Four Quartets

Epigraph contains to Heraclitus quotes:

1. “τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί / ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν”

• Translation: ”Although the Logos (wisdom/word) is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own” (Fragment 2).

1. “ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή”

• Translation: ”The way upward and the way downward is one and the same” (Fragment 60). 

Burnt Norton

“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.”

• The present. Neither from (past) nor towards (future). If not for the present, there’d be no dance—all we know is the dance. The present affords past and future, without present they’d have no being, so what are, then, past and future?

“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.

                                          Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can [moments]

Be remembered; involved with past and future.

Only through time time is conquered.”

• Our dependence on time due to our weakness, but the our knowing-with transcends (?) time. To know-of places us back in time, away from eternity, but to leap into eternity requires leaping from time.

“Here is a place of disaffection

…

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.”

• Third order distraction. Big leap! Meaningless pursuits, stuck in time yet enspirited by that eternal principle (logos) that proceeds and proceeds time?

“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.”

• Dante’s descent. Some apophatic negations of world… detachment from sense, fancy, spirit in surrendering to the unknowable. This was liberation through motion, though liberation can be attained through stillness (ah, back to that present moment! Atone with it!)

“Desire itself is movement

Not in itself desirable;

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless,”

• Desire as longing, all longs, all moves. Love as the impetus and destination (self-swallowing) of desire, of motion. Timeless, eternal.

East Coker

“…Do not let me hear

Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,

Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,

Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire

Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

• Wisdom in folly, wisdom in humility, wisdom in the folly of surrender to something unseen. Humility endless and open, pride exalted and enclosed.

“I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God

…

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.”

• Faith and love and hope lie in the waiting, their potential bounds in surrender rather than a restrictive embrace, for we will partially embrace ourselves. Only total surrender to that unknowable will will free us.

“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.”

• To win, lose. To arrive at the unknown (‘God’), embrace unknowing (ignorance); to embrace the unembraceable, relinquish; ‘what you do not know is the only thing you know’—for we only come to know through unknowing (unknowing is God?).
• What you own is what you do not own…prideful earthly possessions melt away, when we pursue selfish will we become more predictable (free will (owned) becomes conditioned will (not owned))
• Where you are is where you are not… hmmm… if I find the present moment, I find where I am, but there my sense of self fades away—there I am not. Could probably work the other way too. Coincidentia oppositorum.

“…But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

• Ceaseless urge, a ceaseless striving. Whether good or evil we know not, and when we impose our will on these things we muddle them up. Reminded of the book of Job here—his friends’ idolatry in assuming God is justly punishing Job, when really we do not know what is going on, and to surrender nevertheless—therein is Job rewarded!

“Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before and after,

But a lifetime burning in every moment

…

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

…

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.”

1. Starting from home. Disintegration, complexification. The beginningless, endless, unified moment divided into ‘every moment’.
2. Flow state as communion with love, where the discrete time and place dissolve away.
3. Communion with the unknown. Odysseus departing Calypso into the dreadful sea of unknown, in search for home. In the end (home) is my beginning.

The Dry Salvages

“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,

Patient to some degree, at first recognised 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. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.”

• Reminded of Heraclitus here… the river sustains its identity through change.
• At first recognized as a frontier…then as a problem to bridge builders. The plurality of religion, and the challenge of bridging them together.
• Now bridged (modern West), the river (god) is forgotten, yet still flows through quietly sustaining the cities, ready to flood and renew when the time is right.

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us;

The sea is the land’s edge also,”

• God permeates all things, outflows to Himself. Our edges are defined by the sea surrounding us, by the streams pouring through us into the deep.

“There is no end, but addition”

• The procreant urge.

“You are not those who saw the harbour

Receding, or those who will disembark.

Here between the hither and the farther shore

While time is withdrawn, consider the future

And the past with an equal mind.”

• Heraclitus’ stream.
• Equanimity with time.

“At the moment which is not of action or inaction

You can receive this: “on whatever sphere of being

The mind of a man may be intent

At the time of death”—that is the one action

(And the time of death is every moment)

Which shall fructify in the lives of others:

And do not think of the fruit of action.

Fare forward.”

• The threshold of death as a bridge to the eternal… the action divorced from its fruits. The fact that Krishna’s teaching occurs at Arjuna’s threshold of death…
• Die to self so others may be reborn, redeemed, reincarnated?—yourself included.

“Men’s curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint—

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”

• The curious historian and science fiction writer cling to past and future. The saint as a bridge between the eternal and time (something given and taken); a lifetime of death in love—dying to self, surrender to the unknown (death!)

“The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

Here the impossible union

Of spheres of existence is actual,

Here the past and future

Are conquered, and reconciled,”

• Intersection of man and divinity. The hints and gifts divine, the guesses and understandings man. Their impossible reconciliation is also a lunge into the eternal, where past and future are one

Little Gidding

“The midwinter spring is its own season

…

…Between melting and freezing

The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell

Or smell of living thing.”

“I met one walking, loitering and hurried

As if blown towards me like the metal leaves

     Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.

     And as I fixed upon the down-turned face

That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge

     The first-met stranger in the waning dusk

     I caught the sudden look of some dead master

Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled

     Both one and many;”

• Encounter with the divine. ‘Unresisting’ like the Dao. The scrutiny, initial distrust of its strangeness. The dawning recognition of the familiar in the strange.

“And so, compliant to the common wind,

     Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,

In concord at this intersection time

     Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,

     We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.”

• Too strange to each other for misunderstanding… to maintain that strangeness between the other, wherein further familiarity, and its striving, can find footing. The complacency of familiarity that leads to estrangement (e.g., illusion of self)

“I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,

     Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:

     I may not comprehend, may not remember.’

And he: ‘I am not eager to rehearse

     My thoughts and theory which you have forgotten.

     These things have served their purpose: let them be.

So with your own, and pray they be forgiven

     By others, as I pray you to forgive

     Both bad and good.”

• Ease as cause of wonder—the unresisting. Wonder surges through resistance, opens us, flows through our resistance, releases us.