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.
Do you read T.S.Eliot? You ought to.
Especially his Four Quartets. They are the most spiritual poems written in the twentieth century, and Eliot was, above all, a mystic. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and certainly don't be swayed by that crap about him being a misogynistic, anti-Semite. There's a smear campaign going on by the liberal intelligentsia because Eliot was un-apologetically Christian.
PS: It was T.S.Eliot who taught me the word 'inchoate'.
Hear, hear. Anyone who can weave Sherlock Holmes allusions into poetic drama and not break the mood deserves all the recommendations we can give him.
ReplyDeleteIt(the poem and what it's describing) reminds me of a 'moment of clarity'.
ReplyDelete"It was T.S.Eliot who taught me the word 'inchoate'."
ReplyDeleteUh-oh.
T S Eliot:
ReplyDelete"Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values."
I love T.S. Eliot--and you're right about the smear campaign. Do you know, I never realized he converted to Catholicism until I taught him? Certainly, no one ever taught me--or if they did, they made it sound like something done minutes before death, so not really important to his poetry. I've found this to be the case, actually, with a lot of poets and writers.
ReplyDelete