Symbol 1
Presented on: Saturday, October 7, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to Symbols 1 and this gives us an opportunity to reconnoitre a sense of coordination that we have been developing. With the emergence of the brain, our neurophysiology, our psyche, reaches a completion. That completedness has a very interesting set of properties. One of them is that the outline of something that is complete has a sense of geometricity to it and the easiest geometricity is a square, a frame. We have styled that in our learning, a square of attention, which of course can be expanded in a ratio to rectangular; it's a frame. It is a frame of reference but the outline of it, the boundary, the defining shape of it traditionally was something that was paced off, it was walked around, one knew the boundaries because one had gone to the limit and stepped it off and you knew that this was your property. This was the shape, this is the frame of reference within which is a picture. It is a domain which is yours. In that domain we have come to understand three of the most characteristic items are images; images which go to make that picture within that frame and also feeling tones that are deeply associated with those images, so that whenever we are given a very powerful imagery there will be a concomitant feeling tone and it will result in language.
So the picture within the symbolic square of attention, within the picture, will have a mythic quality of experience to it. It will seek for its integral the brain. We are going to see, in just a few moments, how the brain becomes a mind. But the experience founds itself for its traction on a base of actions. The time honoured phrase for those actions are the rituals, the rituals are selected action sequences that have a beginning, steps, and an end, and that these ritual threads can be woven together and they make the texture of our existence. They make not only the karma of the actions that carries through definitely, immediately, into experience, but they also form the objective basis by which all things occur existentially. Out of them comes an interesting pair, an organic pair that stays existential, its rituals of being electrons, complementing protons with neutrons making atoms and atoms coming together and making molecules and molecules coming together eventually and achieving a new order of complexity where experience begins to outstrip existence. One has, instead of just chemistry, the rituals of chemistry, one has the ritual generating organic chemistry and so life comes into play as a deepening, a deepening of the way in which existence had its emergence out of nature. And so we have found that experience will always synergise itself with nature and that the two processes have an interesting parallel between them and that in between these two processes is the objective forms of ritual, action, existence.
Now with symbols we have another parallel; we have a parallel with existential objectivity, the things themselves, but because they have engendered, generated, the mythic process of experience, now the brain that comes out of the mind, the symbolic thought that will come out of experience, will have a parallel, objectively, with things in the world. This referentiality, this parallel, makes, then, the frame of an interesting pair of pairs. We have two processes and we have two objective forms and if we put them into phases, as we are doing in our learning, we now have done something almost magical like a legerdemain. We have taken our learning away from subjects, from categories, from disciplines and put it into a universal expression of four phases: two phases of process, two phases of forms. Together they make a complete referentiality, so that the brain, now, has the ability to believe and to affect in symbolic thought the completedness of a while cycle, the squaring of nature.
But nature, in its processed form, has a circularity to it, and so one says 'Yes we have completed the circle. We have finished the square, we have completed the circle' and yet there is a curious aspect that occurs. The brain will give rise to the mind spontaneously, as if the centre, the focus, were now a fifth phase. If those four phases were like an essence, this is the quintessence. This is the alchemical fifth quality. In show business it used to be called the fifth business, it's the magic of the theatre where the universe now becomes a stage, upon which can be acted out, not just the rituals of existence but the drama that will result in the play. And so a quintessential transform fifth makes it possible for yet a third kind of form to come out, the forms of art. Art forms have this emergence from an alchemical quintessence, which we have come to understand is best characterised in our time by the term 'consciousness' but we are using an old Middle English term to help us instead of just focusing on consciousness and we are going to use the term 'vision'.
Middle English came out with, in the 1400s, 1300s and early 1400s, with a transform of the English language by people like Chaucer, the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a number of very great authors at the time, basing themselves on new language forms from Italy. Petrarch, Boccaccio, Dante, to develop the sense that one now talks about the person as not being just an existential form or a symbolic mental form but being a very quicksilver alchemical transforming form so that the person now will have a visionary quality, will be able not only to have dreams on the mythic level but will be able to have visions on a magical, quintessential, transformational horizon. And so the horizon there, that flow of consciousness, and we will see in the early 20th century, was styled as the stream of consciousness.
It had its deepest imbuing in some of the world's greatest literature and we are going to take for the next four week, one month, one moon cycle, establishing with four presentations, many square of reference, we are going to take two of the most famous stream of consciousness novels, one by a woman, one by a man: Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse and William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. We could use other stream of consciousness works but they are huge; James Joyce's Ulysses, Marcel Proust, Remembrance of things Past, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. Or some of the works of Dorothy Richardson, there are a number of figures that we could use; we are using these two.
They help us to appreciate that the symbolic mind is already a transform of the brain. It already involves vision and because it involves vision, we have an opportunity to have an appreciation, because of our phase learning, that the square of attention now undergoes a radical shift in its composition. That frame can only have four sides at one time, that square of attention is made from before the beginning, out of the sense of the geometry of a square. Not just the four sides, the four angles that will then have a central focus as a fifth quality. But the frame, because the square of attention only holds four sides at once, when vision, visionary consciousness comes into play, nature accepts vision to operate in its place in the square of attention.
In doing so it doesn't face oblivion but it shifts itself into a subconscious mode so that now the stream of consciousness as vision will be a part of the square of attention and nature will go into a subconscious contextual background, which will be recoverable easiest through the centre of the composition. A great American photographer artist Edward Weston in his day books once wrote, 'Composition is the strongest way of seeing' because when one composes one learns not only to see the picture but to see through the picture, to penetrate, so that the images now tend to become, instead of just on a flat plane, the surface bounded by the frame but it becomes multidimensional and not just three dimensional or four dimensional but becomes five dimensional. Instead of having a space-time field out of which existence happens, emerges, and doesn't emerge statically but vibrantly, iteratively, millions of times per time unit, so it will be vital and vibrant and yet it can be held on a plane of the brain, so that one could abstract a static picture from the world and hold it in one's mind, in one's brain.
But with the penetration through the centre now one has a living, moving picture and that moving picture conveys a kinetic quality, whereas existence emerged out of a dynamic nature and the brain emerged out of dynamic experience, the art forms and the person as an art from will emerge out of a kinetic quality, which is not integrally dynamic but is differentially kinetic. Instead of focusing to come together, its process enlarges and enlarges, goes deeper, higher, wider, more complex and so what emerges in a five dimensional, not universe anymore, but a five dimensional cosmos, is the quality of possibilities, transforms, and not only transforms, but transforms of transforms. All possible worlds are now ready to be adventured into, to enquire into.
The ancient way of talking about this in the Classic West was that this was the sense of wonder out of which philosophy, the love of wisdom, began. Pythagoras was the first man to use the term of himself, that he was a philosopher. He was a lover of wisdom in the sense that he was able to, not only himself go into a five dimensional conscious space-time, but to bring others with him through a process of initiation that had two stages to it. The first stage was to learn to listen and the second stage was to learn to put creative imagination into a differential synergy with remembering.
The way that this happened was that the imagination as a structure of the mind was able to pass into visionary consciousness from the structure of the mind into a process of creative imagining. It was able to do this because vision as consciousness had exchanged places with nature and so it had the protean quality of nature, so that the centre of the mind, which was the imagination now became creative, imagining as a process, differentially, and remembering, which was a process in visionary consciousness, exchanged places with it. When it enters into the brain, now becoming the mind, the memory takes the place at the centre of the mind, as the central structure.
When the imagination was the centre of the brain, one's self image was the master integrator of it all but when the memory exchanges pride of place with it, the memory now remembers further dimensions than this world has. It is no longer limited to the four dimensions of time-space but is open to the unlimited possibilities of a multi-dimensional cosmos. And so Pythagoras was one of the first Western philosophers to say he remembered past lives, reincarnated many times. The transmigration of souls is not so much the transmigration of souls but the ability to bring remembering other personal lives back into the play of one's current life, now enriched by more dimensions than time-space had had.
Out of this, about the same time as Pythagoras, in China, because our learning is planetary, we're taking all the traditions of the planet and weaving them all together and putting all of the patterns into a kaleidoscopic overlay so that we are now available to transcend the planet, to go out into the entire state system and inhabit it as a new kind of a home. This is an education to develop a star system population of human beings. So radical is this change that the species itself is undergoing a massive transformation.
When our current physiological, neurological species came into being in Southern Africa about 160,000 years ago, came out of one mutation, a feminine mutation, so that those mutations hold in the mitochondria of the organic cells through the woman, through the maternal quality. There was of course, then, an Eve. She lived a very long time ago but there was a radical change in the species of Homo sapiens, already radical in itself, being a mutation away from Homo neanderthal, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, several other hominid variations of species. When Homo sapiens had existed about 120,000 years there was another transform within the species and we became Homo sapiens sapiens.
About 40,000 years ago the proof of it is that for the first time you begin to find art. You find art in the caves, the Palaeolithic caves, you find sculptures, for the first time, of the Earth Mother and arranged, initially, as two very large circles for breasts, two very large circles for thighs, and one very large circle for the pregnancy centre. One finds that five-part transform of Homo sapiens sapiens after about 35,000 years resulting in the shape of a square, which rises to an ascendant centre as the fifth and one has a pyramid.
The first person in the world, an architect to conceive of the pyramidal possibilities developing out of a previous quality of stacking squares upon squares upon squares within squares of Heronia, so there is a perfect triangle. His name was Imhotep and the Pharaoh in Egypt, the third pharaoh of the first dynasty, Zoser, had Imhotep design several pyramids. The first didn't quite work because the geometry was not able to be carried through and one had the bent pyramid. Then one had the red pyramid when for the first time it was mastered and then it could be enlarged to the great pyramids of Giza, Khafra, Cheops, Mycerinus. One had for the first time not just that these shapes are there but that each pyramid, if understood symbolically, was a five pointed star. If you arranged the three great pyramids as five pointed stars in a particular, slightly bowed line, those three stars were the three large stars in the constellation of Orion, so that one now had the ability to raise Earth in such a symbolic architectural way so as to bring the shape of the heavens into man's symbolic life on the Earth, and to know how to do this and to carry it through.
It wasn't much longer after that one found that the pyramid, the five quality, five-pointed transform square of attention now become a star, a quintessential star, was able to receive further symbolic developments. That came in the sixth dynasty with the pyramid of Unis, for the first time you have a hieroglyphic language put on the inside of the pyramid, so that a symbolic language now literally carpets and does the walls and does the ceilings of a funerary passage which is a Palaeolithic cave art not put into the caves under the earth but put into the structure of the architectural stars above the earth in an ascendant, aspirant way.
If one follows those symbols, the symbols are leading one from the entrance into the tomb in such a way that the tomb transforms itself along the way and becomes a temple, a temple of rebirth. A temple of coming back into life again and that this is an initiation that one does not have to wait to die to do but you can be carried through like the old Palaeolithic cave art, someone could be brought through the symbolic stages, the gates of the passage, and they would be able to rise in a completely new life, a quintessential, transformed life where one could understand, consciously, you will live again and again and have lived again and again. This would, then, not be a rebirth so much but an entrance into the state of eternity. One would have eternal life.
The art form would carry the visionary process and just as the visionary process of consciousness was able to change places with nature in the square of attention, art was able to change places in the square of attention with ritual and so ritual was no longer the traction at the basis of experience but that experience yearned for the further attractiveness of the objectivity differential forms of art and the spirit and the person. Now there was a dosey doe between consciousness and nature and between art and ritual and experience now aligned itself with the visionary transform of consciousness and sought to emerge into the forms of art. The forms of art are markedly different from the forms of ritual. The forms of ritual are always pragmatic. They are, in themselves, made of pragmatic actions, sequences that are definite. They really, when you do them, the experience that will come out is exactly what you do do.
We ended the Nature phase and began the Ritual phase with a Satipatthana Sutras of the historical Buddha. The shorter one is in the Majjhima Nikaya, the middle length sayings, the larger one is in the Digha Nikaya, the long sayings of the Buddha. In a way, in India at the same time of Pythagoras in Greece and Lao Tzu in China, the historical Buddha in India also came to a very similar harmonic and understanding; when one completes this life's cycle, his phrase was, 'Whatever has to be set up has been set up, whatever has to be taken down has been taken down.' Not finito but an equilibria that allows for a spontaneous emergence of quintessential consciousness.
The historical Buddha almost never talked about it in public, he just simply referred to it as 'the other shore'; the art of the differentially conscious person is on another shore which one can cross over to very, very easily. What one crosses over to is the illusion that there is an ocean of samsara that you cannot cross, whereas the crossing of it is without effort. One doesn't have to pack bags, 'you don't need a ticket to ride, you just get on board'. Those are lyrics from a tune that the Chambers Brothers did in the 1960s about time and transform, 'Train of truth's a-comin', you just climb on board.'
The Chinese presentation in Lao Tzu became the root of the five phase energy cycle, which we have used since the beginning of our learning. In the 42nd chapter of the Tao Tê Ching, and I read you my translation from the Tao Tê Ching, of the 42nd chapter. The book is the Tao Tê Ching, it means it's the book of Tao Tê. Tao is a zeroness, Tê is a one. That one, constantly, is emerging out of the zeroness and as they do the tuned interplay between them, as a binary, creates a third and that third is the human heartedness, the Jen, so the five phase energy cycle runs Tao, Te, Jen and the fourth one is I which means the symbols out of which we get the I Ching, the Book of the Symbols.
The fifth phase in Lao Tzu's 42nd chapter is, he calls it a phrase which translates as the ten thousand things. It doesn't mean just multiplicity, it means the differentiality is now active. That differentiality has a special quality in Lao Tzu; it is able to return back into the Tao and leave no trace so that the Tao's zeroness is purely preserved. So what can emerge now is Tao absolutely pure from the unenhampered Tao. But if the ten thousand things, if the differentiality, is messed with - and how would you mess with it? You would crimp the symbols, you would crimp the brain from becoming a quintessential mind and instead of the creative imagination working with remembering and the memory working with the imagination, now something has come in to block that, to block that Qi, to block that energy cycle. What happens is that the mind becomes opaqued and instead of transparent to visionary consciousness it becomes opaqued and becomes a mirror, instead of it being quicksilver as a transform, it becomes a silver backed mirror.
What it reflects, then, is whatever is out there. It doesn't know anything through the looking glass. There's no Alice in Wonderland, Alice going through the looking glass, there is only the mirror. The holder of the mirror sees that they are what they are and that must be maintained. And so the experience comes into play, held in an ever-shrinking kind of parentheses between the closed mind and its need to manipulate the things of the world, so the referentiality maintains its identification. More and more experience is squeezed into a definite limited stylisation. Now you have, yes, you have logic but you have the logic of empire and not of this, not only as an individual egotistically embalmed and imprisioned, but the many individuals that go up to make a kingdom or to make a nation, or to make a world, have a peculiar quality to them.
We know from 21st century science that in a chemical reaction every molecule undergoes its own statistical transform. It isn't the transform of all the molecules at the same time in a chemical reaction; it is the statistical stochastic average of all of them together that characterises the whole. And so one has, in a closed world, eventually, the whole world having the characterisation of illusion, believed in, which is the definition of delusion, and a deluded world has not ability to transform itself because it has closed its mind off. So the root cause of ignorance in the historical Buddha was called prat?tyasamutp?da, the twelve gates through which illusion and delusion occur and happen. The key to it is that there is no way for the mind to determine where the beginning of the prat?tyasamutp?da is. It generates through ignorance but it becomes a blur.
When I was a child there was a fairy tale of Little Black Sambo. The tigers chased him up a palm and they ran around so fast they turned into butter. That blur makes it impossible for the mind to correct itself, because it doesn't come into being as a mind, it only is in being as a neurological completed circle, as a frame of reference that has checked itself through, and it knows that everything is the way in which it should be according to itself, the transform is always at the centre. It's always at a focus but the magical knack is that the centre cannot be a point, it has to be an openness.
If you bring it to a point you get pyramid power that continues to close it off because it isn't that it comes to a point but it comes to a place where, at the point, an inner eye opens up. You'll find on the back of the American one dollar bill the 13 stage pyramid going to the eye at the top of the pyramid where Benjamin Franklin put it originally, to be able to see through this world into shapes of worlds yet to come. As Robert Kennedy once said, 'Most men look at the world and ask "Why?" I look through the world to something possible and ask, "Why not?"' Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's come back to our attentiveness. We are undergoing an inquiry that has a very ancient quality to it. When we were doing some of the mythic presentations, we were talking about both mandalas and medicine sand paintings of the American South West, the Navajo in particular, in our exemplar. Those forms are generally an eight-part form and so the eight phases of our learning is like a medicine sand painting, it's like a mandala upon whose field takes place the stages and the processes of a return to health. The reason for such an enormous radical presentation of a new kind of multidimensional mandala, an actual eleven dimensional medicine sand painting, very reminiscent of String Theory today, is that we have a number of challenges that have come together and constitute, now, either a threshold or a storm front. This is such a powerful storm front, such an all inclusive threshold, that most forms from the past are not going to hold.
Most processes will become ineffectual and the one that will go first is the propping up of an ill-considered social world that is crumbling, perhaps not to dust, but certainly like the walls of Jericho is going to come down, it's coming down now. The main constituents of that storm front and that threshold have to do, not just with us personally as having our lives and our persons and our endeavours, but the very species itself.
Homo sapiens sapiens has been a sub-species of Homo sapiens for 40,000 years, effectively, and now is transforming a second time. The way, perhaps, best to characterise that second transform is that the first transform is a fermentation making the water into wine. The second transform is a distillation making wine into cognac. Now, Homo sapiens sapiens were a wine compared to Homo sapiens but what we're evolving into will be the cognac and I call this new species Homo sapiens stellaris. Star wisdom, star system mankind, star wisdom man, which means that we go from having a continental sense of nationalism to having about a one light year field of home. We have already reached out a billion miles to place Cassini into the Saturn system and drop the Huygens probe down onto the surface of Titan, we have already done that.
There was a great triumph 17 years ago in Pasadena, the convention centre, with all the Caltech and JPL people and everyone was celebrating the arrival of Voyager II at the system of Neptune three billion miles away and then within a couple of years there was the great reverse photograph taken from Voyager II as it was leaving the area of the immediate giant planet edge of the solar system and it was a shot back including every planet with Neptune and the Earth, all the way back to the sun, was called the Family Photo. This was 1991, this was 15 years ago. We have already underway the project of the dawn horizon going out to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, which we now know has 40 or 50,000 bodies about the size of Pluto and just a little less, so that the star system is already many times larger and more interesting than it was in 1991 and it's just going to increase.
By 2020, our capacities will be about 1000 times what they are today in 2006; the ability to go into holding laser tweezers to inspect a single molecule with the atomic force microscopy that's available, means that we are going to be able to go down into the atomic and molecular levels. The speed of the molecular changes is called Femtochemistry. The world founder and leader of that is at Caltech, he is an Arab from Egypt, Ahmed Zewail from Alexandria, which has rebuilt the great library again with a huge new European design like a big tilted roof, circular roof, to house an incredible interior to bring back the qualities of a new past into a merging future. One of my programmes to come out later in this decade will be called The Future and the New Past.
The quality of the transform is not only that we are transforming because of our spirit and our differential conscious possibilities, raised not only to the prismatic level of art, the art of the spirit person, but that in itself generates a kaleidoscopic consciousness known colloquially, when it was a subject, as history but historical consciousness is at least seven dimensional field. Already 100 years ago there was a great philosopher named Wilhelm Dilthey who said that man in his civilised realm lives in the dimensions of history and that it changes the way in which the base of our square of attention reads out. As nature becomes displaced cooperatively by vision and art displaces ritual, history displaces myth, which means that the experience that we had will become more and more, in historical dimension, a kind of a subconscious background and the form that will emerge is the experimental nature of historical consciousness because its affinity, its resonant process is differential, visionary consciousness.
When human beings are largely in the process of their kinetic activity conscious to theory, theoria, contemplative foreseeing and the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history, now we have a population of human beings who are capable of not only the critiqueable forms of prismatic art but the analytic differential forms of science. The jumping ahead on this level is sudden, swift and irrevocable, almost as if this threshold, this potential storm front was becoming more and more apparent. The appearance in the mid 1940s, especially at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947, whose 60th anniversary is coming up next Summer, we have been contacted, inadvertently at first, but now with an almost severe mysterious invitation by other star system civilisations. We must respond. We cannot respond on the basis of the old. They are not going to talk to nations or empires or confederations. They will only relate in some parity way to a star system civilisation. And so it is to our need, as both a new species form of ourselves and a new scale of civilisation, that must be brought into play rather rapidly.
This learning is meant to be as challenging as is possible for the most interesting and talented people, not necessarily the most smart or the most powerful or the most rich, but those who feel the appeal, because there is a planetary population of you, who will, in your own way, recalibrate the way in which education happens. On the first level, on the grade school level, these eight phases develop the first eight grades very easily. By doubling that, you get a high school level of four years and then by doubling that you get a two year college level and by the time men and women are 20, they will have gone through this process in refined, simplified presentational ways three times, and be able to have traction and community with anyone on the planet. You will have the basis of a planetary culture for real, for the first time.
The matrix out of which a star system civilisation can be engendered, realistically, there is no way to get from where we are currently to where we need to be with the facilities, the traditions, the customs, the arrogance, the pride, the wilfulness that is in place today. It is not going to happen, it is going to be a storm front. It can be a transform threshold just as easily and that's why all of this effort, this work. If it were going to be developed in a regular public way, there wouldn't have been enough time to do this and so I have taken the back alleyways of anonymity to make sure that at least some form of it is operative and functioning. We are going to come to the swiftness of the way in which time has speeded up and the threshold of resonance has come to the end of the fermenting type of transform and the need for a distilling transform.
Let's take William Faulkner for just a moment. William Faulkner is a fifth generation Scottish immigrant to America, he is of the generation of my grandfather, who is a fifth generation Scottish immigrant. Whereas my family were given a sheepskin land grant to Illinois territory before it was a state, Faulkner's forebears had land grants in the territory of Mississippi before it became a state in 1817. It's interesting because Mississippi was one of the earliest locales visited. It was a large territory which was both Alabama and Mississippi together, they weren't separated into two different states until 1817 and then Alabama was made a state in 1819.
That was all one territory and the Choctaw and Chickasaw and Natchez Indian tribes held sway over this vast territory for since time immemorial and in a sophisticated way. There are not so well known but there are esoterically known archaeological items from that part of what became the United States that go back more than a thousand years, sophisticated ceramics which indicate that there was a great tie between that part of the Gulf of Mexico Southern US, in between the Mississippi River and the region that eventually became Georgia and a great tie with the great civilisations of Mesoamerica and that there was evidently a commerce along the whole Gulf coast from Mexico where the Mayans, taking over from the Toltecs, from the Olmec, had come all along the coastline and had inhabited that Mississippi-Alabama territory.
The first European there was Hernando de Soto, and Hernando de Soto, in 1540, that's 565 years ago, went into that territory and found that there was no traction whatsoever for him. He left and the next time there was a European presence was almost 150 years later. That 150 years is a space in which there was almost a dismissal of the ability of Europeans to affect any kind of a contact. A similar timeframe was in the American South West where Alvarado and Colorado went in and tried to take over the pueblo peoples and they were thrown out. They came back with Jesuit military conquistador reinforcements and finally the pueblo nations banded together and threw the Spanish out for quite some time.
It wasn't until the 1700s that you began to find an impress again of the European forces and powers on the American Indians of the South and the South West. It wasn't until the 1720s that you began to find, in the American South West, there was a Spanish emphasis but in the America South there was a French emphasis. The French had control of that vast Indian territory, centring at New Orleans and extending all the way up, not only the Mississippi, but along the Ohio, up the Wabash, so that there are still French names of the communities like Vincenz, Indiana, like Detroit, Michigan, they are French names, like New Orleans. That vast territory was called, west of the Mississippi, after Louis XIV, it was called Louisiana and Louisiana was claimed by the French all the way to the Pacific Coast. That whole east of the Mississippi was lost in the French and Indian wars, 1754 - 1763. They reserved the right to keep New Orleans and to keep Louisiana which was this enormous continental tract of land. The person who seized upon that as the basis of an American empire, a western hemisphere empire, was Napoleon.
The first challenge to the French Napoleonic power came from an American genius named Thomas Jefferson who accepted the challenge of Napoleon because he had been one of the instigators of the French Revolution when it was first bright. France had been prepared by Benjamin Franklin, for a genius decade, and he wouldn't leave France until he had someone to handle his position and he wrote to his favourite sister Jane Mecom, he said, in 1785, 'Mr Jefferson is coming and he will be able to take care of everything.' When Jefferson left France, the night before he left there was a dinner in Paris and all of the major leaders of the French Revolution where there at the dinner table. And when Jefferson's carriage was on its way to the Havre, to the port, to get up where - the ships were called packets in those days - as his coach was leaving Paris the French Revolution broke out and all of his friends were leaders of it. One of the most powerful figures in that group was the young Marquis de Lafayette.
When the French Revolution went sour, went bad, its errors became known as The Terror, The Guillotine, the directorate where it was like a proto-fascist state. At that time the French were ousted from the North American continent by Jefferson's Louisiana purchase in 1803. It's interesting because immediately that New Orleans and the rest of the Louisiana territory left the purview of Louis XIV's royal egis, Napoleonic power, there was like a vacuum left where the Indian tribes could only band together for small fights and skirmishes because the influx of pioneers was of such range and speed. Jefferson's emissary to Napoleon was James Monroe and one of the phrases that Jefferson put in, and how we got to Louisiana purchase, he said, 'We have taken the liberty to take a census of all the men who are of age to bear arms for France in the United States. You have 17, 500 and some men. I am sending 20,000 armed men a month through the Cumberland Gap. I am sure we can come to some terms and understanding.'
All of that tidal wave fell first upon the Mississippi territory, more than Alabama. On the Mississippi because Mississippi, bordering not only the Mississippi river and stretching from what is today from Memphis to New Orleans, but was the key to the entire Caribbean coast area and they considered that the actual first second coast of the United States, the Atlantic Seaboard, the Caribbean Seaboard. It was only later that the Pacific became 'the second coast' and now the New South considers itself the third coast but it was the second coast. Faulkner's home, Rowan Oak - a Rowan tree is a mountain ash, in the fall the leaves turn a golden yellow and little red berries come out that survive and the winter birds are able to feed on them, a very interesting tree. In Calgary, Alberta, my three storey house on the Elbow River had a rowan tree right next to the glassed-in front porch, very interesting to see - Rowan oak, the house that he bought in 1930 was one of the first big houses in Mississippi and was founded by an Irishman. And he built it to be one of the grand European type manor houses, not just an Italianate palladio villa, like Monticello, but to be a manor house in order to be a power place of influence, not just a villa to have an state but to be a manor house of being able to control the political and social power of a whole area, a whole territory, like a county. If you controlled in, Europe, several counties you were then a count, the French term was a marquess, a marquis.
So this Irish immigrant would be Marquis, built the original Rowan Oak and then fell on hard times and the house went into dilapidation. One can find a photograph of just such a place. This is in a book called Faulkner's World and one can see a dilapidated manor house and Faulkner's south is all about the dilapidation of the social world that once was an aspirant pinnacle of power that now is not only in ruins but in dilapidation. One of the qualities of Faulkner's background was that a William C. Faulkner, a grandfather of his, wrote a smash hit novel called The White Rose of Memphis. As William Faulkner grew up, among his brothers, he was always someone who was visionary, who had this ability to stand still, not lost in thought, but lost in the visionary play of old times and other times and peculiar times. And so he began his writing career as a poet. He tried to write poetry and illustrate it with meticulous little drawings. He fell in love with Estelle Oldham, she would not have him and married someone else and went away.
Faulkner, about this time, wanting to get away from the town of Oxford, Mississippi, where his house now is a national treasure, not very far from Old Miss, his campus, Faulkner's estate is set back about 200 feet from the street and is surrounded largely by pines. He refurbished the house over many years and many times until I went to visit there, there was a sense, not of a refined modern house, but of a house restored back to its energy way back then, before he was born. The hose barn was not a new horse barn but the sides of it are like rough-cut logs and the entrance where you take the horses in is only about six feet tall so that you have to stoop to go in. It is like an old colonial style pioneer manor house that is inhabited, not for the life of the future and not of the life now but to bring back the vision of the complications of life that led from the grandeur to the dilapidation and how it is that out of that dilapidation may come something not just new but different. It will have to be different, otherwise it will just go through more of that same cycle. In Faulkner's work one always finds the sense of the dilapidation yielding a scintillation of almost hypnotic quality that eventually suffocates you.
One of his great images in Absalom, Absalom! is of an old virgin woman, who sits so upright in her latter back chair, with the shades drawn because sunlight can harm the owner's skin and she, Miss Rosa Coldfield, has sat for almost 80-some years, stiff in that chair and stiff in her life so that anyone coming into her presence faces this huge implacability of no relationality whatsoever. Of course out of this comes the kind of character of Absalom, Absalom!, one of King David's sons, he was a beautiful man, physically, but he was cursed with arrogant cleverness and sought to take the throne away from King David. And actually David had to flee his son, Absalom, and flee with some of his advisers across the Jordan into what is today Jordan, to the oasis that's on the other side of the highway - in Jordan is Highway 30 and in Israel it's Highway 1, coming from Tel Aviv going along in between Jericho and Jerusalem to Oman and eventually to Baghdad - and had to have support to come back through, support from the prophet Nathan to retake Jerusalem, retake the throne. And that's when he made a special appointment of his son Solomon to share the throne with him for the last two years of his reign, because of Absalom.
Faulkner's quality of 19th century Hebraic biblical America was not about the Puritans or the Quakers, it was about the dilapidation of the South that led to a coruscation of character that could not be reformed, it could not be renewed. And so there would have to be a transform of the spirit to recast mankind; man would have to be remade again. In his last great novel, A Fable, published in 1954, when he won the Nobel Prize for literature, he has a figure talking to another, saying, 'You have no confidence in men. I do because man has the ability to transform himself. He will no longer be who he was and his dilapidation will not be cured in the sense that he's brought back to what he was before because he will just dilapidate again but he will be completely different.' The Nobel Prize for Speech had a large section of A Fable. One of the phrasings in it, as Faulkner delivered it on record, it's in the Caedmon record of Faulkner reading, he said, 'When the last dingdong of doom has sounded and man will have paved the entire planet so nothing can get in the way of his car and he will have fuelling stops anywhere and everywhere he chooses that will at once gas you up, get you going, fulfil your dreams, satisfy your sexuality; there will still be, in this completely dead world, a sound, not mechanical, and that is of men arguing with each other about what to do. Out of that creativity will come the sparks for some kind of redoing of mankind.'
He wrote this in 1954 because the hydrogen bomb was set off in that year and the atomic bomb was a scary monster, like Grendel, a thermo-nuclear weapon is a million times bigger than an atomic bomb, it was like Grendel's mother. An atomic bomb can destroy a city like Nagasaki. A 50 mega-ton hydrogen bomb would take the entire island of Manhattan and most of Long Island completely out of the world, for millions of years of radioactivity. It is an oblivion, not just a bad day. We are enquiring in such a way, and using examples, to give us the kinds of pairs through which we make caves that in their resonant sets will make a transform which will enable us to redo ourselves completely, to recalibrate. A renaissance, however, will not be enough. A reformation, no matter how tightly enforced or how broadly, supposedly, based will not do it and revolutions will not work anymore; it takes a recalibration which is an endeavour to begin. But it's like a jet engine: the more it flies, the faster it flies, the better it flies and finally can be distilled and worked and made into spaceships.
When Faulkner bought Rowan Oak in 1930, he had finally just married Estelle on the rebound, had finally just decided that he would take a menial job of stoking the coal into the furnace of the University of Mississippi, of Old Miss, on the night shift. And he had nothing to do except occasionally just to shovel the coal and so he sat down with blank paper and pen and in six weeks flat he wrote As I Lay Dying, as he said, without changing a word and sent it to a publisher who printed about 2,522 copies of it. And with the proceeds, Faulkner was able to buy the dilapidated Rowan Oak, still leaving him in debt, but for the rest of his life, he wrote to redo the house, not to become famous, not to become rich, but he wrote to put everything that he made into the house.
And because of the quality of his character, he was appreciate by another very interesting American character named Howard Hawks and it was Howard Hawks that would bring Faulkner to Hollywood several times. The script girl, at the time, Mata Carpenter, was a beautiful young script girl and Hawks, being a wise old part cowboy, part airplane pilot, fighter pilot, part raconteur would always arrange it so that she was his script girl and they would be left alone. In Hollywood, Faulkner found that he could make more money in just a couple of months in Hollywood than he could publishing half a dozen literary novels. All of that money went into Rowan Oak, so that the house became a kind of a prism, like Monticello was for Jefferson. I became a prism of his person, able to, differentially, shine through and create larger possibilities of historical kaleidoscopic consciousness. For Faulkner he turned that historical kaleidoscopic consciousness into his novels. For Jefferson he turned his kaleidoscopic historical consciousness into redoing the United States. It's called the second revolution.
Not only did Jefferson come in in 1800 for two terms, his close associate Madison came in for two terms and other close associate James Munroe came in for two terms so that Jefferson had six terms as president of the United States, From 1800 to 1825, the United States leapt ahead in its capacity, to such an extent, that it would never again be challenged until 9/11 on its home turf. Right in the middle of it was the war of 1812 and it was in that war of 1812 that, for the last time, one found an event horizon or Jefferson; he was able, just barely, to hold the country together under the aegis of Madison. Madison was about five foot six and Jefferson was about six foot four and he had that kind of a disparate quality of strategic ability. Madison was very good, like in the federalist papers, of following a process but he didn't have what Jefferson had, which was the grand strategic capacity to see the historical horizon such that he could out-general Napoleon and became the most fierce person at the time.
Here in September 1928, Life, 1953, the first of a two volume series on William Faulkner, The Private World of William Faulkner and the little headline blurb, 'Enigmatic inventor of an imaginary county, he created a saga out of his family's past and his environment.' In Faulkner's writings, almost all of them take place in a mythical county called Jefferson. The real Jefferson County in Mississippi is down where Natchez is on the Mississippi River. The Mississippi curves in a big hairpin above Natchez and so in the South one always says Naches Under the Mississippi, which was the first capital of Mississippi and the country just below Jefferson is Franklin. But Lafayette is the name of the country where Oxford, Mississippi is, where Rowan Oak is, where the Old Miss is, where the Faulkner estate is, where he grew up. It is in this Lafayette county, because of Lafayette's special relationship to Jefferson. When the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was happening, the old Lafayette journeyed from France to visit the old Jefferson, still alive in Virginia, just above Charlotte in Monticello. When they met each other, the one said, 'Ah Lafayette!' 'Ah, Monsieur Jefferson!' and they hugged, that's all they needed to say.
When Mississippi became a state and Oxford became the site of its university and Lafayette the site of its county, when Faulkner went to write about those times, he took the name of a river that borders the southern part of the county of Lafayette and changed it to the county's name, Yoknapatawpha, a Chickasaw word. So that it was this quality of the mythos of Mississippi, transformed through symbols, to the vision of Yoknapatawpha that was the source of the art and of the artist and of the spirits. One time at the University of Virginia, one of the few times that he ever offered to speak to the public, a woman asked him, 'What is your greatest novel?' and he said, 'My dear, the next one' andthen he followed it up and he said, 'I stopped writing potboilers when I realised that characters cast shadows. They become as real in their literary personas in art as anyone who has ever lived existentially' and he gave an example, he said, 'I read a little bit of Don Quixote every year just to keep in touch with him.'
We are going to, next week, take, as we do with our resonances, a little deeper cut and we will come to Virginia Woolf whose family was one of the most extraordinary families in England. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen who was involved in the great Dictionary of National Biography in England and who, in 1893, published An Agnostic's Apology in which he outlined that it was very wise and good for man not to have religion and not to have a belief in a God. He said, 'The free will hypothesis is the device by which theologians try to relieve God of the responsibility for the sufferings of His creation. It is required for another purpose. It enables the creator to be also the judge. Man must be partly independent of God or God would be at once pulling the wires and punishing the puppets. So far the argument is unimpeachable but the device justifies God at the expense of making the universe a moral chaos. Grant the existence of this arbitrary force called free will and we shall be forced to admit that if justice is to be found anywhere, it is at least not to be found in this strange anarchy where chance and fate are struggling for mastery.' She grew up in that household. Next week some more.