T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, IIIa “In this twittering world”

29 Friday Oct 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in T.S. Eliot

Tags

Burnt Norton, Distraction, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time, Twittering

III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

This next section of the poem has resonance and even some ironic humor not conceivably present to Eliot, but unavoidable to see now. So I am going to take a section out of order and begin there:

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

We cannot miss the last phrase, “in this twittering world.” The ironic use of the word “twitter” for Twitter (like the Facebook’s “friends”) reads like a parody of postmodernism. But look back how Eliot gets to a “twittering world”: it is the

Eructation of unhealthy souls

Into the faded air.

Like volcanoes, these unhealthy souls are bleching into the air. But the air is faded: it is worn out. This is not a place of healthy life (the souls are unhealthy), but ghostly existence which is not quite alive or dead. It sweeps across the world after the Great War has ruined all and the next war is on its way.

Note: This is not even the darkness:

Not here

Not here the darkness.

They are not in the darkness, that would be too definite. I cannot help but think of his lines from the Waste Land:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

There is an insistence of modern life, which its getting and spending: Eliot living in the bitter parody of Romanticism. As Wordsworth wrote

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

These people are too busy to be redeemed. Consider the lines immediately prior to what we have considered:

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

The language sounds prophetic as to contemporary screen-based reality and life:

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning.

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction

We are distracted from distraction by yet another distraction. And there is no meaning in anything

Filled with fancies – that is diversions—and all of it: “empty of meaning.” It would be difficult to better skewer modern life. And none of this would lead to the anti-capitalist socialism. The problem is far deeper than an economic structure. Notice the line

Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces

Marxism is intensely time-bound: the dialectic moves through economic powers through time. But this being time-bound is the trouble: These faces are faces who cannot escape time. Is “all time … unredeemable”?

Now we can consider how Eliot begins this section:

He is speaking of a very particular place, the time before and the time after: Before and after what? The still point he has been writing of. A place to get outside of the driving of history. But just on either side of a place of eternity (because Eliot seems to be thinking of Boethius’ understanding of eternity) there is

a place of disaffection
Time before and time after

That before and after comes again in lines we have already considered:

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.

So what we have “a place of disaffection”, a time-ridden place, without meaning, capable of offering nothing but distraction. It is a place of “faded air,” a place without even darkness:

In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

This place outside of the still point has less than true human existence. It is not day or night. It is a place without beauty. The darkness which is not present in the time before and after

Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Is the darknight of the soul: a darkness which “purifies the soul.” Note in particular how this darkness is the exact opposite of distraction and time-ridden:

Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.

There is no salvation is in the twittering world, but all the twittering world can offer is distraction. It is not even a place of fullness:

Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces

What then is the use of this poem? There is a note in Christianity of not being bound to the world

¹⁵Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. ¹⁷And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

The poem takes us this strand but forces us to stare directly into what this world is: void all illusion. It is a world of nothing beyond distraction. The air is faded, because it will pass away. The world offers neither full joy nor purification. Come stare directly into this ghostly world which is neither alive nor dead. It is merely

Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

I thought of adding a photograph of people staring into their phones.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton Iid

24 Friday Sep 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in T.S. Eliot

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Burnt Norton, Literature, poem, Poetry Analysis, Rose Garden, T.S. Eliot, Time

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 the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.

This last section makes a sort of argument:

To be conscious is not to be in time. Where is a space which is not in time? It is not the present. As the poem says in section I, “All time is eternally present.”

It could be time past or time future: the poet states these all “a little consciousness.”

But it is not the place of remembrance. The rose-garden, the arbour, the church, are all remembered and thus are all “in time.” That cannot be the place of consciousness.

There was the story about the rose-garden in section I, but that event does not seem real: at least it was not in time. Perhaps that is why it is both “conscious” (because it is not in time) and reality “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality.”

Perhaps this consciousness can take place “at the still point of the turning world.” This would match the case. Of this still point, he writes,

I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Perhaps both the imaginary space and the “still point” are available for consciousness. They do not seem to be the same place, and they are both outside of time.

What then do we do this final line, “Only through time time is conquered.”

What must be conquered in time? And why must time be conquered? Is it to let us escape and enter into the garden with the thrush or to enter the still point?

This seems to bring up an issue early in the poem

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What is this redemption? From where to what? At this point, the question is tantalizing, but the answer is certainly not clear. Fortunately, there are three more sections in the poem.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton II.c

16 Thursday Sep 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in T.S. Eliot

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Boethius, Burnt Norton, eternity, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

We now move from a description of this place where opposites are present – and not, the still place. Rather than examining this place, Eliot turns to consider the effect of this place upon the human being. This portion of the poem considers: what does this still point do to the one who enters it.

Working backwards, we can see a parallel here with the line in the first section “human kind/cannot bear very much reality.” Here, something has been interposed which

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

There may be an allusion here to Paul’s statement in the great 15^th chapter of 1 Corinthians on the resurrection of the body that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God.” The idea of Paul is that the human body must undergo a renovation to participate in the life to come.

Here, Eliot speaks of something which protects human flesh from experiencing a too real world. In making this world too real (I am borrowing from the language of the first stanza), it seems we are in a Platonic realm with this world of ideas and forms is more real than the physical world. Lewis plays on this idea in The Great Divorce.

Continuing to work backward from this protection

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

The present, which is neither the past nor the future is “enchained” (a fascinating word here) and “woven” in the human body. Notice how he describes the human body, it is “changing.” I believe this must be a reference to the fact that the present is constantly new as this still point between the past and future changes.

It is a quite literal statement that our human body can be nowhere but in the present. I must admit that I am not certain as to what is the reference to “heaven and damnation.” I suspect this is a merism for the entirety of Platonic reality. We cannot move outside the present and thus the powerful currents around us cannot touch us here.

The movement in the first section to the phantoms would be a movement into this Platonic realm.

And this leads to a question: is this still place something which is there, something which is there and we do not notice it, or is it a place to which we must enter? Is it a psychological relationship to this place?

The beginning of this line of thought reads

The inner freedom from the practical desire,

The release from action and suffering, release from the inner

And the outer compulsion,

This reads very much like a Buddhist idea of enlightenment and being freed from an illusory relationship to “reality” – which is really an illusion. As such we are discussing a psychological/spiritual relationship which is the result of a different understanding of such things.

But the poem complicates this conception with a contrast, “yet”

yet surrounded

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

It is not just the state of detachment, he adds here “a grace of sense.” This is quite different than the dissolution of the “I”. He is moving into something perhaps more similar to a Christian Platonism where eternity is an eternal now. (And at this point, perhaps he has Boethius in mind). Quoting the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy:

In Boethius, the contrast is between timeless eternity, which only God enjoys, and everlastingness, which (following Plato) the world itself possesses.

It is the common judgement, then, of all creatures that live by reason that God is eternal. So let us consider the nature of eternity, for this will make clear to us both the nature of God and his manner of knowing. Eternity, then, is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life; this will be clear from a comparison with creatures that exist in time.

…for it is one thing to progress like the world in Plato’s theory through everlasting life, and another thing to have embraced the whole of everlasting life in one simultaneous present. (Boethius Consolation, V.VI., transl. V. E. Watts 1969)

Boethius uses his view of eternity to address the problem of divine foreknowledge (see section 6.2). If God knows beforehand what we will do then how can we act freely? His answer is that this problem dissolves in the face of the fact that God does not know anything beforehand but has an immediate, atemporal knowledge of all things. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/eternity/

I think this conception answers more nearly to Eliot’s thought at this point. It is as if one has moved into a realization where everything is frozen in an eternal now. Scenes in a movie where there is an explosion and than a freeze frame where the character looks around and see the matter in motion perfectly still might be a good idea here.

If so, then this is a realization of what is already there. It has just been lost. Our enchainment to the present protects us in a movement from seeing the eternity about it – and eternity as a place of heaven and hell.

Erhebung without motion

The precise meaing of the German here is beyond me because the word refers to a movement up so it could be an uprising or a physical rising or a metaphorical use of the conception. There is a rising without a motion.

both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror.

The old and new worlds could be past and future, or perhaps mundane and Platonic. Our relationship to them is “understood.” And that understanding is both an ecstasy and a horror, which would return us to the idea that reality is simply something which we cannot bear. Hence we are protected from the full experience of this place.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, Part II.a

23 Monday Aug 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in T.S. Eliot

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Boarhound, Burnt Norton, Peter Jones, poem, Poem Analysis, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

We come to the second division of the poem. The first 15 lines which comprise a stanza and certainly must be understood together read:

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle-tree.

The mud thrown-up by the wagon as it plunges along spray up, unto the axle and would “clot” it. That makes plain sense. Yet is not the mud which is send to clot the wagon but the “garlic and sapphires.” This is a striking and strange phrase. Why would there be garlic or sapphires in the mud. Certainly one wouldn’t leave them there – certainly not sapphires. And then to have them merely muck thrown-up to the underside of a wagon. The world is certainly mixed up. But to what end is not apparent in these lines.

The trilling wire in the blood

Sings below inveterate scars

Appeasing long forgotten wars.

The precise nature of the “trilling wire” is not exactly clear. I certainly don’t think he intends any precise physiology on this point. Then what do we have: I take this as something similar to Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” or perhaps Thomas’ “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” It is some sort of live force that runs through all things. I think he means some sort of force in all living things (even all moving things) and more than just human life.

The “scars” above the blood here will become stars above all the rest. The combination of scars and wars works well: The war brought about the scar. The scar will never be removed, it is “inveterate”. And this life at work even beneath the scars of war appease the wars. But how so appease? To appease is to bring to rest some anger. There is a life which runs through and under even wars

Eliot writing after WWI and written during at least the first part of WW2 would not have a dim idea of war. But here the wars are “long-forgotten.” In saying this, he seems to be moving in a dim history. He is not speaking of his own life, but something of life. There is a history written in the life and in the scars. This present is not sharply marked-off from the past. The present bears the scars of the long forgotten wars and the same life sings beneath.

The dance along the artery

The circulation of the lymph

Are figured in the drift of stars

Ascend to summer in the tree

The distinctions between the life of his body and the life of nature also become lost. The life in his body is the life of the movement of the stars. The parts are mysteriously linked together. My pulse is tied up with the movement of stars (and visa-versa).

The effect is quite pagan, where gods become animals or have human lovers and humans have half-god children and humans may find themselves transformed into something quite different. (For a less poetic and more philosophical consideration, see Peter Jones, The Other Worldview)

What is important here for the overall theme of the poem is that it is not just time as an abstraction, but the all things which are bound up together in this moment which is present.

Next, it is the movement above and below which are reconciled and coordinated. The sky above and the mud below:

We move above the moving tree

In light upon the figured leaf

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the boar

Pursue their pattern as before

But reconciled among the stars.

The chase of animals on the ground is the chase of animals in the stars. The music of the spheres is transported to what we “hear upon the sodden floor.”

But there is something else here than bare correlation of opposites or even all things are one: The verb “reconciled” is interesting. What is reconciled? Most directly the chase of the boar and the boarhound. Their conflict and fight is “reconciled” above.

This moves us in a somewhat different mood than bare pagan all is one and inter-vesting each the other. The conflict upon the earth is not merely reflected in the heaven, it is reconciled. This introduces a Christian tone which moves beyond Greek or Norse mythology. Everything is telling one story, but there is a way to understand this story, if you will, in a higher key.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.7

19 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, T.S. Eliot

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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.

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.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.5

12 Thursday Aug 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, T.S. Eliot

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Burnt Norton, Memory, poem, Poem Analysis, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

Other echoes

Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

Round the corner. Through the first gate, (20)

Into our first world, shall we follow

The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

To put these lines into their context, here are the lines already considered. I have also added an underscore to the word “echo”.

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. (5)
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. (10)
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. (15)
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate, (20)
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

Looking back we can a major shift in line 11 with the first “echo”. The first ten lines are philosophical and distant. But at line 11 we enter into some sort of memory and that memory is an “echo”. The echo is of “footfalls” and so of some movement which never happened (down the passage which we did not take). At line 15 there is a bit of a pause, should we follow after this memory?

Then in middle of line 17, someone else intrudes and pulls the “we” toward the door which was never opened. Here there are “other echoes”. We will meet these phantoms in a bit, but here are just sounds.

So why this word “echo”. It is not a sound but the echo of the sound; it is not the original but the copy. By using the word “echo”, Eliot increases the dream quality. Also, these sounds are “echoes” because the original happened (or did not happen) in the past, but they are being experienced in the present.

We also learn what is on the otherside of the door which was never opened, “the garden.”

Raising the image of a “garden” holds all sorts of allusions, particularly in the hands of someone like Eliot. There is archetypal garden of Eden. There are also all of the wall, specially kept places as gardens.

Here the garden is “an abstraction” and a “perpetual possibility” which exists “only in a world of speculation.” To enter through this door in the memory is to enter into this “world of speculation.”

The image of the rose-leaves now comes into focus for we know where the roses came from: the garden in this memory.

But how could there be “other echoes” in this space? If the first echoes were the hurried steps to the door, who is on the other side of this door. But the “reality” (if you will) of the echoes beckon:

He then turns to the reader (?) “Shall we follow?” We could be overhearing his conversation with someone, or we could be the one spoken to: This would mean that in reading the poem, you are being addressed in the lines, “My words echo/Thus, in your mind.” And even if the poem is addressed to a particular “you” and “we”, the fact remains that the reader of the poem is the one who is following down the path toward the garden.

There is something quite mythical about a speaking bird leading one toward a garden. I feel there must be a particular allusion here, but I do not know what it is. It might be an allusion to the Norse god of poetry, Bragi. Whatever the allusion, the image is charming.

This bird calls “us” on quickly, and now we are hurrying down the pathway through the door, through the gate.

In lines 20-22 we have the word “first” used three times: It is the “first gate” and then twice “our first world.” When we couple this with the “garden” we have our first world is the garden: this points toward Eden – at least some pre-Fall world.

Now, Eliot will not actually place in the primeval garden, but there is a deliberate prelapsarian element: The fall may not be the fall of all humanity, but rather a much more personal “fall”. This is “our first world.”

Shall you (the reader, someone in particular to Eliot) and I (Eliot) open this gate in the memory and proceed to the world which didn’t happen and yet is this real to us?

There is one more point to consider, “The deception of the thrush.” What precisely is the thrush’s deception? That there is this “first world”? That we can enter it? If I am being called into something which is abstraction and possibility, is the call to consider that at all a deception?

Is it a deception to consider a world which never happened as a reality now?

And as we know from the first lines: this world which did not happen “point[s] to one end, which is always present.” This first world which did not happen brought about this present: a present where I am being deceived to enter a the garden of our first world.

It is fascinating because it allusive and difficult, but not muddled. He is describing something which cannot easily articulated: it is the vision out of the corner of your eye, the thought which startles and then slips away before you can focus. It is real and a deception; present and only a speculation.

Burnt Norton.2 (“a perpetual possibility”)

18 Sunday Jul 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in T.S. Eliot

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Burnt Norton, Literature, Memory, Modern Poetry, poem, Poetry, Poetry Analysis, T.S. Eliot, Time

Burnt Norton.2

The prior post on this poem is found here

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.

Prosody

It appears he is structuring the lines around beat and alliteration. I may be off here, but there is not a regular meter like iambs. The basic line seems to be built off the Old English alliterative four beat line.

TIME PREsent and TIME PAST

Four beats, the T and P repeated

are both PERhaps PREsent in TIME FUTure

The T and F from the first line as well as the P.

This scheme is not cared with perfect fidelity to the alliteration. For instance line 8:

ONly in WORLD of SPECulAtion.

We can get four accents but no alliteration in the line. It would be possible to read this instead as a third beat line.

Notes:

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

“What might have been” is the item under consideration. He then defines it by three characteristics:

First, it is an “abstraction”. It is an abstraction in both senses: It is abstracted,that is set apart from all else It has no connection with the tangible world. Second, it is an idea without tangible substance.

Second, it remains always and only a “possibility.” It had an opportunity to have come into existence, but it did not. It never matures from that place.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility

Third, it remains in “a world of speculation.” Access to this “might have been” is available only through speculative thought. It has a real existence, but only as a speculation. I can gain access to this “might have been” by thinking it; but it never moves from that space.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

This takes some consideration: Why the addition of “might have been” to what has been? Here he says that might have been and what has been point together to this one point: the present.

The actual past makes sense as pushing a direction to the present. But how does the might of have been participate in this?

Since there is an abstract, speculative existence for might have been, we can’t say that it has no existence; only, no tangible existence.

He is going to develop this “might have been” more as the poem develops, but let’s consider here what it could be. The “might have been” while not have a historical effect outside of my thinking has a profound effect upon me.

Might have been can be the source of enormous regret and loss. But it can also be a ground for thankfulness on tragedy avoided. The might have been is “remaining a perpetual possibility”. When we think of how a might have been actually effects us, that line “remaining a perpetual possibility” grows larger. I am constantly being affected by this perpetual possibility. It is always there.

And this potential acting upon me, and all that has actually occurred have conspired and I am here at this one point, in the present.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton.1

15 Thursday Jul 2021

Posted by memoirandremains in Augustine, T.S. Eliot

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Augustine, Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot, Time

T.S. Eliot is a poet who requires slow, careful consideration. His poems in the small volume Four Quartets are fascinating. I have had some realization from this or that part, but I have never taken the time to truly understand the poems. And thus, I will parade my ignorance as I think this through, beginning with the opening lines of Burnt Norton.

The title itself refers to an English Manor. It seems that it got its name “burnt” due to the drunken depression of a former owner. William Keyt married Anne. However, a dalliance with Anne’s maid Molly, resulted in Keyt losing his wife. It seems he built quite a house nearby for Molly. According to a story in the Daily Mail (which includes some fine pictures of the house), “In 1741, abandoned by Molly and after days spent drinking, he set fire to the new house, which was destroyed, killing him with it. The fire was so powerful that one side of the original house was also scorched, hence the property became known as Burnt Norton.”

Mr. Eliot spent time at this property and named this poem after the same. The poem begins:

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.

He starts here with these abstractions on time as if time were a substantial thing that could segregated: First, there is time present. Now time is a curious thing because it has no existence as just their: rather it denotes a relationship between things. And just like space, I can only occupy one “time” at a time.

So we have now.

We also have past, that is what has gone on before. But in what way to do we have past time: as a memory? In its present effects?

And if the past is affecting the present, then it must be true that the present – when we come to the future — will then be past and will then have its effect upon the future (which will then be present).

Note the use of the word “present” in the second line: It denotes a certain relationship: Object X is present with Object Y: there is a proximity to it. Past and present time are there each in proximity to time future.

But as soon as they are in proximity to time future, the future is no longer “future”, it is now the “present” and the present we began with is now past. .

And so when present and past are “present” with the future, the future is now present and the present is now past.

We need also consider, in what way are the past and present “present” with the future? Does he mean that they are somehow substantial entities that can in this or that place, as if there were a box labeled “time present” which was carted to time future?

But as soon as a moment is past it is unretrievable.

Or does he mean that the movement of time is the movement of potentialities or causation over time? I drop a ball in the present which then bounces in the “future”: without the present action of dropping there would be future action of bouncing.

There is also a tentativeness of the whole, “perhaps present”: has not necessarily arrived at his conclusion, just a potentiality.

Then he turns the analysis around: If the past and present are “present” with the future, is the future already there in some manner in the past? When I drop the ball, the falling and bouncing – both in the future – are already in a manner determined. The future is already contained in the past: it is there present, even though not fully unpacked:

And time future contained in time past.

Then if the future is already there in the past, has there been any movement? There then is no real past or future, since each is present in the other. This leaves us with an eternal present:

If all time is eternally present

This whole movement of thought is ambiguous on a point of the word “present”. Things may be present, because they are substantial proximity to one-another. My dog is present with me: my dog is in proximity to me.

These categories of time may be present in one another as a matter of potential and expression: The ball bouncing was already ‘present’ when the ball was dropped.

He seems to move between these various uses of the word “present” (right now, proximity, potential-expression) which creates the oddness of the language.

But he concludes then with the possible conclusion that there is actual movement of time: there is only a constant “present,” because the future is the outworking of the past and the past contains the future.

This brings us to our final point:

All time is unredeemable.

Redemption: what could be meant by this. A clue may come from noting that Eliot’s consideration past, present, future seems to be developed from Augustine’s notes on time in Confessions. For instance:

I know it to be time that I measure: and yet do I neither measure the time to come, for that it is not yet: nor time present, because that is not stretched out in any space: nor time past, because that is not still. What then do I measure? Is it the times as they are passing, not as they are past?

And:

Who therefore can deny, that things to come are not as yet? Yet already there is in the mind an expectation of things to come. And who can deny past things to be now no longer? But yet is there still in the mind a memory of things past. And who can deny that the present time hath no space, because it passeth away in a moment? But yet our attentive marking of it continues so that that which shall be present proceedeth to become absent. The future therefore is not a long time, for it is not: but the long future time is merely a long expectation of the future. Nor is the time past a long time, for it is not; but a long past time is merely a long memory of the past time.

Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine’s Confessions, Vol. 2, ed. T. E. Page and W. H. D. Rouse, trans. William Watts, The Loeb Classical Library (New York; London: The Macmillan Co.; William Heinemann, 1912), 269 & 277.

The temptation would be to try to explain Eliot by Augustine as if the poem were merely putting the Confessions into verse. But Eliot is not trying to recite Augustine, but rather to think through a problem. He may conclude as Augustine, but will do his own thinking. Note again the “perhaps” line 2: he is stating nothing with certainty.

He is thinking about a problem raised by Augustine concerning time. What then does Eliot mean by the question of time being redeemable? At the least, there is an issue here of change: to redeem a thing is to change its state. It was in one state and then comes to a new state.

What precisely Eliot means by redemption in this instance is not yet clear.

Is Eternal Life Temporary?

26 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in John, Stephen Charnock, Thomas Manton, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Aion, D.A.Carson, Eternal Life, eternity, John 3:16, Stephen Charnock, Thomas Manton, Time

(Got a question from one who heard that “eternal” means a very long time. Therefore, the “eternal life” offered by Jesus may only be a very long life which could end at some point in the future. This is the brief response I wrote)

God does not offer “eternal life” as a shadow or a trick or some temporary thing. God holds eternal life up as one thing so valuable that it is worth losing our life to gain this eternal life. It is better to be hated, abused and murdered and gain this eternal life, than it is to have every good thing which could be had in this world.

The fact that God offers it to us, should give us comfort. If God offered a life which might run out, then it would disturb our peace:

It is an endless and everlasting life. Such as are once possessed of it shall never be dispossessed again. If man be designed to enjoy a chief good, and this chief good must content all our desires, it must also be so firm and absolutely immutable as to secure us against all our fears; for a fear of losing would disquiet our minds, and so hinder our blessedness.

Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton, vol. 11 (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1873), 366. God has not offered a very long life as our supreme good. God has offered us a life which is both never-ending, but also which belongs to a differ age, the age to come. Both of those things should give us comfort.

First, when we speak of “eternity” and God, we must out of our heads the idea that “eternity” is a very, very long time. This is hard for us to do, because we only have only experienced time in this way. In Romans 8:20, Paul explains that the creation – the entire universe that we could know – “was subjected to futility”, it is vain, it is running down (Eccl. 1:2, Gen. 3:19).

This matches what we know about the universe from observing it. Physicists talk about “Time’s Arrow”: the universe is running in one direction, and it is running down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time). So when we talk about “time”, we think of a succession of moments and an increase in entropy.

Stephen Charnock in The Existence and Attributes of God writes

We must conceive of eternity contrary to the notion of time; as the nature of time consists in succession of parts, so the nature of eternity in an infinite immutable duration. Eternity and time differ as the sea and the rivers; the sea never changes place, and is always one water; but the rivers glide along, and are swallowed up in the sea; so it is time by eternity.

There is a great deal of discussion and speculation when it comes to what eternity actually means. Eternity – and infinity — are very strange and very hard concepts. God is called the “everlasting” or “eternal” God (Rom. 16:26), he is the eternal king (1 Tim. 1:17). That is why in Revelation we read that God was, is and is to come (Rev. 1:8, 11:17).

When we start to think of concepts like “eternal life” (John 3:16), we have to realize that when it comes to divine things, we are not speaking about very long things.

It is true that sometimes the words translated “eternal” or “everlasting” sometimes have the idea of very long, or indefinite, or “age”, or “aeon”. That, however, should not trouble us. When we speak to one-another we often talk about something “taking forever”, when we mean 20 minutes. We will say that it was “an eternity”.

But we can also use the word “forever” and understand it to mean something which cannot end. When we use the word “forever” or the word “eternity” we can tell what we mean – and we expect other people to be able to understand us easily. We do this, because can understand the context and the use. We understand that sometimes a word is being used ironically, or emphatically. So if I tell my wife, I will love you forever, I mean to underscore the intensity of my commitment: even though we both know that neither of us will literally live forever.

The same thing applies to uses in the Scripture – the Bible is written in ordinary language. So in Genesis 9:16, God makes “an everlasting covenant” to never flood the earth again. But we also know that God will one day re-create the entire universe (2 Pet. 3:7). Therefore, we know that this covenant to never flood the earth will hold true throughout the duration of the earth’s existence, but the covenant does not mean that God will keep the earth in existence forever.

Or in Genesis 17:8, God promises Canaan as an “everlasting possession” – we quickly see the problem of simply using the word without consideration (even if we decided we would think about it forever).

So, in some places the word aion/aionios means a long time ago: Luke 1:70, As He spoke by the mouth of His holy prophets from of old (aion).

In context we can tell it cannot mean “forever” – that would result in nonsense.

By contrast, in 2 Corinthian 9:9, we read that God’s righteousness endures forever. We can’t say that God’s righteous will last a long time and then wear out. Or God’s throne is “forever”. (Heb. 1:8). If God’s throne is not going to last, God is not much of a God.

What I want you to see here is that you cannot fear that our promised eternal life will wear out in the distant future merely because the word “aion” could mean a very long time. Our word “forever” can mean “a long time”. The way in which a word could be used does not tell me how it is being used.

Second, when it comes to eternity and God, our normal concepts of time simply do not apply.

How then is the word “eternity” used when it comes to our “eternal life”?

It would make very little sense to say that you will live “forever” and it to be only a very long time. Life is something which one either has or does not. If life is everlasting, the word “everlasting” or “eternal” would not be ironic/hyperbole (“it took forever to get home”).

It could be emphatic: and there is a sense in which it is. It does not merely mean continual and without end: it means life which belongs to another age: thus the language life of the Age, or Aeon would point toward not merely a long life, but a life which belongs to the age to come, to “eternity”.

But perhaps the most important aspect is that the idea of “eternal” life is contrasted with death. Consider John 6:51 & 58. In this passage, Jesus is contrasting the bread eaten in the wilderness (manna) which himself as the bread of life. Jesus notes that the fathers ate manna and died (“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness and died” John 6:49). Yet the one who eats Christ “will live forever” (John 6:50). He repeats the same idea in John 6:58: they ate and died, but “he who east his bread [Christ] will live forever”. If Jesus is merely offering an extremely long life, this argument fails. Jesus’ offer is something that cannot end, or his argument is a lie.

This argument is stronger when you consider the other concepts and images which are used to complement the idea of “eternal life” in John 3:

That is the immediate result of the love of God for the world: the mission of the Son. His ultimate purpose is the salvation of those in the world who believe in him (eis auton, not en autō as in v. 15). Whoever believes in him experiences new birth (3:3, 5), has eternal life (3:15, 16), is saved (3:17); the alternative is to perish (cf. also 10:28), to lose one’s life (12:25), to be doomed to destruction (17:12, cognate with ‘to perish’). There is no third option.

A. Carson, The Gospel according to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; W.B. Eerdmans, 1991), 206. Eternal life runs parallel to born again. We cannot be “unborn”, therefore, by analogy we do not un-live.

Second, the contrast is made to death and destruction. If we will die, then the offer of “eternal life” makes no sense if “eternal” only means very long time.

Crosses Warranted to Last Five Years

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Thomas Hardy

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Ancient, Beauty, Jude the Obscure, Literature, Modernism, Thomas Hardy, Time, Ugliness

It was as old-fashioned as it was small, and it rested in the lap of an undulating upland adjoining the North Wessex downs. Old as it was, however, the well-shaft was probably the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged. Many of the thatched and dormered dwelling-houses had been pulled down of late years, and many trees felled on the green. Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day. The site whereon so long had stood the ancient temple to the Christian divinities was not even recorded on the green and level grass-plot that had immemorially been the churchyard, the obliterated graves being commemorated by eighteen-penny cast iron crosses warranted to last five years.

We live in a time and place in which progress and new overwhelm our desire. We cannot be relish the new. However, such is not the only way to understand time. Consider the above-passage from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The description moves from quaint, to bitter irony, to plain mockery. Try to work out the levels of irony in this paragraph.

The sense of the “modern” is quite similar to the modernization depicted in Lewis’ That Hideous Strength. It is interesting that on the front side of this phase of modernization, the best saw the ugliness and brutality in triumph; but how little can we see it now that we have grown accustomed.