II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
                                          Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

— excerpt, Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

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Exhausted this morning.  Many arrows of fate continue to rain down.  The enduring trans-generational unfinished business that ignited a Civil War in 1861 remains; the prejudice, oppression of Blacks in particular, and people of color in general continues to infect this society.  In reference to the economics of a livelihood, the factory and the warehouse are contemporary if less obvious iterations of the antebellum Mississippi cotton field. 

Additional unfinished business is the imperial Presidency.  Separation of powers is rendered moot, as congress and the Supreme Court are bent to serve the “might makes right” ideology of the Republican Party.  Regarding these injustices, there’s no end of rationalization, half truth’s, or bald-faced concocted lies, targeted with drum-beat accuracy to ever more receptive minds.  My head spins to hear a candidate for the Supreme Court assert that she would not let her Catholic faith or her personal beliefs affect her judicial decisions.  How would that be possible?

The lines by T. S. Eliot help.  — like a dose of dramamine for motion sickness while standing on the pitching deck of a ocean going vessel.  Human kind considered in it’s glory and abysmal tragedy is precisely like a amalgam of garlic and sapphire gems in the mud.  This tangle of high culture and bloody assertion of power is an extension of the cosmic-scale cause and effect which astronomy and medical science is well acquainted.  Things change, the patterns remain.  The boar hound and the boar will as always, continue in their pursuit.

All of this, subject to observation, because there is a still point, an axis of rotation that makes “the dance” possible.  ‘There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’ 

The poet counsels meditation.  A mindful consideration of the still point, the un-moved source of Being and of humanity’s role, is release from suffering, from the tension, from the terror of this particular place and this distinct time.

Such contemplation allows but a little consciousness, only as much as one could bear.  To be conscious is not to be in time. But,  only through time, time is conquered.  Erhebung, a moment of uprising, elevation, as with a flash of light one ‘sees’ knowing without words that all is as it has to be.

I’ve experienced moments when time has been conquered, and the release from inner and outer compulsion was deeply felt.  Witnessing a sunset over Lake Michigan, or standing behind a drag strip starting line when a fuel car launches in fire and thunder, were some of those times.

What about you?