An over-advertised drug once led me to change the name of my Eastern Bluebird poem from Sialis, a Latin word for the bird, to Somewhere, suggesting uncertainty. I return now to the truer mood.
08/12:
TWL, Lines 296-306: Epigraphs And Epitaphs
296 ‘My feet are at Moorgate and my heart
297 Under my feet. After the event
298 He wept. He promised “a new start.”
299 I made no comment. What should I resent?’
300 'On Margate Sands.
301 I can connect
302 Nothing with nothing.
303 The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
304 My people humble people who expect
305 Nothing.'
306 la la
296. THE MOORGATE NYMPH: Moorgate is an Underground stop in London’s financial district. This is the second of three Thames-daughters nymphs speaking, suggesting either three separate events or three perspectives of the same event. See note 18 for the general events that set the mood of this poem (the war, the loss of a friend, a troubled marriage), and see note 263 for the possibility of events being out of order. More immediately, and perhaps allegorically, consider the carnality of the event that “undid” the first of the Thames-daughters (line 294), with her knees supine (line 295), and compare this to the second position of one with “heart under my feet,” i.e., on her back. See also the event perceived in the violet hour (line 220), an enactment both foresuffered by Tiresias (lines 243-244) and foresworn by the lovely woman’s half-formed thought: “Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over” (line 252). In the present telling, note that however much thoughts are formed they are left unspoken; likewise, even the nymph’s emotion is reserved, with resentment only half-formed, this as her counterpart weeps and speaks.
298. HE WEPT, HE PROMISED: “He wept” repeats the convalescent’s lament (see line 182: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...”) but also recalls the two word verse after the event of Lazarus’s death: “Jesus wept.” See John 11:35. Jesus had seen Lazarus’s sister Mary weeping and those with her weeping, and this had troubled him (John 11:33). Note that the “he” of line 298 is not necessarily the perpetrator but could be, like Tiresias or Jesus, an observer of the event, or, as in line 360, the one “who walks always beside.”
EPIGRAPHS: By recalling the story of Lazarus, “he wept” returns us to this poem’s opening allusion from the Order of the Burial of the Dead (see note 0.5), and it also conjures the earlier allusion of the Sibyl wishing to die in the poem’s epigraph (note 0.3). This might be considered the poem’s “old start,” and it is comparable to what Eliot had considered as an alternative epigraph, from Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3:
“The horror! The horror!”
But whether one weeps over death, curses life or is horrified over humanity, there is now the hope of a “new start.” Consider the epigraph that starts the Order of the Burial of the Dead, a passage at the heart of the Lazarus event from John 11:26 (note 0.5):
“...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”
And in response to both the weeping and the horror, see Heart of Darkness 3 for Marlow’s comment on Kurtz’s last words:
“Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats ...But it was a victory!” Compare Herman Hesse, A Glimpse of Chaos: The Brothers Karamazov, or The Downfall of Europe (1920; tr. Sydney Schiff):
“Those who cling definitely to the past, those who venerate time-honoured cultural forms, the Knights of a treasured morality, must seek to delay this Downfall and will mourn it inconsolably when it passes. For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning.”
Eliot met Hesse in Switzerland in 1922 and published this translation of Hesse’s essay in the first issue of his magazine The Criterion (October 1922), the same issue in which he offered his debut of The Waste Land.
EPITAPHS: See note 306 for more of this turnaround from beginning to end and end to beginning.
300. RECUPERATION: Margate is the southern England coastal town along a seaside cliff where Eliot, suffering from mental exhaustion, began a course of recuperation in the fall of 1921. He followed this with more formal treatment in Switzerland (see note 182), where he met Herman Hesse (see note 298).
303. BROKENNESS: See note 123 for recurrent images of nothingness, emptiness and brokenness. In this case, broken nails and dirty hands suggest a continuation of the carnality of the nymphs’ event-telling (see note 297). For more broken and dirty nails, see the nails of the corpse-digging dog at line 75.
THE MARGATE NYMPH, third of the three Thames-daughters, has not yet reached the resolution of a new start (see note 298). None of the nymphs have made this connection, and with the Margate nymph’s lines their disconnection and lack of expectation is made even more apparent (see lines 299, 301-302 and 304-305), but their songs, sung at the end of this fire section of songs, are all part of the purgation.
306. FINAL NOTES: The three Thames-daughters’ songs end with a brief “la la” epitaph, a feeble echo of their opening choruses at lines 277-79 and 290-291, uttered with a tone of defeat. The curtain appears to be drawn, even as it is done by the “beneficent spider” (line 408, and see Webster, note 408), who would “make a thin curtain for your epitaphs.” Yet quietly tucked into their songs was that promise of a new start (line 298).
ELIOT’S EPITAPH: Eliot’s hope for a new beginning and his appreciation for Hesse’s end to beginning turnaround (see note 298) would be developed further in his Four Quartets collection (see notes 0.5 and 64). First, from East Coker (1940):
“In my beginning is my end...
...Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure...
...In my end is my beginning.”
Eliot would take the East Coker bookends,“In my beginning is my end... In my end is my beginning,” as his own epitaph.
See also Little Gidding (1942), the final part of Eliot‘s Four Quartets:
“Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.”
Thus, while the conclusion is not yet drawn, even in the nymphs’ songs as they reserve comment and fail to connect or expect, there is hope.
Finally, or not so finally, compare Eliot’s “He wept. He promised...” (Line 298) and Herman Hesse’s “For them the Downfall is the End; for the others, it is the Beginning” (note 298) to the epigraph Dostoevsky chose for his Brother’s Karamazov (note 248), from John 12:24 (note 0.5): “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”
08/13:
The End Of Reason
from Walled Gardens
How can one describe God?
What wins the argument?
I tried reasoning my way to God: it did not work;
How can one know a way that cannot be known?
Reason took me no further than the door,
But in the end God’s presence let me in.
I tried willing the door to open: it would not move.
How can one see a face before it’s shown?
My willfulness had gotten me this far,
But in the end God’s presence let me in.
If reason is incompetent to know its own nature
And will is incapable of knowing itself,
If I don’t seem to know the first thing about knowledge,
Why would I think I could ever know God?
I tried willing myself to God, but I lost my will;
I tried reasoning my way to God, but in the end
it was God’s love and kindness that opened the door;
it was God’s grace and presence that let me in.
08/14:
Reason, Persisting
from Walled Gardens
And the son arose and started walking
back towards his father’s place...
Reason, the traveler, never gets to God:
the traveler’s heart and soul are dust upon the road;
reason’s eyes are dry, unwashed by the love of God,
and blind, unwise to the holiness of God.
Reason, the innocent child, stirs up imagination
out of darkness; the child is moved to discuss eternity
with thoughtfulness and sensuality
until God shows up and sweeps it all away.
Reason, the ambitious bird, takes to the air,
a sparrow claiming the ranks of Gabriel,
but Reason too, like every Gabriel before the Lord,
must one day bow its head and fold its wing.
How can one describe God
if Reason denies that God’s the One,
the step at the start of the journey,
and the image before the dream?
How can one discuss God
if God is just an argument
and heaven is some distant place
beyond the rank and file? O Lone Traveler, stumbling on your wicked soul,
O Raw Youth, caught up in your shallow sense,
O Poor Sparrow, making your way to majesty:
submit yourself to the One without a place.
08/15:
Positure
Once, looking back, my tracks left in the snow
Seemed pigeon-toed and rambling hereandthere
And barely showing where I meant to go
And never really getting anywhere,
So I resolved to walk a straighter line
With better posture and a clearer goal,
And in my mind the tracks I left behind
Were perfect pictures of a pristine soul,
Until, unsatisfied, I turned around
To see my legacy and take account,
Which caused my steps to weave from
edge to edge;
My back re-bent, and I began to sway;
And on my cue, a pigeon on a ledge
Stretched out its sturdy wings
and flew away.
08/16:
Following The Path
from Walled Gardens
A Restatement from David Pendlebury’s Garden
The non-existent have come to serve
at the door of true existence,
nor is it just today that this is so
but since time began
dervishes have come
bereft of wealth and power,
swarming like ants at the door of love.
...No one knows how far it is
from nothingness to God,
but the self will wander right and left
day and night
for years and years
turning around itself like an ox in the mill;
break free from yourself,
free yourself from yourself
and in little time the wandering will cease
and the door will open to you.
08/17:
Sialia Sialis
I
The sun is somewhere in a cloudy sky
And I can’t tell the hour, nor east from west,
But though the dusk my spirit would deny
My body’s telling me it’s time to rest,
And what has carried me these miles beyond
My starting point, that dawn so far away
The fundamental memories are gone,
Would somewhere in the middle of the day
Turn to its history of winding roads
And heaving hills and shifting winds and rain.
But if what breathes can bear the pains and loads
What lives will take each step as gift and gain
And claim the highways leveled and unbending,
And dream the better day of its unending.
II
Somewhere, past the fog, up in the trees,
A bluebird sings its timeless song to me
And to the world of possibilities
Of heaven unsophisticatedly
Descending on a sunless day, a song
So sweet and sad and simple that the air
At once intoxicates and makes me strong,
Uplifts me and abandons me. Somewhere,
I must believe, my destiny awaits,
And at the final turn, this history
Will end and leave its luggage at the gates:
This road, this day, this bird that sings to me,
And all these weary words will cease to be
And I will fly into eternity.
08/18:
Moleskin 4.5: Transplanted
Our second suburban home had been four blocks away from the drainage ditch, and in the summer of twelve we moved even further away, to a place that seemed to be removed from rivers altogether. As before, I don’t remember much about the U-Hauling, maybe because it was mostly Dodge Darting, but oddly I can’t recall anything about the wedding either. We were just suddenly transplanted one suburb south, into a single family home with not much more yard than the townhouse had and with a new person in Dad’s place, someone who also wanted to be called “Dad.” My younger brothers obliged, but I insisted on calling him “Don.” Don was an engineer, and the house was his; he had shared the space with his parents, who were also suddenly transplanted that summer: out with the old, in with the new. Except that Don was old, too, forty four years old, never before married, never had kids. Didn’t have a clue. He was a loving uncle to his sister’s daughter, but that was hardly the same.
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