Symbol 4
Presented on: Saturday, October 28, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
This is Symbols Four. And we're introducing something which is very helpful to us. All of our natural experience in the world frames itself. All of the supranatural extensional experience in the world presents itself as a star; it always has a five pointed quality versus a square or rectangular quality. So that when we're dealing with consciousness, we're always dealing with a five-dimensional continuum and not a four-dimensional continuum. In that it's important to do a transposition. Generally in a four-dimensional world you can say space time, but when you bring in a transformation that has a conscious dimension to it, you have to reverse space time and make it a time space and then prefix it by, 'Conscious.' So that a quintessential realm is a conscious time space and that conscious time space is able to exchange its place in a frame of reference with nature. The old alchemical way to speak about this is that there is a light of nature and then there is a light of lights, 'Lumen de lumine.' The conscious vision is a light of lights which means it's not only fifth as a quintessential added aspect like the thumb to a hand, able not only now to count and to grasp, cling, but able to refinedly take hold and learn not just to manipulate, but to master something. So that it comes within your ritual grasp, it comes within your experienced participation and it adds an element where you do not just understand something, not just get it, but you are now able to encompass the entire world by how you get it. In order for it to do this, not only does nature have to co-operate and let now the square of attention run, instead of nature, ritual, myth and symbol, it now runs, ritual, myth, symbol, vision. It means that symbolic thought, which in a natural cycle completes the world, when we're in a ritual comportment; when we're doing things in an existential action, we are figures in the existentiality of the universe. When we add the ability to have experience, we configure those figurative actions, those numerable sequences and what emerges out of that is that feelings and images nest together and are conveyed then by oral language. But when you bring symbols into play, instead of having an existential world of things, or instead of having a cultural world of experience, you now have a social world where thought is the dominant integral that completes the world. And its basic traction, naturally, is the process of nature, the flow of nature. But when a vision comes into play, nature allows for vision to take its place in the frame of reference. One of the easiest ways to observe this - and try to not do it when you're driving a car - if you start imagining something you will see the imaginative images in your mind and not what you were looking at. If you're driving along you won't see the road, you will see the imaginative images and you will be feeling them and if you don't catch yourself you'll have an accident, quite interestingly. If you get into a daydream, if you get into a reverie, those images and feelings now take the place of perception.
One of the most powerful phrases in the twentieth century, was by the world's greatest linguist, Roman Jacobson, whose little book Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, we're going to take along with The Meaning of Meaning, starting next week, for Symbols Five, Six, Seven, Eight. He said, 'Static perception is a fiction.' Perception is never static and to freeze-dry it, you have to abstract it in the mind, you cannot abstract it in action. So the whole purpose of a vipa?yan? mindfulness yoga is to disclose to yourself that you really are doing this and not something else and this really is happening. That this activity, this action, is taking place. But while you do that the mind can interject so you do not keep track exactly of what you're doing, you keep track momentarily and sporadically of what you were doing and the mind continues to figure it in from instinct, from habit. It's like once learning how to type, if you try to be attentive, vipa?yan?-like on each letter that you are typing, you don't type very fast. But you try to keep track of every single iota, not to type fast but to exercise yourself that your attentiveness founds itself not only on the fact that you are doing something, but that your actions are emerging out of a source, which is a process that is not a form, nature itself. And experience can take part in that, but when visionary consciousness comes into play, it transposes that sourcing so that visions pull us forward, rather than like nature found us in a sourcing. So that consciousness always has an attractiveness and for the first time our attention is not satisfied by the world, something beyond the world now is was is satisfying to us. And because it's a process, it's like an invitation for something further to occur. And what occurs further is an objective phase that we here in our learning call art. So that a work of art will pull us out of the natural sourcing into a visionary sourcing and that visionary sourcing has a protean ability; it can be the source now to generate art, but when art comes into form, it comes into differential form and it takes the place of existential ritual forms. An easy way to say it: art and ritual doesn't mix. If you're doing something ritually, the aesthetic is not going to be operative. But as soon as you shift to an aesthetic form, the ritual ceases to have any kind of traction and you are now using a form, the art form, to pull you out of your ordinary self, out of your ritual self, out of your habitual self. It's like an actor who has learned their lines and they're participating because they've been trained as an actor, they know their gestures, they know their postures. They know how the scene has been blocked up by the director, they know their script, they're attentive to the lighting, all the many, many things that an actor will do. And they will have that ritual comportment basis which they're confident that they've mastered and it will sustain them. And yet there are moments on the stage, or on the screen, where the vivified dimension of vision takes over and the magic comes into play. And now, instead of the actor paying attention to their ritual basis of training, they are pulled into the aesthetic happening of the form. And now it isn't just that this is on a stage, that stage now is the entire world, the play is the thing. And now an actor is raised to the level of an artist and the foundation for the art of that actor is neither nature nor ritual, but the founding source of it is the process. Stanislavski called it, title of one of his books, Building a Character. And as long as that actor now stays in character, their art will have that aesthetic flow and it will be a form that one can appreciate, a form that is refineable now by critique, not by further instruction, not by further ritual inculcation. So that a human being who once learns an art is forever changed and is drawn out of...so that once someone is pulled out of a ritual comportment into the art, into the aesthetic theatre, the aesthetic dimension, that creates a magic that also transforms that stage from being simply an existential location in the ritual figures arrangement, in the mythic, oral, cultural configuration, in the mind's ability to stop action, abstract it, create some kind of a distance, now the aesthetic, sourcing itself in the visionary in consciousness, will add another dimension. And whereas consciousness has added a fifth dimension and transposed space time to time space, the time element, when it is sandwiched as it is between a dimension of consciousness and the three dimensions of space, that new sixth dimension of the work of art, of the artist who imaginatively creates his own person, not just the works of art, but themselves. No longer the character, no longer the individual identity, but sourced as a visionary possibility now brought into an aesthetic focus of a six-dimensional quality. Now conscious time space has a prismatic quality to it, whereas in nature action always has a pragmatic tone. Whereas someone who is spiritual, someone who is really differentially personal, someone who is participating in the magic of a work of art, work of music, on the stage, beholding a painting, sculpture, in a work of architecture, whatever it happens to be, that participation now creates an aesthetic dimension to the conscious time space. What it does is not only replace the ritual basis of our frame of attention, of our square of attention, but it takes the traction away from what the mind has always based itself upon and confidently built a social world which has a political quality to its structure. In this way art sabotages the political structures of the social world and knowing this, a really strong, well thought through tyranny will never allow an aesthetic dimension of works of art, of the spirit, of the free, personal to have any way to occur and how do you do that? You close off the visionary capacity. And how do you do that? You keep the inculcated mind of people silvered off in the back, so that they assume that mental reflection is the whole purpose of thought. And the reflection reflects what the world is for real and you're going to be practical now and how you comport to that world, because they transpose ritual comportment to now experience, trying to objectify experience. That your pragmatic, practical choice is that your reflection has to really mirror what's out there, what we have arranged in the world. So that the time-honoured sabotage of that is a transform where the mind is not silver backed like a mirror, where reflection is not so much just a reflecting back on the existential world, on the cultural happenings, on the mental instructed forms, but progressively the symbols of the mind become more and more transparent. And as soon as one has even an extended moment of seeing through symbolic forms, that they are not in fact in the mind whatsoever, if one were going to quantify it, the mind is only a fourth of what that square of attention is. And with our phases it's easy now not just to identify something, not just to characterise it, though those are advantages, but one can now come to understand why it is that the world continues to have a very curious quality. The more that it is shut off and events continue to happen and proliferate, you get a quality that was there in the old film projectors, of the stuck gate and the image starts to shutter and eventually it can burn its way through the film and you'll see this orange explosion on the screen and that's it, it stops. We live in a time where the entire frame of reference of the world has been closed off so severely, so long, that the social world is delivering a stutter which is not going to last too much longer before it burns itself out and simply won't register anymore.
The making of the transparency of symbols has been the concern for the last 200 years of, especially in its European philosophic origins, has been the concern increasingly because it not only has great promise, but because it has insolubles, in that it cannot be taught, cannot be communicated very well, only to a handful, only to a few in any particular generation. And the first person to write coherently about this was Emmanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 1781. And as soon as he brought out the second edition of it, right after 1800, you began to notice that there was this enormous reaction called the Age of Revolution. Not just the prescient American Revolution that came before it, but now you had a French Revolution, you had on its heels an Industrial Revolution, you had a whole century of revolutions happening and being mischaracterised and squelched to reweave them back into a ritual comportment that could be manipulated if you had stronger and stronger mental structures. And initially you get those huge flows like Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, or the later clever turning of that inside out with Marx, or the developments that came after it, proliferating and tightening. And one of the most honest and devastating was that of Edmund Husserl, who brought in phenomenology, where the technique was the ultimate abstraction that in order to see something one has to bracket it and make an eidetic reduction and now what you see is not the existentiality of it, but you see the phenomenon as it is. And it's at this point that Roman Jacobson says, 'Static perception is a fiction and it has stopped us from maturing.' Because of not just the belief in it, but the application of these reductive, eidetic abstractions and right at the time that Husserl was doing this, one of the most profound puncturings, penetrations through that, was by Cezanne. And Cezanne, in a series of paintings, the most famous series is of a mountain in southern France - Mont Sainte-Victoire - and he would portray in his work of art that Mont Sainte-Victoire is not just that mountain that is out there, not just a representation that I make in my mind and then by ritual techniques I'm able to do a canvas and 'Here is Mont Sainte-Victoire and look how nice the technique is, it's completely beaux arts. You couldn't find anyone who could do a better representation of Mont Sainte-Victoire than this.' And Cezanne junked all of that and said, 'No, that's not it at all.' There are no black lines surrounding forms in nature or in experience and especially not in consciousness. And so when Cezanne would paint - and we talked about this last week a little bit - he would start a canvas not with the light parts, but he would start with the dark parts of the composition that were going to emerge colour in such a way that the colour modulations went through their subtle interplay, through their gestalting, not only create the creative imagining of forms, but create the conscious emergence of that differential gestalt of forms and that in doing so, if one could see it, not just to imitate what the artist had seen, but someone could look at a painting, a Cezanne of Mont Sainte-Victoire and could hone and refine their experience and their ability to the point to where a threshold occurs where they become aware that they are no longer looking to see whether this is a good representation. It is a Cezanne. And then there is a follow-up to that: they are no longer seeing the way in which they saw just previously. They're seeing now, not with a mental expectation of perception, but they're seeing with the theoretic quality of, 'Maybe there are lots of ways to see this' and this painting by Cezanne is giving us a prismatic quality where our seeing now is open to many possibilities, many possible worlds. And out of this comes an artistic person who has an aesthetic spatiality and that aesthetic form has a further quality to it which is startling. It also, like any form in the universe, will generate a process. Just like any process will have forms that emerge out of it, forms also in their turn will generate another process. The aesthetic conscious time space person will generate a process of kaleidoscopic consciousness, which is the true nature of history; the historical process is a kaleidoscopic consciousness. And one of the pair of characters, of guys who understood this, they were friends, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, in Switzerland, in Basel. And it was only on their heels, after about 20 years of their work, their writings on this, that you find a great underrated genius, Wilhelm Dilthey, who says that, 'Really mature human beings live in a multi-dimensional world,' which has an historical flow to it, which does not have a mythic flow to it. It doesn't found itself just on experience participating with nature, but it founds itself on visionary consciousness participating with kaleidoscopic consciousness and that for its basis it uses symbols as if they themselves now in their transparency were not just transparent, but they were completely open and that what is identically, phenomenologically now done is that the mind is now open and that it's the open mind now that is able to go without any hindrance whatsoever into the prismatic forms of differential consciousness. Very, very few people in the twentieth century got this. One of the classic persons to get this after enormous travail was Robert Oppenheimer. And years after they took away his top security clearance in a political realm, he wrote an aesthetic response to it, a little book called The Open Mind. And one of the reasons he was able to write that little book called The Open Mind is that Nils Bohr had written a little book called The Open Mind as well, trying to express this is not about a quantum puzzle for mentality. Not only does the observer change the dimensions of what is occurring, they become, not an observer, but they become a dimension in what is happening. And what is happening now is not just experience but variance without end, an infinite array of prismatic possibilities. And that now human beings have an enormous difficulty: they are able, on the tiptoes, on the shoulders of giants and the tiptoes of the pioneers to understand that reality actually only occurs when one is completely free. That the constraints of an enforced static perception, of a delimited frame of referentiality that identifies that there are representations of what's out there and they have to be aligned in this way and this is what is practical, this is what is pragmatically to be done. And one must suspect the prismatic because it is now vague, one must be suspect of artists because they have their heads in the clouds. Whereas the truth is, a great scientific artist may have their head in the plasma cloud of the big bang and be quite able to understand how it is that not only do protons form and electrons form, but protons and neutrons have what is called nuclear magnetism and can cluster in very specific spins and angular momentums and build elements and that we can consciously understand that and build further elements. Unfortunately the first element we built, plutonium, turned out to be one of the most deadly radioactive elements in the world. But there are elements that are extraordinary that are being built, that are coming, we're at about 114 now and most of them only last split, split attoseconds. A nanosecond is a billionth, after that comes a femtosecond, after that comes an attosecond. Element 118 from all indications is going to be stable, will have a stable lifetime and will have an ability to add to our array of composing, not just putting a few elements together in layers to make a transistor for instance to make computers, but one will have the ability to make materials which are real, though in nature, at least in this star system, they were supernatural, they were magical. All of this is because that star of insight is able to make its transformation of the frame of reference, of the square of attention, but because our learning is very sophisticated, there are ways in which one can expand this, once you get that five phase...like a five phase Taoist energy cycle, which is the basis of the pentatonic scale of Chinese music. We're working with the ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian India. India at this time, 4,000 years ago was called Meluha. The Indus Civilisation in India, the Tigress Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt all had, for at least 5,000 years, contact with each other and one of the qualities that came out was the appreciation of an eight part set, the basis of our octave, the basis of our music. Our education takes eight phases and shows that if you take the two sets of four, the second set of four will progressively introduce a prismatic capability of possibility and transform into the first four and then those working together will create - and in the western tradition the word was always...has been used in its Greek form, the Aeneid - there'll be a ninth. One of the Nag Hammadi esoteric texts that was found is entitled The Eighth Reveals the Ninth. It's an ancient hermetic consciousness, kaleidoscopic consciousness alchemy that shows that the cosmos itself is perfected in an eightfoldness, like Murray Gell-Mann's eightfold nature of the quarks and the way that they arrange themselves. But that ninth is that the cosmos itself generates another process. What process would the cosmos as a perfected differential form generate? It would generate and does generate what we began calling nature. So that nature is an extraordinary fertility of process, four orders beyond magical and is able because it has been generated by the real, which need not have limitations as a form at all. Nature as a process has this unlimited dynamic and is able to source something as arcane as unity. The Chinese word for it was, Tê, the Greek word for it was, Monad. It means that whatever comes into existence really is what it is and when it comes into combine with other such particalities, whatever is made also is a unity. And so monadness becomes a quality that reflects itself in the ritual comportment of the way in which existentiality actually occurs. So that whole numbers, integers, are not just mental, made-up things that are static, but they are actual, existential wholenesses that extend themselves. That two is really two times one, three is really one more than two and one sees it because in the natural, existential harmonic you can have resonances that set themselves up like the arrangement of planets, or moons around planets, or stars and star clusters. They will all follow proportionable, ratioable resonances. And the way to speak of this, which I use, is that they are not proportions of mental ratios, but they are existentially ratios of the real and that those resonance ratios and proportions characterise every existential relationality. If the mind wants to come into alignment it couldn't be more misaligned if it tried to freeze-dry everything in terms of a static perception, which can be without any kind of complication, manipulated and redone the way that we say it should be done. That is pure madness actually. The actuality of it is that resonance ratio of the real that nature delivers to us, discloses that the mind itself as a form, could never not have the possibility of being open to itself. Not that it disappears, or it dissolves, or is nothing, but that its openness is what it is, that is the form. And so the open mind is not just a nice phrase, it is a superior accomplishment of the highest yoga. When we get to the interval for Symbols we'll use the most sophisticated yoga text in the world, Patanjali's The Yoga Sutra. And he says, 'When someone has the universal open mind, whatever they are able to say now is able to participate transformatively into actuality.' The Sanskrit word for that is, '[Pranama/Pranayama 41:34] .' 'Prana,' 'Breath,' 'Nama,' 'Naming.' God says to Adam, 'What do you call it?' He says, 'It's a tree, it's a tree.' It just then became a tree, it's not because it was labelled. It's that it's just now in that dimensionality real. Let's take a little break and we'll come back.
Let's come back to a quality that emerges in symbols. If symbolic thought is reduced to a mentality, images will be considered a representation of something out there in the world and the process of producing the representation will be mimetic. But anyone who has ever seen a great mime knows that a great mime does not reproduce something, but creates a parallel resonance. In Los Angeles theatre literature, Richmond Shephard, who was a great mime, did a book called Mime here in Los Angeles, or if you've seen, hopefully in person or at least on film, Marcel Marceau. Someone who is miming creates a parallel resonance which has a vitality to it and it's not reductive in the sense of trying to reproduce something, so to say that it's a representation, mimetically, is inaccurate. What it is essentially when raised to an art, is that it is presentational. So one of the qualities which we're trying to recalibrate is that symbolic thought is not representational, except in the most rudimentary ways and very quickly becomes resonanced mimetic in order to engender a sense of presencing by presentation. If you look at American Indian ceremonies there will be various societies who will present their dances which are specific to their society and all the interpenetration of these various societies will make the ceremony. The classic ceremony that we would use from the central part of North America is the sun dance, in Algonquin, the, 'Okon.' And there's a film done by the Glenbow Alberta Museum in Calgary, about 45 years ago now, of the last great sun dance in that part of Canada, which could not be reproduced again because it is not a reproduction. In order to put on a sun dance - an eight day sun dance - one has to have all of the implements of all the societies. But in order to make a scared implement it takes four medicine men; if you don't have four you can't make it. It doesn't matter that each one of you knows how to make it. If you only have three you cannot make it. And the difficulty by the early 1960's is that too many of the implements were put into museums, in Ottawa, in New York, in various places, so that were not enough instruments for all the different functions of all the different societies and there were no longer four medicine men living who were able to participate to make new ones. One of those societies in the Blackfoot Okon is the...the Algonquin name for it is, [47:24 Eetskinaiey] and it means the, 'Buffalo Horns Society.' It is men who are potentially dangerous because they know not only how to hunt, but how to kill and it's by confining that quality and keeping it within a scared, ceremonial participation that some of the male power of the sun dance...which is necessary, because an almost courage facing death or dismemberment is required for that ceremony to take place. Another society, also men, but they're the Prairie Chickens Society. They're the ones that have the bustle of the circle of the feathers on their rump and their whole dance is to imitate the prairie chickens, but not to imitate the prairie chickens but to bring that vibration into a part of the weaving of the societies so that the ceremony can take place, not only in a ritual way, not only in a mythic horizon of the singing, the images, the feeling tones, but that all of it comes together in a form that now affects the social world. The health of the social world is the grand strategic purpose for which this is put on. Because it is the wholeness of the social world of the people...and almost all primordial people's name for themselves as a community of human beings, 'We are the people.' And if our social world is an integral knit by our interpenetrative experience, carried by our singing together, our chanting together, our telling the myths, the stories together, that will reach down through the roots of the existence of things themselves, to tone and tune themselves to the mysteries of nature. And we will be whole, not just as some kind of static wholeness, but we will be whole in the sense that the current of the energy from nature flows completely through all of our forms and through each other into the social form, which has a furthering capacity that it allows for opennesses that yield vision. And that if someone had to, from our social world, go to a quest to have a vision, a vision quest, they could do so by initially sending a voice. And by sending a voice, it is like a pioneer probe into the possibility of transcendence into the visionary realm, the supernatural realm. And that one then could go there and return, for it is very perilous to go without preparation. Not only will you not be able to return, but what you will go to will be markedly influenced by the fictiveness of your false mentality and you will enter in something which is not resonantly real, but something that is really artificially perilous. And these are the hells. Curiously enough, out of the 57 transcendent states that advanced Buddhist yoga describe, only three are hells, 54 are blessed realms. The Avichi hell is for someone who is not just ignorant or deluded, but someone who refuses the truth. A great deal of our modern world is populated by a social world that refuses the truth, keeping inventions of Tesla energy under wraps so that no one can benefit by them etc. etc. These are fractures that do not heal, cannot be covered up and the current situation is that there's not even one generation left for any kind of cover-up to hold itself. One can sense by October, late October of 2006 that it's almost all over planetwide already.
We're doing a learning of recalibrating to get our phases, like learning the notes of an octave, so that we can tune ourselves to a recalibration and whatever forms that are possible - and almost all forms are possible from this - will be able to be entered into. Not by an individual but by the personal transform of the actuality of someone's symbolic wholeness. And by the possibilities of actual co-operation on the sense of sharing, not just sharing by divvying up, but sharing by having interpenetrative exchange, freedoms. And this is something interesting because we're taking always a pair, like a tunable pair of books to transform the text into pairs, to get rid of the subject-oriented categorical mind that has been text-bound for at least 2400 years and perhaps even longer in some cultures. To free ourselves up by making it tunable, rather than textable. The pair that we've been using for the last month is Faulkner's As I lay Dying and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. Both of these works are stream of consciousness, both of them have a quality where in the stream of consciousness there are junctures, there are moments which...the writer who brought the old Greek term back into usage was James Joyce, the term is , 'Epiphany.' And an epiphany is a moment of visionary grandeur of possibilities. There is a deeper form called a, 'Theophany' and a theophany is a cosmic revelation of the perfect grandeur of reality. Here's an epiphany moment in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, it's on page 113 in the first section, 'The Window,' the longest section of the work. Hopefully you're reading in it as much as you can. The second section is, 'Time Passes' and the third section is, 'To the Lighthouse, the Lighthouse.' They're seated at a dinner table and Mrs Ramsay, who is an artist in human interrelationalities, has set the table in just the right way that people are paired in interesting angles next to each other, across from each other, kitty-corner to each other and she in her magisterial conducting of her artistry of the magic of a meal of altogether in a spirit family, she...
What had she done with it, Mrs Ramsay wondered, for Rose's arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune's banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and torches lopping red and gold. Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possible of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one's staff and climb up hills, she thought and go down into valleys and to her pleasure (for it brought them into sympathy momentarily) she saw that Augustus too feasted his eyes on the same plate of fruit, plunged in, broke off a broom there, a tassel here and returned, after feasting, to his hive. That was his way of looking, different from hers. But looking together united them. Now all the candles were lit and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waved and vanished, waterly.
Ten years ago, over the enlarging metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, where the famous Phoenix Lights arrangements of unidentified flying objects that flew in an arrangement that did not shift itself with more than a mile in diameter and cruised over the metropolitan area of Phoenix at what seemed to about 30 miles an hour. There's a book written by Dr Lynne Kitei, called The Phoenix Lights, DVD. But the arrangement was seen all the way from the Grand Canyon to the Mexico border of Arizona, down by Yuma. Someone described standing under the lights, that when they went by they were linked by something that was invisible but it was like looking at the stars through water in that shape. So that the lights were not separate objects, but they were correlate focuses in a huge V, extra-terrestrial and that most of its form was an other-dimensional energy resonance and not just lights. And in fact the lights were not lights that were bright in space time, but they were lights that were only glowing within themselves and did not cast out radiances, did not implode radiances, though they could wink out and disappear from the outside in. But that they were presentational as indications in our space time of a much higher dimensional, conscious time space that also included now the dimensions of kaleidoscopic consciousness and that eighth dimension of the cosmos itself as a real form. And so apparently, in this wide universe of trillions of galaxies, there are sentient beings, intelligent beings, who know how to move in a reality and not just into space time with its reactive push. That there is dimensional attraction as well.
In Faulkner, in As I lay Dying, the very core of the peculiarity of it lies in the mother dying, Addie Bundren. There's only characters, 59 sections of various characters and no narration in-between them. One has to let the characters narrate and they narrate in a stream of consciousness way, what they hear, what they think, what they see and it's the weaving of these 59 sections together, distributed by about 20 different characters that give us the ability to have a basket, but there is one sixtieth that is needed and that is the reader themselves completes the form. And so it is not just a ritual form, not just a symbolic form, but is an art form. For Faulkner, when he wrote this, his cue to it was a young writer, a young man, trying to learn how to write to make a living, to make money. He was not being very successful, he had published four books, some of them to halfway decent critical acclaim. He was not making any money. He was shovelling coal in the graveyard shift at the University in Oxford, Mississippi, where his father had a position in Ole Miss, got him this menial job. And it was the day after the stock market crash in late October of 1929, that he turned over a bushel basket, set paper and with a pen in six weeks wrote As I lay Dying and never changed a word. It was a desperate stream of consciousness gushing up, volcanic-like, because what Faulkner had done is he had been able to bring his prismatic, aesthetic conscious time space to the point to where it could create spontaneously the kaleidoscopic consciousness of history. And that he began to understand that he didn't have to write about the whole world. He said, 'I could write about the postage stamp of Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi and it would be able to show the entire world in more ways than the world had.' Addie Bundren, the one who has died, the mother, already dead, who said that she wanted one last thing, to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson. And of course everything happens to this poor, white, rural, ignorant family of four boys and a daughter and a husband, whose only concern is to get some new teeth and to get her to Jefferson and bury her there and get that done with and then get on with things. She says:
In the afternoon, when school was out and the last one had left with his little dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where it would be quiet and hate them. It would be quiet there then, with the water bubbling up and away and the sun slanting quiet in the trees and the quiet smelling of damp and rotting leaves and new earth, especially in the early spring, for it was worst then. I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
And so the imploded, vicious selfishness of the mother has truncated so that each member of the family is only a broken shard and was never like Mrs Ramsay, never brought together into any kind of resonant whole. They're all bits of broken glass and each one was just a shard of something that was never put together again. There are several passages in here; let me just give you: 'Pa stands beside the bed. From behind his leg Vardaman peers' - he's only eight years old and he is scared and he doesn't know what's happening, his mother's dying - 'With his round head and his eyes round and his mouth beginning to open, she looks at Pa, all her failing life appears to drain into her eyes.' The operative symbol in this entire little bit of four or five paragraphs is the eyes; the eyes looking, the eyes seeing, the eyes expressing.
All her failing life appears to drain into her eyes, urgent, irremediable. 'It's Jewel she wants,' Dewey Dell says [her daughter, 17 and pregnant] 'Why Addie,' Pa says, 'Him and Darl want to make one more load. They thought there was time, that you would wait for them and that three dollars and all.' He stoops, laying his hand on hers. For a while yet she looks at him, without reproach, without anything at all, as if her eyes alone are listening to the irrevocable cessation of his voice. Then she raises herself, who has not moved in ten days. Dewey Dell leans down, trying to press her back, 'Ma,' she says, 'Ma.' She is looking out the window, at Cash [another son, the oldest] stooping steadily at the board in the failing light, labouring on towards darkness' [he's building his mother's coffin] And into it, as the stroking of the saw illumined its own motion, board and saw engendered. 'You, Cash,' she shouts, her voice harsh, strong, and unimpaired. 'You, Cash!' He looks up at the gaunt face framed by the window in the twilight. It is a complete picture of all time since he was a child. He drops the saw and lifts the board for her to see, watching the window in which the face has not moved. He drags a second plank into position and slants the two of them into their final juxtaposition. [he's going to bevel them] Gesturing towards the ones yet on the ground, shaping with an empty hand in pantomime the finished box. For a while still she looks down at him from the composite picture, neither censure nor approbation. Then the face disappears. She lies back and turns her head without so much as glancing at Pa. She looks at Vardaman, her eyes, the life in them, rushing suddenly upon them, the two flames glare up for a steady instant. Then they go out as though someone had leaned down and blown upon them. 'Ma,' Dewey Dell says, 'Ma!' Leaning above the bed, her hands lifted a little, the fan still moving like it has for ten days, she begins to keen. Her voice is strong, young, tremulous and clear, rapt with its own timbre and volume, the fan still moving steadily up and down, whispering the useless air. Then she flings herself across Addie Bundren's knees, clutching her, shaking her with the furious strength of the young before sprawling suddenly across the handful of rotten bones that Addie Bundren left, jarring the whole bed into a chattering sibilance of mattress shucks, her arms out-flung and the fan in one hand still beating with expiring breath into the quilt.
He's not representing, he's presenting and he's doing with an aesthetic dimension whose source is visionary consciousness taking a transformative place in nature. The book is not some recounting of something else, it is its presentation of what it really is, a prism as real as a person, as spirit-dimensional as any aesthetic space will have. Integral, politic structures seem very strong in the social world; they are two orders inferior to spiritual art forms and the cosmos is two orders of dimensions further along the way.
More next week.