Just beneath the wide-ranging span of Thomas Harrison’s Of Bridges: A Poetic and Philosophical Account is a churning sea of philosophical thought. This collocation of bridge lore explores the religious and mythical history of the idea of bridges, the role of real bridges as passageways over vast, murky socio-political divisions between enemies and would-be friends, the ways in which artists and writers have conceived of bridges, and the fateful attraction of real bridges and the people who have lived under and around them or taken their lives by leaping from them. The book is filled with aphoristic gems and fascinating facts, a pleasurable omnium gatherum of the world’s richness. But Of Bridges also, and more fundamentally, explores complex questions about the way in which our interaction with the physical world is bound (via bridges of thought, imagination, aspiration, despair) to the world of ideas and, thus, to the development of an ethical and aesthetic conduct of life.
In his introduction, Harrison notes that Ruskin’s Stones of Venice inspired “generations of readers to recognize ideas in forms,” and mentions Georg Simmel’s 1909 essay “Bridge and Door,” which models how one might distinguish, for example, between a wall, which is mute, and a door, which speaks — since the latter explicitly keeps out or opens. Later, we learn of Nietzsche’s “approach to the built space of human environments” and his “intuition about the interaction of material and immaterial phenomena” with regard to the life inherent in certain stone buildings. Harrison does not mention Gaston Bachelard, but Of Bridges is certainly a sibling to the French morphologist’s philosophical-poetical Poetics of Space.
It may be that a bridge is a particularly apt image to illustrate the connection between spirit and matter; as Harrison writes, a bridge is “not just a symbol, but the symbol of symbols, a means to a region holding hidden significance.” But this book, especially in its passages on Nietzsche’s word-bridges and on the theoretical history of ideas about metaphor and language, also illuminates the fruitful tension between all aspects of the physical world and the words used to describe them. This tension is itself a metaphor for the distance not only between word and thing, but also ideal and real, like and unlike, self and other, infinite and finite, immortal dreams and fatal disappointments. On a certain level, then, as Harrison writes, “… at some point everything in the world is a bridge …”
That the correspondence between word and world and matter and spirit is not one of absolute equivalency, but rather an approximation, an aspiration, an attempt (in the sense of Musil’s essayistic ethical experimentation) is well illustrated by the image of the bridge which, in Harrison’s explication, is a meeting place which paradoxically highlights the distance and difference between that which cannot ever be fully united. This paradox is reminiscent of George Steiner’s seminal re-reading of the myth of the Tower of Babel in After Babel, which sees the multiplicity of languages and accompanying misunderstandings not as a curse but as a gift to mankind. Human life, in other words, is enriched by differences, by mysteries, and even secrets and lies in the form of fictions. Steiner’s reinterpretation of the Babel myth is in service to his theory of translation, which posits not only that all language is a form of translation, imperfectly bridging the distance between one idiolect and another, but that all translation is not only inherently incomplete but also better for being so. Just as Harrison’s bridges illuminate the distance between one shore and another, an incomplete translation highlights that which ultimately cannot be rendered in a different tongue — that which, in Steiner’s value system (and apparently in Harrison’s as well) is most valuable of all.
A sort of Nietzschean overcoming, an amor fati, is the guiding spirit of this book — and, as Harrison glosses, the sort of “two-in-one thinking” that Hannah Arendt attributed to Socrates, “whose challenge is to grapple with ‘the infinite plurality which is the law of the earth.’” This is a consciousness pervasive in Yeats’ wonderful essay “Per Amica Silentia Lunae,” which Harrison generously quotes. Consciousness for Yeats, Harrison writes, is “a place of junction and discord, aiming to bridge the split self.” “Those who ignore the discord,” he continues, “are creatures of vague sentiment and lazy attainment.” Yeats himself writes: “The other self, the anti-self … comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell …”
Harrison sees bridges not as tools to cancel out differences or cement eternal unions but as liminal places of betweenness. Bridges, he qualifies, “bind territories that remain disparate, albeit joined.” A bridge “does not neutralize the differences between the shores and peoples that it links. It creates no synthesis …” Nor does a word fully succeed in describing a thing, nor is any one being ever fully merged with another. I am reminded, of course, of Musil’s Ulrich and Agathe, the sibling lovers of The Man Without Qualities, who are emphatically separate but united, and whose incestuous love is a metaphor for metaphor itself. Such a union joins two similar things that are in reality not equivalent and that can only be joined approximately or temporarily. This ultimate non-equivalency (between word and object, tenor and vehicle, one shore of the river and the other, etc.) is explicated by Harrison in his discussion of Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lying in a Supra-Moral sense” — with reference to Musil as well, whom Harrison has written extensively and masterfully on elsewhere. Nietzsche’s exposure of the “lie” of metaphor in this fascinating essay is accompanied by an affirmation of the ethical and aesthetic responsibility of the “creative subject” to continually make metaphors (word bridges), despite — or even by virtue of — their necessary distance from reality. As Musil writes in his great novel, by ignoring the difference between two things when we make a metaphor, in other words, “By leaving things out we bring beauty and excitement into the world.” This does not mean, of course — neither for Musil nor Nietzsche nor Harrison — that we should be blind to the legerdemain of such magical metaphor making, nor that we should strive to cancel out differences or distinctions. On the contrary. Harrison shows us — in keeping with Musil’s collection of novellas, Unions, wherein a wife better unites with her husband by committing adultery — that the metaphor is a bridge which cannot ever be definitively crossed, but which holds itself aloft by remaining taut with the tension of difference. Another image, Heraclitus’ bow, comes to mind — a metaphor for the nature of life itself: “It is in being at variance with itself that it coheres with itself: a back-stretching harmony, as of a bow or a lyre.” The bridge is thus a persistent dilemma with which one must grapple if one has a “passion for reality” — for a bridge, like a bow, can only do what it is made to do if there is tension; without tension it will collapse. This is the “dilemma,” Harrison writes, “that the poetics of metaphor was designed to resolve: how to respect the eternal apartness of things while making them dance together.”
His rapturous description of the Golden Gate Bridge is only one example of the sorts of daring leaps this book makes from matter to spirit and back again. These leaps are ultimately life-affirming — despite their embrace of complexity — rather than suicidal. The Golden Gate, a favorite place to end it all, is also a connector of American and Asia, and the “axis mundi joining Heaven and earth”; a symbol of the “primordial strife between land, water, and air,” of the tension between “telluric origins and sea destinations.” The Golden Gate may appear, he writes, “to be the very last bridge of the world, providing the land’s utmost frame, beyond which it points like a gateway onto the immense cosmos on which all life depends.” Quoting Beaulieu’s The Sea in Greek Imagination, Harrison adds that the Golden Gate may be seen as the “transitional point between life and death, the turn ‘from the ordinary world to … imaginary lands.’”
Harrison’s object lessons range from particular bridges, to musical bridges both literal and cultural, to cultures in conflict or rare pluralistic exceptions, always connecting geographical, architectural realities with socio-cultural idealities. “Bridge cultures” developed in port cities like Trieste, Amalfi, Genoa, Istanbul, Beirut, Alexandria, Algiers, and Marseilles. The Mediterranean, in particular, he writes, quoting Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape …
“… impresses on its dwellers a sharp sense of ‘destiny and fatality, an architecture of spectacle and vision: a way of seeing the horizon and seeking the beyond’ … The horizon visible from the sea’s shores usually ends in a clear division between sky and water, often broken by bits of land, accompanied by knowledge or hearsay about what is different in these separate but proximate lands. This is the geographical basis for that sensation and understanding of mediation, plurality, and alterity that scholars associate with dwellers of the Mediterranean.”
But often, as Harrison repeatedly documents, human attempts to erase difference and create multi-lingual, multi-ethnic pluralistic regions are as doomed as attempts to build flimsy bridges over volatile waters. Harrison writes that the Stari Most bridge in Bosnia-Herzegovina “was demolished during the Yugoslavian war for no other reason, apparently, than its conciliatory symbolic value.” Mostar was a “fully multi-ethnic, multi-confessional city” in which, “apologists for unity write, approximately one-third of marriages were mixed and ethnic ghettos were unknown.” Stari Most “crossed a line of division running between the Bosnian Christians and Muslims of the city … it was ‘a cultural symbol that did not fit with the narrative of Serbian or Croatian nationalists.’” Again and again, Harrison relates the tragic irony whereby bridges built to connect and heal rifts are the sites of “conflict after conflict.” In his discussion of the realities of Serbian-Croatian conflict, Harrison returns to a key legend recounted earlier in his book, from Ivo Andrić’s novel Bridge Over the Drina: angels, Andrić tells us, were instructed by Allah to spread their wings over the deep rifts scratched into the smooth earth by jealous demons, thereby teaching men how to build bridges. Yet “History,” writes Harrison, “and angel bridges share little in common.” And elsewhere, we are given this hard wisdom: “the great bridge-building of God, which binds all differences together, is not to be achieved on earth.”
Not only in life, but in literature, attempts are made to facilitate what Harrison calls an “unfractured idiom,” epitomized by Hart Crane’s idealistic ode to the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane’s poem,“The Bridge” affirms the “symbolic facilitation of cultural union between Europe and the Americas,” implying “that global unity itself is consubstantial with Faustian objectives of human understanding,” as if a work of art were “capable of theoretically binding into one all conceivable events in nature and history.” Crane’s poem posits “a language overcoming the scissions of reason no less than of culture … universal acceptance.” “Love,” concludes Harrison, “in which everything can be united, is another word for the unfractured idiom, overleaping spiritual divides.” But despite all of Crane’s rapturous poetics, “the divides remain irreducible.” All 1,100 lines of Crane’s poem “pursue the same project” of which “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra was so skeptical: to make language join what is eternally apart.” Not only is such an attempt quixotic and impossible, such a unified idiom — or unified world — may not even be desirable. For much is lost in the interest of anodyne sameness. Harrison writes: “For the more one phenomenon is assimilated to another, the more it loses its specificity, its nature, its nature denatured through transformations, semantic abstractions, and the multiple associations of the relations into which it is bundled.”
Harrison’s chapter on musical bridges is a light interlude in the midst of the book’s more difficult lessons. Here he explores bridges as Aeolian harps, water as conductor of sound, the actual bridges of instruments, sound as a bridge between the invisible absent and the visible perceiver, sound art that records and transmits noises on bridges usually ignored by city dwellers, thereby calling listeners to attention in the liminal special space of the bridge. And he explores the cultural bridging of the Blues, from the field hollers of American slaves to the music of freed descendants, from women to men, from Black to White, via the bridge across the Atlantic to the UK and back again to the U.S. via British musicians. Instead of impugning what today’s lingo would call “cultural appropriation,” Harrison celebrates the 2-way direction of these exchanges, and the uses of the “oceanic distance between emitter and receiver” that “allowed the foreignness of the work to register in all its fascination…” Of course, this celebration is a celebration of tensions, too, the tensions inherent in the music (the dynamics of musical bridges), and its fraught history. For the Blues has always been a realm familiar with the Devil and the deals he makes. As Harrison writes in a different chapter, “Each bridge, in offering a new solution, creates a new problem.”
Alongside the life-affirming celebration of cultural exchange, we are made aware of the tragedies of individuals and cultures sacrificed to the water gods who resent those who try to arrogantly overcome nature by crossing them, and also the challenges caused by immigration and the political struggles between autonomous nations, de-centralized cultures, and imperial “yokings” and “forced unions.” Massimo Cacciari, Harrison notes in his section on Nietzsche as wanderer, “surmised that every politics of the future will be pressured to produce unity among individuals without a true state to represent them. Politics will face an ‘autonomous multiplication of subjects’ sharing little other than the space that each occupies in a different way.” The specter of globalism — a word, if I am not mistaken, which does not even occur once in this book — haunts throughout, as the force that would homogenize and forcibly erase differences between individuals and cultures. Harrison writes,
“Beneath grandiose projects and megabridges lurk less conspicuous intentions: to bring provinces under the control of centralized governments, granting themselves the power to control them; to yoke them to the larger economic systems, which thus tighten their tentacular grip; to disconnect communities from reliance on local production and traditions … not designed to produce an encounter with difference so much as to subjugate it.”
The darkest demon — or daimon — lurking beneath Harrison’s bridge-book is Death itself. Just as a bridge “contravenes a natural interdiction against walking over a body of water,” life itself is a bridge over death, or, as Harrison puts it: “Death lies between the footholds of life.” This raises the existential question of how to live upon “life’s precarious, bridge-like foundations” when the “bridge from A to B and C is built over an empty, underlying, vertical space, over the repressed and constitutive fact of death.” Which brings us back to the guiding spirit of the book, that bold Nietzschean amor fati, which dares to love the world as it is, to live on the bridge over an abyss of death — uncertain, incomplete, reaching out across the impossible bridge of longing between self and other, word and meaning, life and death, past and unknown future. Living on the bridge is both mortal and timeless, fraught with tensions and, at best, filled with beauty and fleeting connections. This is a reminder to be as alive, as aware as possible. Like all great books, each a bridge from lone writer to lone reader, Harrison’s magisterial and lively Of Bridges calls us to attention and makes this difficult task more bearable. For there is no ultimate crossing over, only a temporary dwelling in between.
[Published by the University of Chicago Press on April 1, 2021, 304 pages, $35.00 hardcover]