25 March 2007
Tou lógou d’eóntos xunoû, zóousin hoi polloí hos idían éhontes frónisin
This fragment from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus introduces T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece poem Four Seasons, which I have lived with for more than 20 years and am always rediscovering. Heraclitus says that, since the Logos has become dry, the masses live as if they themselves had reason. However, the masses, without enlightenment or awakening, do not have reason, they are only, as Gurdjieff said, machines.
The Logos, or Word, acquired a multitude of metaphysical meanings and connotations in the spiritual world of the Hellenistic eastern Mediterranean, a tradition to which the author of John’s gospel attaches himself and which he appropriates in describing the Messiah, the Son of God, as the Word. Hellenistic commentaries on the Hebrew creation myth identified the Word as the creative power of God in saying “let there be light”.
I don’t know – and I guess no-one does – how much of this later set of meanings can be read back into Heraclitus. But he may have had something like the Stoic concept of the Logos in mind, which is at once the ordering principle of the universe and the divine “spark” which gives humankind its potential for greatness.
The Logos in this sense corresponds to what the Chinese call Qi, the creative, sexual energy that pervades the universe and animates our human bodies, a concept with numerous parallels in many cultures. Between the play of the masculine and feminine principles, Yin and Yang, is the Qi which in fact unifies them.
For John, the Word was made flesh in the body of Jesus, son of Joseph; and for Paul, the coming of the Holy Spirit on the believers made them a part of an immanent new creation, “reborn”. But this metaphysics of division, like all metaphysics, distorts. To be reborn, you must first be born; and birth and rebirth cannot be different, they can only be the same. The Logos is present in all human beings, it is the reason of their birth and the energy which sustains them. But it has become dry. So it is replaced by a variety of heuristic existence strategies which we call reason, but which are inauthentic and not reasonable at all. This is the human condition.
This process of drying out starts very early and proceeds at different paces, but it is usually rapid and definitive. Like a plant denied water for too long, Gurdjieff argues that many people have already died, they are living dead. His message is austere and unpalatable, and it deeply shocks our humanist values. But I fear he is right.
Look around. The world is full of life, in every corner, in myriad ways, and on every level from the cellular to the cosmic. All creatures, all plants, even inanimate things live and rejoice in life. Only in the heart of man is death.
I have long been fascinated, riding the subway to work, by trying to glimpse others’ lives and reality. Even when we know someone very well, their inner reality is shrouded by an epistemological veil which we cannot look under. Of course we do not ask this question of an animal or a plant – somehow their essence is not in question, and we may look past it or ignore it, but, if we try, we can also delve deeply into it and understand it. We can be the plant or the animal, it is not very difficult. But to be someone else is almost impossible.
In the subway, we may wonder how the child becomes the adult and the adult descends into senility and despair. We know this is so, but still it is almost impossible to make a mental map of it. Eye contact is permitted only with children; we do not like others to penetrate our emptiness, nor can we bear to observe the emptiness of others, which mirrors our own. We shroud our faces with newspapers, or, if we can, avoid close proximity with others entirely. Thus we choose, whenever we can, modes of transport and modes of living and being which keep us away from confronting this terrifying social desert at the heart of metropolitan life.
To observe is to be engaged and to be engaged is to change; but observation is impossible without self-observation.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird : human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
T.S. Eliot observes that the pool is dry, so dry that it seems like it has not seen water for years or decades. Nonetheless, simple sunlight is ready to fill it. This brings about a rising of the Qi, of Kundalini, almost imperceptibly as it floats on the surface of the essential nature of life. The image of the lotus is not accidental: Eliot well knows the Sanskrit scriptures in which enlightenment is metaphorically compared to the opening of a thousand-petalled lotus. Enlightenment brings radiance to the complexion of the Buddha.
The pool is quickly filled, but as quickly emptied; the mere passing of a cloud before the sun is sufficient to dispel the moment of enlightenment, no longer to return. This moment of authenticity is as much as the human spirit is able to bear. We must immediately discard it. The bird has led us there, and now he bids us leave. He is the fickle voice of our conscience:
Du holdes Vöglein! Dich hört’ ich noch nie: bist du im Wald hier daheim? Verstünd’ ich sein süsses Stammeln! Gewiss sagt’ es mir was, vielleicht von der lieben Mutter?
For the first time in the forest, Siegfried hears the voice of the bird and sets about mimicking it on his horn. In doing so, he awakens the dragon which he must slay. This ancient, deathly dragon whose sole raison d’être is to guard a treasure of no use to him. And this dragon is, of course, Siegfried himself, he is of his own making. But the raw power of life, strength and youth, must overpower these monsters who keep us in thrall.
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchantment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
Eliot seeks the dance at the still point of the turning world. The dance which, through freedom from “practical desire”, from “action and suffering” and from “the inner and the outer compulsion”, leads us to enlightenment and allows us to fill the pool and to keep it full. The “enchantment” of past and future which we relate to our linear experience of life prevents us from living in the infinity of the present moment. But we are not to flee life, to reject its linearity, its seasons, its rise and fall, its contingency. Instead, Eliot says, we must embrace life because it is only by so doing that we can reach those sublime moments which bring us to infinity. Those moments we all have and remember, when we were really alive : those fleeting memories engraved on our psyches for ever in those rare moments when the clouds dissipated and the sun shone. And those moments, seemingly in time, are in fact eternal, as present now as then. This we also know – those moments are the rare glimpses of reality in the sea of our slumbering existence.
These, dear readers (if I have any), are just random starting points; I could have chosen any. All human experience is consistent and it all points in one direction. It does not matter where you start or what you do, what matters is only that you live your life consciously, what matters is only that you recognize what you know. Do not flee it. Do not be afraid of it. Listen to the bird and follow.
In light and love,
Sean