One of the ideas mentioned in passing in the post about the Four Quartets is the Unity of Opposites. This refers to a situation where two things often thought of as opposite are necessary for each other to exist, and so are mutually dependent. As noted in that post, one of the epigraphs to the Four Quartets is Heraclitus’s observation that
the way upwards and the way downwards is one and the same.
Note the verb is ‘is’, not ‘are’ – there is one way, and it runs in both directions. The notion of upwards doesn’t make sense without downwards, and vice versa.
Earthsea
I first encountered this idea (without understanding it as such) at about the age of 9 or 10 in the epigraph to Ursula Le Guin‘s A Wizard of Earthsea:
Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.
– The Creation of Éa
(The Creation of Éa is a song of Earthsea, Le Guin’s fictional archipelago.)
At various points in A Wizard of Earthsea one or another of the characters refers to the unity of opposites, for example by saying ‘to light a candle is to cast a shadow‘ and ‘For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.‘
Silence and speech, dark and light, death and life: all are pairs of opposites that co-constitute each other. Le Guin explores this idea throughout all the Books of Earthsea, perhaps most of all the necessity of death for life to have meaning. In the third book of the series, The Farthest Shore, the character Sparrowhawk, greatest mage of his day, says ‘To refuse death is to refuse life‘ and later ‘Only what is mortal bears life … Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. It is a movement – an eternal becoming.‘
A mathematical analogy
Consider a line extended indefinitely far in both directions, and bend the ends of this line into a circle so that the extremities almost but don’t quite touch each other, as illustrated below:
Each point on the black line (e.g. those marked with black dots) is mapped onto a point on the green circle via a blue line projecting from the top of the circle to the black line (the green dots correspond to the black dots). Moving further along the line in either direction means getting closer to the top of the green circle, but no matter how far we go, we never reach the top of the circle. However, the extremities of the line become closer and closer to each other at the top of the circle even though they are further and further away in relation to the line.
The circle is ‘missing’ the point right at the very top, because the two ends of the line never quite meet no matter how far out we go in both directions. The circle can be completed by adding a single point, called the point at infinity and denoted ∞ without a + or – prefix.
Adding the point at infinity can be interpreted as unifying the opposites, and the point itself represents their unity.
(As an aside for mathematicians: this is an example of the Alexandroff one-point compactification, and contrasts with the two-point compactification of the real line in which two points at infinity are added, +∞ and -∞, one at each end of the line. My Grandad, an academic mathematician, always used to note that the use of +∞ is to distinguish from the ∞ involved in the one-point compactification and so the + sign is not redundant. The one-point compactification generalises to the stereographic projection between the complex plane and the Riemann sphere, and in fact the diagram above can be regarded as a cross-section through the stereographic projection.)
A deeper metaphor
The Matter with Things is the magnum opus of Iain McGilchrist. There is much more to be said about this book (and his earlier work The Master and his Emissary) both of which are truly magnificent, but at the time of writing this post I haven’t quite finished the first of the two volumes in which it is published and so this will have to wait.
As a brief aside in chapter 15, McGilchrist expresses the mathematical analogy above, and then adds a third dimension by recasting the circle as a spiral:
Although paradox can fruitfully be thought of as two ends of a dipole, another way of expressing the coming together of opposites is not in terms of a straight line, but of a curve, prolonging each end until one comes ‘full circle’. However, it may be not so much a case of coming full circle as ‘full spiral’, so to speak. Not that when you go far enough in one direction you arrive precisely where you started from, but that you arrive at a position superimposed on that from which you started, at the next turn of the spiral.
The Matter with Things, Chapter 15 (p. 607)
McGilchrist goes on to quote from Eliot’s Little Gidding:
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.
Little Gidding: V
and notes in relation to this quotation ‘this is why Eliot says, truly, that over a lifetime one keeps arriving at a fresh understanding of what seem to be the same imponderables, the same words, the same set of circumstances, images or ideas‘.
Let us return now to the epigraph from A Wizard of Earthsea quoted at the start of this post, and its final lines ‘Bright the hawk’s flight / on the empty sky.‘
As with all good poetry this can be interpreted in many different ways: before reading the book as making the most of life in the sure and certain foreknowledge of death; after reading it as a reference to the character Sparrowhawk; even, perhaps as alluding to emptiness and the brightness even a tentative and partial understanding of this can bring to life.
In the light of McGilchrist’s spiral metaphor, it’s hard not to think of an additional layer to this, with the hawk’s flight moving from the two-dimensional opposites in the earlier lines of the epigraph (only in silence the word) into the third dimension of the spiral. Thus I have arrived back at the place where I started from, nearly 40 years later at the time of writing this post, but now from a higher vantage point; and if not quite knowing the place fully, then at least understanding it better.
The fourth and final post in this series about ‘fours’ is, fittingly, an introduction to TS Eliot‘s Four Quartets. This is a cycle of four poems, published between 1936 and 1942. Each poem is a quartet in the sense of combining multiple motifs and themes. As Eliot himself put it:
There are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different movements of a symphony or a quartet; there are possibilities of contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter.
Each poem is named after a place, and relates to one of the four classical elements, respectively air (or light), earth, water and fire, as shown in the diagram. There are also some connections between the poems and the four seasons, but these are less clear than the elements. The fourth poem, Little Gidding, stands on its own, and also resolves some of the themes from the other three (indicated by the arrows in the diagram), leading to unification of the Four Quartets as a whole.
Much of the imagery, references and allusions in the Four Quartets are Christian, which might perhaps jar as the fourth post in a set where the other three are about Buddhism. However, in the poems Eliot also had regard to traditions with some things in common with Buddhism. And to my mind there are some similarities between Christian thinking and Buddhism that I hope to draw out in this post.
Each poem has a five-part structure, also used in Eliot’s earlier masterpiece The Waste Land. By way of extremely reductive summary, the first section of each poem relates to time in some way; the second to dissatisfaction; the third to forms of vacancy; the fourth is more lyrical, and more clearly Christian, referring either to part of the Trinity or Mary; and the last section of each poem has regard to language, love, wholeness and salvation.
The Four Quartets were instrumental in Eliot receiving the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature and are arguably his crowning poetic achievement, alongside The Waste Land. As the speech at the Nobel awards ceremony put it:
The purely poetical part of Eliot’s work is not quantitatively great, but as it now stands out against the horizon, it rises from the ocean like a rocky peak and indisputably forms a landmark, sometimes assuming the mystic contours of a cathedral. It is poetry impressed with the stamp of strict responsibility and extraordinary self-discipline, remote from all emotional clichés, concentrated entirely on essential things, stark, granitic, and unadorned, but from time to time illuminated by a sudden ray from the timeless space of miracles and revelations.
From the 1948 Nobel award ceremony speech by Anders Österling
At the time of writing, I have been reading and seeking to understand these poems for over 20 years. They are the only poetic works that I have taken the time to revisit. What keeps me coming back is that the words of the poems seem to transcend language and give me a sense of the ineffable. As Ursula Le Guin put it:
The artist deals in what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
As with fiction, so with poetry; especially so with the Four Quartets.
The text of the Four Quartets is online in several places. My preferred source is here, not least because of the useful notes.
Each line begins with a capital letter, regardless of whether it starts a new sentence or is an enjambment in which a prior sentence continues. To my mind, the enjambment creates a helpfully disorienting effect, in which lines are read as wholes and are then combined with the preceding or succeeding lines to make larger units of thought. It gives a way of reading the text that overlaps with, but is not the same as, the ordinary use of phrases, clauses and sentences, and can be seen as a technical device that helps to transcend language.
I make no attempt to ‘explain’ the poems, or the Four Quartets as a whole: they convey in words what cannot be conveyed in words, and required the skill of a Nobel laureate to do so. However, in an attempt to draw out potentially interesting points of connection with Buddhism, I permit myself several quotations in the discussions of the poems below. Quotations extract words from their context, and thereby deprive them of much of their meaning. This is particularly fraught for the poems making up the Four Quartets, where understanding emerges very gradually from repeated readings of the whole over time. As Eliot said:
The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.
TS Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
Thus I emphasise that this post is merely an introduction. To do them justice, the poems should be read in full and as a whole. There is much interesting commentary available elsewhere.
Burnt Norton
Burnt Norton was published in 1936. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article. It was not originally conceived as the first in a series, but to stand on its own.
Burnt Norton is a manor house in the Cotswolds visited by Eliot with his friend Emily Hale in 1934. Much of the imagery of the poem relates to roses, and this is thought to be inspired by the rose garden at Burnt Norton.
The poem begins with two epigraphs from Heraclitus, translated as:
although logos [knowledge or reason] is common, the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own and the way upwards and the way downwards is one and the same.
The second of these is an example of the unity of opposites. This is present in Taoist thinking, with the clearest example being yin-yang. Jung also used the idea of the unity of (unconscious) opposites in his idea of enantiodromia.
Heraclitus also advocated a doctrine of flux (sometimes expressed concisely as one cannot step in the same river twice). This is very similar to the Buddhist idea of impermanence.
Burnt Norton starts as follows:
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.
This firmly establishes time as a theme, and it recurs throughout the poem. These lines were originally intended for Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedralbut were removed because he (or his producer) considered they lacked drama.
The idea of the present being the only true reality is a feature of many spiritual traditions, including Buddhism. There is a wide-ranging article (on the site Brain Pickings, which has a wealth of interesting material and is highly recommended) discussing Alan Watts’s views on this. That article also touches on the idea of no-self.
But as the poem says towards the end of the first section, human kind / Cannot bear very much reality, and so we often take refuge in memories of the past and anticipation of the future. The poem talks of two kinds of past: what has been (the completed past) and what might have been (the subjunctive past). The subjunctive past is similar to the future, both involve imagination and are a source of attachment, of emotional investment that can lead to suffering in the Buddhist sense. Even the completed past is uncertain given the fallibility of memory, the tendency of the brain not just to forget, but to rewrite history in light of subsequent experiences.
Part of the second section can be interpreted in terms of being released from attachment in the manner of the third Noble Truth:
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.
Concentration without elimination may refer to the Sanskrit samadhi, the eighth element of the Noble Eightfold Way. Similar mental states arise in Christianity too, for example hesychasm.
The classical element is air (in a slightly wider sense that includes light):
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light
The lotos (or lotus) appears as a symbol in several religions, including Buddhism, and represents escaping from defilement: the flowers have their roots in mud, but open into beauty. The spelling lotos is lexically closer to logos, the Word that was in the beginning.
The last section talks frankly of the difficulties of expressing some things in language:
Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still.
Given the extent of Eliot’s ambition, who can blame him for this?
The last section also contrasts love with desire:
Desire itself is movement Not in itself desirable; Love is itself unmoving, Only the cause and end of movement, Timeless, and undesiring Except in the aspect of time Caught in the form of limitation Between un-being and being.
Here desire seems to be related to the Buddhist idea of tanha. And the nature of the love Eliot is talking about here feels to me like the Christian agape, the unconditional love of God, and its human approximations.
East Coker
East Coker was written and published in 1940. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article. It was very popular when published, selling nearly 12,000 copies to a British public who were perhaps inspired by its messages of resilience as it was becoming clear that the second World War was not going to be over quickly.
East Coker is a village in Somerset in which Eliot’s ancestral home was located. A church in East Coker is the final resting-place of his ashes.
Where Burnt Norton discusses past, present and future, East Coker talks about beginnings and ends, opening thus:
In my beginning is my end. In succession Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Much of the imagery relates to earth, for example:
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
The other elements are also present to a lesser extent. One particularly striking passage brings in air and water:
Dawn points, and another day Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind Wrinkles and slides. I am here Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.
Eliot continues to acknowledge his struggle with words, both in the second section:
That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings. … The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
and in the fifth section:
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years— Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres Trying to use words, and every attempt Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure Because one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it.
Part of the third section is almost like a Zen koan with its conjunctions of opposites:
In order to arrive there, To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy. In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance. In order to possess what you do not possess You must go by the way of dispossession. In order to arrive at what you are not You must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know And what you own is what you do not own And where you are is where you are not.
As with Burnt Norton, love appears in the last section, again outside time and with a sense of agape:
Love is most nearly itself When here and now cease to matter. Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
The waters of the petrel and porpoise look forward to the water imagery of The Dry Salvages, and the final sentence quoted immediately above is in harmonious opposition to the opening In my beginning is my end.
The Dry Salvages
The Dry Salvages was written and published in 1941. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article. A note by Eliot explains that the title refers to a small group of rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts (where he spent time as a child), and salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
The elemental theme is water, and is more prominent as a theme than in the earlier two poems. The water theme is present in the opening section, starting with a river:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget.
and proceeding to the sea, references to which continue throughout the poem:
The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation … The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. … The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, The distant rote in the granite teeth, And the wailing warning from the approaching headland Are all sea voices
The continuity between the river (within us) and the sea (all about us) reminds me of the beautiful water-droplet metaphor for no-self. And the comparison of the river and the sea to the gods reminds me of the use of gods as a metaphor for unconscious forces by followers of Jung, for example James Hollis.
It is towards the end of the first section that the theme of time reappears:
The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers, older Than time counted by anxious worried women Lying awake, calculating the future, Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel And piece together the past and the future
Taken together with the initial excerpt about the river, we see Eliot contrasting the measurable time of civilisation with deeper and more ‘primitive’ time that has been forgotten and swept away by the illusions of city-dwelling. This reminds me of the distinction between reality as perceived by the ego, within Metzinger’s tunnel, and what we might see from outside the ego-tunnel, if such a thing were possible.
The fourth section is a plea to the Christian Mary to intercede for all those on the sea. This is a moving prayer even when taken literally as relating to fishers and other seafarers, but given that the sea is a metaphor, it seems plausible that Eliot means to include everyone.
Unlike the first two poems, there are no direct references to difficulties with words. However there is an long passage at the start of the last section listing ways in which people seek to understand things without using language: astrology, seances, palm-reading, and so on. Eliot says:
all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity
I take the use of pastimes and drugs to criticise the methods, rather than the objective of trying to achieve an understanding beyond language.
In a beautiful passage within the last section, Eliot weaves multiple themes together: time, music, love and Christianity:
But to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint— No occupation either, but something given And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. 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 Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts.
This sense that there is ‘more to it’, that one can lose oneself from the everyday world, and in doing so find oneself, is common to many forms of spirituality, notwithstanding their very different theologies.
Little Gidding
Little Gidding was written and published in 1942. It can be read online and has a Wikipedia article.
Little Gidding is a small village in Cambridgeshire that formerly housed an Anglican community. Eliot visited in 1936, but otherwise had no direct personal connection with the village.
The poem seeks to harmonise and unify the themes of the earlier three poems. It does this while introducing new imagery, notably fire, both in itself and as Pentecostal fire, the manifestation of the Holy Spirit at Jesus’s baptism of his disciples according to the Christian Bible. Thus the fire is a source of salvation.
Two lines from the first section catch my attention every time I read this poem:
Between melting and freezing The soul’s sap quivers.
This can be read in many ways, of course, but one that appeals to me is as a metaphor for the idea that only in the present moment are we truly alive, between the frozen past and the molten future.
There is a passage on attachment in the third section, which reminds me of the Buddhist idea of near and far enemies. If detachment is a virtue and attachment its far enemy, then indifference is its near enemy.
There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life, Being between two lives—unflowering, between The live and the dead nettle.
Immediately following this passage, Eliot again contrasts love and desire, as he did in Burnt Norton:
This is the use of memory: For liberation—not less of love but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the future as well as the past.
In the last section, Eliot finally reaches contentment with his use of words:
every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not pedantic, The complete consort dancing together)
Towards the end of the last section, Eliot talks of
A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)
It seems plausible that this is intended to be interpreted in a Christian way, perhaps as total surrender to the love of God that leads to forgiveness of original sin, and yet it is also reminiscent of nirvana. Invoking the unity of opposites, the fire of Christian salvation is perhaps not so very different to the extinguishment of Buddhist nirvana.
Conclusion
In this fourth post on ‘fours’, I introduced TS Eliot’s Four Quartets and drew out some potential connections between them and the earlierthreeposts on Buddhism.
In both Christianity and Buddhism we are born into a ‘fallen’ state (original sin and samsara), and have to surrender ourselves (or our selves) to enter a state of grace. On the surface, the nature of the surrender is quite different: Christian faith in the divine as compared to the Noble Eightfold Way. Christian heaven and Buddhist nirvana seem very different too: eternal life in bliss or eternal extinguishment, albeit also without any suffering.
But suppose one takes the divine to consist of all living creatures across past, present and future, without boundaries in either space or time, so that our water droplets merge not just into one Ocean, but a Timeless Ocean existing at all moments, without beginnings or ends. Further, suppose that surrender means acknowledgement of participation in this Timeless Ocean, so that the boundaries around the ego in both space and time dissolve. Then perhaps these two great forms of human spirituality aren’t so very different after all.
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