On Ash Wednesday by Eliot

There is a redemption in poetry, in Eliot’s poetry, the divine or the pursuit of the divine seems human enough. Close by. There’s a synthesis of thought of different religions and philosophy and long deep thinking of ages that comes out beautifully in his poems. There is the human pain, and yet there is a divine solace. A sort of redemption is the word that come closest to perhaps … what perhaps great literature provides. A distance seems to open up in the words that takes care of the world and all its entanglements and yet rise above it. There are all kinds of phrases in his fragmentary poems. So many, so many fragments. Perhaps one finds what one looks for in such fragments. He shores some fragments against ruin. He seeks to learn, to be stilled, to care and not to care. It is the generosity of faith brought to you with the beauty of the language of a poet. In a few phrases and words, he lifts you up, lets you float beyond the world for a bit…

And the thing is this is all by the way, not directly shown perhaps, but just where the images lead you. Perhaps I feel his poems are that way very personal. Each fragment lands inside you with an image that you provide to it… and the way he holds the opposites, the everything, in it, it redeems, the way he describes the Lady, the torn and the completely whole, the distressed and at peace, it is world, the world you and I live in, and redemption is found in this world, so that the heart quietens, finds calmness and stillness, and all questions get redeemed, suspended, change dimensions into nought.

The distance or great spaces that open up in his words is because he holds these paradoxes in his mind perhaps, commits them to word, shows them to you… opens possibilities, opens new spaces to breathe away from the stifling narrowness of the lived world. There perhaps is the beauty of great literature too. To open new possibility spaces. Boundless yet somehow accessible spaces to be in.

He does that again and again in Four Quartets. His words resonate with scriptures, the deep thought of different streams of deep thinking religions… he has absorbed it, lived the question and shared what he sees, that boundless yet accessible space.

He calls it dream imagery.

Perhaps the poem reveals to me that redemption in a few phrases. A few phrases that I see and they promise a sort of boundlessness…to care and not to care, to be still, to be in it yet beyond it. The only way man was envisaged to be…with powers like ours, like human consciousness and wonder about this universe, and this universe, what teams are better created? To care and not to care. To be at that cusp of liminal thought, neither of the world nor of beyond, somewhere at the turning point, a new dimension of consciousness is revealed.

There is joy of a still, quiet, tranquil kind, an at peace heart, which knows, whatever Is, is here. Right here, in this now.

When the mind is free of FOMO of all kinds, it is like water of the stream, where eventually the whole jungle congregates, quietly, peacefully. It is charmed magical state, where time itself sits pooled and still, at its feet, at the poem’s unfolding universe, the boundless space next to it. Where else and what else human?