Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 13 of 13

Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
The Remembrance of Things Past.
Stream of Consciousness and the Artist-Seer
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, September 27, 1984

Transcript:
(00:00):
This is the last lecture in a series of lectures by Roger, where on the preludes of the 20th century tonight's lecture, September 27th, 1984 is on Proust, P R O U S T, who lived 1871 to 1922. The remembrance of things past stream of consciousness and the artists see her.
(00:25):
I unfortunately started greeting curl young when I was studying to be an electrical engineer at the university of Wisconsin in the fifties. And it disrupted my engineering. I also used to, at that time, take my suppers at the university of Wisconsin with the very famous French woman, Jermaine gray, one of whose great books is on Marcel, Proust, Marcel Proust, and the deliverance from the time. And she has a fine French woman in her fifties at that time, fine white linen bodices with just a trace of frills at the cuffs. And up here, the hair severely back in a bone and pressed well skirts, just talking beautifully erudite. And I glad to lay my chivalric young American ear to the table to hear these tales and the great writers and why great writers are way beyond the second rate writers. There's no comparison. They're in a different echelon, a different world.
(01:48):
And that someone like proofs is simply like, like someone like Dante larger than life, more astonishing. And so she writes in the very first page of her wonderful book on Bruce, I have long had the habit of going to bed early. This is the first sentence of Proust novel. The Raider is carrying off in a search of, he knows not what Bewitched by the voice of the eye, which lures him along the strange Menendez of an inner Letha an inner forgetfulness. And in Proust's style, he is constantly reminding the reader that it's very difficult to remember anything accurately because we live on the surface and that the surface is extraordinarily deceptive and that it takes a technique, something a little more complicated than a knack, a technique to submerge ourselves below the surface and that this very special technique if practice day in and day out, year in and year out, finally yields a kind of an equilibrium to the consciousness.
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And in this Aqua Librium and this purposefully non-directed semi trance. One can allow elements from a hidden reality to bubble up and occur on the surface as images and that when they do, they bring with them a seed, a Colonel from nature around which they have spun themselves. And when they surface the leading point of natural memory opens this seed, this kernel of the image and the MIH becomes a symbolic eye through which this hidden content suddenly displaces the time-space reality in which we thought we were and informs a self, which we thought we were, what the new eternal continuity that we really belong to. And that through practicing this for years on end, since he was 15 proofs, by the time he was in his late thirties, was ready to find way to reveal this hidden world to reveal what lies beyond the frontiers of consciousness, not some distorted disjointed sensual, paradise, but, and any turtle reoccurance every cycling as it were.
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And that there we have our real being all of this required in lieu of a very sophisticated yoga technique since that was not available to him, required for him to anesthetize almost to the point of sleep, the normal consciousness. And so going to bed from our cell Pru's was like retiring to the hermits, gave in the Himalayas. It was the one place that he could gain a little hedge on the echo nymity required to slightly anesthetize this world and this consciousness, and to allow that other world to allow reality, to surface in him. And so he made of himself a living canvas upon which his own subconscious painted an impressionistic splotches. And so we have someone who begins to distance, the likes of the philosophers of Westeros, great caliber, or the painters even of money is great caliber because Marcel pillows recreates, not literature, not psychology, not art, they'll all those were prized to him, but recreates reality.
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And it was with this sense that he was engaged in a sacred task. That Proust almost never mentioned God, because it is just simply so imbued in the purposefulness of what he is doing, that he takes great care, not to abuse the sacred task, given him Preuss in fact is an extraordinary percentage. His father was a very strict Roman Catholic and his mother was a very Orthodox Jew. And Proust was a meeting of the two. In fact, the very similar situation obtained in the apparent age of Andre. Berkson who we will take, uh, in this coming up a series and proves new barracks attended his lectures. Many of Bergson's famous seed ideas appeared as early as 1889 long before Preuss even began to write. So there is a connection between Proust and Barrack song. This world for Marcel opened up July 10th, 1871. He was born, the family was quite wealthy.
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His father in fact, was a very famous doctor who became like the inspector of public health for the city of Paris. One of his great, uh, inventions and medical care was to have what he called cordon sanitaire, uh, throughout the city ways to curb plagues and epidemics by keeping strict quarantine, certain lines of development throughout the great cities. So Preuss family were very wealthy. They're usually styled upper middle-class. They would be upper class except for the lack of nobility in their heritage. So money was never a problem for proofs. In fact, his childhood was Garrett, very carefree. His maternal family lived just south of sharp in the air. I did with journey there in the summers, and he would spend most of his time in Paris as a youngster playing around the Sean's a Lycee within view of the Eiffel tower until he was nine years old and returning with his parents from some family outing, he was suddenly seized on the street gasping for air.
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He fell to the ground. The father rushed him to a building and began working on him. And he had suffered an asthmatic attack, which just almost snuffed his life out. And from the age of nine onwards, Preuss was under this sort of denim place threatened with instant death for the rest of his life and threatened also with a shortened life. For sure. And so coming suddenly to this threshold, where from the ecstasy of childhood to the anxiety of adolescents, Proust home at nine years old in between these two great generative fields of Schumann, psychic reality, the worlds of ecstasy and the worlds of anxiety, the world of the past, the world of childhood, where everything had made sense, everything was beautiful, but beautiful and made sense in a flowing kind of undifferentiated way. And all that was instantly irrevocably jeopardized by an anxiety that was uncompromising.
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One was seized by the throat, by the very chakra through which one spoke through which one could express in an NCA through one's own voice, the sentence itself, it was here that he was grabbed by the angel of death. And for Preuss, this experience never left him. And as any sensitive individual would made it a central arena around which the circumambulation of the years slowly SAC realized a condition, which would have probably terrified him at first and by circumambulating a sensitivity around this experience. He slowly grew over closed over the more terrific implications, the suddenness of it, the terrible tragedy that this should happen to a child who was very lively and intelligent without warning without deserving. This sense is a time honored way of establishing a poignant, intuitive sense of the sacred of the real four. And closing off this terrific Gulf, this impasse between two universal orders of feeling Proust, also sealed polarized by this sacred act of remembering that interface that normally occurs so gradually through human life, that we pay very little attention to it until the one area has overtaken the other, usually several days before our own death, but for crews, it was remembered vigorously.
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It was the center of his personality from the age nine onwards. His father wanted Marcel to become a doctor. In fact, Marcel's brother, Robert became a very distinguished doctor, the surgeon and became the apple of the eye of the father.
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Marcel was given up to the mother because he could no longer attend school in a regular fashion. In fact was constantly close to death by suffocation, by choking anyone who has had asthmatic attacks in this bureau lamp mode can understand the concern of the mother and her mother Marcel's maternal grandmother. These two find woman, women dedicated themselves to saving the young boy by surrounding him with feminine care, feminine love, and teaching him, and the only way that they could, because he was only nine at the time. How do you teach a child patients? How do you teach a child how to create a sense of sacredness in life over the terrific one to simply wake one from the night mirror and talk long into the night until in the dialogue and the conversation of maternal love, the terrific images are somehow woven into a sense that it probably will turn all right, in the morning for Marcel Pru's, this experience lasted an entire lifetime, the ongoing patience and feminine care of the mother and the grandmother became from Marcel, a tapestry against which she began to measure his own consciousness, those to say his own field of awareness, which included of course, other human beings, but almost always in relationship to himself.
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And that meant almost always in relationship to this kneeling, caring, feminine, interweaving of love and events to circumscribe, and thus describe accurately that nothingness, which death would normally present to one and make of it something less terrific, all those something which could not be identified as an object, but only as a quality that life in its mysteriousness must transcend through patient building Proust would become very feminine in his outlook on life, through this adjustment of his consciousness, to the fact that he could produce in writing the same kind of long meandering consoling constellation, the conversations in termed obli applied with loving care to the sick, to the needy, to those experiencing the terror of the world. And so Preuss great, 2000 page work remembrance of things past is a long healing monologue for modern man through which he can sit with someone masculine in his being feminine and his artistic application of that.
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Being someone who like the Teresas of ancient myth was both man and woman, and therefore knew all the phases of human life. And so Preuss great work is actually a long healing monologue of someone who will sit beside you and face that terror and never leave you. And through long almost interminable discussion with every aspect of consciousness of our reality of life, encourage you to amend yourself to even this most terrific nothing is and work it in and discover within that technique, that a sense of eternal reality, oh, occurs okay. Outside of the rational consciousness, outside of the intent of our living strategies and rescues is like a fairy tale at the very last moment and snatches us from the jaws of June to save us forever after this, ostensibly is what Preuss is about. He began his writing on this work at the age of 15 is by 1886.
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He was already at work on this, but it would be long decades. It would not be until 1913 that the first volume would be published because as he began to work on this, he realized that he knew very little about the world. He had been trained scholastically up to that time, fairly well trained in the classics even had attended, uh, a number of lectures had read his Virgil even once referred to a figure in Homer as being one of the guiding lights of man. They figure the white goddess that appears in the fifth book of the Odyssey. Actually. Um, later on, when I read you a quotation from Samuel Beckett, he mistakes for Virgil, but it's actually homework. What does he? Yes, he is crushed by the God Poseidon by the wrath and the envy and the hatred of the God and luck drifting on a mystical raft that consists only of the keel of a ship and the rudder of his ship.
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The two opposite ends, the polarity that's leftover after the world has been crushed. There was still the polarity under does. He has to float on this as visited by the white goddess who is born of the dynamic of the foam white crests on the waves. And it's usually associated with the ocean coming into Canada land. And that this wave form of the meeting of ocean and land produces this inner penetration where this goddess, uh, Lu patheo yes, her name in Greek well occurs. And she tells him Jessie, as that, uh, the God cannot kill him for cruise. This was a sacred image. As long as the feminine is intact in life, this goddess energy can be drawn down into man's personal agonizing, alienated hell. And through this figure, through the revelations disclose by attentiveness to this figure, human beings may make their way slowly and patiently out of the condition and free home. It is difficult to write on proofs technique, and very few people have ever been able to do it. He is one of the least read of all the great authors. Almost no one you re you run into has read him because it is difficult to form some estimate of what is going on. For instance, let's look at the beginning of all our assertion,
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The 10th for I do first
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Of seven novels, hold Swan's way. Swan's way a way a path or a road. There are in fact, two ways, two ways that are open. There are Swan's way. And there is as the title of the third novel, the girl Montay's way, these two ways Swan's way as a way of an individual in life, they grow Monte's way is the way of a family in life. Very powerful aristocratic family, a very insightful upper class consciousness of an individual. But between these two ways, he has the second of the novels called within a budding Grove, a budding gro, a sacred Grove. The macular Zeus occurred within the DOE the Grove of Dodona. It was at a donut that the rustling of the leaves of the trees could be deciphered by the great horror Oracle, which was a woman that was traditionally through the feminine that miraculous utterances from nature could be disclosed.
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Men could decipher them, they could interpret them, but the disclosure of the secrets of oracular nature take a feminine consciousness because they cannot be translated. They must be presented. And thus the masculine consciousness would seek immediately to represent them. And all the interpretations would be forever lies because they would be interpretations of representation, but only the feminine can present accurately without translation. The reality itself related to Dona was the ancient Siwa in the Sahara desert. That's why Alexander went from Zeus inscribed, Olympian, Greece, to see what a confirm his divinity, because those two sisters from black Africa had been kidnapped and split apart, and one put it to donut and one put at Siwa. So they, the feminine occurs within the sacred grow. And it is within this sacred Grove, a budding Grove, the spring time of the spirit that they most indelible impressions can come through. And thus, the first half of Preuss great work is this triad of novels, as it were based upon a structure that is sacred throughout all time, but reoccurs in this French countryside. In fact, at the beginning of this at the very center is the little town of Cumbrae. And let's see here, let's see what a German Bray can elucidate for us about Conrad. We have to position ourselves.
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The Cumbrae house was the center of Marcel Proust's child home. That was the children's world home.
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And two roads from here led to unfamiliar
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Country, the road to the swans and the road to the grim Montes, two worlds, which are unknown to the child. This is also the world that is pursued feverously and is presented in the form of a person who has not known very often. This, the person without a face in a dream language gives the person without a face is a hermaphroditic energy interface, presenting a person age who has always in transition and therefore cannot be seen, um, or one other way of presenting this. And in ancient times was to say that this, um, this figure was Janice, who had two faces, who faced two ways at once. Uh, the ways being the past and the future, the Janice gate in Rome, therefore was the sacred gate, which could only be closed at times of universal peace. Augustus was the only figure in Roman history, incidentally to ever close the Janice Gates. So we have here got this little village of Cumbrae house, where he had grown up, and this became an identifiable world. It was knitted together. Everyone was understandable. Their life moved in a pattern which was known, but outside of it was the unknown world. So calm becomes like the inner self for the child. Something known in all the others are out there. And these main roads of bifurcation
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Leading to the outer world, the individual, the family,
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So that the child then writes German Bray lives in this environment and accepts
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It. But his curiosity is nonetheless stimulated by the world, which seems to him to lie beyond the everyday limits. His mind continually escapes in the reveries about it, which are not
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Yet conscious thoughts, fostered
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First by images, managing Lander and slides, stain glass windows, then by reading his fantasies, project him out of that familiar world. And so we are lured into the unknown. Our sense of thrown us as existential phenomenology would have. It leads us out of the comfortable, a lot of ourselves. And we began to explore and go out using as a lead guide for ourselves, our sense of fantasy or imagination, our sense of reverie, our sense of literature in the broadest sense reading. Um, what people have told of us told us that the world and highest than among all of this probing is a kind of an artistic sense, which alone would integrate that questioning psychologic adventure. So that, uh, there was, uh, an association of images. The unknown world begins to take shape through this association of images, assimilating chance, fragments from the outer world. It becomes polarized and localized in relation to the known world. Everything begins to get a relationship to what we know and what we don't know yet. So we have to explore more and then relate that back. And so this begins to style a grand
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Polarized form of, of life in this.
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Thus, the child's dream world becomes accessible, a desirable actuality,
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And
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He begins to go into this. And in this sense, fabulous characters begin to make their appearance, as it is always in life. We made individuals that seem to us to be extraordinary. They're just so app the sense of deja VU was there. They appeal to us in a way in which we could hardly have expected it. And these are the fabulous characters that then begin to take on a tinge of meaningfulness and value beyond what they normally would have because they are somehow individuals that occur on these linking relationality. These between the known, which becomes increasingly smaller and withdrawn within the known world of childhood
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And the unknown
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World of the expanding adult scene. So that then to satisfy this disparity, this polarity we'd begin to construct an imaginary
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Parallel world. In our mind,
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We begin to imagine what this world is like, and this is exactly what Marcel Chris did in terms of literature, while this is being populated and being developed, then there comes
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This
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Tremendous polarization in terms of the feeling sense
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Between the
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Anxiety and the ecstasy. These two acts, the act that starts the family drama on the act of writing spring from one zone sensibilities, there are definitive mutually oppose. The first reveals the tremendous capacity for suffering. We have unbelievable capacities for suffering.
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We sustain
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Even in imagination
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And in memory, more
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Extensive health than could ever exist in the space time
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Where we sustain
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Them and suffer through them as if they were real. At the same time, the ecstatic capacities also seem to almost transcend the capacities for the natural world to sustain it by actuality. And thus, we are led closer and closer to a moment of great crisis where to disbelieve in the suffering is also then to disbelieve and the ecstatic.
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And where
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Are we then to throw away these capacities? We would immediately implode as it were back into a very mundane, boring world with very little valuation. This of course is what will happen. And Marcel Proust lifetime in the external world, the first world war 1914 to 1918 will shatter legal world
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Forever. And both the
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Anxieties of the old world and the exigencies of it will disappear. In fact, it will be a matter of great
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Concern and
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In the great biography of Preuss by George painter, two volume work in the second volume laid in the work. Peter has this to say the gaiety of the 1920s had begun in time for proves to glimpse a new age, which he found to in Congress to insert in all our researching at the princess de GRA Monte's last matinee. The music is still a dying echo of a venti El septet, but the evenings of 1922 were danced away to the unfamiliar syncopations of tango and of ragtime, which to the survivors of a past epoch seem to symbolize a dislocation, not only of morals, but of rhythm and what do they do after they finished dancing, inquired a great lady after watching with deep interest, a couple interlocks in the first tango she had ever seen Preuss method makes them calm, Bray, a center, and the two ways swans way and the grow Montes way bifurcate and come up, pass past this. He in his overture
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To the work at the very beginning for a long
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Time, I used to go to bed early. Sometimes when I'd put out my candle, my eyes would close so quickly that I had not even time to say I'm going to sleep. And half an hour later, the thought that it was time to go to sleep would awaken me. I would try to put away the book, which I imagined was still in my hands and to blow out the light. I had been thinking all the time while I was asleep of what I had just been reading, but my thoughts had run into a channel of their own until I myself actually seem to have become the subject of my book, a church or quartet, the rivalry rivalry between while the first Charles, the fifth, whatever this impression would persist. For some moments after I was awake, it did not disturb my mind, but later like scales upon my eyes and prevented them from registering the fact that the candle was no longer burning. Then it would begin to seem unintelligible as though the thoughts of a former existence must be too. I reincarnate spirit, the subject of my book with separate itself from me leaving me free to choose whether I would form part of it or no. And at the same time, my site would reach what return. And I would be astonished to find myself in a state of darkness, pleasant and restful enough for the eyes and even more perhaps for my mind to which it appeared in comprehensible without a cause in matter, dark indeed.
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And normally events
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Like this that would just be fleeting and passing were caught by pure
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And his memory and sustain and worked out okay
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Until he developed a peculiar technique. The best, the description of this technique is by the great Nobel prize, winning author, Samuel Beckett, and his little book on Preuss back at himself. One of the world's great writers waiting for Goodell sold several million copies. He writes in here, okay. On Preuss technique. And it's very interesting to review the most successful evocations experience can only project the echo of a past sensation because being an act of intellection, it is conditioned by the prejudices of the intelligence, which abstracts from any given sensation is being illogical and insignificant. They just scored a discordant and frivolous intruder, whether word or gesture sound perfume cannot be fitted into the puzzle of a concept. So we begin with something that seems fleeting enough, but we're trying it as an experiment, rather like an empiricist rather like a David Hume
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Or a Newton
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Or a Galileo. We're trying now to see what is happening, what actually is occurring. So there comes then the echo of a past sensation. It must've been something natural, the sound of a spoon on the plight. The motion of sunlight coming in Preuss will at one time, right? Of someone opening the curtains at mid day, he's been asleep and he's been in this sleeping meditative mode and the curtains will come back and the sunlight will come in. But instead of being the bright day that he expected the bright summer sunshine day, uh, they, uh, resort on the ocean. What he sees as the sunlight illuminating a Deb doll, white enamel wall. And it seems to him that the day has come in dead and the sunlight is disclosed because they've removed the linen wrappings off a mommy. And all of a sudden he realizes that he has been in this mode for hours, if not days. And that he's seeing in this way, because that's where he still is. He's disciplined himself to let these feeling tones occur in him long after he's awake. This is why he did most of his writing in bed.
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Like someone keeping a dream record only instead of keeping record of his dreams, the dreams of the consciousness, he was keeping a record of the deeper
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Levels, the tunnel levels,
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Which are really transpersonal, but which always need to disclose themselves in terms of the personal, in terms of the natural. And so Proust was faced with a double-edged problem, how to probe these inner doubts. And for that, we have this process that we're looking at now with Beckett, but the concomitant to that was how to create a sophisticated exterior
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Tapestry,
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Like a photographic emulsion, finding enough to record these sensitive images. So the Proust had to do two things at the same time. He had to learn to probe inside himself, like some arcane, nuclear science scientists of the psyche. And at the same time develop an external emotion sensitive enough to register this. And since he was dealing with eternal archetypical occurrences that manifest themselves most, really in human beings, he therefore had to have a social tapestry sensitive enough to record these images coming up. And he realized that he himself would never be enough. He could never travel enough nor see enough. But circumstance had provided him with one of the most astonishing, complex social fabrics ever in gender. It's a French [inaudible] society at the end of the 19th century, where the infinite complications of etiquette, the infinite intrigues between people in the society created such a complex web of innuendo, that it was the perfect vehicle to register the slightest little variations. The most arcane discoveries of fleeting matters that might occur only once and might not reoccur ever again. And so approves tad to inform himself at the same time of two worlds,
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His own inner subconscious world
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And an exterior social world, which he had to know well enough to get involved in it long enough to be able to record accurately every minute nuance of detail. So this first process is what I'm Becca is writing about the inner technique. This is what he did then, but the essence of any new experiences contained precisely in this mysterious element that the vigilant will rejects as an anachronism. It is the axis about which the sensation pivots the center of gravity of its coherence, so that no amount of voluntary manipulation can reconstruct in its integrity and impression that has the will. So to speak buckled into incoherence. But if by accident and given favorable circumstances, you relaxation of the subject's habit of thought of reduction of the radius of his memory, a generally diminished tension of consciousness following upon a phase of extreme discouragement, Proust used personal discouragement.
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Now's
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An opiate like psychological opiate to doll, his normal, extensive sensitivity. He would in calc inculcate in himself, purposely a fine sense of irony, slightly soured into the negative. And in order to limit the scope of the normal ranging mind, and along by this relaxation of the subjects, habit of thought, just starting to fall off to sleep, but maintaining one's consciousness in that mode, not quite falling asleep, but just about with this extreme discouragement tone. And at the same time, reducing the radius of his memory, refusing to be led off refusing to let the mind go off into associations, keeping it narrowed down until finally there would be this moment of equilibrium, this osmotic impasse between the subconscious and the conscious and with the conscious mind not influencing by push or pull the image base subconscious would be free then to throw contents up.
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And when they would come up,
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Normally bye accident. And we just see them in a flash less than a second, a picosecond, but for crews, they were caught, they were indelible and he could see them and training himself year after year, he began to piece together that there is an order. There's a pattern. We live a life, which is truly arcane and invisible and hidden. And all the time we cover it up by glossing it over so-called conscious activity, constant consciously. We obscure the rail in order to permit ourselves, this old habitual confidence that we are living our life and know what we're doing back. It goes on if, by something, the miracle of analogy, the central impression of a past sensation reoccurs as in immediate stimulus, which can we instinctively identified by the subject with the model of duplication whose integral purity has been retained, because it has been forgotten. These images are pristine because they have never been tampered with, by consciousness they've to put it cloak really never been licked into shape. They have never been made, made to fit into a cause and effect kind of logical form. They simply are they're
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Full-blown. And when we recall them,
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We recall them instantly and wholly, they come unbidden. Yeah. The hero, the protagonists in Lala research, and one place is walking
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In a dining room and he's
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Preparing himself all the time to reduce himself down, to allow this osmosis of the subconscious to occur. And suddenly he's not in the dining room, but he's in a forest. And he realizes that he is just as really in that forest as he was moments ago in that dining room. And then he realizes that what did, it was the cacophony of the sound of girls giggling outside that he had heard that at one time in his life, in a forest. And now just that same mode, that same cacophony came through from the outside and because he was prepared for it, he was instantly transported. In fact, one would say more accurately that that world instantly displaced this time space, just justice rib. And so Preuss began to try to carve out the geography of the subconscious
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World and lo and behold,
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It was not personal. It had nothing just simply to do with Marcel Cruz. It was an eternal inner scape that occurred for all human beings, just the same way, and that we are all knit together, rather like mysterious rhizomes of the same hidden structure. We think we are a separate in different only by virtue of the arrogance of consciousness. But in fact, we are closer than similar. We are eternally together. There is no other. And is this, that is real so that the total past sensation, not its echo nor its copy, but the sensation itself writes back at annihilating. Every spacial and temporal restriction comes in a rush to engulf the subject and all the beauty of its infallible proportion. Thus, the sound produced by a spoon struck against a plate as subconsciously identify by the narrator with the sound of a hammer struck by a mechanic against the wheel of a train drawn up before, uh, would, uh, woods, uh, sound that his will had rejected as extraneous to its immediate activity, but a subconscious and just interested in just interested act of perception has reduced the object, the woods to its immaterial and spiritually digestible equivalent.
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And the record of this pure act of cognition. Remember last week, this was the whole push of the phenomenological movement to attain to a pure act of cognition. The 20th century came in with man needing to have some place to tack down his sense of reality for Husserl. It was in the outer world for proofs. He said, this is in the outer world only because we put it there again and again and again to eternity. But that, that mirror out there is dependent upon occurrence within, and without that, it just simply wouldn't exist. This pure act of cognition has not merely been associated with the sound of a hammer struck against a wheel, but centralized about it, that is ordered
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Striking. Gotcha.
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So then if we move by association, we continued to slur. We continue to blur so that all metaphysical systems of association analogy do nothing more than encourage the mind in its slurring empire building. They do not disclose the real, whereas this is different. The point of departure of the Preuss Jian exposition is not the crystal and a glomeration, but it's Colonel the crystal lost. It is the crystallize
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Form
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Of natural expressed in a reality that reoccurs again and again, and we can call up this crystal. The most trivial experience he says in effect is in crusted with elements that are logically not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence. In fact, the intelligence, if it were able to visualize them, think about them, would see that these elements that are brought into juxtaposition are illogical. They do not lead to a line of order. Therefore they should be incoherent and rejected by the mind they can't possibly be real. And you have Preuss discloses again. And again, it is just those incoherent so-called
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Crystals
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Of our subconscious that are real and reoccur on bed only because we make the conditions available. Thus, it is, it is imprisoned it's as if this remembered experiences in prison that a large vase and that our inner psyche, our subconscious has rows and rows and rows of these vases are suspended along the height of our years and not being accessible to our intelligent memory are in a sense, immune, the purity of their calm attic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness. Why could man not re-injured into paradise because he forgot in that moment of terror, uh, thinking that the sword of wisdom was threatening
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Him.
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So Beckett writes each one is kept at its distance at its date. Exactly so that when the imprisoned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new error and a new perfume knew precisely because already experienced. And we breathe. Then the true error of paradise of the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman and the paradise that has been lost and reoccurs instantly suddenly this identification of immediate with past experience, the occur, the reoccurrences of past action or reaction in the present amounts to a participation between the ideal and the real imagination and direct apprehension, symbol and substance. This is too difficult for people that just wander in. You have to really stay up. This is very crucial.
(55:38):
If the mine were left to itself to its
(55:43):
Coherent structuring, it would then dismiss the reel as being impossible. It simply would not recognize it for anything except a, a mistake. It doesn't fit into the sequential order that it should have in order to fit into the mind. What is the Bhagavad Gita say? The mind is the Slayer of the reader. They cannot stand the real. This is why all mental spaces are illusions just for this reason. They never could be anything else, but now how to keep this going. This was the problem for Bruce. This was almost an incredible problem for him
(56:38):
And the concomitant to making this probing
(56:45):
Indelible was to turn it into literature, to write it out.
(56:51):
And in order to write it out, he could not have a literary form because all literary
(56:58):
Forms, all literary genres are mentally created. They're meant
(57:03):
To service the mind, the essay, the novel, the poem, any form
(57:09):
That you name is mapped to service the mind. And this was material content that had no
(57:19):
Form,
(57:21):
Okay. And should not be put into a form because it would become a lie immediately later on when this began to suffuse European culture, the Weegee peer Andela would write a play six characters in search of an author, this kind of an outlet. It was revolutionary. Well, we'll take a look at this other aspect of Prius when we come back from our break, but I think we better take a break now. Thanks for the sustained strength.

END OF SIDE ONE

(00:00):
The way I was educated, the learning takes place among yourselves and the teacher is only a catalyst and a good teacher should absent himself when the talking gets going and usually an education, I would do that. And just let you be 20 minutes. That's a good sign. You're getting to know each other. And that's where it happens. Lecturing is dispensable in education. All this is just needless frail is this is just blurbs on the cover and the dust jacket that has nothing to do with the book inside. So I'm glad to have you get along with each other.
(00:43):
Well, I should put something here on the cassette for those who do not have the pleasure of coming and being here. We don't know how far these technological ears extend. So in case it survives, we would wish those who come after us to have a chance to understand that there were once upon a time human beings who did understand life and lived it and loved it in each other. So let's put something on the tape from provost himself. This is from within a budding Grove, the second novel, which won the one, the pre gong car. When it came out in 1919, the first volume Swan's way came out in 1913. And of course it was totally ignored. Almost nobody paid any attention to it. Preuss was seen as a Dilla tone, an eccentric dilettante, no less someone who just, who wrote for the newspapers figure out and so forth.
(01:49):
How could he know anything? But the readers during the first world war slowly came to see that Preuss was extraordinary more than just good. He was extraordinary. I wanted to read you, uh, from one of Andre sheets letters, January, 1914, he was the one that had refused to let the new Val, um, um, Fran say republished, the new vow review Francais, the NRF publish Swan's way. And then he had run across it at a friend's place. And you'd started to dip into it to derive pros and he was seized by the incredible subtlety the flow. In fact, just give you a paragraph from this letter and then go on to Preuss. This was written by Jade and, uh, January of 1914, for several days, I have not put down your book. I am super saturating myself in it with rapture. I am re reveling in it.
(03:02):
Alas, why should it be so painful to me to like it so much? And then he goes on to say that, uh, he had let everything go by because when he had opened the manuscript originally absentmindedly and as ill luck would have it, my attention fell immediately into the cup of camomile tea. On page 62, then stumbled over the sentence on page 64, the only one in the book I still don't clearly understand up to now for, I am not waiting to finish before writing you where there was talk of a pediment with some vertebrae showing through, and now it is not enough for me just to love the book. I have fallen under its spell and under yours with a very special kind of affection admiration predilection. I can't go on, I feel too much regret too much pain above all at the thought that perhaps some repercussions of my absurd rejection may have affected you, hurt you.
(04:07):
And that I deserve at present to have you judge me as unfairly as I judged you. Chris, responding to him, MoMA share. He, I have often found that certain great joys require our first being to be deprived of a lesser joy, which we had the right to expect. And without the expectation of which we could never have known that other joy, the most splendid of all, of course, what Marcel is writing about is the sense of the real to engender for someone else through our love and our care, their ability to disclose for themselves the real, this indeed is the most splendid joy of all. So we come to within a budding grow published just after the first world war had come to a close in 1919, and it won the pre-con car. The best novel of the year. Here's a section of a page and a half from this extraordinary section of his large bird.
(05:14):
Presently, the days grew shorter. And at the moment when I entered my room, the violet sky seemed branded with the stiff geometrical traveling if flew giant figure of the sun, like the representation of some miraculous sign of some mystical apparition leaning over the sea from the hinge of the horizon, as a sacred picture, leans over the high altar while the different parts of the Western sky exposed in the glass fronts of the low mahogany bookcases that ran along the walls, which I carried back in my mind to the marvelous painting from which they had been detached seemed like those different scenes, which some old master executed long ago for our conflict turbidity upon a shrine whose separate panels are now exhibited side by side, upon the wall of a museum gallery so that the visitors imagination alone can restore them to their place on the Predella of the Ricardo's, which means that the imagination can take the fragments given to us.
(06:40):
If we know how to do it, take these fragments of reality and put them back together again in the indelible original pattern and arrangement that they had in that high altar of the rail in the eternal temple with him a few weeks later, when I went upstairs, the sun had already set like the one that I used to see at Cumbrae behind the Calvary. When I was coming home from a walk looking forward to going down to the kitchen before dinner, a band of red sky over the sea compact and clear cut as a layer of aspect over meat, then a little later over a sea already cold and blue, like a grey mullet, a sky of the same pink as the salmon that we should presently be ordering at river belt, awakened reawakened, the pleasure which I was to derive from the act of dressing to go out to dinner, you see the most common place is where the sense of the real may occur. Most poignantly. It is the ordinary. That is extraordinary. It is only through the ordinary that the real may manifest. If we spend all our times being on ordinary being radical, we never permit the threshold of the real to occur. Therefore, the most miraculous life is one that is natural
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And ordinary
(08:22):
Over the sea, quite near the shore. We're trying to rise one beyond another at wider and wider intervals, vapors of a pitchy blackness, but also of the Polish and consistency of agate of a visible weight so much so that the highest among them poised at the end of their contorted stem and overreach, the center of gravity of the pile that had hitherto supported them seam on the point of bringing down and ruin this lofty structure already half the height of the sky and precipitating it into the sea, the size of a ship that was moving away like a nocturnal traveler gave me the same impression that I had had in the train of being set free from the necessity of sleep and from confinement in a bedroom. Not that I felt myself, a prisoner in the room in which I now was sentence in another hour, I should have left it.
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And they're getting into the carriage. I threw myself down on the bed and just as if I had been lying in a birth on board, one of those steamers, which I could see quite near to me in which when night came, it would be strange to see stealing slowly out into the darkness, like shadowy and silent, but I'm sleeping swamp. I was on old sides, surrounded by pictures of the sea, but often is not. They were indeed only pictures. I forgot that below their colored expanse was hallowed. The sad desolation of the beach travel by the restless evening, braise whose breath I had. So anxiously felt on my arrival at Baalbek all backs down the coast by do this halfway between calm and do him. Besides even in my room, being wholly taken out with thoughts of the girls whom I had seen go pass.
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I was no longer in a state of mind, calm or disinterested enough to allow the formation of any really deep impression of beauty. The anticipation of dinner at river bell made my mood more frivolous still. And my mind dwelling at such moments upon the surface of the body, which I was going to dress up. So as to try to appear as pleasing as possible in the feminine eyes, which would be scrutinizing me in the brilliantly lighted restaurant, you see how he's attentive to both directions. At the same time, he's immersing himself in the social world. He took his, his guide. Somebody the most wealthy Rua is at the time. And everyone thought Preuss is just a wastrel, but it took them as guides because they could get him into high society. At every level, he went to every so long and as time progressed to became more and more, the eccentric, lovable, shallow Marcel until the books began to be published. And they realized that you've been doing research. You've been constructing very carefully, the motion so fine. So filled with you in and you endo and ambiguity that a Curry court, anything that came up and it'd be neat. My window, the unvarying gentle flight of sea Martins and swallows had not arisen like a plane fountain. His images are gorgeous, like a living fireworks, joining the intervals between their soaring rockets, with the motionless white streaming lines of long horizontal wakes.
(12:41):
You see the Provence of the goddess suddenly occurs. It's just in the image, the birds, the flight of birds, it's like an ancient augury there. And that flight like rockets going up fireworks the brilliancy of colored light, the revealing of these hidden crystals of explosive manifestation in this context, suddenly they're the long whites of foam calmness will appear without charming miracle of this natural and local phenomenon, which brought into touch with reality. The scene that I had before my eyes, I might have easily believe that they were no more than a selection made of fresh every day of paintings, which were shown quite arbitrarily in the place in which I happened to be. And without having any necessary connection with that place, you're saying that normally we think that it's just happenstance, but in fact is eternal. And if we have the right method, the right mode, so right, life hit records, and teleplay exactly on time.
(13:58):
There it is. At one time, it was an exhibition of Japanese color prints. Now he's going to tell us a couple of examples. I'm telling you, you went to an exhibition of Japanese color prints beside the neat desk of sun red and round as the moon. Hey, yellow cloud seemed a lake against which black sorts were outlined like the trees shore, a bar of a tender pink, which I had never seen again after my first paint box swelled out into our river and either bank of which boats seemed to be waiting high and dry for someone to push them down and set them float. And with the contemptuous board frivolous glance of an amateur or a woman hurrying through a picture gallery between two social engagements, I would say to myself, curious, sunset, this it's different from what they usually are, but after all I've seen them just as fine, just as remarkable as this.
(14:59):
I had more pleasure on evenings when a ship absorbed and liquified by the horizon. So much the same and color as herself, an impressionist exhibit this time you see, he shifts without telling you now it's the impressionist exhibit creamy pinks. You once went out of his way to find a creamy pink shirt. You know, you wear a tie, they were wonderful shirts with the white collars turned down and then a stud jeweled stud put here. When he was writing this passage, he was looking for a pink shirt, just edible like that Japanese print pink, or just like that impressionist pink. You thinking of him on anything that what she, when this feeding tube that it seemed to be also of the same matter. Of course, it's the same matter this universe is in Oregon. And if it's the same manner has the same origin, which also can be found mysterious. We also have the same matter appeared as if someone had simply cut out with a pair of scissors, her bows bows, and the rigging in which she tapered into a slender filigree from the vaporous blue of the sky. Sometimes the ocean filled almost the whole of my window and when it was enlarged and prolonged by band of sky edged out the top, only by a line that was up in the same blue as the sea, as in a Hiroshi, correct?
(16:41):
So that I suppose that all to be still safe and the change in color due only to some effect of light and shade another day, the sea was painted only in the lower part of the window. All the rest of which was so filled with innumerable clouds packed one against another in horizontal bands that its pains seem to be intended for some special purpose or to illustrate a special talent of the artist to present many quotations, a cloud study, who is the artist of nature, wild trait, a special talent of this artist to present a cloud study while the fronts of various bookcases showing similar clouds, but in another part of the horizon differently colored by the light appearing to be offering as it were the repetition of which certain of our contemporaries are so fun and have one in the same effect, always observed at different hours, but able now and the immobility of art to be seen all together in a single room Preuss once wrote in the letter to friend of his, he said the extraordinary great Mrs. Shakespeare is that he is the only writer in which a single scene of the play presents all of the action of the play together. We would use the term now garnered from cinematography of montage and Shakespeare, and D is a Supreme artist at presenting in almost an infinite montage series. All of the meanings infinite as they may be in one scene in one fell swoop is at work integrated their multidimensional consciousness
(18:36):
Universal sometimes
(18:39):
To a sky and see uniformly gray. A rosy touch would be added with an exquisite delicacy while a little butterfly that had gone to sleep at the foot of the window seemed to be attaching with its wings at the corner of this harmony in gray and pink in the Whistler manner. The favorite signature of the Chelsea master. He's talking now about the American painter Whistler who lived in England and it would paint compositions. And we call that one painting Whistler's mother, but it's really composition in grade. Why? Because Whistler understood that he was dealing here with harmonies of town and that because we translated because we interpret it in terms of human life, we missed the universal aspect of it. So Proust is listening to this
(19:30):
Paying attention to this, the pink vanished. There
(19:36):
Was nothing left now to look at. I rose for a moment. And before lying down again, drew close the inner curtains above them. I could see from my bed, the Ray of light that still remained glowing steadily finger and thinner, but it was without any feeling of sadness without any regret for its passing that I thus allowed to die about the curtains the hour, at which as a rule, I was seated at table four. I knew that this day was of another kind than ordinary days. It is time. I said, I stretched myself on the bed, then rose and finished dressing. And he goes down to dinner.
(20:27):
He has in sections, individuals who like his, um, power more Albertine. He becomes progressively enamored with her. And he says that she began to occur to him that when first knew her, she was like, um, just another cloud in the sky. She was like the white moon and daylight among the clouds of the sky. And it was only as the whole scene of his psyche shifted that she became more and more glowing. And he could see that she was not a cloud, but she was a moon, like a moon goddess that she was extraordinarily important because she began to present for him a constellated, meaning that was, had been hitherto unintelligible in himself. And of course, um, he goes to great pains to show that we must not confuse the ordinary external complications with the inner eternal structure. That this is a way that leads us away all the time. What about purist as an individual? I have here a book published just a few years after Paris died. Someone who knew him, um, Leon here Quinn, he said Proust at 20 large black brilliant eyes with heavy eyelids, that drooped slightly to one side, a look of extreme gentleness, fascinating along time on the object, it fell upon a voice, still more gentle breathless, a little and somewhat draw drawing verging on FX station yet always avoiding it. Proust was extraordinarily kind. I don't mean just
(22:26):
Kind hearted. I mean
(22:29):
Kind almost to a point of perfection. He was like a Shelly and incarnation of the bodhisattva, Samantha Bond, the universal perfection of loving kindness constantly. He would sometimes seem to threaten people who were jaded about the world by this, um, seemingly fawning. Uh overindulgence but when they got to know Proust, it was, it simply that's how he was. It was a concomitant of his character. He always made sure that everybody in the restaurant, he favored the risks, the hotel rents, he said, it's the only place you can get chicken done right in Paris. He would always tip every waiter. He would say, well, they're all here. And they know that we're tipping these people. He was a big tipper, three or four times as much. So he said, well, we have to tip them off. They're all here. So of course he got good service. He was always extraordinary in the sense that when he was perfecting his knowledge of society, because it was done with such intimate detail, he would always arrive late and stay late.
(23:48):
And he would reveal people with stories. There'd be a cluster of people around Preuss, and he would go into the most intimate details of situations. I don't mean sensual. I mean, exacting and there would be captivated by this. And then proofs would begin to use this as a basis then to ask them about their impressions of so-and-so of this situation. And he would build up viewpoints of an individual from maybe talking to 20 or 30 people, or he would build up impressions of a certain soiree from maybe 20 or 30 people who had been there from different points of view. And then he would meditate on all of them, compare it, bring it together, refusing to discount, anybody, always insisting that everybody was right. And that the reality of the situation was learning to keep an openness of mind that did not portion out into simple logical structures.
(24:58):
The overwhelming numinous reality of the event as it really occurred, not just occurred in the past, but because it had occurred in nature, always was still there. And that the human being could recover not only that event, but any event, all events and that all men had to do was to train himself to do this. But because this over sensitized society was in jeopardy, there was an unstable society. In fact, it crumbled in his lifetime. We have never gone back. He wrote his great novel to reproduce that social environment for all time. So that the book reading the book makes us a party to that society. We, again go to all these engagements, see it through the eyes of all these people and are able to reconstruct for ourselves through the technique and through the world that Preuss made available. The sense of the real that he had come to his beloved father died in 1903, his mother in 1905.
(26:28):
And Preuss began to withdraw from the world, realizing that his time was coming to a close. He moved from the old family home that he had lived in since he was born to another place. Um, the Rue Houseman in Paris, and there, he had constructed a bedroom with cork lined walls, the famous cork line bedroom. So no sound could come in because he was dealing with such delicate nuances. And because normal sounds of everyday life were queuing in indelible eternities. By this time he was very good at this. He had to be able to filter out and select those aspects, which he was going to let manifest. He was like a scientist and he is a laboratory. And so Preuss more and more became a month sequestered in this cork line bedroom. And he filled 24 tow volumes of notes. They were stacked on the mantle of the fireplace.
(27:38):
They were stacked on the bed. He wrote almost always. And invariably in bed, the rest of the house was totally bland visitors who were there. Um, describe it as an apartment that no one lived in, one came in and one had the sense that the owners were away because he kept more and more this skimpy external world, because the internal revelations have become so prolific by this time. So far reaching, not only in the depth that they disclosed, but in the interlocking sense of reality that they disclosed. So Proust lived in this until within three years of his death, the landlord sold the building and Proust was evicted and he lived the last three years of his life in a place that he never unpacked his suitcases. He died, uh, in November, 1922. And just before his death, the fourth volume of remembrance of things passed, was published.
(28:53):
And he wrote a letter just two days before he died to a friend of his Andre Devorah. And at the end, he writes, share on the don't trouble to reply. Don't send news for my condition, which no one knows I was too sick to write you about Riviere and the Bouguereau prize, my affection and admiration for whom you nevertheless know, and now everything should be finished. If anything about my dream. So sleep is straight in, it must be removed if I left it in, I did so out of forgetfulness and it makes for useless repetition. Now expect nothing more from me, but silence and follow my example and yours always Marcel pers the last thing he ever wrote, he was of course, increasingly lionized as an eccentric genius. The succeeding novels were published after his death and it began to occur, uh, in the mid 1920s.
(30:14):
That Proust was indeed one of the great masters of world literature. I have watched almost everything out that I was going to share with you. So you'll have to take a look at these books on your own Preuss forms, the organic, feminine feeling tone of half of the Janice gate that initiates the 20th century. The other half is the individual that we start the new series with next week, the masculine side, the abstract side, the great Russian painter, Kandinsky, and Proust and Kandinsky together, present to us in those great artistic Sears at the commencement of this terrible century. Those two techniques for survival that we must know. We must know how to find the real within ourselves, and we must have some way to express it externally. So with Kandinsky, we'll take a look at the language of the real next week from the beginning of this new series. Remember the lecture on the 22nd is on Carl Young, even though it says Thanksgiving holiday, and that'll be at 2029 high period. You're all welcome to come there. Of course, anytime. Thanks for your attention today.
(31:40):
[inaudible].

END OF RECORDING