Something I love about T.S Eliot's poems is his understanding and love of the theme water. Having grown up by the sea, I can appreciate how Eliot always said his childhood spent by a river affected his whole world view. It is impossible to be a child near the sea or a river and not develop a sense of other. By this I mean you see that there is an alternative to land, you know that journeys on the water will take you places you can't imagine, you watch waves build independently and you wonder whether there is a greater power out there.
Eliot's third Quartet, The Dry Salvages, said to be named after some rocks off the north east coast of Massachusetts, was written during the Second World War. In it he asks such interesting questions about nature and science, about the point of progress and whether something timeless is watching us all stumble away from the point of life.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
How interesting that the river starts this sentence as a strong and untamed god and ends as a mere problem to be overcome. I think Eliot was exploring a Christian faith when he wrote this so he is perhaps playing with the convenient ebb and flow of faith in a God that is struggling to find a place in a modern world. Not only is he personifying the river here, but he seems to be enabling it to grow through human stages - starting as a sullen and difficult child and maturing as it finds its uses.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities - ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
It's so easy to forget that the planet was here long before we were. I'm sure that watching the war unfold around him, Eliot was particularly conscious of man's poorer decisions and the planet paying the price. How quick we are to dismiss the natural world in favour of worshipping the machine - whether that machine is a gun or a mobile phone. Quite right to characterise the river as periodically reminding us that although we can ignore, pollute or attempt to control it, it could wipe us all out in one wild rage. What I find most unsettling in this extract though is the notion that nature is our spectator - a knowledgeable spectator - witnessing us all charging in the wrong direction. What is he waiting for?
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
Here Eliot weaves time into his exploration again. He takes the presence of the river from the nursery, through April and autumn to the evening - a lifetime. The river is ever present. Like a god. This introduces notions of legacy and immortality. Is man in constant struggle to compete with nature to achieve a timeless existence? I think I am quite happy in the knowledge that I am a mere drop along the way for our planet's rivers and seas. I take comfort from the knowledge that these waters will outlive me by centuries. I quite like the idea of them watching over my children when I am gone. I can only hope that my boys will take some time away from machine worshipping to contemplate the wisdom of the sea.
Friday 15 May 2015
Monday 4 May 2015
The Girl From Eponymous
Today I will invite you over and give you the best I have to offer. Imagine arriving to a kitchen spread of all my favourite foods, my all-time momentous tunes on the playlist, the house cleaned to perfection and Long Island iced teas served by an intriguingly handsome yet shy bartender. Today's written offering will be the poetic equivalent of all the above. I am going to invite you to sit on my virtual picnic blanket, lay back and breathe in these words and images. Taken from T.S Eliot's fourth Quartet, "Little Gidding", I am not exaggerating when I say these words have stopped me in my life tracks on numerous occasions and changed everything.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Just take a moment and reread that. So much to wrap ourselves up in. Firstly, I love that Eliot says 'We'. This isn't a solo journey; it shows an awareness that souls belong in jigsaw groups. How would Eliot have felt knowing that blogs would exist one day to bring remote jigsaw pieces to their table? This first line is one I would happily have painted over our front door, or tattooed on my children's foreheads I believe in it so deliciously. Exploration doesn't have to mean strapping on your backpack and packing a lunch, it can be sitting in the same armchair but delving into every feeling, chasing every thread of a thought to uncover new ideas. It can mean exploring other people, really trying to understand that even the people we live with experience this life in a completely different way to us.
It's a warming idea that the end of our exploration will bring us to where we began, a circle. Some would say frustrating, but there is a comfort, almost an excitement to thinking that we may already have come very close to where we will end up. Imagine asking searching questions as a teenager whilst sat on a windswept beach; questions that we ache to understand but feel too small to even begin. Returning to that beach on a deckchair with our grandchildren, years later, we may feel those questions in the salty air or wedged between the pebbles and smile as we realise they were the wrong ones to ask but they led us down the path we took. Knowing the place for the first time suggests that either we didn't really know it as a teenager or that we don't recognise it as a grandparent. Or it suggests that with our memories and experiences in our exploration albums, everything makes a new sense.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
So gorgeous to think of something being 'unknown' but 'remembered'. Again, Eliot touches on the idea of the parallel self. Is that what feelings of deja vu really are? A prosaic but nonetheless important question. In those quiet moments when we feel something that is both foreign but comfortable, are we not brushing close to what we might have been? Or what actually is being elsewhere? There are lovely notions of time, as well as place woven in here too: the start of the river being present in the waterfall at the end - speaking to us, just like the children in the apple tree. The obvious reference to Eden blossoms the thought out to notions of wisdom in our choices. Are we making the right decisions? Are we being the right person? I have no idea how to answer these fabulous questions but I do always remember to listen for wisdom in the stillness between the waves.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Just take a moment and reread that. So much to wrap ourselves up in. Firstly, I love that Eliot says 'We'. This isn't a solo journey; it shows an awareness that souls belong in jigsaw groups. How would Eliot have felt knowing that blogs would exist one day to bring remote jigsaw pieces to their table? This first line is one I would happily have painted over our front door, or tattooed on my children's foreheads I believe in it so deliciously. Exploration doesn't have to mean strapping on your backpack and packing a lunch, it can be sitting in the same armchair but delving into every feeling, chasing every thread of a thought to uncover new ideas. It can mean exploring other people, really trying to understand that even the people we live with experience this life in a completely different way to us.
It's a warming idea that the end of our exploration will bring us to where we began, a circle. Some would say frustrating, but there is a comfort, almost an excitement to thinking that we may already have come very close to where we will end up. Imagine asking searching questions as a teenager whilst sat on a windswept beach; questions that we ache to understand but feel too small to even begin. Returning to that beach on a deckchair with our grandchildren, years later, we may feel those questions in the salty air or wedged between the pebbles and smile as we realise they were the wrong ones to ask but they led us down the path we took. Knowing the place for the first time suggests that either we didn't really know it as a teenager or that we don't recognise it as a grandparent. Or it suggests that with our memories and experiences in our exploration albums, everything makes a new sense.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
So gorgeous to think of something being 'unknown' but 'remembered'. Again, Eliot touches on the idea of the parallel self. Is that what feelings of deja vu really are? A prosaic but nonetheless important question. In those quiet moments when we feel something that is both foreign but comfortable, are we not brushing close to what we might have been? Or what actually is being elsewhere? There are lovely notions of time, as well as place woven in here too: the start of the river being present in the waterfall at the end - speaking to us, just like the children in the apple tree. The obvious reference to Eden blossoms the thought out to notions of wisdom in our choices. Are we making the right decisions? Are we being the right person? I have no idea how to answer these fabulous questions but I do always remember to listen for wisdom in the stillness between the waves.
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