{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

Harold Stahmer: (I should begin with a rather lengthy introduction, but you have heard many sides of Professor Rosenstock-Huessy's background--some of them rather humorous, and many of them more serious. It is a very real pleasure for me, particularly, as a student of his, to welcome him back to this class. As a person who is a friend of time and not a friend of space--as he just remarked, coming over here--he had difficulty finding this place--as a friend of time, he is really a -- a very rich person. And in accordance with the term "person"--a person is one who speaks many languages and wears many masks--you shall hear a man who will speak one of many languages today, and it is one that he has devoted most of his life to. And that is the whole area of the unity of the -- of humanity really in terms of the social sciences as a key to an appreciation of language and of time. The language that he talked about, {appears in} one of the titles as Sprachdenken, or speech-thinking. This will be the first of three lectures which I arbitrarily entitled in his absence, "In Defense of the Grammatical Method," which is the title of this paper that you have read in part as the preparation for these speeches.

(It is a very real privilege to welcome him back, and I think it should be a privilege to you to see three generations of students in action--one of them doing in the strict and ancient sense the art of professing; the other merely acting again as a student, as a teacher. Professor Rosenstock-Huessy.)

Well, I must say: ladies, ladies, and gentlemen. While I was casting about for a good beginning, I tried several jokes to entertain you. But I was helped yesterday by a student. I went to the Viennese restaurant and had a supper, and there was a boy sitting. And he was reading a book. And it solved all my problems, because it was Spinoza's Ethics -- {More Geometrico}, Ethics in the Geometrical Manner. So of course I got furious because my whole life has been devoted to destroy the idea that you can -- geometrical ethics. And here I am, very glad that a student helped me out, and that's as it should be.

In real speech, there are always two people--one, thinking he is stupid, and being wise; and the other, thinking he is wise, and being stupid.

Instead of casting about for a thing of the modern scene, of the daily papers, about speech, I was taken back by this boy 300 years: when the world was young, America had been discovered, the poles and everything else was there for the explorer, and we prepared the bomb. That is, we wanted to know the quantitative secrets of the universe; and in this sense, Mr. Spinoza serves this great purpose, that even man was a quantity and should therefore be tolerated,

one by each -- the other. As you know, New Amsterdam is the city in which we find ourselves here. And Spinoza hailed from the old Amsterdam and preached toleration, which is, so to speak, practiced in New York. And it means that a man counts as much as anybody -- any other man; that man is a quantity; and if you -- count the votes, you know who will be mayor next time. Or you won't. And I was just told yesterday that nobody had voted for Mr. Wagner, but he was elected just the same.

Quantity is the obsession of the mathematician and of any world view. To reduce us to quantity can be a very great purpose. We will see that -- grammatically speaking, Mr. Spinoza's bent on calling our ethics "a quantitative problem of geometry" has its merits, something rather heroic. But -- but man is not the world, because he is not dead. The world is doomed and ends in death. If you and I were seated here just for the purpose of dying one day, it wouldn't be worth listening to each other. There would be no truth. There would be nothing important. Why should we bother to study? Eat, drink, be merry. Be dead the other day. If death is the end of things, then we live truly in a world which is perfectly senseless and meaningless. It can be measured by some indifferent person called the geometer or the mathematician. But you and I have nothing to do with his measurements. You and I -- are left perfectly unmoved, uninterested by anything that concerns our stature. I am small, but that doesn't help me. I have to behave as though I was big. And the -- a big man has to behave as though he was humble.

So every one of us begins where the world leaves off. Every one of us contradicts the world as it exists around you. If you are ugly, if you are pretty, resist it, because that's no mark for your real life to say, "I am pretty," "I am ugly." Fifty years later, my dear people, you will all be -- look alike--neither ugly nor beautiful, but old. And that's a different quality, to look old. It's something of great beauty, and of something more. You are then a child of God, and no longer a child of this earth. And to look this way is -- seems to be -- become more and more difficult in a big city. You will try to be so terribly beautiful at 14 that you don't look beautiful at 60.

I traveled with such a lady yesterday on the plane. She was 60, and there was no hope in her face. She had squandered her property.

So we cannot be quantity. And -- so what can we be? Against the ethics of a grammatical -- of the -- of the social-geometrical method, I am trying to put here an ethics based on grammar. And I call this a grammatical method. And I first have to convince you that I am dealing with something that the grammarians in your schools did not deal with. The important point of today's lecture is to bring out to you that there is something in your own experience, in language,

in speech, in articulation, in communication, which the grammarians in your textbooks on French, on Russian, on Latin--or on English, for that matter--have never mentioned, and which is the heart of the matter, which will allow us to divide grammar, geometry, music, religion very easily. It is something so simple that the grammar gentlemen never have thought of it.

So in defense of the grammatical method, I am going to speak on this very innocent something. And I'm reading to you this clipping--I mentioned before--which brings home this really interesting and exciting thing that the grammarians have forgotten.

This comes from Vancouver, British Columbia:

"Members of the Salvation Army's Anti-Suicide Bureau usually can tell from the tone of a caller's voice whether he really intends to carry out a suicide threat. If the voice is flat and toneless, he can bet the person really means to kill himself. But it has -- if it has a healthy resonance, chances are the caller just wants to get his troubles off his chest."

Intonation is a secret by which you can express all feelings, nearly, without words. You can know, as -- this piece -- the Salvation Army tells you, whether a man is in dead earnest on the way to suicide, or whether he just means to have a break because he is tired. The -- intonation has no place in the grammar book. In the contrary, coming from the geometrical ideal of three centuries back, most of you are taught to speak with a hardly understandable voice, to swallow your sounds at the back of your throat, and to call this "English." But it's just New York, or at worst, Chicago. Tone is the one great sufferer today among human speakers. And yet tone makes it unnecessary for us to go further into grammar.

In a big factory the direction -- the board of directors felt something should be done about the spirit of the place. There were 50,000 people working, and they dreaded -- that it had become a drudge. And no -- no spirit left. So they asked a spirited speaker to deliver a lecture on the topic, "Can a man find a creative life in this industry?"

The man came and talked -- as follows: "There have been in ancient days meters in which you could speak and perform. There was the hexameter, and the pentameter, and the trimeter. But nowadays we seem to have two different ways of speaking. One is the pessimeter and the other is the optimeter. And I am going to tell you how this theme runs with the optimeter.

"Then it says, as you have read it: 'Is it possible to lead a creative life in

this industry? But the pessimeter would sound like this: 'Is it possible to lead a creative life in this industry?'"

I only was going to show you that you can express by mere intonation love and contempt; loyalty, you see, and revolution. "In this industry?"--and you are finished.

Now intonation is this side of the distinction between words and figures of mathematics and of names. And therefore my first the- -- thesis is that this side of the division of language into these three items, which you find in any dictionary--the numerals, the figures; the words; and the names--there is tone, there is intonation. And the tone is something between you and me. It presupposes that we all have the same soul, the same resonance. We -- we all are organs on which many, many keyboards may be found. Some -- richer, some less numerous. And the problem of getting old obviously is to develop this organ, this keyboard of intonations. If you are 70, you must understand more tones than you can understand now. You may be pretty now. but I don't think that your inner soul-organ is as multiple and as rich as that of an old person who has suffered, has cried, has loved, has -- seen disappointment and triumph.

So you -- task of your life is to develop the keyboard of tone, of intonations; so that simply by the tone you can gauge the people who speak to you and you also can speak your own inner vitality as of this moment. When you hear yourself sneering or gossip, you better stop. These are the dissonances on the keyboard, which you can overdevelop, as you know of so many ladies who by 60 have unlearned all the other keyboards except gossip. And that's a certain tone. It may gossip -- be gossip about Mrs. Jacqueline; but it may also be -- be gossip about God Almighty, or the Church, or politics in general, or your family. The tone of sneering, or of gossip, you see, pervades everything. The topic is quite indifferent. You can hear from afar whether this lady has cultivated sneering. You must see that in her face, you see; it's a sneering face.

Intonation makes faces. And since our intonation expresses our faith, the racial problem which plagues the world at this moment -- as of this moment so much is a problem of intonation. You have that face which you intone. It cannot help resulting in something if you, for 60 years, sneer, or laugh, or smile, or say, "How wonderful!" and it isn't wonderful at all. All exaggerations of our tone, of our intonation, you see, brings out our features in the end. We'll have to say -- say -- say something on this tomorrow -- next time more carefully when I will speak about the relationship of the spiritual life and the biological creature-man in his cradle and then in his old age. We talked -- about this at greater length the next time.

Today I am satisfied to -- point out to you the importance that tone is your own betrayer. The tone you use towards the world will reflect on your face. You will see every -- at 60 in every human face whether he has co-suffered or whether he has co-sneered about the world at large; or whether he has remained indifferent and has no face at all. There are many people at 60 who have lipstick, but no face. But you work on this expression all the time, ladies. And if you keep silent, it shows, too. Tone is the betrayer of the features of the human soul, and it reflects on your face. It is not what you say. That's perfectly indifferent. You can speak about the weather, as I said, lovingly; and you can speak affectionately; and you can speak resentfully, as you are incli- -- I am inclined to do up in Vermont during April, when we have mud time. You get a -- a very ugly face when you wake up and see what is going on outside.

Now what -- all I want to do at -- of this moment is to warn you that most people who deal with speech or grammar begin far too late. They begin with sentences: "La rose est une fleur." And then they want to know what language is this, you see, where you can say, "La rose est une fleur." That's not the problem of language. The problem of language is to put yourself on a keyboard and get into the swing of things by making the corresponding face. "Making faces" is a very good expression for ex- -- you see, for telling you what a child really knows about speech. They are making faces, and you know exactly how they feel.

But in order to teach you something lasting about language, I now have to bring home to you that you all know a little more of language -- although you have forgotten intonation as the background. You know that language consists of words, of names, and of figures. You can say that here are 78 people in this class. That's a fact. And we call a fact something nobody can contradict. And the first lesson I want to give you -- bring home to you is that geometry, as Spinoza knew, has one quan- -- quality which is outstanding: nobody can contradict it. It is as it is. There are 78--I don't know, maybe 80 by now--Mr. Fiering has just arrived, and I'm here, too--so there may be 80 people in this class.

The figure in mathematics is a common truth for all men. And that's its handicap. Any truth that is true for all people is a very poor truth; it's a secondrate truth. Because already, you see, you have to in- -- admit that it's quite important that I should be standing here and you should be sitting there. I'm delighted, you see. I wouldn't like to sit there. I am too old for that. I am impatient, you see, when somebody else says something. I want to speak. You are very kind--you still have this patience, because you are still young, to let me speak.

Well, it makes a difference. Therefore, 78 is a poor count, you see. Here is one teacher and there are 77 listeners. You see, it makes a difference. You can't express in geometry what's really going on in this class. It is impossible. Seventy-

eight is true, but it is not true enough. That is, all truths in mathematics are true for all people when they are expect -- in figures; but they are second-rate. They are of no importance. Because they only mean what already is there and cannot be changed. You cannot at this -- as of this moment change this class, except by interrupting it. And it wouldn't be the same class if I let in now another 50 people.

Figures are true, but of no importance. They have the one great quality that they are true for all. You cannot contradict. When Mr. Spinoza said that every man took up a certain space in geometry, he was right, and it makes for toleration. But everybody also became uninteresting because none could claim that he knew the truth. Among the millions of people Mr. Spinoza wanted to feed on a social ethics, you see, nobody could boast that others had to obey him. You couldn't have leadership, you couldn't have a government, because nobody was any better or any different from anybody else. Quantity is drab. It levels off the real difference of living people.

Then there come words. I can sure tell you that this is a gray day. You will admit it. In Japanese, you wouldn't -- they wouldn't understand us, because I don't speak Japanese. I speak English, so to speak, to you.

That is, words make for relative truth. Words in distinction from figures are not true for all people, but for some. So when you look up the dictionary, it is true for English people, that they have to use -- can use this dictionary, you see, successfully. It's limited by languages, for example. That's not the whole story. But the important thing as of this moment is that you discover that we know a distinction between words, and numerals, and figures, which is never mentioned, that the facts expressed by figures are valid for all people. The -- the -- the story told in words is -- are true, may be true for some people and some others will be left completely indifferent.

So when I say, "This is the class on religion," I am using words. And I don't say "78 students," but I qualify. But what religion is, nobody knows except the people here in this class, because Mr. Stahmer was good enough to define it, I suppose. Otherwise, we wouldn't know, because -- religion is --. He has learned this from me. No definitions.

Now you can today study the -- the propinquities, and vicini-- vicinity of words and figures by one nice point. We live 350 years now under the spell of mathematics. We have even invented the bomb with the help of mathematics. And therefore, during the last 350 years, people have tried to treat words as figures. And what you -- what you do, really, when you try to think--which is a desperate undertaking--when you try to think, you define words. You say, "This

is --," you see. "God is an entity of which nobody knows what."

This is the kind of definition which proves my point, that we are living in an age of mathematicians, because a definition is an attempt to degrade a word to the rank of a figure. A defined word is a desperate attempt of modern philosophy to reduce the beauty of Shakespearean language to definable words. Obviously, "To be or not to be, that is the question," you cannot define. It has an undefinable charm. And if you try to define the words used by the poets, you see, you are very funny. But people, as you know, have a whole branch called "literary science," or the "science of literature," by which they do just this. And they are un- -- incredibly funny. And later we will run a circus on them, I think, a century from now, as the last remnants, you see, of the age of mathematics, where even poetry had to be reduced to -- to definitions.

When the poet -- Thomas came from England to my college, he rightly said there was -- for one poet now in America were at least two scores of professors of literature. So of course poetry couldn't survive because they reduced his poems to definitions, and that had nothing to do -- anymore with poetry.

A definition then is an attempt to assimilate words -- the speech by words to the speech of the mathematician. And it's a puzzling undertaking. It has gone on since Plato's days, who also believed in the five platonic bodies in mathematics, and tried to reduce the beauty of the Athenian women to something that could be sold on the meat market. The most awful enemy of modern feminine youth is Plato. I warn you against him. He is a terrible man, and he is still poisoning America, as he poisons Russia. The Russians are worse Platonists than we are, but we nearly compete with them. Plato is, of course, the enemy of my method and the -- is the adherent to the mathematical method, trying to live by definitions. That is, trying to -- to reduce living speech to definable entities, which would make them into figures. To define is an attempt to imitate mathematics in the realm of human speech. Don't do it. No good comes of it. The only thing -- the only place where this has to be done is the place where we reduce living beings to dead things. That's the court, the court of justice. When you are accused of murder, society, in order to fight you off, is allowed to defend your act as murder. And by defining it, it puts you either to death or into prison. That is, it takes away your vitality; it makes you into known entity.

And the whole problem of Platonism is the misapplication of jurisprudence, of legality, to human beings at large, to innocent people, who have not murdered, and have not committed theft or adultery. It -- comes all back--this legality, you see, this definition by the law--that we transform by -- under the law living beings into dead, known, quantitative entities. You can say that you have a thousand prisoners in Sing-Sing, and by and large you know then how

they feel. But I could not undertake to say how you 78 people here feel without transgressing my right of a mathematician. What do I know when I say here are 78 people? I know nothing about you, really, you see. Every one of you has -- his own -- her own story to tell. And so it is very little. It's just good for {califactor}, for the heating plant to know that you have to be seated here at 87- -- 78, and when to open the window, you see. For these physical problems, figures are adequate. But not anything is adequate for expressing your existence here as students of religion.

Now I go a -- some step further. 78 you are, and you have been whenever you enter this class, since the beginning of this course. Students of religion you are at the very moment when somebody undertakes to speak to you really of religion and not of some nonsense called "religion," as I'm -- seriously trying to do, as of this moment, warning you that by defining words, you are killing your soul.

There is something bigger in this class, however. This is a part of -- this is in Milbank Hall. But Milbank Hall is a part of Barnard College. And Barnard College is a part of Columbia University. And Columbia University in your life is not an empty word. It's a star that is shining above you. For the rest of your life, you will say that you were graduate students of Columbia.

Now what is Columbia or Barnard? It's a name, a name. A name is something totally different from words and figures. And therefore Mr. Spinoza very carefully has avoided mentioning names. They don't exist in his vocabulary. He can only speak of God as a definable nature, you see. And -- you know his famous saying that "God" and "nature" were two terms for the same thing. Very true, if God is a thing, then you can call him "XYZ." It makes no difference. But since God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the God of Jesus, He has a name which is unique and cannot be transmitted to any idol, as the -- people do today. There are many ecclesiastics who abuse the word of God be- -- by giving lectures in theology defining God. That's, of course, blasphemy.

Who is this God to whom we have recurrence in order to be saved from death and asphyxiation? It's a God the power who makes you and me speak. And whenever you take a fresh breath or listen to a fresh speaker, you think you can be inspired. A new lease on life is coming to you. Any fresh word is a breath entering your chest from the outside and implementing your own breathing. Life is based on breath. Without this fresh air or oxygen, you -- you would succumb.

Now we have found a machinery combating your threatening asphyxiation. You -- living in the Bronx, or you're living on Manhattan, you would be dead by now if not somebody would speak to you and give you a fresh inspira-

tion. And you are students in order to condense this spirit in such a way that you can live on this, the residues, the reserves built up in these years here for the rest of your life.

Now don't believe that spirit is anything myth- -- mythical, or mystical, or mysterious. It is just as I say. It is giving you the certainty that at any one moment this little body of yours, this mortal body of yours, can be enthused. God can enter you and tell you what to say. And He can tell you to what to listen, to whom to listen, especially. Breathing and -- inspiration are the same thing, only distinguished by the separation into one individual who breathes, and two people who speak to each other, and thereby borrow each other's breath.

If you -- you cannot listen to me without co-speaking. People have funny ideas about hearing. They think it's something separated from speaking. Of course it isn't. You cannot understand one word that I say if it wouldn't resound in you--very, very, tenuously maybe. But to hear means simply to speak with a speaker, you see. That's why in the Psalms this comes out very clearly, because the second half of the verse is articulating this having heard the first half of the Psalm verse, you see; and you repeat it articulatedly. And this is the true way we should speak. You should all be able at the end of this lecture to say again what I have said, or you haven't heard it. And you can only do this by very softly intoning what I say. And the more you give just to this intonation process at this moment, you better will be able to repeat it. Don't let it go through your head only. But if you listen the cadenza of my -- to my -- to the cadenza of my speech, it will not be forgotten, you understand?

That's a way -- a different way of hearing as you have learned. You always think it's here, the hearing. No, it's here, and it's here. We hear -- the ear --. Have you ever -- put on an alarm clock? Who has? The most ugly experience in life, to be -- waken up by an alarm clock. Who has, please? Confess frankly your sins! Well, it's ruinous for your nervous system; never do it again.

Why? There's -- from every sin, or every crime against the human body, one can learn something. The alarm clock is important as an experience which shows you that the sense of hearing, acoustics, are not anything of a brain. The sound which wakes you up in the morning falls directly on your sympathetic nerve and on your heart. And that's why it gives you such a fright.

The various senses, ladies and gentlemen--and I am now very serious--are connected with quite different parts of our body. Smell is -- connected with the genitals--that is, with the great honor we have to perpetuate the race. The eye is the only organ which leads from its sense organ to the brain. And that's why anything we see is subordinate, is second-rate. Prettiness is not all, I -- we have

said, you see. Because you see too much and you know too little. But hearing goes through the heart, just as contact goes through the skin. You see, that's another sense. And taste goes through the tongue.

The whole human body is immersed into a very wonderful system of sensory perception. And these senses translate to us the world in five opposite manners. To know the world by smell contradicts all the truths about the world by sight. You can just think of the dissolute women. They look nice, but I won't go any further.

This is very serious. You come from the grammatical method of Mr. Spinoza. You come from 350 years of geometry. And you have been told that all the senses are reporting to the head, which is a big lie. They do not report to the head, first of all. And second, they immerse us in five different networks of reality, and not into the same. Nobody can translate the messages of smell into the messages of sight without coming to know the whole problem of humanity, mortality, future life, and everything. Because when you see something, you are outside this reality. You see me here. But as long as you look at me as a figure in space, I am sorry to say, you will not be able to understand me. -- Anybody who hears what a person says must forget how he looks. If he doesn't, he doesn't hear what the man says. "To hear" means to include the speaker into your own existence. "To see" means to exclude the man and put him in a framework on the wall, as you can do with any picture, you see.

In this country, as you know, pictures have it. Life. What they call Life is death to me. It's photography, you see. Mr. Luce cannot produce life. You can buy his journal and make him rich. But wealth is not life. The -- Life has a wealth of photographs, but it has not a -- wealth of reality. If you have heard your lesson, this resounds and reverberates. And the Gospel would have died 2,000 years ago if they had the movie camera by that time, to shoot the movie, you see, be it "Cleopatra," or "Ben-Hur," or "Moses," or what have you. This is murderous. It kills every religion. Nobody can resist the film industry, you see. What they touch is dead. Don't go to a religious movie, or at least give short notice to the clergyman who asks you to do that.

This is important. We come now closer to the secret: what speech is. Speech is the power not to see what you see, but to hear what is to be heard. And you have to listen to me whether you like my face or not, if I tell the truth. It can make no difference that you like my tie or something else about me, you see. The liar looks good, doesn't he? But that's not -- no reason not to say that he is a liar. That's why diplomats and ladies dress so well.

You know the story: who is a diplomat and who is a lady? Who knows the

story? Then I can't tell it. Well, a lady, you see -- a diplomat, when he says "yes," he means "perhaps." When he says "perhaps" he means "no." And when he says "no," he is no diplomat. But a lady, if she says, "no," she means "perhaps." And if she says "perhaps," she means "yes." And if she says "yes," she is no lady!

It's just another argument for my point of intonation. "Yes" and "no" carry the whole scale, you see, of human relations in space with it. As much as you say "yes" and "no"--you can move very well in any society, if you grade it.

But my main point is that you have to free yourself from this greatest heresy of the geo- -- geo- -- mathematician today: that our five senses are messenger boys for something called "the brain," or "reason." You always commit treason to your better self when you listen to reason. Because reason has this id- -- really idiotic assumption by it that to smell, and to hear, and to taste has anything to do with the brain--or to touch, to contact people, you see. It hasn't.

To give you one more example, to leave this with you then. I can't go into this in detail today. When you listen to me, I said to you, you include me. But there's more to it. You listen to a piece of music; there are no walls between you and the music. You can only listen to -- to Beethoven in a rapture as long as the universe has no walls. Between you and the rest of the world, music is melting down the barriers. There is a harmony of the spheres. And you, young lady, despite all your harness of beauty and fashionable dress, allow it to enter you and to lay down the barriers of resistance. And you say, "I am now not a separate entity. But as of this moment, the music is allowed to float through me," you see, "without any limitation. I do not put on restrictions."

If the lady in the first row at the symphony orchestra smiles while she is listening to music, she still wants to be looked at. She is an ape. She is not a human being. A human being listens to music so that you forget how you look. If you don't, you are not at a concert. But you are in a fashion show. And that's very different.

In music, the individual person is of no importance. And that's a condition of her listening to the music. It's the exclusion of the personal which makes music possible. All -- all -- everything taught to you in New York as of this moment is against it, my truth. But every piece of music entering your heart is proving my point. Anybody who goes to a concert for a moment admits that world create- -- God created one universe permeated by sound and swallowing up your little resistance into side-walls of your being. Otherwise you can't listen to music.

Now I grant that most people who go to concerts don't listen to the music.

They either want to see Mr. Bernstein or they want to be seen themselves. At least in the -- in the intermission. And for this they pay the ticket. I mean, that's a minor matter.

Don't betray yourself. Most people imitate the social intercourses of art without having anything to do with their real -- real achievement. Don't believe that out of a thousand people who go to a play or to a concert, you see, more than 50 know what they are doing. The rest is fashion.

We are all apes, when it comes to that. I mean, 90 percent of you and me every day is animal nature. It goes by gravity. But to overcome the mortality of your flesh, and to be exposed to -- for one hour to the rapture of a Beethoven symphony or of a Bach cantata makes you a -- as we say, a better man, another person. Why do we mean this? Because it allows you to leave behind the shell of your flesh, of your mortality, and to share in some secret order which this composer has discovered in the whole of creation, you see, and allowed you to enter upon and to be part of something infinitely bigger than you and I.

Therefore, it has nothing to do with the brain. It has to fight the preconceptions of your brain. Most people do not do this. They want to "understand" the music. Well, poor music, and poor concert people -- concert-going people. They can understand it, and can then become professor of musicology, whatever that may mean.

To listen means then to break down the barriers of the visible world. And you cannot listen to God, or to religion, or to poetry, or to wisdom, or to a command given by the commander in -- in the field, if you cannot for one moment deny that there is a wall between the speaker and the listener. For this one moment, the man who makes the sound, you see, and the man who intercepts it must be united. No command could be executed in time unless the soldier volunteers his will and submits to the will of the commander as though he himself had spoken it. As soon as there is any resentment, and the soldier said, "Oh, he shouldn't have given me this order," it will be badly executed. There has to be complete identity of the man who emits the sound and the man who perceives it.

And it's very strange. In this country, of course, with its egalitarianism, people resent orders given. Yet you know very well in camping, in any expedition on a river--where there is -- the flood threatening you--the execution -- or on a basketball team, or so--the execution of a command has to be like that: you must distinguish between the man who gives the order and the man who carries it out, you see. It's the wonder of being one bumblebee, one corp -- corps in spirit and body, by which you achieve any achievement on -- in teamwork. What we

call "teamwork" is that you can no longer distinguish, you see, why one man is the leader and the other is the follower. He just -- what -- who is the leader? Who insinuates his will in such a way to the men that they are quite sure that it is their own will. And that's leadership.

This means that in any speech recurs the musical experience that the listener and the speaker form one body politic. And the whole word "body politic" is, of course, nothing but the application of this law: that in order to -- that we may be able to listen and to speak, God has given us this faculty of melting down--in humility, in obedience, in enthusiasm, in conviction--the walls of our being. And you should not marry if your husband has not been able to break down the walls of your virginal resistance. There are too many marriages that are based on your will. Don't marry when you feel at the altar that it is just by your free will that you marry. If it is by will, it will end by will. To will is not enough. You have to submit to some higher will, or you can't get married. And there are too many marriages in this country who are based on this wrong psychology that the lady has desclar- -- declared to herself, "I will marry this man." She may, but he will never be married to her.

And there is much tragedy as is -- you know, in this country from this wrong theory of speech. You really think one man speaks and you think it over, you see, and then you decide. Well, the decisions which we think we make are always the wrong decisions. The only decision you must make is when you say, "I can't help it," you see. "I can't help it! I can't pass him up," you see. "He is the man." And it's perfectly, usually indefensible. He usually is a rascal. But you have to marry him. And the man who is not irascible, but a very virtuous boy, don't marry him. He is too tiresome.

So to speak is the entering always into a covenant, in which it does not matter who has said something. If I -- do right by you at -- as of this moment, my dear friends, what I say must be so in your heart, whether I said it, or you said it, or I quoted it. Makes no difference. Because to speak and to hear makes the tale, the walls--which we have established by architecture, by political reason, by confession or denominational distinctions -- "the truth must prevail" means that it, in every moment, forms a new body politic. As of this moment we against the whole world outside is in un- -- are in unity, and this "our" should make -- mark this experience of yours that at one moment you and I have seen eye to eye.

What does it mean, "seeing eye to eye"? To have the same body, you see, have given up the distinctions of our physical separation. That's -- we mean by "see eye to eye," as though we had one -- one pair of eyes. Or I haven't said anything, if this isn't the result. If you now -- look at me critically and say, "What a fool," you haven't listened to me. I have spoken in vain. May be. That -- this is

all right that you should hold off. But then, obviously, the lecture was not a success. It was a failure.

Names have the unique quality that they cannot be repeated, and that they never command total agreement. About the name of the living God, gentlemen, there will be disagreement as long as there has to be a prophet who -- announces His newcoming. There will always be the old corpses of men who say, "I hav- -- we haven't heard of this ma- -- this spirit," you see. "That's a new God. Down with him. Crucify." And the truth -- as long as the truth will be crucified, will always go under a new name, not yet adopted and accepted by the oldtimers.

And therefore, Columbia University, you see, when it was founded, of course, was a very doubtful proposition. Harvard said, "Wha- -- what's Columbia?" you see.

A name is of the future, and it is combated; it is doubted; it is -- can antagonize people. Figures can't. And it's the merit of a name that the bearer of the name--for example, "the living God," or "the coming Messiah," or "the prophet," or "the poet," or "the artist," or "the inventor," or "the future president of the United States"--are at one time the only people who know who they are. Because the greatness of a figure is, you see, that every colleague can use a figure, but since 1708, people need not know that I have been counting you. The count is taken without the object's knowing it. The words are spoken between people arguing about defining them. The name is known to the bearer of the name first, and much later to all the others. It's the very opposite from figures. In mathematics, there are so many chairs in this room, and not one chair knows it. Ja, that's quite exciting. They have no idea that we count them, you see. Just as Monsieur {Jourdin}, he -- he didn't know that he was speaking prose, but he did.

But in names, it is very different. The name betrays the great nostalgia of mankind to be recognized, to be identified. Every one of you wants to have a name one day recorded--just in getting married, or in you -- making your -- a name for you in business, or in the professions. The name is waiting. The figures are at an end. Figures come at the end of reality. Names start reality. That's why any child of God has to receive a name at the beginning of the life, so that at one time this child may say, "I have taken up this name, you see, and made it into something that meant something real to other people." That is, the three grades of speech--figures, words, and names--also connote the three distinctions of the times in which you live.

By names, you live in the future. You hardly know the man whom you are going to marry. So you don't even know your future name, because you will

share his name one day, will you not? You are ready to receive a name. That's a great story which God obviously has written into the heart of women to remind these damned unmarried bachelor philosophers that they are fools. And woman is only a woman as long as she will be free to receive the endearing name of affection by somebody else -- by an adopted child. It hasn't to be the husband. By some friend. By the community, who honors the nurse. But to receive the name is a proof of the fact that you are still alive.

To count things is -- is a proof of the fact that you live in a world littered with corpses. Corpses must be counted, can be counted, should be counted. And carried away. Dump them! That's all you can do with all the houses on Long Island. You can dump them; you can count them; but you can't live in them. Because they are dead, hardware. Go to the hardware store for geometry. But -- don't go to the hardware store, but go to the cradle where a child has yet no name, and you will understand that the name is the power to draw this child into reality, into the future life. And what they call in the Bible and the -- in religion the "future life" is something very real; it has nothing to do with the beyond. It is this power of yours and mine to believe in your own future. That is, nobody has as yet called out your full name.

To the end of life, my dear people, you will -- you will have to wait for the endearing name, which is your true name, your final name, the name under which you will live forever. You had -- just have to think of Abraham Lincoln, whom all the stodgy professors at Harvard despised as a common, you see, villainous person with off-color stories. And when he was murdered finally, they bowed their head in shame and said, "We hadn't known who Abraham Lincoln was. Now we know." And ever since, he has even been adopted by Harvard.

So I think my time is up. Is that true?

Harold Stahmer: (It is.)

Thank you.