As usual I received the weekend update on my iphone news feed from the New York Times.  I attempted to read over my bowl of cheerios.  Interesting and concise as always, but I felt repulsed.  My mind resisted following the cascade of deepening “troubles.”  Another Black man is shot while fleeing police; demonstrations against systemic racism continue; the President denies being in poor health in the face of observation of his gait at a West Point graduation ceremony; data in reference to race and ethnicity is missing which veils Coronavirus damage to communities of color, and so on…

The stories were just “too much.”  I was not surprised, just dismayed.  I found what I expected in the news feed.  I thought of the T.S. Eliot poem,  Burnt Norton which is the first poem in the series, Four Quartets.  The poem is a meditation upon time.  Time discloses that the end of a thing is present in its beginning.

I thought of a picture taken of my father when he was fourteen years old.  The expression in his eyes is sad, a youthful face, on the cusp of a life “full of promise” as the figure of speech would have it.  Both the beginning and the end is always there in that present, as Eliot writes in a number of elegant expressions in the Burnt Norton poem.

I, am my fathers end, the culmination of all that happened to him, and his responses to those events.  In that picture, in that time past, my father was my future, my coming-to-be in this world.  Though that would occur some years in the future after he met my mother.

This Sunday morning, are featured some pictures taken in the backyard garden.  It is a patch of ground partially shaded by pine trees, upon which grows vegetation in part wild woodland, and in part hybridized flowers.  Flowers are mentioned at points in Burnt Norton.  I especially like Eliot’s mention of the clematis, — how preposterous the expectation, the vine and flower would bend away from the trellis and incline toward the viewer.

So it is with the events around us.  Events must be what

they are, and will not be (cannot be) bent to our favor.

IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

    Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

    The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.