Reflections on Lockdown, with some help from T.S. Eliot

How a poem from 80 years ago helped frame my thoughts on desolation, death, and rebirth in a time of COVID-19

My favorite poem(s), that I try to read at least once every year around Easter time, is T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Every time I read them, I: #1) feel certain almost all of it is going right the heck over my head, but #2) also understand it in new or fresh ways. Like all good poetry, the Quartets reward repeat visits.

This year, I was NOT READY for the fresh mindf*** (I mean that in the best sense) that would shatter over me on reread, and have me going, “Hey, T.S., you time traveling or what??”

A key theme in the poem, to completely butcher Eliot and thousands of years of philosophical thought, is that all of history is contained in the present moment, that historical patterns and wisdom are both repeated but also brought to completely new meaning, in the present moment. And boy did that bear out today, as I read words that spoke beautifully about the time we’re in right now — written approximately 80 years ago.

Poetry For a World That Feels it Will Never Be the Same.

The poems were published right before and during WWII, and reflect a world that was facing global destruction and the end of everything people knew. We aren’t facing anything like WWII right now, but we are facing a global pandemic that has us all on our heels, facing something we’ve never faced before, and not knowing what the world might look like when it’s over. I was astonished at how remarkably Eliot’s poetry spoke to our time, our fears, our human and earthly needs.

The Quartets are a long and dense read, so I’m pulling out the part that particularly spoke to me today — selections from the 2nd “quartet,” which is titled East Coker, starting in the third section. This particular section speaks to the impermanence of all things, the meaninglessness of all that we build, the death and dark that take all life, and yet it glimpses a sense of hope that death and loss — the ending of things as we know them — are merely an essential part of a longer journey (link to Dumbledore wisdom for my fellow Potterheads).

Many people are writing right now about what this “pause” could mean for us as a society, as humans. Think pieces chronicle: “What habits can I break? What new habits can I make? What things do we want to bring back? What things do we want to end forever?” In the most physical of ways, even as our economic strongholds are crumbling, nature is pushing itself into our consciousness and blurring the margins we’ve drawn — people in India are seeing the Himalayas for the first time in decades as smog recedes, coyotes are migrating across the Golden Gate Bridge — a small sense of rebirth flickers through the devastation on our news feeds.

We are in the middle of a long road ahead. True loss and desolation are on the path, and we should not minimize that. But a truth I believe about the world is that desolation is not the end: Morning will come again, no darkness, no season is eternal.*

With that, please enjoy…

Selections from East Coker:

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.

IV
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind us of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere….

V
…There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business….

Home is where one starts from…
…In my end is my beginning.

And of course let’s not forget how the whole thing ends, in the final piece, Little Gidding, where Eliot reminds us that “to make an end is to make a beginning,” and quotes Julian of Norwich:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.

— — —

*Y’all KNEW I was gonna get a BTS quote in there, HELL YES I WAS!!!!!!!!