End Notes to the First Draft

In the summer of 2012 my friend Chris Bellavita – a wonderful name – suggested I use Mary Ruefle’s poem, Fear, as the prompt for my morning meditations. I enjoyed the experience, but wanted something stronger and spent much of the Fall with The Waste Land.

After fifty-two days arguing with Eliot over the decline of Western Civilization, I needed a new source. It was December 1, the feast day of Nicholas Farrar, the founder of the religious community at Little Gidding. The Four Quartets was close at hand and I claimed the coincidence. The Waste Land had occasionally motivated a response in verse. I decided to make this my consistent form in responding to Little Gidding.

As is my morning discipline, I did not have a plan or particular purpose for the series. I did not even read all of Little Gidding, but simply began each morning responding to a portion of the poem.

Clearly I was predisposed from the start to an ontological theme which over the next thirty days I continued to explore. In constructing my thoughts I referred to Heidegger, Hegel, Heraclitus, Augustine, and others. The coincidence with Advent is as obvious. I spent the second Sunday in Advent at the National Cathedral. Michael McCarthy’s Matin Responsory was the Introit and is echoed in my meditations. I was at Saint Mark’s Philadelpha for Gaudete Sunday. In between was the Newtown Massacre. All these have specific influence.

It was not until the third week that I noticed Little Gidding is divided into five parts (a pattern often used by Eliot) which matches the four Sundays of Advent and the arrival of Christmas. This reinforced the ecclesiastical elements I had already introduced. There are, I perceive, interesting relationships to Advent in Eliot’s text, such as the prominence of love in the fourth part and the attention to words (logos?) in the final part.

For most of the first half I am very much responding to Eliot, sometimes quoting him or disagreeing. Throughout my text I adopt the architecture of Little Gidding. Eliot also inspired – and gave me permission – to draw from Julian of Norwich and Shakespeare’s Henry VI.

Gradually in the second half I am less attentive to Eliot’s themes than to my own. I was, however, occasionally surprised by unintentional conjunction. I was not conscious of my similarities to Eliot’s verse found at beginning of Part V until a second or third re-reading. By then I was using Eliot mostly as a template into which to fit my own thoughts, rather than as a call for my response.

In the three days before Christmas I was reading Rimbaud, who Eliot much admired. My poem’s title is taken from Rimbaud’s Une Saison En Enfer and the last line is from a letter to Verlaine. The English translation: “The one true word is: come back. I want to be with you, I love you.” In French the one true word is actually one word: reviens.

In the 1940s the Four Quartets was critiqued by some as “too religious” and my poem is more High Church in an even less religious era. But it was a wonderful way to spend Advent and begin Christmas.

Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity 
(Costing not less than everything) 
And all shall be well and 
All manner of thing shall be well 
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire 
And the fire and the rose are one.

Until the flesh of vowel and consonant
Become one luscious word
Rising from the ground of being
A clear stream flowing to the sea
Flooding every low place
Exuberant cascading exalting
Meaning revealed and sung aloud
Alluvion of being reconciled with its source.

Le seul vrai mot, c'est : reviens, je veux être avec toi, je t'aime.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning; 
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.

Between rock, soil, and thorn
We emerge, we become
In dark dank mud
We begin with connotation
Saying it again and again
Quietly fearfully carefully
Hearing its meaning
Sounding its purpose
Sharing its singular beauty

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.

Finding is distinct from knowing
Experience does not always explain
Coherence may not be consistent
Ending does not typically complete.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern 
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails 
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel 
History is now and England. 

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

In this moment is our being, in this moment we become
In this word our meaning and expression of meaning
Croaking or singing, softly or boldly we become
As the body breaks and the blood cools
This precise word is needed, fulfilled in being
Placed not here, not there, but now and everywhere.

In this choosing meaning is made and being fulfilled.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

A word was is will be said
A whispered beginning coinciding end
Diverging from noise converging with silence.
A thousand million thoughts straining to sound
One word emerging
From dark cacophony
Bringing bright harmony
The ultimate narrative unbound.

V.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning. 
The end is where we start from. 
And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, 
Taking its place to support the others, 
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, 
An easy commerce of the old and the new, 
The common word exact without vulgarity, 
The formal word precise but not pedantic, 
The complete consort dancing together)

We are words, each with our own meaning
Correct pronunciation and preferred placement
We belong together in sentences, complete thoughts
Converging into paragraphs, pages, and unfolding plots
Each an author, playwright, creator of fine works
Finding how our one word might fulfill its function
Alone: Yes, No, even a groan
But more often in pairs, phrases, subject and verb
Contrasting coupling sometime contending
This becoming new in communion with that.

Who then devised the torment? Love. 
Love is the unfamiliar Name 
Behind the hands that wove 
The intolerable shirt of flame 
Which human power cannot remove. 
     We only live, only suspire 
     Consumed by either fire or fire.

Love often travels with five friends
Fierce fire, dramatic desire, envy, greed, and need
Who can conspire to impede finding love at ease.
But these querulous companions may also transpire
To transport us to love's spiry sanctum
     Where still ascending
     Love's light descends.

IV

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare 
The one discharge from sin and error. 
The only hope, or else despair 
      Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre— 
      To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Yes Yes Yes
Saying yes is love
Embracing hurt accepting pain
Sitting with our suffering
To know and for a profoundly other to know
     Here I am we are each becoming
     Love is love not despite but because

And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

We might at least choose pink
Joining one with another, this and that
Blending bonding binding
Finding in an other our complement
Each persisting in flaw, fault and foible
But alloying in shared strength and joy
I IT AM that is highest;
I IT AM that is lowest;
I IT AM that is ALL.

We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed 
Accept the constitution of silence 
And are folded in a single party.

We choose one or an other
Like or dislike, enemy and friend
We decide cut divide.
Even our own being
We detach bit from bit
Public hall and private hole
Professional, personal, preposterous

If I think of a king at nightfall,
Of three men, and more, on the scaffold
And a few who died forgotten
In other places, here and abroad,
And of one who died blind and quiet
Why should we celebrate
These dead men more than the dying?
It is not to ring the bell backward
Nor is it an incantation
To summon the spectre of a Rose.

But we be too often distracted
Too busy to be, too tired to come
Ambitious angry and annoyed
Other places and purposes
even other states of being
entice our concentration.
In the temple garden we choose
between a white rose or red
When royal and deep blue
Indigo ought be chosen instead

Sin is Behovely, but
All shall be well, and
All manner of thing shall be well.
If I think, again, of this place,
And of people, not wholly commendable,
Of no immediate kin or kindness,
But of some peculiar genius,
All touched by a common genius,
United in the strife which divided them;

Clearing his throat the priest persisted
The Lord be with you, to which the people replied
And also with you, but he knew it was not true
He, She, the great I AM, Ehyeh asher ehyeh,
Being Existing Becoming Ongoing
I IT AM that is highest; I IT AM that is lowest;
I IT AM that is ALL...
Standeth all aloof and abideth us
Sorrowfully and mournfully till when we come.

For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,
To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

He prayed for opening, cleansing, freeing from sin
The choir sang, Lord have mercy
Words were read and more were said
Allusions made to evil done good undone
But in trying to say: strengthen you in all goodness
He could but cough and barely wheezed eternal life.
There is no strength without weakness
Wholly embraced, suffered, honored, and transfigured
Weak is the shrewd twin of strong, oft leading the two along.

III

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives—unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

Reality was is and will be, here there everywhere
Not contained, in recalling we re-create and create anew
In imagining we seed now and next from this moment
But being neither waits nor remembers, being is now and forever
Amen. He turned from the light, though the light remained as bright
And proclaimed aloud: Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
To which the people responded as they had been taught

From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
     Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
     Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
     He left me, with a kind of valediction,
     And faded on the blowing of the horn.

Being in so much as it is being
     Proceeds from negation, abrogation, annihilation
     Towards permission, addition, even consummation
Neither this nor that is being
     Fullness, wholeness, the song sustained
     A Grand Jeté stretching between stars

Second, the conscious impotence of rage
     At human folly, and the laceration
     Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
     Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
     Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
     Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
     Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.

Behind his eyes flashed the morning's sequence
      Another headache, perfunctory prayer
      Stilted talk, granola store-bought, rushing to depart
Nothing awful really, no cause to complain
      Though he did, if barely - an ordinary day
      No great pain and no utter bliss
Minutes unfolding into hours and on into days
      Fully experiencing neither that nor this
      Love or hate, yes or no, living or dead

But, as the passage now presents no hindrance
     To the spirit unappeased and peregrine
     Between two worlds become much like each other,
So I find words I never thought to speak
     In streets I never thought I should revisit
     When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
     To purify the dialect of the tribe
     And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
     To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
     First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
     But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
     As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

But as I am my seed is weedy,
     My making warped
     All that I touch becomes less than it ought.
How do you know what works or not
      Your weed may be another's tonic
      Be fully as you are, here and now, boldly new.
What are you saying, unfold, explode, exceed
      Becoming new, I am what I am
      A mind, two hands, a body.
Always reforming, growing once, now dying
     Thoughts changing, choices ranging, souls transforming
     Embrace the dying, engage the new.
I do not welcome death, whatever may be beyond...
     You have already died twice today
     In denying you merely prolong your dying.

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. Last season’s fruit is eaten
And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.
     For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
     And next year’s words await another voice.

He barely whispered, "Who am I"
     Born of Ruthie and Fred, all these years grown
     Singer sinner reader writer this and that
And the light replied, "you are each and all"
      Made for these and more, much more
      Each has purpose, let them become.
You must not mean that for anger, avarice, and pride
      Which are too often where I abide
      And he confessed without words to even worse
Let them become, unfold, live and die
     Grow, ripen, and explode, spreading seed
     Yielding and finding other boundaries to exceed

Although we were not. I was still the same,
     Knowing myself yet being someone other—
     And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed
To compel the recognition they preceded.
     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.

The priest looked about the extravagant paddock
     A few hundred faces, mostly strangers to him
     Though none stranger than himself to him
And well beyond the few he knew, he perceived
     A persistent pattern: joy tinged with sadness
     Doubt mingling with desire
In concord at this place and time
      Excluding no one and nothing, not even the worst
      Knowing and unknowable entwined

     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; in the brown baked features
     The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
     So I assumed a double part, and cried
     And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’

     And as I fixed upon the slight sound emerging
That furrowed brow with which we discern
     The child's cry (is it delight or distress)
      I heard a high tenor sing, I look from afar
And lo I see the Power of God coming
      To which a choir did reply, Tell us
      Art thou he who should come to reign
Both intimate and unidentifiable.
      A new song echoing all that had come before
      And a ruby light did pierce the veil: Spiders running pall-mall

In the uncertain hour before the morning
    Near the ending of interminable night
    At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
    Had passed below the horizon of his homing
    While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
    Between three districts whence the smoke arose
    I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
    Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.

On the hour appointed and announced
     As the sun nears its apogee
     A paradox of night and day
After the catfish had thrashed and thrust
     Long after the veil had been torn in two
     And the remnants of trembling displayed
Over the doubting, dying, and diminished
     Hung high a new mourning veil
     Behind which light is kept covert
A million spiders weaving traps
     Before the cracks of Plato's cave.

Water and fire succeed
The town, the pasture and the weed.
Water and fire deride
The sacrifice that we denied.
Water and fire shall rot
The marred foundations we forgot,
Of sanctuary and choir.
This is the death of water and fire.

In purple gown the priests process
Toward seven lamplights flaring
Pressed between ample holiness
and dreadful lack of mortal daring
What am I, one mutely asks
Even as he sings,
"Wakened by the solemn warning,
let the earth-bound soul arise;
Christ, her Sun, all sloth dispelling,
shines upon the morning skies."

There are flood and drouth
Over the eyes and in the mouth,
Dead water and dead sand
Contending for the upper hand.
The parched eviscerate soil
Gapes at the vanity of toil,
Laughs without mirth.
           This is the death of earth.

Next comes the crucifer
Two acolytes beside
Reminding where our journey bends
Toward betrayal, derision, accusation
Injustice, abandonment and death
We each know these stations
Regular stops on our main line
            Mind the gap between this and that.

II

Ash on an old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

Ash on the Thurifer's sleeve
Terebinth, Frankincense, and myrrh
A cloud of fragrant mystery
Marks the beginning of the mass
A journey toward Bethlehem and beyond
Eventually to Jerusalem and death
But in this season we wait and watch
For God becoming as one of us.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

Wherever your path may fall there will be others
Who have been beyond where you have gone
They can tell of twists, troubles, shelters and springs
Some will lie to you, steal from you, show the wrong way
Whoever and whatever you encounter, listen and learn
Now in this moment with this person you are becoming

                 If you came this way,
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

               If you would come nearer to being,
Then whatever the experience, give thanks
For sun or rain, loss or gain, fun or pain
Give thanks.  In each is the seed of life
Thanks is to see the relation of this with that
Thanks is self-interrogation
Thanks is self-giving to an other
Thanks is to accept the self-giving of an other
Thanking is thinking: "to cause to appear to oneself"
Framing sense and notion, shaping sensibility and self.

And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. There are other places
Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—
But this is the nearest, in place and time,
Now and in England.

And the descent. For your object is experience
A sprout of understanding
From which meaning can unfurl as a vine
In many directions slowly, sometimes suddenly
Rooting deeper here than there, probing rock and wood
Seeking the dark humus of prior lives and seasons
Altered in becoming
And becoming is our only purpose
The ergon from which we arise and to which we return
In every place and time
Bethlehem then, Boston or Botswana

          If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade

        If you would come nearer to being,
Turn from flickering shadows cast by fire
Turn toward another light, if but briefly bright
That arises from your own becoming
Turn to deep shadows thrown by life lived
Making from love and loss, knowing and unknowing
Risk, reward, and failure
Laughter and copious tears
A shadow that looms long in the setting sun
A silhouette sharpened by a steep and rugged ascent

And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year.
Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers.
There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

Each rare ray cherished more than mid-summers's
As the north twists toward its shortest day
Darkness claiming more and more
We raise our face to any light
Cheeks burnished by brief brilliance.
Once a penitential season when light's flight bid us
To journey farther into shadows of our own soul
Now fixed on phantasms before a smoky flame
Preserving stilted stasis, suspended in empty space
Neither this nor that

A new meditation begun on the feast day of Nicholas Ferrar who founded the religious community of Little Gidding, responding to T.S. Eliot's poem entitled Little Gidding (1942).

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.

Late autumn unfolds into the coming cold
Landscape stripped of October's blaze
Farm fields emptied of beans and maize
White roses made pink by fleeting frost
The moon rises as fire amongst the trees
Apollo attended by rosy fingered dawn
Clothed in purple, amaranth and amber
Ascends to a lower angle, a briefer reign.