant gestalts of conscious time space come into possibility. That is to say they don't come into some objective form which is right, but they come into a human range of a rainbow, a spectrum of possibility, each aspect of which could be temporarily assumed and tried on. So that instead of the right view, you have a multiplicity of possibilities which you can try for any given situation. And so the Shakespearean use of English transformed that language enormously. Shakespeare's English made the Cosmos spiritually accessible to the high dram of spoken English. Which is why the Shakespearean text is not some cut and dried ossified scholastic thing which can be filed away. Shakespeare's texts are full of mysteries. The academics have never been able to digest and make, well this is the way this play should be. There's no way that any of the Shakespeare plays should be. It's the performance, it's how someone directs it, how someone acts it. There are always different, there are dozens of ways. There's always a new way. When John Cassavetes made his film of Shakespeare's Tempest, he put Raul Julia and a bunch of people, including himself and his wife Gina on some kind of a Greek Island, and he made it work. Troilus and Cressida can be set in the first world war as the allies and the Germans and it plays beautifully.
But before Shakespeare did that to the English language, there was someone like a Chaucer who also radically reformed the way in which English as a language was able to artistically create a conscious time/space. Shakespeare is the poet of drama, Chaucer is the poet of lifting poetry off the page personally. We only have two really good portraits of Chaucer. One of them shows him riding a horse because he was always travelling. He was the King's purchaser of wine and other things. He was a very elegant man. He wore red velvet suits, and he lived over one of the gates of London so he could watch all the people come and go because he was interested in a world full of people. Chaucer humanized the English language. Before him the English language had languished. It was good for a certain kind of court speak. Whereas Chaucer took the English language and put it into a poetry that's concerned, not with Mythology but with human beings; with the peculiarities of personality. It's only in Chaucer that one could find a wife of Bath. She says, you know what the secret of women is? The thing that a woman wants most (the wife of Bath says in Chaucer's rendition), she wants to control the opinion of her husband. Then she's happy. So Chaucer has this quirk, this foible. He loves the peculiarity of character. But he does it in a kind of poetic that takes the language off the page and delivers it personally. The other portrait of Chaucer, not just on the horse, but the other portrait show him reading his own work before the Royal courts of Europe, in France, in Italy, in England. But he's not reading the text so much as he's delivering the language off the page. The living poet delivers the language off the page; projects it out one says. And this also is a dramatic form, it's the form of the monologue which is different from the Myth. A dramatic monologue like that, especially cast into the high conscious form of a long poem. Any story in the Canterbury Tales has a poetic to it. The prologue is perhaps one of the most famous of all poems meant to be heard allowed. And Chaucer's English is so different from what came before it that that stylization of language is called Middle English. It's a special language, it has its own dictionaries. It has its own concordances.
Whereas Shakespeare's English is a kind of a Renaissance English made most famous, oddly enough, by the King James version of the Bible, which had been worked on for generations and was only published in James time, he had almost nothing to do with it. And people say well, Shakespeare could not have written his plays. It must have been someone like Francis Bacon. Look at how beautiful his essays are. Yes they're beautiful essays. He couldn't write drama. I remember one time taking one of the surviving plays of Francis Bacon, it is a drama between the Bacchic spirit of wine and the new spirit of tobacco from the new world. He couldn't write any kind of drama, it tended to very academic, very dry. Bacchus says, I make men drunk all over, and tobacco says, I only give an inebriation to the head, I leave the rest of the body alone. And it's a very clumsy kind of squared off allegorical junk. He obviously couldn't write a play, much less they're not playable. The thing about Shakespeare is that he's playable infinitely. You could go to Shakespeare plays every day for twenty years, and if you had a great acting troupe and great direction, you would never become bored. It's always ongoing.
But the first great stylist of English as a language is a man who lived in the late six hundreds. His name was Bede. In fact he was so loved, he was always referred to as venerable. He wasn't a Buddhist. The Venerable Bede. And the Venerable Bede wrote a History of the Christian Church in England. And you would think that that's very dry. But it wasn't dry at all in the late six hundreds. Because the standard of education was Peter Lombard's Sentences which reduced everything to a radioactive pseudo mythic level of authority based upon an ideology of state selected text. Whereas the Venerable Bede's book brought a human Historical consciousness into play, and showed that this human Historical consciousness also could make forms like the Church and so the Church was not the authoritarian governor of what things were, but it was a form, one of the forms of human activity in a free Cosmos. It's a totally different take on it.
And I think, towards the end of his life, the Venerable Bede also was the author of the great national English poem, Beowulf. Beowulf is an ancient old English hero, a mythic hero. The hero who fights and kills the monster. Beowulf who kills the monster Grendel and becomes King. But if you read Beowulf, it's not mythic at all, it's structure is high visionary art. It's such a great transform of the myth. The myth of Beowulf goes back to a mythic archetype, the bear's son archetype. It occurs even in Homer, Homer's Odysseus is related to Beowulf mythically. But the English national epic, Beowulf is not mythic, it's great visionary art, verging on History. Because in Beowulf, the Venerable Bede, not only has Beowulf kill the monster Grendel, but later, fifty years later in his old age, he has to confront an even worse demon and that's the monster's mother. Yeah. The monster's mother is the origin of the entire complication and she's much, much tougher. Her son was just a monster, whereas she was (excuse me) a Mother.
This quality, where the English language has been transformed, you almost have to use a Shakespearean emphasis on it, transform-ed. The entire way in which the language is able to present, not to represent things, but to present perspectives. So that you're not, like in a myth, having a narrative line that rolls along images. So that the energy that pushes a myth is imagination, it's imaginative. And the little roller along which it goes are images. And there are big rollers called symbols, which then raise myth into the symbol level, into the level of thought, into the power of ideas. But ideas work very similar in the symbolic mind to the way in which narrative lines work in stories. Whereas a vision jumps completely out of that skin. A vision is not limited to a narrative line at all. It's not limited to the shaped confines, the liminal capacities to form by ideas. Visions transcend ideas; they go way beyond them. Visions color outside the lines. They're not interested in those lines. They're not interested in what the mind says it should be, or what mythic experience says this is how it is, or the existential it must be this way. Visions color not only outside the lines, but they color sometimes without lines at all. Someone like a Matisse could see pure color and wouldn't have to have form at all. You don't need form at all. There were times for Monet where he thought he was going mad at first, where he saw, not the color of form, but he saw the color of impressions before they formed into images into the mind. And he trained himself to be able to see visionarily, the impressions before they became shaped into images. So that Monet's paintings, as he grew in his capacity to deliver this, are a gestalt of color that can make a whole variety, a whole spectrum of possibility of forms.
That capacity to paint like a Monet or like a Matisse is very similar to what Shakespeare did to the English or what Chaucer did to the English language. So the English language is capable of that. And the thing that gets in the way is that people are educated by exegesis from a text, which conditions you to the code of Hammurabi and all of his successors. So that you become very nice cogs in other people's wheels.
I remember, about thirty years ago, a student revolutionary named Mario Savio said "everywhere we look, we see the gears of oppression. We have to throw our bodies on those gears and stop them if that's the only way to do it". That kind of sixties talk. It doesn't work. Because that image, that metaphor didn't originate in the Berkeley free speech movement, it originated with Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator, where he gets caught up in the gears and the gears send him all the way through the machinery. As long as you play the game of gears, the gears will always win. You have to play the game of non-game and that is to unplug the machinery. Or something even more radical, the Zen solution, leave the building. Let them have it. The Cosmos is so filled with possibilities of conscious time/space that you could give them all of the geography that they could possibly hold in their hands and their legal portfolios indexed forever and you would still have an infinite realm to live in.
So the Exegesis language of a text is exactly opposite of what I'm doing for you. Which is a catastrophically radical un-stylizing of a differential language so that you can play in it indefinitely. And just because what is being said here today is limited by ninety minutes, doesn't even begin to unfold the possibilities of that language. This ninety minutes plays with infinite capacities against the ninety minutes from last week, or expectantly what will come next week. And when you put a hundred and four of these ninety minutes together, you get a rather large production. It's about twelve times the size of Wagner's Ring Cycle. It's 156 hours. All of it a scintillating kaleidoscope of possibility of learning. And yes it has relational indexes, but not a right one. It has as many as you care to generate and to follow through.
And so it has that capacity which is able to navigate on the oceans of History, because you need a language freedom on this level in order to be in History. Not that History is so difficult as a thing, but it's so difficult as a non-thing, as a non integral thing. History doesn't integrate at all. And to have the expectation that History will somehow bring it all together is psychotic. It doesn't do it. Vision doesn't do that even. To think that Visions will save you because they are integral and bring things together is to misunderstand completely. If there is any saving to be done it's because they open up. Infinite possibility. That's what visionary. Without Vision the people will not be free. It's more than truth, it's an operative algorithm of exploration which continues to proliferate. But the mind especially is inculcated and trained by exegesis of text for several thousand years to consider that option as madness. It's exactly that freedom that the mind says is dangerous, it's worse than death. The mind stylizes that as a chaos nightmare. Nothing will be determinable. You won't be able to have, in fact what you will have is an identity crisis. And that's exactly right. But the identity crisis is not something to be solved by searching for an identity but by junking the whole need to have an identity in the first place. That is a fatal addiction. Do I have to be who I was in order to be who I will be? That's absurd. That's like Groucho Marx monologue, right. I mean Harpo had it right, don't say a thing. Just find the blow torch out of your pocket and light your cigar.
The sabotaging of the text is part of the radical consciousness that's being engendered here. You're being acclimated, not conditioned, but acclimated to freedom. Are these books difficult? Yeah, as texts their difficult. But we're not even concerned with that. We're endeavoring to do something which has never been done before and will never be done this way again no matter how many hundreds of millions do this kind of education further into the twenty-first century, they'll never do it the way that you did it, and that's the way that you're doing it. Each time it's unique because the possibility of spiritual personhood is indefinite.
One of the qualities that exegesis of the text depends upon for its authority is the insistence that counting starts with 1. Whereas that's ridiculous. Deep wisdom understands that numerousy is a projected possibility in the realm of zero. The case of musical scale is one of the best illustrations. If you think all music has to be by such and such a scale, the octave, the eight note scale that repeats, then you won't be able to hear Chinese music at all because it's on a five note scale. Or some ragas which go into a completely different. . . . . . .or other kinds of so called ancient music which don't use that scale at all. As a matter of fact there are an infinite number of musical scales, all of them capable of music. So that all the music that every human being has ever heard on the planet is a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to the musics that are available Cosmically.
So that scale of freedom takes away the neurotic urgency to tow identity lines which the mind insists is necessary for rational behavior. Rational behavior! It's a joke. Both words in that phrase are, not only problematical and fraught with ridiculousness, but the phrase itself is truly a butt line for a very poor joke.
Yet someone like Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition says, in 1958 when this came out, she says we have an unprecedented situation that has happened and all of the History of mankind has come to some new juncture never before seen and all of the old problems and all of the new problems are suddenly germane again in a way that they haven't been, sometimes for a very long time, and others never. And the event was the launching of Sputnik. The launching of a man made object that joined the heavens. And she says in the very beginning, page one, this is an unprecedented thing because we've been conditioned to think of ourselves where the condition of man is the Earth. That the final arbiter of all symbols and images of what is identifiably real for us is the Earth, the Mother Earth. And that recent Western History, over the last couple of hundred years has shown an alienation from the overwhelming authority of Father Celestial Heavenly Gods. And now she says what's before us is not only the rejection of the Father, but a rejection of the Mother Earth as being the final arbiter. As being the ultimate parenthesis within which all experience happens. All the myths refer ultimately to the Earth. And nobody had any myths of other places before this. The ascriptions to somebody being the daughter of the Moon or the morning star and all that, the cognate value was always Earth bound. Whereas she says now we can see post Sputnik, all of a sudden that for the past few decades, science fiction has been giving us something which we had not planned for. It doesn't incorporate under the rubric of myth. Though they seem mythic at times, science fiction is really an unexplored visionary language. New possibilities of person have emerged and one of the crucial qualities in this is that as new possibilities of person have emerged, new facets of the Cosmos have also evidently emerged and we're having to catch up with a more complex Cosmos than was there before. That the Cosmos has changed because we have added something new to it. We've put a different inflection on our conscious dimension of conscious time/space and the Cosmos has responded. That we could take it mythically, like Carl Jung's famous book on UFO's, Modern Myth of Things Seen In The Sky, Self symbols, the disks. But that's a regressive mentality. It's actually an ideology, ideological outlook to look at it that way. There are radical possibilities that haven't been even brought into presentation. There are many possibilities.
But what's differentially conscious about that is that the more that we go into it, the more possibilities there are to have. So that the differential Person and the differential Cosmos grow asymptotically larger and faster than the mind is able to stylize in any integral way. So that if it holds to the bad habit of seeking to have those kinds of identity, boom or bust, it's only alternative will be to become an authoritarian anti conscious tyrant. We will all become little Caesars in our own lives, just for defensive safety against freedom. This, as Camus said and wrote so eloquently, this is absurd. When the only questions of life are whether to commit suicide or not, this is absurd. When the only social issue is to commit murder or not? And suicide and murder, as Camus points out, the myth of Sisyphus for absurdity for the individual, the ideology of murder, in his book The Rebel, that these are truly dead ends. Not of us, we were never really corralled much less defined, much less able to live truthfully within those kinds of tinker toy games. Those are just archaic games.
Tacitus, already in The Annals of Imperial Rome, shows what happens when an entire world accepts a codified ideology, The Roman Empirium and all of its religious mythic infrastructures. He shows progressively, because he lived through it, how in the first century of the Common Era, the first century AD, the entire world went crazy together. And it was only people who painstakingly abstracted themselves from this that they didn't become psychotic. The entire world became psychotic, all of it from top to bottom, all the way through. And yet some lived to produce a History that brings us still here. We're still here.
We're going to talk next week about robots. About robots who become one of the last stands, one of the last vestiges of this projection of an identity through a powerful symbol to maintain itself in a Cosmos that becomes increasingly infinite in possibility and capacity. But not to Asimov, we'll mention Asimov. But the original robot story is a play, Rosoms Universal Robots known as RUR, by Karel Capek. Capek was a Czech writer during the First World War. His universal robots are a great stylization in the dramatic conscious language of how an identity crisis in the First World War in Western History showed something which only science fiction was able to envision at the time. More of that next week, thank you.
END OF RECORDING