T. S. Eliot's dark night: East Coker, III

T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets. You might have seen me going on about it before.

Today, on this pentecostal national holiday, I got to thinking about this excerpt from "East Coker", the second of four Quartets. There is something incredibly restful and silent and vast about this section of the poem. The darkness Eliot evokes digs itself into me, creating space where it goes.

Emptiness and darkness - we all carry it within. And I don't mean in a negative way. From emptiness comes everything, as we know from the Big Bang.

III

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, 

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, 

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, 

The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, 

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, 

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark, 

And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha 

And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors, 

And cold the sense and lost the motive of action. 

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, 

Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury. 

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

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, 

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed 

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness, 

And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama 

And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away— 

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations 

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence 

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen 

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about; 

Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing— 

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. 

Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. 

The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, 

The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy 

Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony 

Of death and birth. 

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.  

***

"Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury"

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God"

"Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought / So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing"

These are paradoxical sentences, but they are opening a well of wisdom in us, I find. We understand them, as we are humans, not machines working on algorithms and binary codes.
 
I am sinking into this text heart, hue and hide. "The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant" - this always hurls me into a great vastness and makes my chest light up like a starry night's sky. The darkness, emptiness, space and light all at once.

"Oh dark dark dark. They all go into the dark" - yes, we do. And how I cherish it, how restful it is. I particularily like how Eliot doesn't use commas between the three darks, and how he stops there before starting a new sentence. It gives the theme of this section, I think. Quiet yet deep.

The whole of the last bit is only paradox. Perhaps it tells you something anyway?

I am particularly drawn to "In order to arrive at what you are not / You must go through the way in which you are not". It gives me the sense that I am already here, already in place, already arrived at what I believe I am searching for. It gives me glimpses of timelessness and a vastness completely unrelated to space; something outside of it all. And this something is in us all along, and we are in it. 

If you want a musical companion to this dark, silent and deep piece, try Bach's Chaconne. (Not while you're reading, perhaps, but after. Don't want to spoil the rhythm of Eliot's words! - Or the simplicity and complexity of this everunfolding piece of music.)

It surely opens up something in me.