Bianca Stone is joined with the host of Moral Minority Podcast, Charles Dashings, for the penultimate moment: Rilke’s 9th elegy. The Ninth Elegy. The “last but one.” We are not actually at the end, yet the end has somehow begun, like a wave just as it begins to form into a visible wave, nearing the shore itself. We know the sea cannot end when a wave ends, yet you cannot doubt it has made a long journey towards this moment of articulation, form, and dissolution. I’m reminded of TS. Eliot’s Four Quartets, with a similar form to the Elegies, in which, in the penultimate poem-section, The Dry Salvages, section II, repeatedly uses images of the Seasons, the sea and wreckage, and questions the ending, in a refrain, in waves, that change slightly each time they return:
Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?
…..
There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,
No end to the withering of withered flowers,
To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,
To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,
The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable
Prayer of the one Annunciation.
Charles Dashings is the co-host of Moral Minority, he’s a self-proclaimed inveterate bibliophile, a great lover of cats—so obviously we’re getting along splendidly. Moral Minority is a podcast on moral philosophy and the problem of moral foundations. Like Rilke’s project, and all project of deepening the work of being more fully in this world, Moral Minority continuously asks questions, and turns them over and over. In their words, at its foundations, its asks: Why does morality matter? What grounds the moral principles to which we appeal when making judgments about right and wrong, justice and injustice? Do we have good grounds for making the judgments we do make–in our everyday lives, our relationships, our work, or in politics? And if not, where does that leave us
