Deep Calls to Deep | Poetry, Prophecy, Philosophy in Ibn Gabirol with Zevi Slavin

33:38And I'm trying to play with that sense of appealing as both a call and that which attracts us. That's what I'm... Sorry, I hope I'm not seeming like I'm being nitpicking. I'm trying to map... Because I'm trying to get that not only is it essential to our finite transcendence, which you did great work with. I'm trying to get that it's sort of the fundamental way in which we are enacting our participation in reality, right? That we enact the emanation and the emergence with prophecy and poetry. Sorry, I feel like I'm being vague. No, let me try and find you there. let the deep cold to the deep the same deep that the spirit of God hovers over in Genesis 1 exactly the unknown that yet to be unpacked so let's explore that together there's something interesting and I'm going to focus on Ibn Gabriol in particular as our poet prophet so that we don't get lost in general abstractions that we're grounded in a in the matter of one specific person.

35:00That is my besetting sin, so I'm glad you're proposing this. Yes. I see that Ibn Gabriela paints himself as a kind of almost resentful or reluctant prophet poet. And he compares himself a few times to Moses, who has this early moment, according to the rabbinic literature, according to the Midrash, where he's tested to choose between a gem or sort of gold and a coal. And he goes for the gold and the angel pushes his hand to the coal and he puts the coal in his mouth instead. And this was Pharaoh's testing to see whether whether this young child was going to be destined to try and take his throne or not.

35:52And the angel saves the life of Moses by giving him the call. But as a result, he burns his tongue and he becomes a ral svarsayim. He has some sort of speech impediments. And then throughout the life of Moses, Moses is reticent to use his voice, his prophetic voice, in a way that can be effective partially because of this impediment and because of the trauma associated with his childhood around that. And perhaps the impediment is just a symptom of his deep internal alienation, separated from his mother at birth, thrust into the hands of the enemy, raised in the house of Pharaoh. And there's this point where God and Moses argue with each other at the burning bush, where God is trying desperately to convince Moses to go to answer the call of the people.

36:42And there's a beautiful moment where God, at the very end of that conversation, says, your brother Aaron will be your prophet. Niveyecha is the word in Hebrew, which is prophet. And the way that's translated by most translators is that he'll be your spokesperson, which is what prophecy also is, is to speak on behalf of another entity or another agent. And there's a beautiful moment where Ibn Gabbal records that a friend of his tells him that you must go and use your prophetic voice despite your impediments, despite your inabilities and your indesires. And for those that remember the previous conversations we had, Ibn Gabri 'l was a man who was afflicted with terrible physical ailments, skin diseases.

37:27And he was not a character who saw himself as charismatic or likable or someone whose voice wanted to be heard. And he has this internal struggle where he's being pushed to speak, to use his prophetic voice. And I think that part of the prophetic challenge is that when one is in touch with a certain degree of sensitivity about the nature of reality, there is a desire to share, but there is an overwhelming necessity to shut up, lest one becomes a prophet that is castigated and that is saying things that don't want to be heard. And I think what I'm hearing from you, John, is that there's an impulse in the prophetic.

38:08And I see there's a beautiful line in Maimonides as well. where Maimonides sees his project also as prophetic. He sees himself as coming into contact with the active intellect and saying what he must say by necessity. And he writes a line, not in the Guide for the Perplexed, but in his halakhic work in Mishnah Torah, his other great magnum opus, which researchers don't read as much as they read his philosophical work. And he writes there, when he writes about the laws of prophecy, so there are specific biblical and there are big laws around prophecy. A false prophet in Judaism, in biblical canon, is subject to be put to death, to be stoned.

38:43And Maimonides writes there that a prophet who receives prophecy and suppresses their prophecy, which in Hebrew is hakovesh et nevoa, someone who suppresses the well of prophecy that boils within them, their punishment is death, but not at the hands of an earthly court, but at the hands of a divine court. There's a category in Jewish law that one is subject to the death penalty, but by the hands of God, not by the hands of humans. So for Maimonides, there's this kind of this blade's edge where if you speak false prophecy, you're put to death by your fellow humans, according to the law. But if you suppress your prophecy, then you're put to death by God.

39:28And I can imagine that for the prophet, there's a question of when they're going to speak. Am I about to speak words that are false prophecy or am I about to not speak and thereby suppress my prophecy? and I see Maimonides calling and I see Ibn Gabbrel and this interaction that he has with his friend as this calling to prophecy there's a poem where Ibn Gabbrel writes and maybe I'll read a bit of the Hebrew here along with the English I love it when you read the Hebrew too by the way this is that you know I think who was it Walter Benjamin that said that prophecy sorry that poetry is that which gets lost in translation there are some really wonderful translations of Ibn Gabbal's poetry that actually managed to reinvent the poetic element in English but I think the original language has something rich there.

40:17So Ibn Gabbal writes,

40:24Sometimes I think God put a thing in my mouth, a jewel, when he put it there but it has turned into a coal, a clear reference to that story of Moses of the jewel and coal. Kishir asher yushar veyaaroch af enosh, or something like a song, which is sung, which reeks with a mix of fragrance and decay. Mibain imrativ chalbono o shecheilat, lo chatzrei hayo b 'bet lot yadu an shei Sedom tif tukhu al-delet that if and this is a very strange end to this to the stanza that if the men of Sodom of Sodom had sniffed the scent from the house of Lot they surely would have broken down the door which is this strange oh wow strange image biblical image to refer where he sees himself as having this prophetic voice that he that both must be spoken and yet becomes a colony's mouth that both if spoken becomes fragrant and repulsive and invites desire, but also violence.

41:23It's very tortured. The other prophet that he compares himself to, and I wonder if this resonates for you, John, is to Balaam, the prophet who was hired by the king Balak to curse the Jewish people. And for those that know the story in the book of Numbers, I believe, Balaam comes to curse the people and instead utters words of blessing. He says, Matovu, ohalecha Yaakov, mishkinotech Yisrael, how good are your tents, Jacob, your dwelling place, Israel. Verses that become part of contemporary Jewish liturgy for thousands of years to follow. And Ibegabra compares himself to Balaam, where he has a message that wants to be spoken, but his words get twisted and perverted and not heard by his contemporaries.

42:04And I think there's something of the challenge that he sees as the prophet of trying to find ways to articulate that which he must articulate, but gets lost in his mouth or gets misheard by the people. There's a sense where we're striving into a realm that is beyond where we are. And I think we see this very strongly with Blake as well, but in ways that the world is dark or silent too. Yes, yes. I like that. I think that's very helpful. and so I'm thinking now of like there's I don't know if this will land but there's something like there's an urge from the ultimate and which you've articulated very well but you know and Desmond talks about the opposite there's an urge to the ultimate also and again and Blake for me it like again I see now I like this language by the way I see both of them in Blake I see his right he He is both trying to wake people up, and that's the urge from the ultimate, but he's also trying to extend his reach.

43:22He wants to see a world in a grain of sand and heaven and a wildflower. There's also that. There's the urge to the ultimate. There's the urge of trying to make the finite language point to the transcendent. But I think you recalibrating this and mapping it onto these two urges. And I see different traditions as emphasizing them differently. So, like, for me, Taoism is more poetical, and I mean that very positively, than prophetic. There's this great welling up that comes in Taoism. And there's this urge, and it's very poetic, and they're trying to reach the silence.

44:13Whereas there's other traditions in which there's a much more of the sense that the ultimate is sort of crashing into our world. I'm trying to use neutral language. And that resistance that the prophet has, I'm reminded of the stories of Muhammad that Gabriel, not Gabarol, Gabriel would be strangling him and pinning him down and throwing him to the ground and sort of compelling him to recite. which is this weird moment because the recite is like a poetic term but but it's obviously a prophetic urge from the ultimate like i don't again i'm trying to not be too simplistic but is it is it like uh there's a notion in psychology locus of control um which is where's the urge coming from like is like when i'm in a poet like i write poetry i've been writing poetry for for four decades.

45:18And it's very much, it comes from within. It's responsive to something beyond. I don't think I've ever experienced prophecy, although I've probably experienced something on a continuum with it, like a very powerful insight given to me by somebody else, something like that, that breaks in. And it seems to me that the prophet seems to act, like you said, as a spokesperson, whereas the poet seems to be speaking. I'm trying to articulate again. And obviously, I'm doing an idealization for clarity. I keep admitting, you keep admitting, Many individuals are both, the way up and the way down are the same way.

46:08But I'm trying to dig into the phenomenology because I'm trying to get, again, those two dimensions of orientation. When I'm oriented, I have to stand and I have to take a stance. But the world also has to disclose and impose on me if I'm going to be properly oriented as opposed to just fantasizing. There's something I'm trying to get at. I'm trying to get at. Go ahead. I want to maybe see if I can help here, where there's a sense in my, what I'm seeing in your words is that in terms of this directionality or situatedness of the poet versus the prophet, or there's modes even within the same person, as we're saying, where it seems almost that the prophet to me, it's interesting because the prophet is doing something which is auditory and vocal.

47:11So in the Hebrew tradition, in the biblical tradition, the word navi, most scholars believe the etymology comes from nivsvatayim, which is the murmuring, the muttering of one's lips, that there's something that one allows one's lips to move and words to be spoken from them. But in order to speak as a spokesperson, one has to listen. And to me, there's a deep listening that the prophet is doing, listening to reality in order to utter truth about reality. Whereas the poet, and I'm thinking here about Ibn Gabriel's poetry and some of his poems in specific, there's something more ocular. He is looking at the nature of reality.

47:50Yeah, yes, yes, yes. He's looking deeply at himself, at his contemporaries, at an object, at a flower, at a bird. He has a lot of nature poetry. And there's something about sitting and watching something intensely and then being able to put that out in letter. And that's very different. If we can sort of think about the senses that are involved. So if we're thinking about prophecy as auditory to verbal and poetry as visual or ocular to written, those are very different. And the distinction between that which is seen and that which is heard is a very important distinction in Jewish thought, where one hears something by definition piecemeal.

48:39So you would hear one syllable at a time, one word at a time, one sentence, one paragraph, and then we make those things together. And we speak in the same way where we can only articulate things in the linear sense. When we see, we see a full picture. And then we're able to focus in. And to me, there's a sense where we're in the prophetic and the poetic. There is actually a, and I wonder how this is going to resonate with you. There's a sense where those become intermingled. where we were able to hear something all at once or see the very tiny details when we are otherwise seeing everything at once.

49:16And we kind of are able to invert that, which is why in the Jewish mystical tradition, there's a great deal made about how at the revelation at Sinai, which is the paradigmatic moment of revelation in Jewish history, the grammar of the biblical sentences are inverted where the Jewish people hear that which is usually seen and see that which is usually heard. Oh, that's interesting. Yes. There's a sense where in order to do the prophetic and the poetic, we must apply the measures of hearing to that which is usually seen. And we must apply the measures of seeing to that which is usually heard. Oh, I like that.

49:54Which I'm taking to mean that one is typically done in linear, sequential, piecemeal, itemized, and the other is typically done to see all at once. And how do we engage in a way of hearing where we hear all at once? And how do we see what we see in a much more minute sense? To me, that's something which is core to the prophetic and poetic endeavor in that. That lands extremely well for me. So you've basically taken the bi-directionality and the opponent processing, and you've turned it into something more like a cognitive synergy where you're getting this figure ground reversal for both of them.

50:36I start to hear like I would see and I start to see like I would hear. And in that way, the hearing and the seeing become more interpenetratable to each other. I take it that that's part of what it realizes. And so I like that better. I think you added something that my notion of just bi-directionality wasn't getting. This notion of like active interpenetration where you're, like you said, you're getting this figure ground reversal and you're transposing from sight onto sound and sound onto sight. It's interesting because, you know, you talk about Mithin and other people like that and, you know, the revolution that takes place in the upper Paleolithic transition.

51:19And it's that kind of ability to do that weird, mapping between the senses that often comes out in metaphor and other things that is proposed to be the big innovation that's happening at that time. I really like that, Zevi. I think that adds something really interesting.

51:43So, I mean, if your argument is good, which I've just said, I think it is. A good poet should have some sense of prophecy and a good prophet should have some sense of poetry. Oh, certainly. Yeah. Certainly. I mean, let's look at the biblical prophets that Ibn Gabri 'l is steeped in and raised on. They're writing works of immense poetry. Yes. And poetry in this full rich sense, right? Where King David, a person who is inspired by God and a prophet hearing the voice of God and in conversation with the prophets of his day, with Nathan and others, is writing some of the greatest poetry that goes on to inspire centuries of Jewish poets and philosophers following him.

52:35I think there's certainly an interplay. And I think that the poets of the Middle Ages explicitly see themselves as engaging in a prophetic tradition in line with that. And I think that part of that also is, you know, people have this perception that prophecy and poetry maybe is like kind of clean and neat and tidy and sublime and pure. And it certainly can be, but in the poetry of the Bible, there's anguish, there's pain, there's lamentations, there's cries, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me i mean these are some some of the deep poetry of life gives us the ability there there's a there's a christian author who who did a poetic translation of the bible um i think it's called the the message and he i was listening to in preparation for this conversation i was listening to a talk that he had with chris ter tippett in the the on being podcast um and he said that the poetry of the Bible teaches us how to cuss at God without cussing.

53:43Because part of that experience of our interaction with the absolute sometimes is painful. We want to scream at it. We want to yell at it. The book of Job is entering into a deep polemic with the absolute about how impoverished the human experience can be in the face of what seems to be the capricious face of the absolute. And I think that all of that is present in the prophetic poetry of the Bible. And I think McGraw-Barrell is certainly seeing that interweaving of medium in his, literally, in his Bible, in his primary texts. Yeah, I like that. I mean, it's sort of a, you're proposing there's a dialogical relationship between hearing and seeing and poetry and prophecy.

54:38So now I want to bring in another figure, and that's Parmenides, in which we clearly have poetry. We clearly have prophecy. You know, the goddess tells him what he's supposed to speak to us. But many people regard him as one of the first great philosophers. and so given what you've said about like this interpenetration of trying to make new sense and hear new sense but the way you've described it hearing as if we're seeing and seeing as if we're hearing which I really like Zevi I think that's really brilliant what is it that the philosopher is doing then. And of course, there's Asian examples too.

55:28I mean, Lao Tse is writing poetry, but many people consider what he's doing as philosophy. And there's something else going on here. Now, my initial proposal was inspired by the work of Evan Thompson. He talks about sense-making, which is this ongoing process of relevance realization, but he then talks about making sense of sense making. And he proposes that that's initially what consciousness is. Consciousness is the faculty of making sense of our sense making and sort of recursive relevance realization. And I like that. But in that sense, philosophy is the act of being conscious of the sense making that goes on in the hearing that is seeing and the seeing that is hearing the making of sense and the receiving of sense um and what do you think of that that what's going on is there's just then there's an additional move which is yeah i you know i i'm getting i'm getting this surge and i'm getting this surge and languages like doing this like you said uh it's going up and down in this interpenetrating reconfiguring uh dialogical manner but what the heck does it mean and we right and and and uh another source of course for this is plato um and plato is really trying to deal with the mania of the poets um and as you know um he also also includes the prophets when he's talking at times in that category so where where where do you see poetry?

57:08And then, of course, that takes us right back to Ibn Gabaral. What's the philosopher doing? If we've got a better grasp, I think we do, phenomenologically and functionally about what the poet and the prophet is needing, what's the job of the philosopher in this? What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a great question. I think maybe a way of understanding this, that I'm understanding this in Ibarraal specifically, and this is very much couched in the Jewish traditions of prophecy and poetry, where they're both seen to be something akin to a dream-like state. So in Jewish literature, a dream is considered a 160th prophecy or some sense.

57:56And I think that what that means practically, or what one potential meaning, is that in a dream state, things that we would not think possible in a waking conscious state become possible to us. Opposites can coincide. People can change. Geographies shift and times move like sand. And I think that in what the sages are saying when they refer to a dream state as part prophetic is what you're saying, John, that there is an influx of a broader horizon, and a broader, deeper wisdom about the nature of reality into our constrained sort of flat reality in a way that can feel impossible and feel explosive, but gestures towards a brighter tomorrow or new self.

58:45And I think that what perhaps philosophy might be doing in the sense is to afford to a dream what waking consciousness affords to a dream philosophy is affording to prophecy and poetry. So it is coming back to clarity and being able to soberly look at the vision or the articulation that had emerged in that state of suspension of impossibility and make sense of this. And I'm saying this partly as a helpful conjecture, but also a conjecture that's rooted in McGabriel's own poetry where he refers to, in that famous poem that he has about the flowers, he refers to the flowers as a sealed letter from the king, which is likely a reference to the Talmudic phrase, that a dream that is uninterpreted is like a letter that is not read from Treg Dei Brachat.

59:46That there is a dream uninterpreted is like a letter not read means that we have those moments of deep perception, whether they are welling up from within us in the poetic, or they are feeling that they are being shoved and imposed and exploded upon us from outside in the prophetic. And then there's the responsibility of reading that text, of opening it up and unpacking it. And to me, that is the philosophical. And there's a sobriety in that. There's also an ecstasy in that. In the Plotinian sense, the philosophical is ecstatic, at least in moments. And I think what Ibn Gabriol demonstrates for us is someone who has those deep moments of prophetic poetry and poetic prophecy, and then does the slow and deliberate work of waking up from the dream and reading the letter and interpreting it for us and creating a metaphysic that we spent the two previous episodes unpacking in a way that is entirely in conversation with his poetry, but in that same relationship as waking up and reading the letter soberly like one would to a dream.

1:00:50That's beautiful. And now I can, I'm going to do a cog sci thing because it feeds back into your sensitization. So there's a, there's a, you know, this goes back into Jeff Hinton's work on deep learning within neural networks. And what you do is you have the network sort of attached to the world and it's compressing and picking up patterns. And then you decouple it from the world and it does, this is in his, it's the, it's the sleep state in which it does fantasies. That's his word, by the way, which means it generates all kinds of variations. And then the point about that is like, why? And again, I'm not going to get into, there's a lot of, Jeff's work often requires interpretation.

1:01:34But it's that idea that when I do all those fantasies, I'm sensitizing myself to patterns that I haven't otherwise seen in the world. It's kind of like evolution does the variations. And then you open your eyes and most of them get killed off, but some of the variations survive. Some of the fantasies actually grab and it turns out, oh, right. And in fact, they think, and if you combine that with the overcoming of overfitting by Robert Carr Harris, that one of the functions of dreams is to do exactly that. It's to sensitize us and open up the possibility space for our cognition, but not just randomly, but in a way that is beholding to the world.

1:02:23And so I'm going back to the interpreting the dream is actually that process of, okay, we take that, now we're sensitized, but we don't just let the dream go. We don't just project it onto the world. We have to winnow it. The world has to winnow it so that we separate the wheat from the chaff of the dream. And then we see more than we could before the dream. How does that land for you? Yeah, there's something beautiful about that, where it's not just another mode of approaching that same material, but it's that in that space the prophetic and and the and the um and the poetic there's the possibility of of things entering into that that that do not comport with with the um with what would make for a healthy waking reality yes yeah and and and the role of the role of prophecy sorry the role of philosophy here um is to is to winnow uh is to is to clarify um that which that which is worth carrying forward.

1:03:31I think there's also a temporal sense here where sometimes something can emerge from our fancy, from that realm of the fantastical, the imaginal, in ways that might be salient for the individual, but not for the collective. Oh, yes, for sure. The collective in the moment, but not in future moments. And I think part of the work of literature is a wisdom process by which the collective determines what from that realm is salient to be communicated and passed on. And I think the process of, I don't like this word because it's not a Jewish word and I don't think it's, I think it's inaccurate and anachronistic, but the process of the canonization of the prophecy and poetry of the Hebrew Bible, uh the i'd rather say the the process of of making it sacred of of sanctifying those texts yeah yeah sacralizing yeah is is a process of the collective determining uh in in in moments of attempts to cultivate wisdom in moments of sober philosophy what of those messages are relevant to the collective and what are relevant for the future collective um because it's not just a question of is this fantasy that needs to be dismissed or kept it's a question of how relevant right what is the relevance realization for that for that for that for that thing which is coming over the horizon am I ready to hear it are the people ready to hear it do the people need to hear this for times for times to come I think that's there's a larger process of collective wisdom it's very interesting that you know the process by which jewish texts become sacralized uh and and not canonized is very different than than than other traditions very different than than a than a than what i understand to be a formalized um top-down process that we see in christianity where there are councils that come to determine uh which texts are appropriate and correct orthodoxy and which ones are heterodoxy.

1:05:37And that's a complex... And I don't mean to be minimizing or strawmanning the process of Christian canonization of sacred texts, but simply to contrast to a Jewish process where there really isn't... I think some scholars and historians have attempted to look at the Sanhedrin or the men of the Great Assembly in Yavne following the destruction as doing this kind of top-down process. But my intuition and my understanding of the history as well is really that the process of sacralization of Jewish texts and practice throughout the ages, and this is certainly one which is true for Ibn Gabri 'al, and he's a prime example of this and will be relevant to future figures that we might be discussing from the Jewish world, is that the question of whether these texts become included as sacred for the masses and for the future is actually left up to the masses and left up to the future.

1:06:31That something becomes sacred in Judaism because it is accepted by the majority of Jewish communities. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. So the Talmud, for example, becomes the Talmud. The Shulchan Aruch becomes the Shulchan Aruch. The essential text becomes the central text. I would say the Bible as well becomes the Bible because a majority of living Jewish people that are engaging with that wisdom tradition choose to make it a sacred for them not because they're told by some sort of authority above them that this should be sacred and there's a sense where there's an inbuilt mechanism for this for this relevance and for this wisdom realization that takes this thing that may be otherwise just fanciful um you know just disruptive prophecy and poetry and and is recognized by the people themselves as something which is relevant for posterity.

1:07:20Yeah, I think that's beautiful. There's parts where Hegel is wrestling with these two because you have the contrasts to use a legal analogy. I'm not claiming that Judaism is legalistic or anything stupid like that. I'm not doing that. I'm just using this idea that you have English common law versus a Napoleonic code. That's the contrast I'm trying to bring out. And Hegel makes an argument, which is kind of unusual for him to make, especially given some of the other things. But he seems to argue that the codes ultimately, and this is what I think too, I think the codes ultimately depend on common law.

1:07:59If there wasn't enough common law that had already taken place before the councils, the councils wouldn't have enough common ground and enough common orientation and enough common criteria to come to the code. And now whether or not codification changes common law, that's another question. But I think I understand that you're being you're being appropriately and ethically careful. And so I'm not putting this into you, but I'm claiming that I tend to think of, you know, the self-organization within the collective intelligence of distributed cognition takes priority. over any top-down sort of Iron Age bureaucratic attempt.

1:08:45You know, I'm continually criticizing that we attempt to codify things. I'll put it more boldly. We keep trying to codify wisdom, and this is something we can't do. It's like trying to make relevance realization computational. So I think that's right. and I think there I mean so who came to mind when you said this is a figure that's also intersecting all these points is Nietzsche. Nietzsche of course is writing very poetically but he's writing very prophetically also Sprock Zarathustra and he's also proclaiming that he's ahead of his time and that he's like you know the madman in the marketplace you know I haven't been heard yet I'm like lightning the sound hasn't gotten here, hasn't got here.

1:09:38And by the way, he's playing with seeing and hearing the way you were too. And so I think that's right. And I think, I mean, one of the things that Brandon brings out about Hegel is we're always making this two-way appeal. So now we have a horizontal bidirectionality that goes with the vertical. We're always appealing to past precedent, and we're also making an appeal to be setting precedent. And we're trying to balance those, like, what are the, like, are the future people going to like this? Are they not going to like this? Because we're prospective, right? As well as retrospective. I think that's deeply, deeply right.

1:10:15I hadn't thought about that. There is a, there's a horizontal, which is count the temporal, like you said, there's a dimension to this that's intersecting with this vertical that we've been talking. Sorry, am I misrepresenting you or am I getting what you're talking about? So I see, just like you did this, there's this interpenetrating loop going this way. There's the interpenetrating loop going this way. And I'm wondering then if, now to be, you know, sometimes we get caught up in our pictures and Wittgenstein, but is the philosopher sort of sitting at that nexus point? That the philosopher is the person sort of trying to keep, right, the nexus point between, intersection point between the vertical and these horizontal like loops that are happening and they're trying to like they're trying to like i've got to keep i've got to keep the deep calling to deep but i've got to keep the future and the past calling to each other also balanced off each other and they're because like you said the interpretation of the dream is right it's both retrospective and prospective in nature.

1:11:23I mean, this is one of the central insights of both Jung and Freud, that a dream is obviously tremendously retrospective, but it's also prospective in an important way. So does that resonate with you? Yeah. No, that's very interesting. I really appreciate that new access, that new plane, the temporal. I just want to comment. I didn't realize that Nietzsche made that point specifically in regards also to lightning, the original context of the Jewish idiom, which is then expanded upon greatly in Jewish thought and literature, is that at the mountain, the verse says that the people saw the thunder and heard the lightning.

1:12:05Oh, wow. That's the original, that's the biblical phrase, which then gets expounded by later commentators about this interpenetration of the senses and what that means. Yeah, so that's very interesting. And I wonder if Nietzsche is aware of that reference when he's making it. I would be surprised if he wasn't. In terms of the temporal, it's interesting. I think my intuitive sense here is, and I'm trying to not privilege any one of these three P's over the other. We like our alliterations and here we have one for us. um i think i think that in in my sense the and and you can tell me how this is sitting with you and and also i don't mean to to there's something about making a tidy categorization here which is both appealing and also um insufficient but yeah yeah yeah to me to me the prophetic um like the dreamer seems to be looking forward, right?

1:13:07And the prophetic is, while the prophetic is not... It's perspective in a way. It's perspective, yeah. And I'm thinking here about biblical prophecy, which is telling the people, if you continue to behave this way, this is the consequence that destruction will come upon us or there will be a time of prosperity that is yet to come post the destruction. There is a... But isn't there also... Sorry to interrupt, but isn't there also in the prophecy there's a calling back, there's a retrospective. Come back to what the covenant was. Come back to the faith of your father. Come back. There's also a come back.

1:13:36Certainly. There always is because there is the desire to the return to the Edenic, to where people came from, both historically. So there's a voice in the psalmist that says, Chadeh shiomeinu k 'kedam, renew our days like the days of past. So there is always that prophetic call. But in reality, that bidirectionality is collapsed because the future time is a recapitulation of the beginning of time, of the pristine time. The Edenic is the eschatological messianic. So calling them to the future and calling them to the past. But that's the interpenetration again, right? You just did it. There's the interpenetration this way too.

1:14:21Yeah, it's interesting. And I think on that frame, my guess would be that the poetic is, if I had to allocate one to past, one to future, one to present, I would say that the prophetic feels most future-oriented. The poetic feels most present-oriented. The poet is calling us to the minutia, the moon of sunset, a flower, a grain of sand. Right. And then, and then, and then in my mind, and maybe this is the way that I think about, and I know the way that you think about philosophy as well is deeply, deeply historical. Right. When you, when you do a series on, on philosophy, we're, we're looking back to a figure from the 11th century.

1:15:04We're, we're doing in your, in your brilliant awakening from the meaning crisis. You're moving chronologically, historically from the pre-Socratics all the way, you know, there's a sense where we're, we're looking and Hague, you know, um, Marx has this great line about philosophers that he says, until now philosophers have simply retold history. Our job now is to create history or something to that effect. And you can correct me if I'm butchering that. And I think Marx in some sense, in that moment, he's being prophetic, but he's not being philosophical, right? The philosophical is this deep engagement with the wisdom of the past and an attempt to cultivate that wisdom into the present.

1:15:41Yeah, there's something... It's not... Yeah, I think that's good, Sevi. It's not the past for the sake of the past, right? It's not nostalgia. I get that. I get it. It's like there's a legacy from the past that we owe a loyalty to. And in that sense, it's conservative, not in the modern political sense, but in the sense of where we look for our models of wisdom are to the past that has survived, like that has survived the test of time, as we say. Yeah, actually, let me savor that because it's sort of like the philosopher is speaking about the past, maybe towards the future, but speaking from the past.

1:16:24The poet is trying to wake us up to the present. And maybe the prophet is speaking from the future into the present. And very much like I was trying to get this movement of the large world into the small world and the small world into the large world. So we've got, but now with time, with this axis, we have three. I like that. Did that land for you? That like the philosopher speaking from the past to the present, the poet is trying to unfold the present, like you said. And the prophet is in some sense speaking from the future into the present. How does that land for you? Yeah, from the future into the present.

1:17:02And I would also say from the present into the future, right? They're envisioning new realities that might be. And I'm thinking in a biblical context, that's very much the case. I also want to caution that this is satisfying and there's something beautiful about it. But we have to complicate it a little, right? The poet, a true poet, I want to be careful about that. Not a true poet. great poets are often writing with a deep saturation of the past of poetry in their pens, right? Well, yeah. The scholarship of Harold Bloom and all of that, where poets, I don't want to create a fictionalized, you know, infantilized version of a poet.

1:17:48No, no, no. Okay, well taken, point well taken. one way we could propose to talk about this is we're making an analytic distinction to try and pick out functionality but causally they are deeply interwoven and that's and that keeps showing up in how the they there's all this interpenetration happening um and yeah and so we're doing we're doing the thing that you know mctaggart worried about we're trying to take a continuum and we're breaking it up into pieces in order to try and make sense of it but of course uh no no you can never square the circle um uh kind of thing that's a point well taken um and by the way we're exemplifying the very thing we're trying to bring it into a small world and then we say but remember the large world right it's actually more complicated than this and it's more uncertain than this and um and i i actually love those moments in which i find that we're when this this is a office often a pivotal moment in dialectic into dialogos when you start to feel the logos when you start to exemplify the intelligibility that you're trying to articulate as opposed to just speaking of it, you start to exemplify it in the very discourse.

1:19:01And for me, that's when, well, those are moments of prophecy and poetry and philosophy all at once. I really, I'm drawing this to a close, But this was so much fun. This was such serious play. And truly, I mean, so the thing to I mean, I hope there's a lot to remember from this, but a framing remembrance is what you said. All of this discourse about their difference and their interpenetration there is to point to the fact that they complexify with each other in some really important way. um yeah and i take that to be right and so very much like trying to figure out you know a complex dynamical system like the body and you may distinguish the organs you can't really understand the organs on their own and that's what i mean about right and i and so um but nevertheless it's also it's like complexification also doesn't mean you just allow a vague sort of amorphous blob, you try to articulate what you can.

1:20:11You try to differentiate when you can, and then you get called back to the greater whole again and again. And I think we exemplified that a lot. Sorry, I'm being very meta here, but I love what, this happened last time too, I love how we often end up exemplifying a lot more what we're trying to articulate than what we're actually putting into terms. And I think I find that very grace-filled when that happens. And so I really, and I think that that speaks to my interlocutor. It speaks to what you bring to this, your heart and your head and your eyes and your ears to pick up on some of our language.

1:21:00And I deeply appreciate this. I look forward to we've already agreed we're going to do another series on Philo, and we're going to try and make that. We'll work out all the logistics. Not sure when that's going to happen, but you can count on it, you know, God willing, that that will happen. And so I just wanted to, again, it's joyful to do this kind of serious play with you, Zevi. It's really joyful. I hope that many people are getting to see the beauty in you, which I see, and that will call them to some of the other work that you're doing that I think is both really important and especially needful right now.

1:21:51It's needed in a really deep way. yeah so thank you thank you thank you John I feel humbled to be able to engage in this play that is both serious, challenging and full of delight with you and I am only able to engage in this kind of delight because of the the great friendship and compassion and wisdom and delight that you bring together here. So you are the one who brings this out of me. So it's because of my good friends that I'm able to have good conversations like these. So thank you, John. Well, yeah, I mean, Sara and I made a lifetime commitment to each other because love is the recognition that you reliably bring out the better in each other.

1:22:52And, you know, yeah. and i think that i mean that's what we uh do and so i like to give as you know my interlocutor any last parting words you might have for the viewers or the students of this video um again you're you're generous and gracious john i there's there's one final um thought which in mcgubbrel uh ends his his poem about the flowers that i've been um returning circling back to again and again. And in that poem, Ibn Gabri 'l sees the flowers decay and rot away, and all that's left of them is their fragrance, is their smell. And there is that sense where he's seeing beyond the external, beyond what is usually seen into the depths, into the essence of it, until the very oils, the very fragrance that is left.

1:23:43And just to throw in a final little little bomb into the conversation the the final the final sense that that he invokes is is is smell is fragrance and smell is that sense which transcends times which brings us back to memories past like nothing else and which which moves we're now in the hebrew month of cheshvan which is associated with the sense of smell uh which which which which transports us across time and also has a messianic component because uh the jewish wisdom says that when the messiah comes he will smell and judge it is through the power of his smell that sees beyond the essence uh like god who who's who sees not um what is the line that the prophet um samuel says to to the young david before he anoints him king he says adam year like adam year out late nine bachsham year out that god that humans see by the eyes but god sees the heart uh and in that sense of smell we are able to sense beyond that which we can ordinarily see.

1:24:44So my ending blessing is that we are all able to, through engaging in this pursuit of wisdom, we're able to smell that sweet smell of the garden from which we come and to which we strive. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you very much.

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