Now I'm going to read a very long poem called
"The First Hour of the Night."
How's the volume?
Is there too much feedback?
Is it OK?
This poem has a number of sources, the most important,
biggest one is an essay called "The Dream"
by a German philosopher named Wilhelm Dilthey.
And it is the basis of the central episode
in the poem, a dream of the history of philosophy.
You're going to get inundated for a while with philosophy
and names of philosophers, and I hope
it's not going to be too hard to be under the deluge.
I don't expect the listener or reader
to know a lot about these.
I'm getting a lot of feedback now.
I'm going to turn it down.
Well, I actually like using the mic.
OK, how's this?
How's this?
It was better a minute ago.
OK, let's do it there.
How's this, how's this?
OK, thanks.
Sorry.
I don't expect you to recognize all the names,
but I hope that the basic groupings that the philosophers
are in will be clear.
The entire poem is enclosed in quotation marks,
except for the last line.
So just before the end of the poem,
I'm going to say unquote, and say one more line.
"The First Hour of the Night."
Quote, "This happened about 12 years before I died.
What I have to tell you is the narrative
of an evening and night, a little more
than a succession of dreams.
One anxiety following another, the whole somehow,
for me at least, wound and bomb.
The friend I've been closest to throughout my life three years
earlier suddenly was dead.
For three years, his son had invited
me to visit the family home.
The family seat, a great house inherited
by my friend in his 20s at his father's death,
inherited now by his only son.
What used to return.
During his life, both of us often
insisted that our philosophical discussions,
ebullient arguments, hydra-headed analysis
of the motivations, dilemmas that seemed to block and fuel
our lives were central, crucial.
But after his death, all I now could see
was the self-generating logic of his life.
It's distant, inaccessible, self-sufficiency.
He'd been a storm at sea seen from land.
What used to return as I imagined standing again
within that house, within that world he'd been given,
but it's so transformed by his affections, curiosity,
shifting enthusiasms, care.
Walking up the central staircase.
Then after 20 feet, entering his study,
its obscure, arbitrary finality stopped my breath.
Three years to the day after this first death of a friend
my own age, his son wrote that I would do his father's
only child a great kindness if once again, I
came to stay, even for a night.
The house was, of course, changed.
I suppose I had expected a museum to my friend.
Instead, I found the embodiment of different interests,
as well as incomprehension of or even the desire to erase,
to blur what in his father had seen bold or witty or coherent.
An unsymmetrical, fragile, Indonesian rocker
had been sold, because uncomfortable.
Curtains obscured the high, bare rectangles
of windows, whose light or blackness
once was shut out only by recessed, seldom-used shutters.
Half the books were stored were sold.
After dinner, we went into the study.
Neither of us sat in his father's chair.
High-backed winged, it still stood
at an angle right of the fire.
And I sat facing it on the left where I had always sat.
The couch to my right was still there.
He slumped at its far end.
The small coal fires always burned one's face
and failed to heat the dark, huge room.
He put his hands to his temples, making a kind of hood
over his eyes.
I couldn't see his eyes.
Then he spoke.
I can neither sell this house nor live in it.
If father had a favorite horse, you and I
could sacrifice and eat it next to his grave.
Then set up its head on a stake driven directly into the grave.
That's how Harva says the Tartars convince the dead
to stay dead.
They seldom succeed.
If a dead man's widow and children grow sick,
the shaman knows the dead are eating them.
You've known me since I was born.
You know that I wasn't waiting for father to die.
I had my own work, friends, income.
I admit that I've always been a spendthrift,
but I wasted my own money, not his.
The prerogatives that descended upon me at his death.
Position, much more money.
The freedom implicit in the demands now placed upon me.
I didn't connive or even will.
They came in the course of things,
because he was not here.
But I enjoy them and even now, expect them.
Again and again I dream father has come back.
He's standing in the hallway as I descend the staircase.
He looks up at me tired, relieved to be home.
He's whole, well, not changed.
But even as I rushed down the steps to embrace him,
even as the irreparable fact that drained and diminished
the world isn't fact.
I know that I don't want him to have come back.
All this is his, not mine.
I'm again what his death made me no longer.
Before I reach him, an elated circle of servants and friends
surrounds him and leads them off.
As they disappear, his head turns back to look at me.
Then I know that each object that father
chose for this house, but absent now from it,
says that everything ever unresolved, clearly forever
is unresolvable between us.
For though I must give it all back, I can't give it all back.
I've already spent too much money.
Thus, though I know that no creature possesses anything
on this Earth, sweating, I wake up terrified
that father's returned to it.
Baffled and appalled to find that what I want is his death.
Then he stopped.
There was a long silence.
The voice I heard as he said all this in a sudden intonation,
a passing phrase, in the pervasive self-wounding
relentlessness of its logic was his father's.
The fist at the center of my chest
refused to unclench until he and I, the furniture we sat on,
the room, the house, the very world
itself cracked apart then self-combusted, self-consumed
by our own self-contradictions.
I told him that when I was a child,
I had a pony who was for a period, my life.
Even now if I close my eyes and look into his face
I'm a boy again, looking into the face
of a neurasthenic, panicked, mute creature like himself.
In secret alliance forged half against what we lacked,
words, a world that demonstrated its mastery over us
by coercive, involuted adult human speech.
He was a high-strung intelligent miniature colt my size,
the prize of my sixth birthday.
Perhaps time and retrospect have improved
our mutual, absolute trust, delight, connection.
But this was the first of those passionate attachments,
passionate judgments that here, like answers, like soul answers
soul, which since my childhood, whether in relation to animal,
friend, an artist or performer I've discovered,
a work of art, except where feeling has been bewildered
by the desire for the reciprocation of erotic desire,
have never betrayed me.
Never when I've encountered again in body or memory
what I loved seemed then stupid, ill-founded, grounded merely
in willfulness, more illusion.
At nine, I was sent to boarding school.
The approach of this cataclysm held no allure for me.
Rather, I felt rage and a sense of betrayal.
But in fact, within a few weeks, books,
the desire to dominate the attention of my teachers,
and even wary camaraderie with my peers, for the first time
swallowed me.
When I unwillingly arrived home on our first holidays,
I was told that several horses had come down
with a fever, including mine.
That my horse was dying.
The next day he was carted off.
There was no grave.
Perhaps my earliest memory that is absolutely
fixed in scene and time is the black horseflies' biggest
thumbs covering and clinging to his body,
the weird unseasonable blood-red sunset saturating the world
while I knew his body was being carried off,
but howling, I was held back within the house.
Much later, when I was 12, 13, 14, in my dreams,
my little horse again and again came back.
He wanted to play, for me once again to mount him and ride.
But I had no time.
What I now was interested in were
friends, school, my studies.
Besides, as I stood next to him, he was too small.
I had grown and he was now too small to ride.
With a shiver, a stamp and sound of torment,
he seemed to take this in.
I told my friend's son that what he had felt in his dream
was nothing so simple as greed or selfishness.
That later in my 30s, again, I had known very similar emotions
after other deaths.
That there seemed to be something structural
in human relations making what we had felt, well, impersonal.
So he thanked me for my generosity and candor
and said that he felt not only exhausted, but somewhat better.
As I mounted the stairs to my room that night, what I felt
was a woe unameliorated, unappeased.
Now follows my dream of the history of philosophy.
For that night in my room as I threw off my clothes,
seeking in sleep only oblivion, erasure
of the throbbing, that irremediably ignorant eye,
angry at I did not know what, above my bed,
I saw again, what since my first visit
had hung there, Volpato's fine etching of Raphael's
School of Athens.
I remembered with a sudden and flooding access
of pleasure the first time I'd seen in Rome Raphael's fresco.
Here, under the image of the many-breasted goddess
of philosophy in a medallion in the ceiling,
flanked by two angels announcing knowledge
of the causes of things, at the center of the high arch
of the fresco itself, framed there
by a vast, symmetrical, seemingly
stable, but essentially, at least
according to some writers, unbelievable architecture,
there are two heads isolated by three
great descending central arches that dreamlike,
open to the sky.
Calmly presiding over an ideal assembly
of the great philosophers of antiquity.
Not only metaphysicians and scientists, but students,
a soldier, the leaning, listening figure
of a Averroes, commentator representative of Islam.
Plato and Aristotle, by their parallel but opposite gestures,
Aristotle pointing downward, Plato upward,
divide and order this debating, brooding, teaching, writing,
nearly disharmonious multitude.
On the side of Aristotle, representatives
of the exact sciences, Euclid, Ptolemy,
with speculative thinkers, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras on the side of Plato.
Opposite gestures, the Janus-like
show us where to seek the causes of things.
In this ideal community of the spirit,
the social world, as the social world never
is, death, rage, and arrows have receded to adorn recesses
in the architecture.
On the left, under a yielding, even voluptuous Apollo
holding his lyre, an aging Triton
seizes the breast of a resisting sea nymph.
On the right, Medusa's severed face, mouth frozen
open in an O of horror, from Athena's victorius
shield stares powerless.
Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, protector of the home,
family, reason, civilization.
When I first saw this scene, the title, School of Athens,
a misapprehension imposed on it in the 18th century,
I was largely ignorant of the intricate iconography
connecting the room's four walls and ceiling.
Philosophy looks across at theology
while poetry faces jurisprudence.
Each itself divided, canon law and civil law,
in the interrelations and elegant distinctions
informing its walls and ceiling.
This is a compendium even synthesis
of Renaissance speculative religious aesthetic thinking.
An ideal Renaissance, temple of the human mind.
Its premise, the neoplatonic Christian humanist confidence
that the world's obdurate contradictions,
terrifying unintelligibility can be tamed by classification.
Time now has effaced.
This room, intended as the site of the Pope's personal library,
then where he signed before assembled dignitaries
of the highest papal tribunal bulls and official documents
was the first of the rooms that Raphael painted for the Pope.
Only 25 with little reputation, he'd been summoned from
Florence to Rome at the suggestion of his patron,
Bramante, architect of the new Saint Peter's.
Decoration of the room was already begun.
But no one is certain how much Sodoma, six years Raphael's
senior, had completed.
For when the Pope saw Raphael's sketches,
there's never enough wall space here.
At the center of power, he ordered everything
that Sodoma had painted destroyed.
In the fresco, next to Raphael's own self-portrait,
is the face of Sodoma.
Both stand behind Euclid, geometry
is central to the painter's skill at perspective.
Euclid has the head of Bramante.
Raphael, without illusions, looks out at us.
Sodoma smiles without rancor or humiliation,
absorbed in the conversation before him.
In this ideal community of the spirit,
Socrates and Aristotle are modeled on antique busts.
But Plato has the features of Leonardo, Heraclitus
self-enclosed but writing, the short hooded stonecutter's
smock of a pensieroso Michelangelo.
The Apollo who shares rain with Athena
here is the God not of reason, but poetry, I said to myself
as I began to fall asleep.
And then fixing the arc of the Fresco before my mind,
here, everyone feels it.
The gesture of Plato and the gesture of Aristotle are one.
Knowing that I loved it, my friend
once had placed the School of Athens above my bed.
Smiling, now I remembered this.
Now I'm asleep.
Then to my humiliation and shame, I was in it.
That tumultuous perished world now not perished lay before me.
Out of estrangement, I had gained or been given entrance,
privilege in no way earned.
Above me, past the temple's multitudinous, strangely empty
rising steps, Ptolemy still held aloft the green and blue globe
of the Earth.
Then as I turned to crouch or hide,
from the distance on either side,
I saw a long row of men dressed in the varied garments
of succeeding centuries approach the steps where I stood.
When each figure passed me, for a moment looking
into my eyes full face, I tried to recognize him.
There, just as I had imagined them
in the light of their portraits, was Bruno, one button
missing on his long, black scholar's gown,
still smelling of sulfur from the fires of the Inquisition.
He held a book titled Feast of Ashes.
Descartes, priest-like in devotion
to his self-made revolution, heavy-lidded, as if worn out
by thought or lessons at dawn for the queen of Sweden.
Hegel and Schelling walking hand in hand, as
in the morning of their young collaboration
before distance, fame, silence.
These, and so many others, each alive as his voice on the page,
each body now inseparable from its fate,
yet with the unachieved, purposeful will of the living,
ascended the steps.
And without barrier, began to listen and mix and speak
in earnest debate, yet strangers' courteous deference
with the philosophers of antiquity.
Irrational happiness seized me.
Not at the absence of discord.
Discord will come.
But to see this that at last lies before me
is as I have known real.
After chimeras of contingency and resistless
self-estrangement to see chimeras of the real.
Then something happened which I did not
expect, even in a dream.
As if compelled or drawn by inner necessity, dividing,
they rushed to join themselves into groups,
groups that now I saw had been there,
though I had never seen them.
But my words are mere summary for what
I remembered when I woke seeing the faithless shadow of what
I had seen.
First, the movement pressed to the right,
where next to Ptolemy, wearing on his gown
a resplendent globe of the heavens, Archimedes,
leaning down to the stone beneath them, drew his circles.
Here around these two figures gathered
materialists, mathematical naturalists, positivists,
I recognized Hobbes, Comte arguing with Descartes.
Then restlessly circling at the edges of the group,
D'Alembert, whose ironic smiles seemed
to mock the dreams of the metaphysicians
All those thinkers who see within the indecipherable,
furious cataract of life, within bewildering,
annihilating flux, a great intelligible
process, measurable universal nature, impartial,
noncensorious, whose unbreakable chain
of unvarying coherent laws frees us
from the prison house of human superstition, religious dogma,
hallucination.
Here mind and consciousness or body, free will,
darkness still undispelled by science.
Now Comte, systematizer of positivism,
standing as if confident that he is heir
to the immense authority, confirming
its insight into reality conferred on science
by its transformation of the world,
announces to devoted listening thinkers from all nations,
his face flushed, eyes shrewd but credulous,
a new clergy, a scientific, industrial elite,
henceforth translating to expectant hungry society
invariable laws newfound by thickened science.
As he spoke, Descartes, abruptly once again the French cavalier,
striding forth with bold, setting forth with bold stride,
disengaged himself from all these figures,
turning his gaze irresistibly toward the center of the temple
to a second group, which had assembled, arranged itself as
if magnetized around Socrates at its center.
With an old God like Plato and young Aristotle each writing
down his words at his feet.
Here, the conviction that mind, spirit, consciousness
are merely an interpolation in the immense text
of the physical universe was reversed.
As Socrates spoke, among those listening,
I saw Plotinus, Cicero, Christian theologians.
Augustine held the confessions.
Thomas Aquinas distractedly fingered strands of straw
from a crown of straw on his head.
As he explained it through dialectic dialogue,
argument by contradiction proceeding
to the reconciliation of contradiction,
for only contradiction impels thought.
And what is thought but the silently occurring
internal dialogue of the soul with itself.
Pug-nosed and pugnacious, Socrates
had made me feel that he had seen in spirit what he
struggled to express in words.
As he explained it through dialectic or power of reason,
we can make our way to an order past the delusions
of custom self-deception, desire,
and can then by an act of choice change, correct our lives.
Suddenly, from behind his voice, blending with his voice
was a woman's voice.
I moved slightly to the left to see its source.
There, were the seated figures of Dante and Sappho,
who grasped disintegrating pages of a book in her hand,
wrapped, silent before her, was Scheherazade
seated on an embroidered pillow, wearing transparent silks,
plucking an instrument.
Whose wizard songs, I've known them since my youth,
beguiled the sword that hangs above her.
Troubled, excited voices soon broke my attention.
Turning back, I saw the circle of listeners
now had divided into disputing factions
while Augustine, standing to one side, stared out at them.
What one thinker confidently asserted,
another spurned as illusion.
What one human being flew from, another sought.
Some struggled to reconcile the wisdom of Greece
with Christ's revelation while other melancholy voices doubted
the free, sufficient autonomy of reason
and the human will, faced with our confusion,
weak and isolated organs of perception, helplessness.
The abrupt arrival of Descartes.
For the first time, I noticed that the hair thickly growing
beneath his lower lip on one side was shaved off.
Then later, of the stooped, slightly built Kant
with his cane and three-cornered hat,
his features hardened as if by the strain of thought, brought
brief order to this spectacle.
But Augustine, pushing past all this
with a gesture of revulsion, that
seemed to rise from an intuition indistinguishable from himself.
His hands now empty, already had abandoned the scene before him,
turning to a third final group gathered
at the left of the temple, whose center was Pythagoras
and Heraclitus.
From this milling, Mercurial crowd,
Hegel now looked at one moment like Bismarck and another
like Shelley.
Words emerged, master and slave, predestination,
preservation of the species.
God imminent in nature, race, blood, stages of absolute mind,
progress, class.
The inexorable laws of history, the psyche, the age.
Logos, the world as will and idea, the one.
The inescapable society of the dead and the living
who have made us what we are.
Here, the materialists have been as it
were turned on their heads.
Now spirit, imminent, transcendent, or unknowable,
is ground of body, governs body.
The single human psyche powerless
within the immeasurable power of its laws,
goals, will, reached by daring to contemplate
in a calm spirit, coherence.
Or by hard-practiced submission.
Freedom here is to accept necessity or else
when intolerable existence wholly becomes
the snake that swallows its own tail, to smash
the head of the snake.
Here, ceaseless human choices, decisions dilemmas,
mortality itself is illusion.
The cunning used upon us to silence the voice within that
says, someone else led my life, I
am an onlooker on my own life.
Then among those listening to Schopenhauer,
I saw my dead friend.
I'm certain that I saw him, though when I approached him,
standing just behind him, when he turned at my touch,
his head was the cloud dispersed into discrete atoms
as if I had drawn too close to a painting made out
of discrete spots of separate color.
He was no longer there.
Inheritor inheriting inheritors.
He'd worked to transform an inheritance, transformed
in its turn, as if the soul delivered
over unconscious and defenseless not
only to this world of things, but to its own darkness.
Flinging itself into the compensations
that the world and its own self offer it,
but finding the light of self-knowledge."