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Tag Archives: reality

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.7

19 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, T.S. Eliot

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Burnt Norton, Determinism, Freedom, Imagination, reality, T.S. Eliot, Time

Finally, the poem moves to a loss of the phantoms and the perpetual possibility and a recapitulation of the first movement:

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.


Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

With these spectres, the “we” of the poem moves in “formal pattern” (the dance perhaps, some sort of joint enterprise).

This dream scene moves into “the empty alley”. And with this movement, it seems we have moved into the world of Eliot’s earlier poems, Prufrock, Preludes, and Rhapsody on a Windy Night, the grim modern city rather than the still garden with unheard music.

The imagery at this point becomes deathly (I had not thought death an undone so many):

                        into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,

A “box circle”: using google n-gram, I believe that Eliot has coined a phrase. This is perhaps a paradox: a circle cannot be squared. The impossible “squaring a circle”. A trap, a box canyon? I take it for an impossible place.

And in this into this impossible place we have a scene of death: the pool is drained, dry, rotting (brown edged). In his poem The Waste Land in the section, “What the Thunder Said” the dry rock is the image of a dead land. And so the ghostly band has come into a city-scape, and to an impossible place of death. Where there should be water (a pool) there is none.

At this point, we come to a series of images which I cannot help but relate to Wallace Stevens. In “The Glass of Water” we read the lines

                                    Light

Is the lion that comes down to drink. There

And in that state, the glass is a pool.

Ruddy are his eye and ruddy are his claws

When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws.

I am not saying that Eliot was thinking of Stevens (Eliot’s poem was earlier than Parts of the World), just that it resonates. The lines of Eliot read:

And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.

Photo by Marné Lierman

Here in the midst of a dead land (a dry pool) sunlight entered and produced light. Living in a very sunny place all year round, sunlight would make me think of a dry land, but living in England, I imagine sunlight would be associated with the production of life. A lotus would be exotic to one in England. The whole scene then seems like a wonder of life exploding.

This spectral world is becoming quite real and full: the “they” are there looking into the world, too. It seems that the whole is on the verge of becoming not merely a possibility but real. And then

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

The cloud interrupts the revelry. It is whatever prevents the imagination from persisting. I don’t know that it has any particular “outside” reference: if the sunlight is the imaginative work of creating the scene, then the cloud is that which interrupts.

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

This is curious: the bird says go! Why? Because the leaves are full of children (just as the shrubs were filled with music). Are the children dangerous in some way? Why? It seems the children are again the intrusion of something more intense. In the parallel lines it is reality. By means of the parallelism I take the children to be the intrusion of reality.

Human kind

Cannot bear very much reality

This speculation and possibility of the past is on the verge of becoming real. 

Or is it that this revelry is disclosing something about reality which has not yet known? What is the reality which we cannot bear?

Having comes to this point, we return to the inevitable present:

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

There is a greater will of some sort which always bears upon reality and which determines the present.

When I come to this point, I wonder if more than a meditation upon time and imagination and regret, it is also a meditation upon freedom and what must be.

He has brought me to think about these things, but not as in an essay or argument. Rather than telling me about them, as a poet, he is calling me to look at them. Whether he receives a clearer resolution will depend upon what comes next.

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM

31 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Edgar Allan Poe, Literature

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A Dream Within a Dream, Edgar Allan Poe, poem, Poetry, reality

By Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream
?

Imagination & the “bitter lapse”

16 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Edgar Allan Poe, Wallace Stevens

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Edgar Allan Poe, Imagination, poem, Poetry, reality, Short Story, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Plain Sense of Things

There is a fascinating conflict and paradox in this introduction. Poe works for the mysterious: In just a sentence after the quoted section he will write, “What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered.” He creates the effect by means of a prose which avails itself of poetic effects: alliteration, “during, dull, dark, day, dreary”; assonance, “dull, autumn, hung”. The sheer intensity of the description which piles gloom upon gloom.

And yet the brutality of the image lies in its intense realism “a mere house and the simple landscape features”. The bite is that is a real place, “the bitter lapse into everyday life”, rather than an opium fueled revelry. He complains that there is no poetic imagination which could attach to the building; which is ironic, because this house could actually exist nowhere. It reminds me of Stevens’ poem “The Plain Sense of Things”

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Poe’s oppressively real house exists only in the imagination — indeed, it can only be had and held by means of imagination, which makes it even more intensely real:

“DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.”

Edgar Allan Poe. “The Fall of the House of Usher”

A human life filled

11 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Church History, George Muller, Prayer

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Arthur Tappan Pierson, Church History, Faith, faith, George Muller, Prayer, reality, Seen, Unseen

“A Human life, filled with the presence and power of God, is one of God’s choicest gifts to His church and to the world.
Things which are unseen and eternal seem, to the carnal man, distant and indistinct, while what is seen and temporal is vivid and real. Practically, any object in nature that can be seen or felt is thus more real and actual to most men than the Living God. Every man who walks with God, and finds Him a present Help in every time of need; who puts His promises to the practical proof and verifies them in actual experience; every believer who with the key of faith unlocks God’s mysteries, and with the key of prayer unlocks God’s treasuries, thus furnishes to the race a demonstration and an illustration of the fact that “He is, and is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.”
George Miiller was such an argument and example incarnated in human flesh”

Excerpt From: Arthur Tappan Pierson. “George Müller of Bristol.” James Nisbet. iBooks.

Foolishness and Time

31 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by memoirandremains in Biblical Counseling, Hebrews, Meditation, Psalms

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Biblical Counseling, Death, experience, foolishness, Hebrews, Hebrews 9, Hebrews 9:27, Humility, judgment, Meditation, Psalm 90, Psalms, reality, Self-Examination, Time

Often foolishness finds its cure in the conflict with reality. Thus, the foolish belief that I can skip class and not study will conflict with the reality of grades. After an F I will hopefully be cured of my foolishness.

Other forms of foolishness cannot be cured until it is too late to make a correction. Psalm 90 mentions one such problem:

So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.

Ps. 90:12.

There is a foolishness that comes from thinking the temporary is permanent. My days are short, but I easily and foolishly will live as if the days will go on forever.

This foolishness cannot be cured with experience, because by the experience intervenes, it will be too late.

There is also the foolishness that comes from failing to realize that I am permanent. To live one’s life as if there is no eternity before me is also foolishness. I must learn to number my days, because there will be a judgment.

Such a day may be a joy if I am to acquitted. But to do so, I must be reconciled to the judge:

27 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment,
28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Heb. 9:27-28

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