I have decided on a frame for this blog. I am going to read some fabulous parts of some fabulous poems and wander through them with you. It will help me to expand my appreciation of the greats and will hopefully inject a little poetry into your life. It's important to be open to poetry because I think it has an unfair rep. We are a generation asking for fulfilment, for experiences that will blow our minds, for untrodden paths. All of these you will find walking the lines of poetry. Trust me on this.
Where else could I possibly start than my first poetic hero - T.S. Eliot. I read a small section of his fourth Quartet as a child and it reached inside my chest and took residence there like a friend I knew immediately would be for life. Thomas Stearns Eliot was a Yankee. The highlights of his life for me were that his mum was a social worker and a poet herself. Thomas was a poorly child and so spent a lot of time alone and with books, particularly loving Tom Sawyer. He grew up by a river in St Louis and always said that this location influenced perhaps more than any other. He attended Harvard, moved the England when he was 25. As an academic, he jumped between Paris and Harvard only to return to London where Ezra Pound met him and deemed him "worth watching". These parts of his story, more so than his writing catalogue, make a poet 'meetable'. You can imagine him on the street, at a lecture, in a bar. His thoughts were made of the same particles as ours.
I will work my way up to The Wasteland but I need to warm up a little first so I am starting with the first of the Four Quartets - Burnt Norton.
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.
I like the idea of time existing as an entity. That the past and present are lined up on a shelf in the future - tangible and observable. More unsettling is the idea of the future already being a known substance in the past. It's as though time is actually like a museum exhibition that we are walking through. It all already exists, we are just restricted to moving though it at Greenwich Meantime pace. This does make time 'unredeemable' in that we can't change any of it but, in Christian terms, it means we can't be forgiven for it either. It seems quite a cruel interpretation of life and brings Catholic notions of Hell into this life.
However, what follows makes me feel like Eliot didn't really believe this.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
I love the 'Sliding Doors' conversations where you consider how completely different your life would be had you made just one small decision differently. These 'What might have been' narratives are as real, often, as the life we are living. Eliot is making me wonder if these narratives are only fabricated - never a real possibility in reality. This is something we will never know the answer to. We will never know whether we are able to make any choices other than the ones we make. Every choice is pinned onto the wall of time so even if we go back and change that choice, the change is further down the wall. The original choice is 'unredeemed'. Would it make life easier or harder knowing that our scripts have been turned into our life story already?
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
Beautiful. Is an echo not the shadow of something real? If we have memories of the echo then either our memories are unreliable narrators or our parallel selves have followed another path. I will never pretend to be any kind of authority on what poets meant when they wrote. I will, however, ask permission to bring their beautiful words into my own life and weave them into my understanding of the world. I love this image - a parallel version of myself taking footsteps down a passage that I walked past. On her way to a rose-garden.
Until next time.
