The Geometry of Little Gidding

~Daniel Albright

Memory recalls not the intended object of an image or but a feeling associated
with a given image or event think of recalling the gets burg address or the last
presidential debate, the feeling

metaphor for feelings

so when you tell an audience the feeling there is no connection between the
image thats created and the affective resonance

Language makes the real>

In his great essay on Ben Jonson (1919), Eliot distinguishes the hard
integrity of Jonsons fictive worlds from the flashier but shallower worlds of
Beaumont and Fletcher. Eliot quotes the following lines from Fletchers The
Faithful Shepherdess (circa 1608-9):

Hair woven in many a curious warp,

Able in endless error to enfold
The wandering soul;

Eliot refers to these lines as cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand:
Detached from its context, this looks like the verse of the greater poets; just as
lines of Jonson, detached from their context, look like inflated or empty fustian.
But the evocative quality of the verse of Beaumont and Fletcher depends upon a
clever appeal to emotions and associations which they have not themselves
grasped; it is hollow. It is superficial with a vacuum behind it; the superficies of
Jonson is solid. We cannot call a man's work superficial when it is the creation
of a world (The Sacred Wood, p. 116)

So, for Eliot, Beaumont and Fletcher blow iridescent bubbles of verse that
poof into nonentity when carefully studied; Jonsons plain, even rough-hewn
verbal surfaces contain a reliable universe, a world that will stand. But, as Eliot
follows his line of speculation, he seems to become a little uneasy about this
solidity of being: he finds something odd, askew, really wrong, in the constitution
of Jonsons play-world: Jonsons characters conform to the logic of the emotions
of their world. It is a world like Lobatchevskys; the worlds created by artists like
Jonson are like systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They are not fancy,
because they have a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world,
because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it. (SW, pp. 116-
17)

But if Eliot was uneasy about Jonson, he was even uneasier about his
own description of Jonson, since he deleted this sentence when reprinting this
essay in Selected Essays.

But there is something deeply non-Euclidean about Eliots whole canon,

from beginning to end, as Ill try to show.

Ben Jonson, a fairly early essay, restates in less philosophical prose

some of the ideas in Eliots Ph.D. dissertation, a somewhat uninviting book
published under the quite uninviting title Knowledge and Experience in the
Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. The dissertation makes the unusual claim that
nothing you can say or think can be, with any confidence, called unrealnot
even such a nonexistent thing as a chimera or the present King of France, not
even such a stupendous absurdity as a round square:

the round square is also real. It is not unreal, for there is no reality to
which it should correspond and does not.
(Knowledge and Experience, p. 55; cf. p. 135)

If unreality is really real, it is also true, for Eliot, that reality is really unreal:
Reality contains irreducible contradictions and irreconcilable points of view. (KE,
p. 112)

Eliot, then, doesnt believe that there exists a criterion for distinguishing
the real from the unreal: the universe is always delaminating into a crumpled pile
of incommensurable worlds, indifferently real or unreal as you choose. Some of
these worlds may contain only quadrilateral squares; some especially muddled
worlds may contain only round squares. For some worlds, the law of gravity may
not apply; a man falling up is just as real as a man falling down. But all the
worlds are one world, because every assertion you can make, no matter how
preposterous, is truetrue for the world in which you and I actually live.

Eliot realized that practical considerations may require us to reject

unicorns and round squares, but he believed that these practical considerations
have no metaphysical or philosophical standing.

Another way to express this: there is no set of axioms, however poorly

fitted together, that doesnt constitute a valid geometry.

I will now say something about how non-Euclidean geometry worksyou

may already know all this, but maybe it would be good to describe it a bit. Euclid
constructed his geometry from a small number of axiomsstatements that
cannot be proved in themselves, and do not imply one another, but from which
an array of internally consistent theorems can be derived. Most of these axioms
are simple and unobjectionable, such as the first one, saying that two points can
be connected by a straight line. But the fifth axiom, known as the parallel
postulate, is different, and its awkwardness troubled Euclid himself, not to
mention his contemporaries and later mathematicians:

If a straight line falling on two straight lines make the interior angles on the
same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if produced
indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right
angles.

The old geometers spent a good deal of effort trying to discover whether
this might not be theorem rather than axiomthat is, whether you could prove it
from the other axioms, without listing it as an axiom unto itself. But this could not
be done. Another approach was to find whether this axiom could be expressed
in easier languagethe most famous of these is Playfairs axiom, which is
logically equivalent to Euclids parallel postulate:

Through a point not on a given straight line, at most one line can be drawn that
never meets the given line.

This seems intuitively right for two-dimensional space, and is certainly

useful, but it doesnt seem intuitively right in just the same way that the axiom
that two points can be connected by a straight line is intuitively right. So,
mathematicians continued to scratch this annoying itch.

Starting with the eleventh-century Arabian Ibn al-Haytham, geometers

tried to attack the parallel postulate with a procedure called proof by
contradiction: that is, to assume that the parallel postulate was untrue, and see
whether a logical contradiction developed by its interaction with the other axioms.
This seems like a good test for the necessity of the parallel postulate: take
Playfairs axiom and negate it:

Through a point not on a given straight line, no line can be drawn that never
meets the given line.

Or, another way of negating it:

Through a point not on a given straight line, more than one line can be drawn
that never meets the given line.

If you discover that the whole system of geometry collapses, then obviously the
parallel postulate is necessary to the smooth functioning of mathematics, and
you neednt bother yourself further in thinking about it.

But around 1830 Bolyai and Lobachevsky published papers that showed,
consternatingly enough, that the whole system of geometry never collapses: non-
Euclidean geometries work just as well as Euclids geometry. If you imagine a
two-dimensional space that is curved in a certain way, rather like a inside of a
bowl, we find ourselves in a situation in which a negated version of Playfairs
axiom yields a logically consistent system:

Through a point not on a given straight line, an infinite number of lines can
be drawn that never meets the given line.

This is called hyperbolic geometry. The technical term for these newly-
drawn lines is ultraparallels, since theyre not parallel in the Euclidean sense, in
that
they dont remain a constant distance from the given line: they swoop upward
from both sides of the given point.

On the other hand, if we consider a two-dimensional space shaped like

the surface of a sphere, we find ourselves in a situation where the other negated
version of Playfairs axiom holds true:
Through a point not on a given straight line, no line can be drawn that never
meets the given line.

This is easier to understand: consider a longitudinal line, from the earths

north pole to the south pole, passing, say, through Quito, Ecuador. Now
consider a point not on that line but also on the equator, say the Galpagos
island of Isabela. If you draw a line from Quito to Isabela, that line will be exactly
perpendicular to both the longitudinal line that goes through Quito and the one
that goes through Isabelaright angles on all sides. So if we were in Euclidean
space we would have two parallel lines. But in this convex space they arent
parallel at allin fact they will meet at both the north pole and the south pole, just
as all longitudinal lines meet there. So two lines constructed as parallels in fact
always intersect, a statement that would make Euclids head ache, since the
concept of a curved but two-dimensional space was alien to him.

This is called elliptical geometry. For the purposes of todays talk its
important to remember these two terms: hyperbolic geometry, where there are an
infinite number of parallels that pass through a given point, and elliptical
geometry, the spherical sort, in which no parallels can be constructed through a
given point. All this may sound like a sterile exercise in numerical vanities, but
its not: for one thing, we live in a universe in which space cant be described by
Euclidean geometry, but only by hyperbolic geometry, since Einsteinian relativity
shows that stars deform the space around them, make it sag into concavities of
the sort that generate way too many parallel lines.

Back to Eliot. Im asking myself whether the boggles, the deformed

spaces, of Eliots philosophy and poetry might in any way be described by
hyperbolic or elliptical geometry. I suppose that the spaces you find in his
dissertation, and in the poetry written about the time of his dissertation, are
almost unthinkably odd because they are non-Euclidean, in fact hyperbolic: this
is not the only sort of connection that can be made between Eliots relativity and
Einsteins. Consider the famous footnote from The Waste Land, citing F. H.
Bradley, the philosopher whose radical idealism lay behind Eliots dissertation:
Cf. . . . F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346. My external sensations
are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case
my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with
all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . .
In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for
each is peculiar and private to that soul. (CP, p. 75; cf. KE, p. 203)
I live in a complete but impermeable world; I assume that each of you in the
audience, like every human being on earth, also lives in such a world. In these
pinched-shut universes, every element is identical, and yet no element can be
shared. Consider any object that is common to our worlds, for example the
lectern behind which Im speaking. Its there for you, and its there for me, and
its the same lectern for each of us, and yet there is no connection between your
lectern and mine, no basis for genuine comparing or contrasting, because each
of us is drifting through existence in an opaque bubble. Through this point there
pass an infinite number of world-lines, since the lectern is one and the same
lectern for each of us, and yet your world-line will never cross my world-line; they
are strict ultraparallels. From this lectern your world-line and my world-line push
apart from one another, flee from one another, bend away from one another in
the sort of curve known as a hyperbola. There are as many worlds as there are
human beings, and though we may yearn for them to touch, they never will.

Reality, then, is the set of all these endlessly diverging world-lines, for your world
and my world and everyone elses world keep moving apart, like the stars in the
expanding cosmos that Lematre and Hubble would describe in the late 1920s.
This is why, as Eliot put it in his dissertation, reality contains irreducible
contradictions and irreconcilable points of view.

But I think that as Eliot moves toward a Christian understanding of things, he

moves away from hyperbolic geometry to something else.

For one thing, the concept of a base line changes. In the earlier poetry, the
poets own slushy pulp universe, full of chimeras and round squares and upside-
down towers, constitutes a world-line, from which all other world-lines fly away at
every point where a common element might be thought to exist. The more-or-
less real women who talk of Michelangelo dont talk to me; the more-or-less
unreal mermaids who comb the waves hair dont sing to me. But in the later
poetry the number of universes starts to dwindle, often down to two: a place
where I live and a place where I dont. In The Hollow Men, for example, the
scarecrow populace lives on a shattered planet lit by a fading star; but, with all
the fervor in their straw heads, they pray that there exists a somewhere else,
deaths other Kingdom they call it, a paradiso that is a multifoliate rose:
III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead mans hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In deaths other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places

We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of deaths twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

Straw men lost in a stone world, broken-jawed men lost in a world that looks like
a broken jaw, they pray to a completely absent being, a deus absconditus. Their
vain prayers are a surrogate for voices of human intimacy, unspoken and
unspeakable voiceslips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone. These
lines are derived from an 1865 poem by James Thomson, titled simply Art:
Singing is sweet; but be sure of this,
Lips only sing when they cannot kiss.

Did he ever suspire a tender lay

While her presence took his breath away?
Had his fingers been able to toy with her hair
Would they have then written the verses fair?

Had she let his arm steal round her waist

Would the lovely portrait yet be traced?
Since he could not embrace it flushed and warm
He has carved in stone the perfect form.
Statues and pictures and verse may be grand,
But they are not the Life for which they stand.
In a Bradleyan universe where each ghost lives in a ghost world, fleeing
continually from every other ghosts ghost world, the ghosts want to kiss, and
their desire for kissing hardens into a desire for stone.

Unreal creatures on a defective earth, the hollow men dream of a real place in
which they themselves could be real, a place beyond their understanding, almost
beyond their capacity to dream. This becomes a normal model in the Christian
poems that follow: there is a base line, fixed and reliable; but the world of human
experience seems parallel to it, and we are exasperated that it teases us and
remains out of our grasp. We would like to pull it down to our world-line or world-
planethis would constitute realization, that is, salvation, for only the saved
possess reality. But this is difficult, though maybe not impossible: there are
moments at the worlds end when our unreal world, and the real world that is
known through images of strange and elusive beauty (a transitory blossom of
snow) or of formed energy (a flame shaped like a rose), will intersect. The
Christian hope is that the universe is an elliptical geometry where there are no
parallels: all worlds will ultimately meet.

An elliptical geometry is a geometry based on a sphere, and the sphere

dominates the spatial imagination of the later Eliot. When we teach Eliot, we all, I
guess, quote the line about the still point of the turning world. But, as weve seen,
the North and South Poles have a specially intense meaning in the non-
Euclidean geometry: they are the two points where all the parallels meet. The
poet of Four Quartets is an explorer, and ultimately he is Peary or Amundsen,
seeking that odd point where every step is a step in one direction, for the spatial
coordinates of the rest of the map no longer make sense. Or maybe it would be
better to compare him not to Amundsen but to Scott, for, having found the still
point, he cant really hope to return to the waste sad time, the waste sad place,
stretching before and after.
Eliots Christian fascination with the North is anticipated by Kierkegaard:
There is much talk these days about an expedition to the North Pole, an
undertaking involving extreme exertion and danger. Now suppose that we had
gotten the idea into our heads that taking part in such an expedition had
significance for our eternal salvation. And let us assume that the clergy have also
gotten into the affair and now are going to help us (out of love!). It is perfectly
clear that in order to take part in such a North Pole expedition a person must first
of all (if he lives in Europe) leave Europe, his home. Then he must travel a long
way north before there can be any question of a North Pole expedition, which
can be assumed to begin only with dangers and the initial exertion.

The clergy would make use of this. They know, of course, that those who would
actually make the strenuous and dangerous journey will be few, an insufficient
number to supply a living for the many pastors with their families. Consequently
they change the terms. It now becomes a matter of changing North Pole
expedition to an effort in the direction of such a North Pole expedition and then
to babble on about it to those who pay money to listen.
(http://members.optushome.com.au/davidquinn000/Kierkegaard/Kierkegaard02.h
tml)
I think that Eliot is uneasy about his own polar expeditions for exactly the reason
that Kierkegaard specifies: they may turn out to be, not heroic treks to the end of
the earth, but more-or-less praiseworthy attempts to make a more-or-less good
faith journey to, say, the Outer Hebrides, in the hope that reaching the Outer
Hebrides will be just as good as getting to the North Pole. These anxieties
about the touching-places of the timeless with time manifest themselves in three
domains: imagery, syntax, and drama.

First imagery. When Eliot imagines the place where the parallel lines of our
unreal world and Gods real world intersect, his imagery tends to become
strained and convolutedas must happen when a poet tries to imagine the
unimaginable. Even his most beautiful images tend to have disquieting aspects.
I think that there is an unstated anxiety in Eliots Christian work that the hints and
guesses of some supernatural splendor, the childrens voices in the tree, the wild
strawberry and winter lightning, may actually be vain or even hellish. In other
word, it is possible that the whole issue of Euclidean and non-Euclidean
geometry is moot, because there are no points outside our commonplace world
for any lines to be generated, either parallel or not parallel.

One of the earliest examples of the moments bienheureux of Four Quartets can
be found in Ash-Wednesday:
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
But the resemblance is disturbing, because the bent golden-rod and the cry of
quail seem uncomfortably proximate to the empty forms between the ivory gates,
the gates of false dreams according to Homer and Virgil. The beautiful
tantalizing images may turn out to be fakes of transcendence, possibly
everywhere in Eliots work. Four Quartets was originally entitled Kensington
Quartets, and the respectable British neighborhood may be as close as Eliot gets
to the North Pole.

Second, syntax. The evolution of Eliots linguistics is one of the most fascinating
areas of Eliot studies. If youre trying to write English sentences that are faithful
to the ontology of Bradleys philosophy, grammatical divisions such as subject
and predicate are no longer appropriate. St. Narcissus, for example, is always
both the toucher and the touched: he is like a comedian who turns his back to the
audience and caresses his shoulder-blades as if someone else were fondling
him:
Then he knew that he had been a fish
With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers . . .
Then he had been a young girl
Caught in the woods by a drunken old man
Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness . . .
("The Death of St. Narcissus [1915; 1967], PWEY, pp. 29-30)
Narcissus is both a universal subject and a universal object. The same is true of
the murderer whom Sweeney describes in Sweeney Agonistes:
Well he kept her there in a bath
With a gallon of lysol in a bath . . .
He didn't know if he was alive
and the girl was dead
He didn't know if the girl was alive
and he was dead
He didn't know if they both were alive
or both were dead . . .
Death is life and life is death
I gotta use words when I talk to you (CP, pp. 122-23)
The sentence man kills woman is identical with the sentence woman kills man: all
words are nominative and accusative at the same time.

This destruction of syntax was something that Eliot found in the more
metaphysically adventurous nineteenth-century poets. Swinburnes poem
Hertha (1871) systematically scrambles the actor and the acted-upon: the poet
abuts the pronoun I against various nouns, to create a universe of predicate
nominatives to the universal First Person:
I am that which began;
Out of me the years roll;
Out of me God and man . . .
 I the mark that is missed,
And the arrows that miss . . .
The search, and the sought, and the seeker, the soul and the body that
is. . . .

I the grain and the furrow,

The plow-cloven clod
And the plowshare drawn thorough,
The germ and the sod,
The deed and the doer, the seed and the sower, the dust which is
God. . . .
In his essay on Swinburne, Eliot describes such poetry as an objectless verbality,
words like orchids feeding on thin air, surviving without roots:
The poetry is not morbid, it is not erotic, it is not destructive. . . . The morbidity is
not of human feeling but of language. Language in a healthy state presents the
object, is so close to the object that the two are identified.
They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object
has ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning,
because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent life of
atmospheric nourishment. . . . Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively
and consistently among words as Swinburne. (SE, p. 285 [1920])
But, read in the light of the dissertation that Eliot wrote five years before, the
Swinburne essay is clearly describing a Bradleyan reality where round squares
are just as real as chairs and tablesSwinburne, it seems, is F. H. Bradleys
dream poet, blowing huge private world-bubbles billowing off into non-entity.

Another means of destroying the referential solidity of language is to create

extremely vague subjects, such as pronouns without antecedents, so that the
sentence seems to circle around some algebraic x that remains wholly indefinite.
If Eliot learned the subject-object confusion strategies from poets like Swinburne,
he learned the strategy of antecedentlessness, so vivid in The Hollow Men,
from poets like Coleridge:
The sole true SomethingThis! In Limbos Den
It frightens Ghosts, as here ghosts frighten men .
Thence crossd unseizdand shall some fated hour
Be pulverized by Demogorgons power,
And given as poison to annihilate souls
Even now it shrinks themthey shrink in as Moles
(Natures mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground)
Creep back from Lightthen listen for its sound;
See but to dread, and dread they know not why
The natural alien of their negative eye. (Limbo, probably from the 1810s)
Coleridge describes Limbo as if his own eye, his own thought processes, were as
degenerate as the thing he describes; the whole poem is composed in an
exceedingly nervous, jerky fashion, as if the poets grasp of his subject were
shaky, reeling, clonic. Limbo infects the observer with its own garbledness. If this
were a drawing and not a poem, we would note that the pencil scarcely touched
the paper yet made demented zigzags, smudges, scrawls. Limbo is the kingdom
of the unimaginable, and it cannot tolerate any image. Limbo is an antiworld, like
deaths dream kingdom in The Hollow Men, a place in which the critical
categories of our universe, time and space, shrivel and grow dim. And the
prettinesses in the The Hollow Menthe multifoliate rose, the perpetual star
may turn out to nothings created by blind eyes: allegations of possible relief with
no purchase in reality.

Eliot felt close to Coleridge, closer than he liked. At the end of a 1932 lecture
series Eliot obliquely described himself as a hollow man, by quoting the James
Thomson poem to which The Hollow Men alludes:
If, as James Thomson observed, lips only sing when they cannot kiss, it may
also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing. I am content to leave my
theorizing about poetry at this point. The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me
from the shadows.
Eliot feared that he would become another Coleridge, whose creativity dwindled
as he lost himself in critical and philosophical speculation, lost himself in a limbo
of his own devising.

In the 1930s Eliot fought against objectless and asyntactical language by various
bold assertions of discriminating force, notably Thomas Beckets opening speech
in Murder in the Cathedral:
You know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.
You know and do not know, that action is suffering,
And the suffering action. Neither does the agent suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
In an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still.
This is paradoxical but lucid: the actor and the acted-upon (that is, the sufferer)
are clearly distinguishedthe actor doesnt suffer, nor does sufferer act
although they are transfixed, transfigured, into a single pattern when studied from
a great enough distance. They are fully interdependent: action entails suffering,
and suffering action. We are far from St. Narcissus, for the wheel of acting and
being acted-on has a still point, where the lower world touches the higher
where the parallels meet. Thomass speech curves outward into a healthy
sphere, whereas Narcissus is involute, shut up within the closed surfaces of
negative space. In the non-Euclidean domains of Eliots imagination, hyperbolic
syntax is confused, elliptical syntax paradoxical. One destroys meaning through
endless subject-object reversals and endless chains of copulas (he was a hand
and he was a fish and he was a drunken old man and he was a girl); the other
purifies meaning by mapping it onto larger and larger worlds of discourse, and
then refines meaning by setting ing those worlds spinning. In Thomass speech
action and suffering are distinct, but there is still point where those opposites
converge, where those parallels meet. It is instructive to compare this speech
with another passage from the play, a chorus of the Canterbury women:
I have eaten
Smooth creatures still living, with the strong salt taste of living things
under sea; I
have tasted
The living lobster, the crab, the oyster, the whelk and the prawn; and they
live
and spawn in my bowels, and my bowels dissolve in the light of
dawn. . . .
I have lain on the floor of the sea and breathed with the breathing of the
sea-anemone, swallowed with ingurgitation of the sponge. (CPP,
p. 207)
This is Narcissus-hell, where the subject decomposes into icky invertebrate slush.
If Thomas lost focus, lost the capacity for action, lost precision of speech, he
would join his parishioners on the ocean floor, a pair of ragged claws. Clear
brave sentences have a flimsy foothold in the universe of diseased language, the
word-spew that keeps teeming in Narcissuss purulent imagination; and when the
Fourth Tempter echoes back to Thomas his clear brave sentence about action
and suffering, the whole project of salvation through nice language seems in
danger of collapse.

Weve now discussed imagery and syntax: now Ill end by speak a bit about the
geometry of drama. The word drama comes from a Greek verb meaning to do,
and so one might expect that a drama consists of deeds, events. But what
constitutes an event? One possible definition for an event is a consequential
impinging upon a subjects bodya blow of the fist, a long-awaited kiss, a
swallowing of poison, a rapeor a displacement of an impinging, such as a
curse, a love-letter, or the shocking news of someones death.

In the world of Narcissus, the world of hollow men, there is no such thing as an
event. There may be a frenzied flux of pseudo-events, but since the executioner
and the victim are exactly the same person, nothing can actually happen. Since
there are an infinite number of non-converging parallel lines, nothing that one
characters does can have an real effect on the life of another charactereach
world-line diverges from every other. There are whimpers galore, but
banglessness is the strict law of a universe governed by hyperbolic geometry.

This is why an early play like Sweeney Agonistes has a hole at the center instead
of agon: the story of the murderer and the lysol bath. The thrust of the younger
Eliots dramatic imagination can be illustrated by a little spoof he wrote to Conrad
Aikenimagine that this were the summary of a short play:
. . . life . . . has a sens, if only that
 the torch-bearers, advancing from behind the throne which King
Artaphernes had just vacated, progressed two by two into the centre of the hall.
To the shrill piping of the quowhombom and the muffled rattle of the bass trpaxli
mingled with the plaintive wail of the thirty captive kings, they circled thrice
forwards and thrice backwards, clockwise and counterclockwise, according to the
sacred ritual of the rpat, and finally when the signal was given by the pswhadi or
high priest, they turned a flip flop somersault and disappeared down their own
throats, leaving the assembly in darkness. (L I, p. 146)

The action of this Aztec-Babylonian fable is simply an implosion. The story eats
itself up, leaving nothing behind. In a bookshop in Chengdu I once came across
a translation of Laozis Daodejing which began In the beginning there was
neither being nor nonbeing, a mysterious sentence which has a certain
fragrance of early Eliot about it.

In world governed by elliptical geometry, an event is possible, but only at the

North Pole, the still point of the turning world, where the parallel world-lines of the
characters meet. To find ways of indicating the extreme remoteness of an event
from the world of commonplace life severely taxed Eliots dramatic imagination.
In Murder in the Cathedral, the event is obviously the assassination of Thomas
Becket, which takes place offstage and some 750 years before the plays
premiere. Still, this event is far more immediate and consequential than the
events of the later plays, in which events drift off into rarefied and
phantasmagorical areas of experience. In The Family Reunion Harry is haunted
by the notion that he pushed his wife over the railing of an ocean liner, but isnt
really sure that it actually happened; in The Cocktail Party Edwards mistress
Celia becomes a Christian missionary and suffers a series of unfortunate events:
And then they found her body,
Or at least, they found the traces of it. . . .
It would seem that she must have been crucified
Very near an ant-hill. (CPP, p. 381)
As Lyndall Gordon notes (ENL, p. 175), in the script for the first performance our
people found Celia's decomposed body eaten away by antsits as if Eliot, in
revising the play, kept averting the audiences eyes further from even the
narrative of something actual.

The characters in Eliots plays give every sign of being people with physical
bodies: they drink alcohol, they have children and clandestine lovers. But it is not
easy to believe in them as corporeal presences: its as if their bodies dwelt, so to
speak, at the North Pole, a domain of spiritual ultimates, where concepts like
salvation and damnation have meaning. In some sense they are searching for
their bodies, though they may find them only in various aspects of crucifixion,
formication.

If the word cerebral refers to thinking that is detached from bodily processes,
Eliot is the least cerebral of poets. As he says in a famous essay,
Those who object to the artificiality of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to
look into our hearts and write. But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or
Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the
cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract. (SE, p. 250)
The intestines contribute as much as the brain to the poetic act. For Eliot,
disembodiment is a condition of terror: Gerontion, for example, has lost his ability
to smell, taste, touch, and is therefore metaphysically as well as physically
impotent. Heaven and Hell alike can be approached only through the physical
body. The peculiar genius of Eliot as a playwright was to devise ways of
inventing disconsolate chimeras who glimpse far offstage the passionate bodies
that they might once have possessed or might hope to attain. Eliot figures this
glimpse as a move toward spiritual enlightenment, even heavenly bliss, but I
wonder whether Eliot might not have preferred life in Hell to the no-life of
Prufrock, Gerontion, St. Narcissus.

There is an astonishing passage in the great Dante essay of 1929, where Eliot
speaks of the resurrection of the body, not in terms of happy souls after the Last
Judgment, but in terms of Hell:

Hell, though a state, is a state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only
experienced, by the projection of sensory images, and that the resurrection of the
body has perhaps a deeper meaning than we understand.

It may be that elliptical parallels meet as often in the Inferno as in the Paradiso.
But as another great Modernist wrote, Hell is other people.

And that brings us to Little Gidding:

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
Whem the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart's heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The souls sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in times covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable
Zero summer?

The poem opens with a description of a blessed moment in which a landscape

on earth suddenly takes on the aspect of an extraterrestrial landscape; the whole
winter scene reconfigures itself into a metaphor. We live in an unreal place, but
every so often this sodden world can turn around, become a trope for some
crystalline purity that it itself can never possess. This process of metaphorization
arrests us with a glimpse of a state of being that runs above us, on some
unearthly track. That state of being possess complete generatedness, and
therefore outside the scheme of further generation; it is a transsensuous beauty,
and therefore intuited only when the senses are disabledwhen the eye is
blinded with light, and when there is no earth smell or smell of living thing. A
hedgerow blossoming with snow is a closer metaphor than a hedgerow
blossoming with normal flowers; but still not a very good metaphor, because the
snow itself is transitory, and in the other place nothing is transitory.

There is a difficult passage in the Pauline epistles (I Corinthians 13:12) about

seeing in the transcendental sense: the King James version gives it as For now
we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face; the Vulgate gives it as
Videmus per speculum in enigmate, We see through a mirror in an enigma. In
Four Quartets Eliot shows a strong tendency to approach ultimate things by
means of enigmasthat is, allegories and metaphorsand through a mirror.
Mirror images are backwards, and Eliot seeks what is beyond earth by inverting
or everting every earthly thing. So the earthly and the unearthly seem to be
parallels running in opposite directions, one toward disorder, heat-death,
entropys whimper, the other toward perfection, the multifoliate rose.

Disturbances of the temporal orderroses in late November, tufts of snow that

parody sprays of flowershint at an eternal order; as Goethe puts it, Everything
transitory is but a simile. Yeats liked to speak of Faeryland as an anti-world:
there the lambs are born in November and not in the spring, as he says in The
Hour-Glass; and in his autobiography he remembered that great mystic Madame
Blavatsky taught that there is another globe stuck on to this at the north pole, so
that the earth has really a shape something like a dumbbell (Four Years 19).
Eliots poetry, like Yeatss, is driven by the notion of an anti-earth where
everything partial is made whole, everything corrupt is made pure, everything
contingent is made absolute, everything desired is in fact given; and both Eliot
and Yeats tend to approach this state by means of calculated outrages to the
imagination and to language, as if through destruction of normal patterns of
thought and sensation we can liberate ourselves, at least a little ways, from the
prison to which our minds and bodies confine us. By making our language
deliberately unreal, deliberately not pertinent to any known universe of discourse,
we can both approximate the actual unreality of our condition, and look beyond
the actual unreality to a reality that looks utterly absurd because beheld darkly in
a mirror. Our world is a funhouse with wavy distorting-mirrors everywhere; it is
only by arraying complementary distorting-mirrors can we correct our view. One
of the meanings of the line from East Coker, where you are is where you are
not is, Where you are real is where you dont existthat is, reality obtains in
some mode of being beyond our present life on earth. The only summer worth
having is a summer where the temperature is absolute zero, because only the
absolute is authentic, and only the void can be a satisfactory image of plenum.

The mirror, of course, gets in the way, keeps the two realms separate. World
and anti-world, it seems, can never touch; we may still be in a hyperbolic space
where lines fly apart from the place where they seem to grow close. But maybe,
like Alice, we can go through the mirror and visit the anti-world, or at least the
outer precincts to which our reversing metaphors and our aporias give us inkling
and access.

If we keep saying things along the line of x is not xwhere you are is where you
are not, or zero degrees Fahrenheit, or Kelvin, is a pleasantly hot temperature
we may find ourselves at a point of undecidability where we cant tell the
difference between the world and the anti-world. The anti-world is mysteriously
available in many places, not just in the midwinter spring landscape described at
the poems beginning:
There are other places
Which also are the worlds end, some at the sea jaws,
Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
Here, the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.
Maybe for us there are only three or four blessed moments when the gates of
perception swing open; or maybe we are always standing on a promontory at
finis terrae, staring at some absconded domain of being. Kafka says that
Judgment Day is a court in perpetual session. If grace descends on Eliot as he
tries to wrest his ruined language into the shape of speech, he will find that all his
oxymoronic babblings make up a Pentecost.

Pentecost appears elsewhere in Little Gidding:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one dischage from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
 Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.

Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Incandescent terrorbut that terror, like the burning shirt that human power
cannot remove, leads ultimately to our transfiguration. In Odyssey XI, Odysseus
in hell meets Hercules, who died from the torment caused by the shirt soaked
soaked in the centaurs blood; but Odysseus remembers that this is only
Hercules phantom, for the real Hercules is on Olympus, married to Hebe and
rejoicing in the company of the gods. That is the hope: that the phantom Eliot
glides through England, while elsewhere there might be some other Eliot,
unthinkably real.

Pentecost is a moment when words suddenly possess meaning, when (as Eliot
writes in a triumphant passage in The Dry Salvages) the commonplace abstract
hypothetical little word incarnation suddenly grows flesh, incarnates itself as
Incarnation-with-a-capital-I. And for a moment the speaker of such a word grows
real, right along with the word he speaks. And when such a thing occurs, the
plane of our sodden world and the plane of Christian reality intersect; and this
brings me to the second part of my thesis, that Eliots world-geometry turns
upside-down as he moves from a secular philosopher searching for an Absolute
that he knows he will never find, to a Christian poet seeking images of an
Absolute that he believes to exist whether he can find it or not. As a philosopher
his geometry is hyperbolic; as a Christian poet his geometry is elliptical. We can
draw world-lines through a point not on our world-line, constructed entirely with
right angles; but these proposed parallel world-lines always intersect somewhere
with our own. Formerly, an infinity of parallels; now, no parallels at all. There is
a plane of truth hovering above our present plane of lies; but somehow, though it
always remains in the sky and beyond our grasp, it also manages to touch us, to
make us instinct with it.

When the higher plane buckles, offers us a sense of its presence, it may either
exalt us or depress us or both. There are many examples of exaltation in Four
Quartets: in Burnt Norton, the moment when the leaves full of laughing children,
among the flowers that have the look of flowers that are looked at; in Little
Gidding the moment when the snowy hedges suddenly have the look of flowers.
In the second part of Little Gidding, there is the other sort of moment, in which
we are undone, unstrung, by a revelation of the unreality of our stateI mean
when the ghost visits the poet in the unreal city during the second world war:
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
 To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetimes effort.
First, the cold fricton of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and sould begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of things ill done and done to others harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.
This passage, as superb as any Eliot ever wrote, was for the most part a
rehearsal of the old familiar catalogue of blessed moments: as Helen Gardner
prints in her treasurable The Composition of Four Quartets, originally the ghost
said:
Remember rather the essential moments
That were the times of birth and death and change
The agony and the solitary vigil.
Remember also fear, loathing and hate,
The wild strawberries eaten in the garden,
The walls of Poitiers, and the Anjou wine
But every movement toward exalted glimpses of the real is also a movement
toward disgust with our present unreality, and excoriation of our present unreal
selvesthis is why the poem has a certain manic-depressive feel. That is what
happens when quasi-parallel lines intersect: the poet wishes to leap onto the real
line, but is wretchedly stuck on his present world-line, a line full of gaps and
irrational numbers. The ghost is to some extent the shade of Yeats; to some
extent Eliots own Doppelgnger (So I assumed a double part, and cried / And
heard anothers voice cry); and to some extent the voice of Tradition,
impersonally and intimately addressing the Individual Talent. But maybe there is
another ghost too: at the end of a 1932 lecture series Eliot obliquely described
himself as a hollow man, by quoting the James Thomson poem to which The
Hollow Men alludes:
If, as James Thomson observed, lips only sing when they cannot kiss, it may
also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing. I am content to leave my
theorizing about poetry at this point. The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me
from the shadows.
The ghost in Little Gidding seems a confident, powerful, authoritative speaker;
insofar as he is Yeats, or Tradition, his speech might be said to represent
something unassailable, tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. But
Eliot knew, and identified himself, with other, less competent ghosts, such as that
of Coleridge, whose creativity dwindled as he lost himself in critical and
philosophical speculation, lost himself in a limbo of his own devising.

I think that there is an unstated anxiety in Eliots Christian work that the hints and
guesses of some supernatural splendor, the childrens voices in the tree, the wild
strawberry and winter lightning, may actually be vain or even hellish. In other
word, it is possible that the whole issue of Euclidean and non-Euclidean
geometry is moot, because there are no points outside our commonplace world
for any lines to be generated, either parallel or not parallel.

In Eliots previous work, one of the closest passages to Four Quartets blessed
moments can be found in Ash-Wednesday:
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
But the resemblance is disturbing, because the bent golden-rod and the cry of
quail seem uncomfortably proximate to the empty forms between the ivory gates,
the gates of false dreams according to Homer and Virgil. The beautiful
tantalizing images may turn out to be fakes of transcendence, possibly
everywhere in Eliots work.

The ghost in Little Gidding is another worrisome construct. We do not usually

speak of ghosts as heavenly emanations; it is more common to think of ghosts as
denizens of hell, and the ghost in Little Gidding not only locates human life in
hell, where all fruit is shadow fruit and all men are shades, but he also seems to
offer little in the way of consolation or redemption. It is true that he offers a hope
of refining fire, like Dante in the passage quoted at the end of The Waste Land,
but maybe this is only hells dream of purgatory. There is an astonishing
passage in the great Dante essay of 1929, where Eliot speaks of the resurrection
of the body, not in terms of happy souls after the Last Judgment, but in terms of
hell:
Hell, though a state, is a state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only
experienced, by the projection of sensory images, and that the resurrection of the
body has perhaps a deeper meaning than we understand.
Every where in his work wanders through irrationality and absurdity, round
squares, the empty forms generated by blind eyes. I wonder whether Eliot,
despite his fervent prayers, was ever Christian in his imagination. Sin was
behovely beyond his dreams.
Nowhere is Eliot really sure that his non-Euclidean geometry is elliptical; the fear
of the hyperbolic, the terror that all lines are diverging parallels, haunts his work
from beginning to end. The ghost in Little Gidding speaks of the cold friction of
expiring senseadvises the poet to detach himself from the sensuous world,
where all fruit is shadow fruit. But

that Hell is not a place but a state; that man is damned or blessed in the
creatures of his imagination as well as in men who have actually lived; and that
Hell, though a state, is a state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only
experienced, by the projection of sensory images, and that the resurrection of the
body has perhaps a deeper meaning than we understand.