“Meditations in Fast Times” was a devotional
writing experiment I took up for the Season of Lent in the year 2014. Each day
during the season, I wrote a poem as a meditation, using as my inspiration
and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as
incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the
same as those Eliot used while composing this seminal work and other writing.
The truth about words is that they accumulate through
time, first in the mind, then as markings on clay tablets, then on papyrus, palm
leaves, amalgamations of plant fibers, parchment, vellum, then wood pulp. Words
fill scrolls, palimpsests, books, and electronic storage units. The more basic
truth about words is that their accumulation constitutes the collective memory
of our species, for better and for worse. To the extent that we collect and
care for our accumulations of words, they are our children. Words are also
ancestors, parents and teachers to us; we interact with words in our nightly
dreams and in our daily lives, we share words with one another. Words do not
live by themselves; they live because someone remembers them, references them,
ponders them, speaks them, exchanges them, agrees with them and lives by them, or disagrees and rearranges them to something that could be lived by in a
proper context.
This last notion is vitally important, particularly
in this “digital media era”, in which ownership of words (and everything else),
is constantly at issue. Perhaps the most difficult aspect toward an understanding
about accumulations of words is that they can constitute unique thoughts, in
certain situations, while in others what they express is universal. Day by day,
there are people who want to challenge the notion that one’s innermost thoughts
are private. There are people who want to own the publically expressed thoughts
of people long dead, and to have control over them. This is a deadly impulse. “My
thoughts are not your thoughts; my ways are not your ways”, yet we should be
able to freely exchange ideas and to have these influence our range of ideas
and thinking in a communal way. There is a real threat that ideas will
disappear from the landscape of information available to the average person,
and this goes against everything for which the Encyclopédistes and founders of public libraries stand,
when it comes to literacy, politics and social integrity.
Although the ownership and control of ideas is a
philosophical position that has economic and social implications too deep to
explore in this introduction, I will venture to posit that words and their
accumulation are so fluid that it is impossible to own and control them the way
some people would like. The accumulations of all expressed, notated and stored
thoughts have, to some extent, made us into the people we are, now or at any given
moment. The way in which a person thinks is a direct result of the words that
have been passed on to the individual, throughout a lifetime of parental and
societal nurture, combined with personal and highly individual exploration.
All words lead to all other words. One book is never
enough—to read one is to be led to read another, if not ten or a thousand. It
is very possible that I have, between what is inside my home and garage, a few
thousand books. I may not have read them all (indeed, quite a lot are dry
instructional manuals), but I have certainly consulted most of them, and the
presence of each volume is an indication that I intended to read it, or it was
given to me as a gift. Actually, all the books have been a gift; each is a gift
of time and effort and thought someone else put into a printed accumulation of
words. Literature is the fluid legacy of all thought throughout time.
T.S. Eliot understood this about the legacy of
literature, and in his various writings sought to interact with the legacy, as
well as put his own imprint on it, even to the extent of exerting a
deliberate social influence on the intelligentsia of his time, through his
writing, teaching and publishing activities. In particular, his poetry is an intertextual exploration and internal
thought exercise. His writing is clearly infused with the ideas that came from
a lifetime of reading, and his work references, mostly consciously—although
perhaps also unconsciously—other writing and ideas that he experienced and
admired.
For my own intertextual experiment, I used T.S.
Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” as my
primary source, secondarily considering current events from the newspaper and
other literature that came to mind as I meditated on passages from Eliot’s
seminal work.
The technique I used may be similar to the
technique Eliot used, although he never described it. The first step for me was
to take a copy of “Four Quartets” and annotate it with what I guessed to be
source materials for bits of his text. (Of course, I had read all the texts
that I associated with Eliot’s passages, which is why they would come to mind!)
I also consulted the “Annotations to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” by Servotte and Grene (iUniverse, 2010), Eliot’s
“The Sacred Wood; essays on poetry and criticism” (Barnes and Noble University
Paperbacks, 1966), “T.S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets” by John Xiros
Cooper (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Helen Gardner’s excellent study,
“The Composition of Four Quartets”
(Faber and Faber, 1978), a work that is rather difficult to find, but a copy of
which now rests on one of my shelves at home.
Reading the scriptural texts from the daily office,
I would hit upon one that resonated with a passage from “Four Quartets”, and
the meditations on those passages, often with reference also to an item from
the daily newspaper, resulted in the forty poems that follow. I also annotated
my own work, so that anyone reading it might know what ideas I had included in
my thinking. Taken together, this collected work constitutes a species of
dialectical journal, as well as a spiritual exercise.
Elisabeth T. Eliassen
14 June 2014
Alameda, CA
14 June 2014
Alameda, CA
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To see the first of the 40 poems see this link, and work your way forward through all 40, if you are interested!
http://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2014_03_05_archive.html
