T.S. Eliot: Session 2

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:10)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone. Welcome to our time together, Turning for Guidance, found in TS. Eliot's poem, Four Quartets. In the previous session, we reflected on the first of the four poems, Burton Orton. And now we move now into the second of the four poems, East Coker. And right away, we can see the continuity of these poems. And they're just as Burton Orton refers to an actual place. East Coker refers to a place. Only now, the place, East Coker, is a town in England. Instead of a more specific place like Burton Orton, it's a town. Another source of continuity, which is more relevant, is he's going to begin by reflecting on a town from the standpoint of time. And then he's going to roll it over to look at time from the standpoint of eternity and the town. Another interesting little shift is he's looking at the town from the standpoint of time with respect to the buildings that people build to live in in the town and to conduct the business of the day. And that's how he's going to start. I'll begin then with the opening stanza, East Coker.

In my beginning is my end. And so he starts out with himself, just where he left off before. But now he's moving out of the buildings of the town. In succession, houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place is an open field or a factory or a bypass. Old stone to new building, old timber to new fire, old fires to ashes and ashes to the earth, which is already flesh, fur, and feces. Bone of man and beast, corn stalk and leaf. So this is the slow eventual crumbling away of all structures. houses live and die. And now he quotes scripture. houses live and die. There is a time for building and a time for living and for generation and a time for the wind to break the loosened pain and to shake the Wayne Scott with the field mouse trots and to shake the tattered ars woven with a silent motto. So first of all, there is a time for living. We're in time. We're living in these buildings. There is a time for living. And also there is a time for building. And there is a time for living and for family, for generations of the on-going. There is a time for all of that. But also to always know, as true as that is, it's also inevitably true that there's time for the wind to break the loose in pain. In other words, imagine an elegant house, a niece Coker, and the people who lived in that elegant home are all dead. And maybe the people who lived there after them are gone, and now it's abandoned. And in that abandoned building, this elegant home, that's now empty, the wind is breaking the loose in window pain, cracking the cracked window. And to shake the Wainscot, Wainscot, one of the words, got to look up to see what it means. In these elegant homes, the Wainscot, there would be expensive imported oak, and they would put it along the bottom of the walls, at the floor, a few inches or a few feet high. It was considered elegant looking this way. And now along that Wainscot, the field mouse is trotting in the abandoned falling apart house. And to shake the tattered auras with a silent motto, and auras were tapestries, huge woven tapestries hung on the wall to hide an alcove. So now that it's faded, and it's woven with a silent motto, and we could say the motto might be death, or the ending of everything is a silent motto. The cloth of the fabric is woven with that. From there, the poem shifts, the scene changes. And now we're going to move from the perspective of time into the perspective of a moment of eternity, a moment of consciousness, when we're not in sequential time. And the scene begins with himself again. In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls, and the scene is that you're alone in the countryside in an open field. Now the light falls across the open field, leaving the deep lane shuttered with branches dark in the afternoon, where you lean against a bank while a van passes, and the deep lane insists on the direction into the village and the electric heat hypnotized. In a warm haze, the sultry light is absorbed, not refracted by gray stone. So now we're coming to the moment of consciousness in which we're not in time. Remember, in Burt Norton, this is way too. But instead of it being a moment under the gray barbers, it starts to rain. Or you're in a drafty church, a smoke fall. Now the scene is that you're there in an open field, leaving the deep lane shuttered with branches, so there's a little lane, there's overarching trees that shutter the deep lane. Or you lean against a bank, you're all alone, and you're leaning up against a bank, and a van passes. And the van is passing, and it's just in the direction into the village, into the electric heat, where hot things are happening. And all those people having a big night in town, they're all going to be dead eventually, too. And the buildings are dancing, and they're all going to be crumbled, everything this way. Into the village, into the electric heat, hypnotized in a warm haze, the sultry light is absorbed, not refracted by the gray stone. The dahlias weep in the empty silence, and they wait for the early owl. And look, the dahlias are bright colored flowers that grow in Mexico through South America. And I hate this image about plants. So now the moment of consciousness, you're alone out in the country, in this field. And there's these dahlias, the van goes by, you're all alone now and it's quiet. So here's the image that came to my mind. It came to me once, say imagine that you're alone in the middle of the night and you're dying, and you know that you're dying. And you turn to look at the flowers on the window sill, silhouetted in the moonlight. They seem to know all about it. So there's a way of being all alone in the middle of a forest, in the middle of nature, the flowers, the primordial life of plants. And somehow you drop down into the primordial life of the flowers and the plants. And they're sleeping in the empty silence. There's no content. They're sound asleep, waiting for the early owl to come to start the beginnings of the night. In that open field, namely that field, the field that you're in when you're about to have this experience of being conscious and leaving time. In that open field, if you do not come too close, if you do not come too close on a summer midnight, you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum and see them dancing around the bonfire. The association of man and woman in dancing signify matrimony, a dignified and commodious sacrament. Two and two, necessary conjunction, holding each other by the hand or the arm, which be token of concord, round and round the fire, leaping through the flames or joined in circles, rustically solemn or in rustic laughter, lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, earth feet, long feet, lifted in country mirth, mirth of those long sense under earth nourishing the corn, keeping time, keeping the rhythm in their dancing as in their living in the living seasons. The time of the seasons and the constellations, so the constellations reference to the stars, the timelessness of the constellation of the stars overhead. The time of milking and the time of harvests, the time of coupling of man and woman and that of beast. Feet rising and falling, eating and drinking, dung and death. I like to reflect on this. Poetically, especially in the light of where this poem is headed this way. So you're in a field and you look out across this empty field. I had this image once when I was, Maureen and I, we used to have a therapy office and we would go in together three days a week. And one day I went in alone for the fourth day. And there was a cemetery on the way to the therapy office. An old cemetery. And I would stop at that cemetery and sit on a bench there. And I would be struck by the fact I'd look out at all the tombstones this way and realize that six feet under the ground were all those coffins. And the thing about it is they were all empty. No one was in there. The remains of their body was in there. But the shine in their eyes, the sound of their voice, the one that you loved and loved you, because they were all eternal. No one's in there. It isn't just that all those that were in time and across to the veil of death are now in the eternity of God, which they are. But here's another way of looking at it. It isn't just that we're eternal, but the daily rhythms of our life are eternal. So the rhythms of your life, like getting up in the morning and going to bed at night and preparing your meals and sitting and taking a walk, God knows all those rhythms, and God never forgets. And so the primordial rhythms of the daily life, they're also eternal in God. Not only are those who have died not dead, but the rhythms of their daily life is not over, because it's never over. If you don't get too close, if you don't get too close, you could see the eternality that never passes away, and all the rituals of the day that are endlessly passing away. He's inviting us to have this kind of poetic sensitivity to this, about ourselves too. Dawn points and another day prepares for heat and silence. It's all going to start again tomorrow, the next day, the next day goes on and on and on. Out at sea, the dawn wind wrinkles and slides. So out in the middle of the ocean, no one's there. The wind is moving the waters back and forth. He's sliding back and forth in the wind. I am here, I'm there, or elsewhere, in my beginning. So in my beginning, I'm all pervasively present, and the endless falling away of the eternality of what never falls away. This way. And he's trying to help us go into a meditative consciousness where we're not subject to linear time, to be sensitive to the spirituality of our lives. Because our life on this earth and our bodily being is a temporary arrangement. We're not here for very long, really. But in the deep down depths of things is the endlessness of ourself. So that when we were born, our life did not begin when we were born. It's when we appeared out of the eternality of God's heart. And when we die, we're not annihilated. We vanish away in time, but everything is forever. And here we're trying to be meditatively sensitive to this.