T.S. ELIOT AND PRESENCE
[TL:DR as I age and I am "Being" differently, more present, different poems of his speak to me differently yet still eloquently]
I was 15 when I discovered the poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot within the *Norton Anthology of Poetry.* Nearly 50 years later, I'm reading him completely differently. Back then, I was smitten by "The Hollow Men," which can still be read as quintessential teenage angst:
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Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
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It ends famously, in italics:
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This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
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I discovered that I had to memorize Eliot before I could begin to make sense of his writings.
Next came "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I created a verb, "to Prufrock," which is to take the notion of the most modest of molehills and turn it into something so massive and overwhelming that to take that action would disturb the universe, which could not be dared, because it wouldn't have been worth it and because the would-be protagonist was so insignificant anyway that even if he attempted to do so it would have been completely misunderstood.
But then, glossing over "The Waste Land" until much later, I found "Burnt Norton," the first of his 4 Quartets. I endeavored to memorize the complete works of T.S. Eliot before I graduated high school, but after much of "Burnt Norton," my brain was full.
But it is "Burnt Norton" that still speaks to me today, as it is about presence, and time. It was written after a walk through the garden outside the mansion of the name with Emily Hale, "The Hyacinth Girl" of "The Waste Land," written for her, the woman he did not marry, but was nonetheless in love with whom he had created her to be 15 years earlier. We create the idea of who the other people are in our life. He was in love at the time, he would later write, not with Ms. Hale, but rather with the "ghost" of the Emily he knew decades earlier.
It begins:
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Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
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A lament, and yet acknowledging how fruitless it is to mourn the road not taken or a future the will not be embraced.
He ends the first section of the poem:
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Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
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*Always* present.
Later in the poem:
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At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
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He can't place it in time because it is always present -- the still point of the turning world, the in-between of past and future.
The second part ends:
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Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
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There is more to the poem. He brings in religion and damnation, evoking Dante. Some might read my perceptions of these poems and paraphrase a line from "Prufrock" and protest:
"That is not what he meant at all
That is not it at all."
But "The Hollow Men", as brilliant as it still is with its memorable haunting lines, nor longer speaks for me. For decades I identified with Mr. Prufrock, and while it is still an amazing poem which I likely will still be able to recite when I can't remember my own name, he no longer resembles me, nor I him.
But now, as I aspire towards Being, and Presence, I am conscious to not be in time, for all emotion is temporal, either as laments or nostalgia for the past, or as apprehension or excitement for the future. To be fully present is to be at the still point of the turning world....
