tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8689671.post965686471938006618..comments2024-01-04T02:20:14.170+01:00Comments on Chamber of Secrets: Burnt Norton and the pool of light - T. S. EliotTheklahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10068144182099086220noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8689671.post-57234593379004985662013-08-13T22:52:23.526+02:002013-08-13T22:52:23.526+02:00I'm not too sure about the 'birthing exper...I'm not too sure about the 'birthing experience' interpretation of Burnt Norton. Undeniably TS Eliot was deeply connected with his mother, and she served as an archetype of all he admired and loved in women. His first marriage was a denial of his hopes, and his second a reconciliation. <br /><br />His allusions and images are drawn from 'emotion recollected in tranquility' - much as one might look at a photograph of the empty pool in an evening with one's album of memories - and a complex synthesis of Christian, Buddhist, Hindu and Quantum Physics views; all of which were familiar to him in considerable depth.<br /><br />Throughout the Quartets there are many approaches towards the still point of the turning world, and both congruent and paradoxical notions of the significance of the components he assembles. He was deliberately constructing images which would give access to people from a wide range of belief systems, so that people approaching from as disparate directions as religious fundamentalism and sceptical atheism could find something useful in his vision of the universe(s).<br /><br />Perhaps turning back to birth might betray Eliot's unconscious sense of the material imperfection of incarnation, but he seems more to strive to express the transcendent value of understanding oneself as being merely an insignificant part of a greater 'reality' (of which human kind cannot bear very much)which is both humbling and exalting at the same time. <br /><br />The experience of being gives us cause to rejoice at having become a part of the 'divinity' of time, space and matter, but also to see that we are, individually, and as a species, no more important than any other assembly of charged particles.<br /><br />Birth is a moment of connection and disconnection - especially for a man, since men do not have the umbilical connection to their children as they did to their mothers and foremothers.<br /><br />Samuel Beckett is good at addressing these issues, and is far more likely to say useful things about birth (from a male viewpoint) than Eliot. My personal reading of the pool is more concerned with the womb as a place of conception than of birth, and I believe that TS Eliot meant that too, since he longed for union far more than for separation.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14529870572480345719noreply@blogger.com