A couple of months ago I was invited to speak at the Oxford Pastorate’s Stella Aldwinckle brunch, a now yearly event for postgraduates and early career academics (named after the Pastorate’s mid-century chaplain who founded the University of Oxford’s Socratic Club, inviting C.S. Lewis to become its President). Each event has taken a twentieth-century author and thinker as the starting point for a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation on a topic connecting the big questions of life to our everyday work and thinking in the academy.
I spoke on T.S. Eliot, the poet, playwright, and critic, focusing on his wartime masterwork, the Four Quartets, and asking: what does it mean to be people of vision, living and thinking well through times of uncertainty and difficulty?
The Quartets are a touchstone of my thought life in a number of ways, a poetic and philosophical landscape I return to regularly. So it was exciting, though challenging, to be able to explore how Eliot’s erudite, sometimes dense poetry can give us not only aesthetic pleasure or academic challenge, but real pathways towards shaping ourselves and our lives.
People of vision?
In a theme I had also been considering in a sermon on Ezekiel and Revelation for my college chapel, I set up this definition of vision:
the capability to move in our understanding between the ordinary and the extraordinary, with the latter enabled to realign the former.
Visionaries, in this sense, do not see something else than what’s in front of them, they see through ordinary reality to its full significance and complexity. Most of us don’t experience ‘visions’ in the sense of a supernatural intervention into our understanding. Instead, vision can be a capacity or habit of thought and practice, one we develop in ourselves through specific forms of attention.
Embracing disrupted perception
Poetry is one means of cultivating this kind of vision, in part through defamiliarization – a technical term coined by the early twentieth-century Russian theorist Victor Shklovsky. It refers to the power of particular uses of language to jolt us out of the everyday, complacent approximations of things which we use as our primary means of understanding, into a deeper or more nuanced appreciation, enabled by a slower, disrupted form of perception.
The Quartets use this technique on several levels. In part, Eliot is building on the radical modernist poetics of fragmentation which characterised his earlier poetry, such as The Waste Land. But his mature poetics go further and deeper than this deconstructive impulse, seeking a way through to reintegration. The Quartets witness powerfully to the changed spiritual and philosophical outlook of Eliot’s middle age, which flowed out of a thoroughgoing conversion to Anglican Christianity and many other personal and social dislocations in the ensuing years.
The first poem of the Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’, could be understood as one long exercise in defamiliarization. Its core image stems from a visit Eliot made in 1934 to the eponymous country house in the Cotswolds, and specifically to the centre of its rose garden, a moment he explores from fractally expanding perspectives:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
[…]
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
There is always the sense that something is out of sight: though the ‘moment in the rose garden’ offers a unique flash of integrating vision, it’s incomplete. That feeling suffuses the Quartets as a whole. Here’s a portion of the third poem, ‘The Dry Salvages’:
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
[…]
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying
Living in the middle
Eliot sees himself, in these poems, very much ‘in the middle way’, a quotation from the famous opening of the medieval visionary poem, Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s both an acknowledgement of middle age and a recognition that we never see fully, never know fully, amid the limitations of human life. I find Eliot’s perspective compelling in part because of the various disappointments, dead ends, and personal failures that punctuated his life, and his clear awareness of his own inadequacy to write a narrative that redeemed and justified them all. Witness the next few lines from the Dry Salvages:
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.
Despite his sometimes dourly realist view of human capacity, Eliot presents us with faith for the future, for a point of integration and understanding which is not graspable yet but is still certain. That’s where we eventually arrive – with the help of mystics as diverse as St John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich – in these famous lines from the final of the Quartets, ‘Little Gidding’:
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Practising vision
True vision will come through re-vision: a practice of return, of spiral or palimpsest, looking and looking again as a practice, in the moment and over our whole lives. Wisdom, Eliot shows us, comes through cultivation of an attentiveness with humility, the knowledge we need to look again and will keep on needing this no matter how learned and experienced we grow.
As I said to the gathered participants at the Stella Aldwinckle brunch, this applies to us as academics very acutely, but it’s a personal challenge that goes well beyond the life of the mind. Vision turns out not to be first of all a special gift or intervention, but a habit of patient attention – to history, to the natural world, to other people, even to ourselves. That’s not only an academic methodology but a way of life.
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