Gigantomachia » Eliot

So the darkness shall be the light

mce — Sat, 03 Jul 2004 15:04:41 +0000

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

4 Quartets (East Coker)

Somersault

mce — Sun, 16 Nov 2003 13:17:49 +0000

…the torch-bearers, advancing from behind the throne which King Artaphernes had just vacated, progressed two by two into the centre of the hall. To the shrill piping of the quowhombom and the muffled rattle of the bass trpaxli mingled with the plaintive wail of the thirty captive kings, they circled thrice forwards and thrice backwards, clockwise and counterclockwise, according to the sacred ritual of the rpat, and finally when the signal was given by the pswhadi or high priest, they turned a flip flop somersault and disappeared down their own throats, leaving the assembly in darkness.

T S Eliot to Conrad Aiken, Aug 21, 1916

Time not our time

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:44:29 +0000

And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

4 Quartets (Dry Salvages)

Between two waves of the sea

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 16:29:48 +0000

At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

4 Quartets (Little Gidding)

Between un-being and being

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 11:31:33 +0000

Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

4 Quartets (Burnt Norton)

Impossible union of spheres of existence

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:35:03 +0000

Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual

4 Quartets (Dry Salvages)

Not the intense moment

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:21:32 +0000

Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.

4 Quartets (East Coker)

Where you are is where you are not

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:18:33 +0000

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

4 Quartets (East Coker)

This extended portion of East Coker is taken from San Juan de la Cruz (Subido). Therefore Eliot’s involuted introduction of the citation:
You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again?

World not world

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:13:17 +0000

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

4 Quartets (Burnt Norton)

There we have been

mce — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 02:10:21 +0000

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.

4 Quartets (Burnt Norton)