Dialogue 2: East Coker

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to Season 10 of Turning to the Mystics, where we're turning to TS. Eliot and his poems in the four quartets. And I'm here with Jim to discuss his second session where you took us through the stunning poem, East Kokal. Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:43)

Yes, thank you. Yes, I'd be in this with you and all the folks listening in.

Kirsten Oates (0:49)

So much to talk about today. I'm looking forward to diving in. Before we dive into the poem itself, Jim, just a couple of things I noticed. I remember in our introduction how we talked about TS. Eliot being a very innovative poet for his time. And you mentioned that one of the ways he was innovative was that he moved through all different types of poetic form. And you can really see that in this poem.

James Finley (1:15)

And what I think the significance of that is, and we can read commentaries to on TS. Eliot from a literary point of view. In a way, he feels very free to move around with different forms in terms of meter and pacing of words. In the same way in which we're trying to express something from the depths of our heart that matters very much, we're not monitoring syntax and sentence structure. We're speaking in the words that come to our heart or express ourselves. So I think he's giving primacy to the subtlety of being liberated from the tyranny of time to live in the eternality of our life and God. You see that kind of freedom to move around with structure and so on, to give primacy to the insight.

Kirsten Oates (2:02)

I love that, the different rhythm he felt in his heart when he was expressing different aspects of that journey, yes.

James Finley (2:09)

Because in a way, another way of looking at it, this is not logical and it's not practical.

But the logical and the practical is myopic and brief, but the poetic is eternal and boundaryless. We're kind of at that crossroads of how can language help us serve that sensitivity. It's supremely practical not to be forced to try to stay always practical, to be always linear and not be more luminous openness.

Kirsten Oates (2:42)

Kind of always stuck within a certain container.

James Finley (2:45)

Exactly. He's breaking us beyond the containers.

Kirsten Oates (2:47)

Yes. Lovely. One other thing just to note is that if you're reading the poem yourself, there's a number of words that you'll need to likely look up. So some words are old fashioned like Middle English perhaps. So there was one in this section. You replaced it with the word conjunction because that's what it means, but it's spelled C-O-N-I-U-N-C-T-I-O-N, a word I'd never seen.

James Finley (3:16)

Yes.

Kirsten Oates (3:17)

Other words are specific to a context, and as Americans, we might not use that same word. And so you've given us some definitions, but just for people reading the poem themselves, that's one of the reasons it's challenging.

James Finley (3:33)

That's right. And that's why in these sessions, we're being very free to use the poem as spiritual reading.

Kirsten Oates (3:40)

Yes.

James Finley (3:41)

We're turning to, like we would to any mystic teacher to kind of move not toward the poem, but what the poem is trying to help us realize.

Kirsten Oates (3:49)

Yes.

James Finley (3:50)

And that's the emphasis for turning to the mystics as well. And that would please TS. Eliot, because that's really what, that's his concern also.

Kirsten Oates (3:58)

Yes.

James Finley (3:58)

That's why he's going to say, East Coker, the poem doesn't matter. He actually says that.

Kirsten Oates (4:03)

Yes, he does. Yeah, I love that part. Okay, well, let's dive in. And so, part one really felt to me a little bit like a mirror to Burt Norton, where he's helping to expand our sense of the way we look at time, the way we, so to help us become more conscious about how we experience time in ego consciousness and help us break that open. And you said that the difference with East Coker is he's starting with a town.

James Finley (4:35)

So you're right. In Burt Norton, he's starting with the place, this burned out manor house. And so East Coker is a place, only it's a town. And in Burt Norton, we're looking at a place from the standpoint of time, where a tragic thing occurred in the past. And we're moving from a standpoint of time into eternity, where we see the dead. And so here, East Coker, we start out in time. But what he's looking at really in time are the buildings people will build to live in in the town and to conduct the business of the day. And we're looking at those buildings in time. And again, I think it's easier, here in America, America's not been around that long. We can look back to indigenous peoples and what tribes lived here and so on. But where you have, like in Europe, where you have the Stone Age back to the centuries, you can see this big arc of time, of what happens to buildings in time. He's gonna start that way. And then he's gonna switch then into a state of not being in time, just like in Burt Norton, a state of consciousness, a meditative state in the field. So that's how he sets all this up.