T.S. Eliot: Session 3

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, and welcome to our time together, Turning for Guidance, to the Teachings Found in TS. Eliot's Poem, Four Quartets.

We're now turning to the third of the four poems, which is titled Dry Salvages. And an explanatory note in my edition explains that Eliot, his parents, when they left England and settled in America, in the summers they vacationed in New England. And in New England, off the coast of Cape Anne, Massachusetts, there's a small cropping of rocks in the distance, which are called the salvages. And it has a little beacon or a little lighthouse in it to warn the ships going by so they don't crash and sink on the rocks. And so he's going to use that as the place for the poem, around time and eternity. And really what the poem is about, deeper down, are the ways in which we in time, especially in the time of technology and engineering and achieving things, it's really about the ways that we interface with the primordial, with the primitive. There's a saying that nature is God's first scripture, it's the world. And so there's the primordial world, and then there's the effect of technology and engineering and science about being exiled from the primordial, and also the primordial depths of ourself. That's really the poem. And how do we be healed from that exile? So the poem begins, first stanza.

I don't know much about gods, but I think the river is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed, intractable, patient to some degree, at first recognized as a frontier, useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce, then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. 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, unhonored, unpropeciated by worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. I'd like to reflect on this.

You know, it's really true that in the ability to build bridges over the river, traffic can move freely. And once the bridges are built, the river is forgotten and moves on. In terms of conditions of comfort and practicality, it's true. But not completely forgotten, because the river has its own primordial time in which floods occur, and homes and streets and so on, just filled with water destroyer this way. And we're shocked when that happens. Then it drains off until it happens the next time. And so he's talking about this kind of estrangement from the primordial, but it's not just the strange way in which technology really keeps us safe from the destructive powers of the primordial. And it could not just be water here, it could also be tornadoes, earthquakes, fires. The realm of nature reminds us we're not in complete control. There's a deeper problem that he sees in this. And the deeper problem is what happens is what's not recognized by worshipers of the machine. But the primordial force of nature, the river, is waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, in the rank alanthus of the April door yard, in the smell of grapes on the autumn table. So I want to reflect on this for a minute. That really the infant's bedroom is primordial, because the infant is primordial. That's why I use this image. I've used it before in these reflections, where a mother is holding her newborn infant. And she holds it, it's so limited. It can't sit up by itself, dress itself, feed itself, talk, anything. It's like the essence of limit. And yet, with the imperial strength with which her infant is clasping her extended little finger, it all but carries her heart away. She knows that if she were to die in the act of saving the infant, she would die in the truth. What's also true is this infant, in the limitless nature of its limits, reveals her to herself as capable of seeing that, which is the primordial. And she also knows, underneath the layers of all the things she is able to do, there's also a limitless limit within her. See, the sacred that never dies. We're touching on a big theme now we'll be looking at in further sessions with Later Mystics. William Blake, the poet, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, he says, he has a poem, he says, if you're holding a leaf in your hand, know that of all the trillions of leaves throughout the whole world, only the leaf you're holding is that leaf. And the leaf is saying, in effect, I came here to be me, inside of Duns Scotus. We also see it in Martin Heidegger, people on their farms in Germany, he said, after the war, there were so many refugees after the war, but on the farmland, there's people sitting in their farmhouse that the father lived in, the grandfather, the grandfather, the great-grandfather, great-grandfather, and the primordial darkness is falling about the house, but they don't even know it because they're huddled around their radio. They were exiled from technology by the primordial depths, which really is the divinity of the concreteness of everything.