T.S. Eliot and the tough road to waking up

I've loved Eliot's writing since I first discovered it more than 40 years ago. I circle back to his poetry - an image he would understand and agree with - over and over and am always finding new things that, of course, were always there. To me, this is what makes a work of art great - that I can find greater depths or new insights in it as I grow and my experience makes room in my own consciousness for these insights. I don't know it it's necessary for the artist to be consciously aware of what he is building into the work (I think I'll address that one here some day) because the work, once it's done, stands apart from its creator (another future essay).

Lately I've been reading "Four Quartets" a collection of four poems with linked themes published in the early 1940s. It's his last major collection and led to his being awarded a Nobel Prize.

The poems are full of archetypal, mythical, and Christian mystical references, things that sound scary and off-putting to a casual reader. But if you can accept the truth that you will probably never understand all the references and are willing to take the poetry on with whatever you have to bring to bear, you may be surprised and pleased at how much beauty and wisdom is there before you.

I am, like all human beings, going through growth and challenges, things that test and stretch me, every day. I dipped into "East Coker", the second of the poems, looking for a reference that I half-remembered. Here is what I found:

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.
[lines 136-146]

What wisdom. What beautiful, scary wisdom! What is your friend and your tool at one point along your path can trap you at that point. To arrive where you are - to become awake to yourself and the truths about yourself and your circumstances - you have to go through a kind of stripping down, a kind of death that prunes away all that is false or worn out, no matter how dear it once was to you.

And so, the wounded surgeon's steel, with sharp compassion, cuts us to heal us.

Sleep is so comfortable and so comforting. I could easily dream my life away, distracted by the daydreams of the cooked-up indignation of the news media, the day-to-day urgent trivia, the silly battles that we fight for reasons we don't know (another poet - Matthew Arnold - wrote of ignorant armies clashing by night), little luxuries, and - if I'm lucky enough to earn the money for them - big luxuries. I might even sleep until I die, slipping from a waking stupor into whatever comes next. I feel the pull of that gravity all the time and fight against it, sometimes successfully.

The way wherein there is no ecstasy is a scary one. So are the ways of ignorance and dispossession. The only thing scarier than the cure is the disease.