Redeeming Time, T.S. Eliot's Four quartets - Kenneth Paul Kramer

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Redeeming Time, T.S. Eliot's Four quartets - Kenneth Paul Kramer

This exploration of T. S. Eliot's last major poem, Four Quartets, examines the poem's potential to transform readers' faith journeys. Kramer shows that the power of Four Quartets is its ability to create a dynamic interaction between the poem and the reader that promotes a genuine connection with the natural world, with others, and with the Divine.

from Ch. 1 Burnt Norton : ENTERING OUR FIRST WORLD

Although the Logos is common to all
We live as if by our own wisdom;

The way up and the way down are the same.

—HERACLITUS

In the years after Eliot’s 1927 conversion to the Church of England, a period of reflection and realignment, he plunged wholeheartedly into minute details of the Anglo-Catholic tradition and liturgy. In September 1929, barely two years after he had abandoned his family’s Unitarian faith and his own American nationality, Eliot’s mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot (née Stearns), died. The possibility that she had not really understood his marital choice, much less his poetry, left him feeling guilty and deeply disappointed. Emerging from this loss, in 1930 he published Ash-Wednesday, which drew largely upon images from scripture, the liturgy of the Mass, and Dante. Weaving together personal experiences and memories, the poem marks a turning point in Eliot’s life. What was new inAsh-Wednesday was the poet’s point of departure: there, he began with his decision not to turn back to the false deceptions of life but to explore faithfully the irreversible act of conversion. The themes of spiritual wisdom and ascesis, or self-denial—central to that poem—would continue to guide his search for divine presence.

Upon returning from the United States in 1933 (after his first visit in seventeen years), Eliot did not return to his wife,  meditative practices that represented part of a profound struggle to avoid becoming trapped by the relativity of private experience. Soon thereafter, Eliot became warden of that church (in 1934), and Father Eric Cheetham, the vicar, offered him boarding in his presbytery at 9 Grenville Place. Eliot readily and gratefully accepted. The situation was ideal. It offered him a dependable spiritual companion, The Rock” (published and performed in 1934), and Murder in the Cathedral (commissioned in May 1934 and performed in June 1935). For the first time in his life, Eliot saw a wide audience responding positively to his writing.

Written in the autumn of 1935, the genesis of Burnt Norton lay in Eliot’s 1934 visit to a vacant country manor house and formal rose garden, which are set apart from the rest of the world on a high hill overlooking a verdant English countryside in Chipping Camden, near Gloucestershire. Burnt Norton was first published independently as the final poem in T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909–1935. East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding would follow in 1940, 1941, and 1942. According to Eliot, Burnt Norton might have remained by itself had it not been for World War II, which diverted Eliot from writing for the stage and turned him in on himself. It was only in writing East Coker, Eliot said, “that I began to see the Quartets as a set of four.”1

Before reading a word of the poem itself, at the beginning of Burnt Norton, the reader faces the problem of understanding two fragments from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, which are left untranslated. These aphorisms announce thematic notes that echo throughout the poem:

The way up and the way down are one and the same.2

These fragments, now appearing as an epigraph for the whole poem, provide an interpretative lens through which the narrator’s personal religious experience may be clarified and enriched. Aside from the question of what these fragments mean individually, it is equally important to recognize what implications the connection or disconnection between the two fragments make. That is, in choosing these lines, Eliot highlighted a liberating relationship between the timeless pattern common to all and the transient flux of daily life. The first fragment points to the logos (“one end” or goal of life that is common to all), which is recognized and explored especially in each quartet’s first two movements. The second points to its associated path (the “one way” or spiritual practice up and down), which is recognized and explored especially in each quartet’s third and fourth movements. Through “a grace of sense,” the logos and its paths are then drawn into a deeper communion in each quartet’s fifth movement.

The key term logos, as used by Heraclitus, and by Plato, Philo, and John, presents many problems for translators and has been rendered Universal Law, Word, or Truth. In each case, the need to capitalize the word chosen to define logos indicates a tendency in philosophy and theology to view it as a uniquely universal or transcendent reality, the realized knowledge of which brings liberation into the world. Eliot quoted from his own copy of Hermann Diels’s arrangement of the Greek fragments (1901), and it is likely that he would have agreed with Diels’s translation of logos as “Word,” especially since this translation includes a creative interplay between philosophical renderings and its Christocentric use in the Gospel of John. The poststructuralist critic William Spanos rightly challenges modernist commentaries that give privileged authority to a logocentric vantage point—of a fully established concept of eternal being, ontologically prior to contingency—from which to interpret logos.3

While I agree with Spanos that reading the Quartets cannot be based on oversimplified interpretations that assume an onto-theological, centered, or closed understanding of the universe, I disagree with his privileging Martin Heidegger’s understanding of logos. Unlike Heidegger, for whom the logos of Heraclitus names not an unchanging truth but an individual disclosure of being as it emerges in existence, Martin Buber claimed that the ever-changing logos can be understood only in relation to meaningfully spoken words that are common to everyone. Buber argues that while each soul has its logos deeply within itself, “the logos does not attain to its fullness in us but rather between us; for it means the eternal chance for [human speech-with-meaning] to become true between [persons].”4 What constitutes logos, for Buber, and I would suggest for Heraclitus and Eliot as well, is born of reciprocal and reciprocating sharing of knowledge—a “genuine We.” It is this communal speaking that generates and is generated by a common cosmos, the shaped order of what is experienced. Eliot placed this Heraclitian fragment at the beginning of Four Quartets to situate the poems in the realm of a common logos: the immediate presence of unreserved, spontaneous mutuality common to each person, yet reaching beyond the sphere of either. Impossible to objectify, this unifying presence of reciprocal sharing (e.g., a memorable common fruitfulness between poet and readers) comes alive through common speech-with-meaning from which the uniquely human arises ever anew.

The second Heraclitian fragment embodies an existential demand that a person become disengaged from those satisfactions in life that curtail our ability to engage the common logos. Heraclitus affirms that “the way up” (the via positiva) and “the way down” (the via negativa) are both necessary and, in moments, complementary paths toward the commonlogos of meaningful speech between persons. The poet begins the second quartet, East Coker, with a line that is applicable here: “In my beginning is my end.” That is, life’s goal (to apprehend “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time” [DS V]) and its associated path (to descend lower into spiritual darkness, and to fare forward with purified motives) become reconciled in moments of genuine reciprocity with life. Therefore, BurntNorton, and Four Quartets as a whole, continually challenges individual wisdoms (including the poet’s own), or private insights limited to one’s own experience, and proposes instead the practice of endless humility from which genuine commonness can emerge. To move toward this dynamic goal, Eliot emphasizes returning again and again from temporal confusion and disharmony to interspiritual values both in one’s present situation and in relationship with tradition.

The Lotos Rose (Burnt Norton I)

Burnt Norton’s spacious manor, built in the seventeenth century, sits secluded on the edge of the Cotswolds, ninety miles northwest of London, overlooking the Vale of Evesham and the Malvern and Welch Hills. The grounds are located far from the main road, a mile and a quarter north of Chipping Campden, Oxford.5 The manor house, which was once a home for boys, was named Burnt Norton because it was built on the site of a house that had burned to the ground in the eighteenth century.6 The Burnt Norton garden is approached by way of a long private road that runs over a cattle grid and leads beyond a caretaker’s house. Partially covered with ivy, the manor itself is relatively unimposing. Surrounded by a brick wall, a large formal garden lies to one side of the house. A gate opens to a rose-bordered walkway leading to another bed of roses. Two sets of stone steps descend to the lower level of the garden. To the left are two empty pools: one larger and rectangular; the other smaller and semicircular. From a knoll to the right, one can look out over the expansive and rolling valleys7

Landscapes in English poetry, especially English Romantic poetry, often reflect elusive, spiritual, and emotional sensibilities.8 According to Marshall McLuhan, Eliot’s principle poetic innovation was that of le paysage intérieur or the “psychological landscape.” That is, Eliot’s “objective correlative” (a physical expression‎ of the poet’s state of mind) becomes “the places and things which utter themselves.”9 Moreover, according to Nancy Duvall Hargrove, five major “landscape clusters” representing five major psychological states can be located throughout Eliot’s poetry: “The city (boredom, triviality, sterility), the country (release, fertility, rebirth), the desert (chaos, terror, emptiness), the garden (ecstasy, innocence, serenity), and the sea or river. . . .”10 Each of these landscapes and states of mind appears in Four Quartets.

The entrance to the garden at Burnt Norton.

 Burnt Norton opens in a relaxed atmosphere of internal inquiry. In Eliot’s oral reading of these lines, the word “time” is intoned meditatively in a way that clothes it with an importance beyond its ordinary usage. Burnt Norton begins with ten lines that frame not only Burnt Norton but the entire Four Quartets in the context of time and timelessness.

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.11

A central subject of the poem, as well as the ground of its discourse, is the ever-changing relationship between the timeless logos and the field of time. In these opening ten lines, the poet interweaves four distinct senses of time: chronological, eternal, speculative, and “always present.”12 First, time is presented as a chronological series of events, stretching between past and future. The first three lines present the possibility that present, past, and future “perhaps” coexist, each present in time past and time future. Second, time is imaged as eternally present. In such an eternal present, however, the future is already determined and thus unredeemable. Third, time is pondered as a series of unfulfilled potentialities that might have been realized differently. Abstracting one’s self from the present moment to consider “what might have been,” however desirable it may seem, remains  logos common to all), which is “always present.” The fuller significance of the interplay between these distinct senses of time, only hinted at here, unfolds throughout the poem’s spirit-charged landscapes.

Many commentators have noted that the specter of time and the presentation of its various “enchainments” haunt much of Eliot’s verse. Prufrock’s repeated “There will be time, there will be time,” for instance, only allows “for a hundred indecisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions” (CPP 4) within which time itself is lost. The futility of time-bound existence is again explored in The Waste Land. In “A Game of Chess,” for instance, a voice repeats: “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” Magnifying the underlying futility of the question, the voice repeats, “What shall we do to-morrow? / What shall we ever do?” (CPP 41) but finds no answer to this question. Later, however, in the Ariel poems, the poet’s voice, though still distracted by the temporal process, begins to evoke hints of a timeless design that, when directly experienced and then recalled with a disciplined imagination, temporarily releases him from being trapped in the temporal flux.

Determined neither to succumb to time’s enchainments nor to escape into his own imagination, the poet in Ash-Wednesday (1930) draws inspiration from the Lady (a compound figure embodying the Virgin Mary, Dante’s Beatrice, and perhaps the mythic Isis) who wears “white light folded, sheathed about her” and whose presence restores Eden’s innocence. With a “new years walk,” she brings with her a “new verse” that transforms “ancient rhyme” with a liberating message:

. . . Redeem

The time. Redeem

The unread vision in the higher dream. (CPP 64)

Adapting the biblical metaphor of “turning” (teshuva), redeeming time embodies a double movement: turning away from self-centered awakening toward God. This liberating message is taken into Four Quartets, where, as we will see, the poet addresses readers in ways that include them in the poet’s situation and glimpses,13 in the process, that the whole created order is in need of redemption.

Eliot’s poetic imagery, in Four Quartets, divides itself between the ceaselessly restricting repetitions of “time before and time after” (BN III) and the echoed ecstasies of “movement / Timeless, and undesiring” (BN V). Remembered ecstasies, recollected in detachment and appropriated in different forms, prove liberating to the poet in unforeseen ways. Time is first restored to its original, undivided innocence (e.g., “you are the music / While the music lasts” [DS V]), and second, it is renewed, or filled with new immediacy (e.g., “I am here / Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning” [EC I]). This double emphasis on restoring and renewing time will be reinforced and expanded, for instance, toward the end of Little Gidding, where the poet says,

. . . A people without history

Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

Of timeless moments. (LG V)

Four Quartets, accordingly, is characterized by a necessary back and forth movement between unredeemed and redeeming time. Being redeemed in time, we will discover, is a transforming condition that brings “inner freedom from practical desire” and “release from action and suffering” (BN II). It is a “condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)” (LG V), which results from the reciprocal relationship between unpredictable grace and an undistracted openness to the fullness of the moment.

In this light, the significance of Burnt Norton’s opening passage consists both in what is said about time and its restoration  “eternal present” (a perpetually speculative possibility) and the always present “one end” (timeless moments in time yet not of time) visually conflict with, though at times complement, one another. Chronological time, eternal time, speculative time, and the “always present” intertwine, especially as the poet evokes the power of memory, with varying degrees of significance throughout the poem. Reconstructions of remembered experiences and of images drawn from earlier poems, themselves remembered, traverse the poet’s terrain.

Burnt Norton thus begins with speculation on the possibility of experiencing and retrieving timeless moments in the endless flux of temporal existence. Reverberating in time,

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.

The rose garden is filled with echoes—both earthly and mythic, personal and universal, from the present situation and from inner recesses of his memory. A feeling of excitement enters the poem. The sound of birds fills the rose garden and urges the poet to risk the terror and ecstasy of entering a new world. Initially, the thrush’s call—“Quick said the bird, find them, find them”—is deceptive, and we follow it only as an act of trust. Is the bird’s call, “in response to / The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,” reliable? Will it lead us to Edenic redemption? Adding to the excitement, he notes: “And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at” (BN I). As we will see in each quartet, repetition (whether of a rhetorical memoria sui) leading to self-transcendence and the intuitive awareness of God’s presence (memoria Dei). And from Dante, Eliot learned “to consider memory not simply as the repository for images of the past, but as a power that allows us to reshape and interpret past experiences into a new and different form.”14

The poet’s “we” and “your,” meanwhile, suggest the presence of another person.15 On the one hand, the disposition of the poet to engage II) challenges readers not only to enter into the landscape but also to consider turning away from time-conditioned, unthinking phatic chatter and toward the “still point of the turning world” (BN II). The poet thus reaches out to the minds and hearts of readers and urges us to participate with him through meaningfully encountering the logos common to all.

At the same time it is likely that Eliot had first visited Burnt Norton in 1934 with his longtime American friend Emily Hale (1891–1969), who was visiting her aunt and uncle in Chipping Camden at the time.16 Beside his mother, Charlotte, who proudly admired him, Hale, whom he had met in his junior year at Harvard, was one of the few significant women in Eliot’s early life.17 What drew her to him, aside from their family circles, was their shared literary tastes, especially their mutual interest in religious poetry. A correspondence between them ensued and deepened. Starting in 1923, Eliot would send her inscribed copies of his works, including his conversion poem “Journey of the Magi” and all four of the Quartets.18

Emily visited Tom (as she called him) in England every summer between 1934 and 1938, except the summer of 1936. He felt very much at ease with her, and, in that spirit, they would often take long walks together. According to her American friends, after Eliot’s separation from his wife, Vivienne, she felt unofficially engaged to him. Indeed, one of her friends in Chipping Camden remarked that Emily was “incurably and most uncomfortably in love for so many frustrated years, always believing that if she were patient long enough, her moment of glory would assuredly arrive.”19 It is safe to assume that, in addition to “we” as readers, Emily Hale is the other person of the “we” and “us” in the garden appearing as an idealized, faceless companion instead of as a unique woman.

The unfolding drama, signaled by the poet’s repetition of “first”—“through the first gate / Into our first world”—takes us further back, biographically, to Eliot’s childhood, mythically to the garden of Eden, and contemplatively to the primal senses of consciousness. Commentators have pointed out that these lines refer to Milton’s account of Adam and Eve, who “were dignified, invisible.”20 The stress on invisibility in the garden—unheard music from unseen sources, disembodied voices echoing, and the “unseen eyebeam crossed”—suggests the presence of spirits diffused in the garden. In the midst of the autumn heat and vibrant air, arrestingly, the “unheard music” and the “unseen eyebeam” in “our first world” bring new life to the roses as well as the poet himself. Rounding the corner of the concrete wall that opens into the garden of “our first world” represents, from a contemplative viewpoint, a “return to the primal senses of consciousness, [where] the scenes enacted in ‘our first world,’ provide both a first destination for the ‘strategic withdrawal’ into inwardness and the starting point in the reconstitution of identity on a new footing.”21 This withdrawal into inwardness, as Eliot indicated, temporarily at least, is necessary for the poet to then maximize his interactions in the world.

A view of the lower-level garden at Burnt Norton.

Lined with box hedges, the formal garden at Burnt Norton is rectangular and crowned with a half-circle. A drained pool sits next to a smaller, semicircular pool, at the center of the garden. The garden’s shape is reminiscent of a mandala (meditational pattern), at the center of which is an empty pool, or “bindu point” (into which mediators disappear in contemplation).22 When the thrush call leads the visitors past the flowers and out from the entrance walkway into the contemplative midpoint of the garden, we come to the pool.

There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,

Along the empty alley, into the box circle,

To look down into the drained pool.

The dry pool at Burnt Norton.

But who are “they” in this passage? As intimate, invisible presences, “they” (perhaps the innocent children of Eliot’s youth whose laughter is heard in the leaves) are also dignified and accepting guests in the “First World” garden.

Out of nowhere, the poet is overtaken by a visionary experience:

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.

Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.

In these six lines—which Martin Scofield called “as close to perfection as poetry has reached in [the twentieth] century”23—a gray-brown desolate empty pool becomes transfigured by a glittering 24

What happened to the poet here (commentators have suggested a wide range of interpretations from a mystical experience to a hallucination) cannot finally be determined or understood. However, the metaphors he uses to describe the event open up provocative possibilities. The “lotos rose,” for instance, joins Eastern and Western spiritual symbols in ways that transfigure the intended meanings of each. As a graduate student at Harvard University, Eliot had studied the “lotos” symbol in relation to both the Hindu true self (atman) and the Buddhist absolute emptiness (shunyata

In the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, Krishna teaches Arjuna about the yoga of actionless action (karma yoga). When Arjuna asks to see Krishna’s bodily form, Krishna reveals his dual (material and spiritual) nature. Krishna’s infinite brilliance manifests, in response, as a thousand suns. Upon seeing Krishna’s infinite form, Arjuna’s first words are: “Brahma, the Lord [I see], throned on the lotus seat.”25 Analogously, in the Buddhist tradition, rooted in but not limited to the mud of temporal and physical reality, the pure “lotos” of the true self rises out of the muddy water of experience. According to Eliot’s lecture notes from Masaharu Anesaki’s Harvard seminar, “Schools of Religious and Philosophical Thought of Japan,” the lotus can be distinguished from other plants by its26 The lotus, in other words, is the fruit it bears.

Just as the lotus functions as a central symbol in Hindu and Buddhist traditions, the rose has come to occupy a central place in traditional Christian poetry. Indeed, the poet’s epiphany in the garden parallels the radiance of Dante’s Empyrean—“The heaven of pure light.” In Paradiso, Dante (like Arjuna), after seeing the final and only true heaven, is momentarily blinded by its divine effulgence. Dante’s “multifoliate rose,” in Canto XXX, radiates “the heaven of pure light. And in Canto XXXIII, the Supreme Light of God is so dazzling that Dante has to turn immediately away.

I saw within its depth how it conceives

All things in a single volume bound by Love,

Of which the universe is the scattered leaves.27

Here, the Book of God and the Rose of earthly existence are metaphorically one, and the conflict between Word and immanent reality is resolved. When asked about the significance of roses in Four Quartets, Eliot once remarked, “There are really three roses in the set of poems; the sensuous rose, the social-political Rose [always spelled with a capital letter] and the spiritual rose; and the three have got to be in some way identified as one.”28 The “lotos rose,” it can be said, becomes a fourthkind of rose in the Quartets, acting as both a noun (a lotus and a rose that are united) and a verb (a lotus that “rose” from the pool). Subtle yet profound interactions generated by including and transmuting symbols from these two spiritual traditions—“the lotos” (emptiness, or true self) and “the rose” (fullness of the divine)—reverberate through the poem.

Yet what happened to the poet in the rose garden happened between time-conditioned, self-reflective consciousness and the  spirit of the garden, the poet then becomes drawn into direct, exclusive relationship with the empty pool. The pool now becomes no longer pool. In this transfiguring occurrence, the poet experiences himself addressed by a unique presence beyond ordinary words. More than the sum of its qualities (color, texture, setting), the illuminating wholeness of this structure addresses him with a full presence that cannot be detached from his relationship to the pool. The poet receives what he did not have before—the elevating power of full mutuality stirs his soul with an inexpressible confirmation of meaning. Analogous to the poet’s glittering “heart of light,” Martin Buber, following Plato’s Seventh Epistle, likens this “betweenness” of spontaneous mutuality to light that is kindled from “leaping fire.”29 Situated in these reciprocities (between poet and garden, between poet and reader) a new quality of communication leaps forth. Our ways of understanding become communal.

In light of Eliot’s dissertation on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, it has been suggested that the “lotos rose” represents the poet’s “immediate experience,” that is, experience of timeless unity prior to the distinctionbetween perceiver and perceived, which is not an object of nature or thought anywhere present to anyone, yet which cannot be analyzed away.30 Yet, Bradley’s term, whether intentionally or not, still seems to emphasize the content of one’s own experience, no matter how transcendent that experience is perceived to be. In light of his understanding of the Heraclitian logos, Buber, on the other hand, speaks of “the between”—a genuine third alternative between inner and outer, subjective and objective, that is, the presence of spontaneous mutuality that comes alive in and through powerful moments of relational grace. Beyond “immediate experience,” in the redeeming reciprocity between poet and the fully sensible, unique wholeness of the rose garden, common to each yet reaching out beyond either, poet and garden affirm each other’s unpredictable uniqueness and simultaneously surrender to each other’s innermost wholeness.31

Further, Charles Taylor has argued that the modernists like Pound and Eliot have articulated epiphanies not of being but of that which “comes from between the words and images.” Taylor therefore indicates that it is appropriate to speak of an “intertemporal epiphany,” for “only when we recall it in memory can we see behind it to what was revealed through it,” and “the epiphany can’t be seen in an object but has to be framedbetween an event and its recurrence through memory.”32 It is important to add, I believe, another interdependent reciprocity to this frame—what is between the poet’s address and the reader’s intelligent response. Without the interpretive grasp of my voice “the lotos rose” loses its meaning-bearing value. The “leaping fire” that opens heart and mind is extinguished. Just at this “moment,” though, as suddenly as his awareness of time ceased, a cloud passes over what “has been,” and the timeless vision disappears into memory. Burnt Norton’s “heart of light” is hidden again in the empty pool.

The bird that initially invited the visitors into the garden (“quick, said the bird, find them, find them”) suddenly and urgently calls them to leave their “first world.”

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.

The intense vision—the rising pulsing light—disappears into emptiness. It is here that the poet records a glimpse into the overwhelming significance of the timeless moment. The sublime moment in which the “lotos rose quietly, quietly,” apprehended not in the poet but emerging from the vital reciprocity between him  this earth. Restating and recapitulating the heart of the opening mediation, the last three lines of the first movement of Burnt Norton remind us, however, that the always-present “one end,” is now hidden, or forgotten.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

As it will continue to do, the poet’s meditative voice concentrates upon this “always present” redemptive possibility of being released, temporarily at least, from the restrictive effects of the temporal process.

The Still Point (Burnt Norton II)

As each quartet shifts from the first to its associated second movement, the initial landscape meditation unfolds into a deeper rumination, which, through “a grace of sense,” brings release from temporal suffering. In the meditative tradition of the seventeenth-century English metaphysical poets—who sought, as Eliot emphasized in his 1926 Clark Lectures, to balance the intellect, the emotions, and spiritual sensibility—the soul, longing for union with the divine and attempting to bring focus to its spiritual journey, projects itself through “interior dramatization.”33 Speaking of Eliot’s interests in the metaphysical poets, Louis Martz’s comments describeFour Quartets as well:

A meditative poem is a work that creates an interior drama of mind; this dramatic action is usually (though not always) created by some form of self-address, in which the mind grasps firmly a problem or situation deliberately evoked by the memory, brings it forward toward the full light of consciousness, and concludes with a moment of illumination, where the poet’s self has, for a time, found an answer to its conflicts.34

In composition of place in Burnt Norton, self-examination takes the form of interior mindfulness pictured in exterior scenery, a pattern that is repeated throughout Four Quartets. Here the poet moves from a description of the external landscape to an internally oriented expression‎ of the contemplative truths that it reveals.

The second movement of Burnt Norton begins with a fifteen-line lyric in which the “lotos rose” of the garden is transmuted into an earth-bound metaphor: “Garlic and sapphires in the mud / Clot the bedded axle-tree.” Provocatively echoing the Buddhist wheel of samsara, as well as the manger and the cross, the “bedded axle-tree” reconciles above and below. Below, hunter and hunted in the round of daily existence “pursue their pattern as before”; above, our earthly movements are “reconciled” in the heavens. Opposing elements—the “garlic” is a white, pungent-smelling transmution of the lotus warring against the “sapphire,” a blue mineral signifying stars glistening—are sunken into dark mud.35 These seemingly different images manifest in two planes at once: dancing “along the artery” and “figured in the drift of stars.” The axletree—or axis of the world, symbolically equated with the Tree of Life—reconciles them, becoming a fixed point at the center of the turning world. When one draws a circle and bisects it horizontally and vertically, as Northrop Frye has pointed out, the horizontal line represents linear time or the Heraclitean flux, whereas the vertical line represents the presence of the divine entering time.36

Garlic and sapphire, artery and boar, heaven and earth gather together

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

Where the past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nortowards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Suddenly, we are brought into the realization that except for the still point—a moment of timelessness within time—there could not be genuine reciprocity. One glimpses the poet’s struggle here to recognize the logoscommon to all, arising from a multiplicity of consequent sensibilities and behaviors, arising from presence as well as absence.37 To make some sense of these conflicting temporalities, the poet, like Heraclitus before him, relies on paradox. This rhetorical act of negation/affirmation allows him, by pushing language beyond its immediate boundaries, to enter his experience more deeply and opens fresh possibilities for understanding thelogos

It should be remembered that when Eliot left the Harvard philosophy department in the summer of 1914, after three years of study, he was awarded a travel fellowship to spend the academic year 1914–15 at Oxford studying Aristotle’s philosophy with Professor Harold Joachim. Though Eliot was never to return to Harvard’s philosophy department as a teacher, the work of Aristotle continued to interest him, especially the De anima, in which Aristotle, quite rationally, presents an image of the good, which both moves desire and attracts desire to the unmoved center of a wheel (III.10).

Viewed through overlapping philosophical and spiritual traditions that interested Eliot, the “still point” echoes the stillness alluded to in Ash-Wednesday. In the 1930 poem, the poet prayed to the “Blessed sister, interaction between people, does not refer, as one may too quickly assume, to the opposite of motion or to doing nothing. Nor does it identify a state of peace within the poet. It refers, instead, to an altogether different kind of inaction-in-action, which is why, in Ash-Wednesday, the poet asked to be taught how to care without caring. The “still point” refers to the oscillating sphere of genuine reciprocity between poet and rose garden, for example, or between poet and the kingfisher of the fourth movement. Beyond the sum total of poet and rose garden, a reciprocal and reciprocating mutuality—the “still point”—joins them briefly in a spontaneous mutuality that only later can be spoken as a timeless presence. As we have and will see, just as the poet ruminates on the varieties of time-bound existence framing our lives—its frenzies, distractions, and enchainments—he also repeatedly evokes moments of grace that restore a necessary balance between activity and stillness.

The significance of the next eleven lines sets them apart.

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.

These lines bear behavioral consequences of his recognition in the rose garden that “only through time is time conquered.” From spatial and temporal images, the poet now evokes ascetical tensions. Intuitive sensations release him from temporal compulsion. Remembering moments of immediate connection with his  must become “surrounded / By a grace of sense.” The immediate sensation of renewal lies outside sense experience as we know it, and the words “I cannot say” point to the fact that extraordinary meaning cannot be contained in time-determined words. Pushing beyond speech, the intensely contemplative experience overcomes subject-verb-object relationships through genuinely reciprocal relationships with the world in the midst of the logos common to all.

What is made explicit here, or is understood in a new way, are the behavioral effects arising from entering a genuine reciprocal relationship with nature, or persons, or art. He likens this experience to being at a physical and metaphysical still point, which, at the same time, is moving like the hub of a wheel that does not seem to move at all as the wheel turns. While he intuitively realizes that the still point does not release him from the limits of time-bound existence, the evocation of “inner freedom” (“surrounded / By a grace of sense”) suggests positive behavioral consequences of the still point. The poet’s experience of “inner freedom” can be understood in a redemptive sense in that, on the one hand, it brings release from attachments to desire and action, suffering and compulsion, and, on the other hand, it brings exultation (Erhebung) to consciousness. Beyond yet within time, supported by a “grace of sense,” the intuition of a new “first world” includes and transmutes the old such that the old is revealed in a new light.

Though the all-important phrase “a grace of sense” reads easily, apparent contradictions—“Erhebung [lifting up, exultation] without motion,” and “concentration [gathering together at the center] / Without elimination”—strain old vocabularies beyond their normal capacities. The poet’s renewed imagination gains him access to previously unapparent similarities-in-differences and differences-in-similarities. “First world” states of soul are glimpsed where contradictory actions are neither one nor two,  Burnt Norton, Eliot wrote: “The human mind is perpetually driven between two desires, between two dreams each of which may be either a vision or a nightmare: the vision and nightmare of the material world, and the vision and nightmare of the immaterial. Each may be in turn, or for different minds, a refuge to which to fly, or a horror from which to escape.”38 Such feelings of ecstasy and horror are, in Burnt Norton, held in fruitful tension: horror (fear and trembling before the divine) is connaturally a part of life’s ever-unique, ever-surprising ecstasies.

In a gripping image, the poet concludes this movement by necessarily juxtaposing the positive, even redemptive, effects of genuine reciprocity by acknowledging that restrictive limitations are endemic to fleshly existence:

Yet the enchainment of past and future

Woven in the weakness of the changing body,

Protects mankind from heaven and damnation

Which flesh cannot endure.

In these lines, separating disincarnated contemplation from genuine contemplation, the poet distinguishes between contemplation that excludes everything, and contemplation that includes everything, especially the body. Since past and future are woven into the flesh, one is at least “protected” from being overwhelmed by “too much reality.” At the same time, it is precisely because of, and within, temporal “enchainments” that the poet can say,

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.

 remembering (through smells, sounds, sights) both recollects special places and moments of past experiences (now altered and transfigured) and integrates their transfigurations into the present moment. The “moment in the rose-garden,” the “moment in the arbour,” and the “moment in the draughty church,” are retrieved from time past and become a spirit-infused lens through which to engage the present. By restoring these moments of “immediate experience,” in which the enchainments of past and future are broken, if only temporarily, the soul, burdened by temporal limitations, is awakened to new life. After timeless moments are directly, albeit briefly, experienced, then later retrieved from memory, when revivified in time through a disciplined imagination, the poet is liberated from himself. For this reason, the poet, throughout theQuartets, attempts to distance himself from the deleterious distractions of his personal, historic, and artistic life, in order to pass back into life with maximum potency.

Descend Lower (Burnt Norton III)

If the first movement presents a meditation on the poet’s immediate experience in the rose garden, and the associated second movement evokes a temporal illumination by which the inner freedom of the still point is glimpsed, the third movement elicits the spiritual discipline necessary to purify the soul in its journey toward union with the divine. The third and centering movement of each quartet evokes a descending-ascending spiritual  Burnt Norton, this core movement has two parts: acknowledging weary routines of the “twittering world” and yet, in response, describing the necessity of practicing traditional ascetic paths.

The first half of the third movement shifts the poem’s atmosphere from the light-filled garden of our “first world” down into the darkness of the London Underground. (Eliot often took the train from Glouster Road Station to work.) Before we can realize it, we descend into the contemptible underworld of Dantesque half-light that is neither the full light of day (“investing form with lucid stillness / Turning shadow into transient beauty / With slow rotation suggesting permanence”), nor the true darkness of the soul’s dark night, nor the true darkness that purifies the soul (“emptying the sensual with deprivation / Cleansing affection from the temporal”). Underworld dwellers, those who have passed from elevation into a twilight world, are dominated by distracted, empty, tumid, unwholesome, faded, and torpid consciousness. In this time-bound world, “time before and time after,” there is neither daylight nor darkness, neither “lucid stillness” nor the darkness of the physical world that lies at the entrance to a mystical darkness purifying the soul. Here, there is neither plentitude of meaning and value nor vacancy of sensual attachments. Here, in these dark moments, there are only “strained time-ridden faces.”

The death-undone faces that flowed over the London Bridge in The Waste Land echo here: frightened, troubled, confused, dull, sweaty, almost dead. These masks for human faces recall the headpieces “filled with straw” in “The Hollow Men,” where “between the motion / And the act / Falls the shadow” and where we confront the horror of eyes that cannot see, ears that cannot hear. The unhealthy atmosphere also recalls the yellow, putrid fog in “Prufrock” that settles in the tedious streets, “the burnt-out ends of smoky days,” the “dull head among windy spaces.” The “chilled delirium” of “Gerontion” and the twisted faces tossed up from the bottom of the street by waves of fog in “Morning at the  from distraction by distraction”—effectively encapsulates the negative power of this “twittering world,” where there is only “tumid apathy.”

But the third movement of Burnt Norton does not only denounce the lesser darkness of clockwork time. The next stanza opens by juxtaposing a redemptive possibility in the midst of a more radical darkness. A central realization of Ash-Wednesday resurfaces: overcoming the impact of the “Waste Land” on the human soul involves sinking downward more deeply into the darkness. John Senior notes that “since the central meaning of the poem is the idea that the way out is down and through, as if the answer to all questions could be found by pulling the questions inside out like a sock, Eliot [at this point] pulls the poem inside out.”39 Echoing the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas, and especially St. John of the Cross, the poet introduces the way of darkness (via negativa) and proposes that the way up and the way down are, mystically, the same.

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit

The poet especially echoes here a profoundly mystical, contemplative theologian, Carmelite reformer, and poet, St. John of the Cross (1542–1591), best known for The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night of the Soul, and The Living Flame of Love. According to St. John, toward whom Eliot’s intenser spiritual sensibilities 

St. John, in his often-studied mystical writings, describes the “dark night” as an episode of emptying the self of desires and passions. Forsaking the time-conditioned, time-restrained ego, choosing to renounce temporal gratifications—it is suggested—opens up possible liberation from this world’s “metalled ways” by reconnecting the soul to its source.

Then, the poet brings forward a compatible path

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement

But abstention from movement; while the world moves

In appetency, on its metalled ways

Of time past and time future.

One of St. John’s major themes involves a radical shift in our ordinary habits of thought by choosing forms of detachment and depravation that lead through purgation to illumination and encountering the divine. For St. John, the negative way of “deprivation” and “internal darkness”—if deliberately chosen—involves becoming reduced to a state of emptiness, poverty, and abandonment, for the sensual part is purified in emptiness and the spirit is purified in darkness.

St. John also emphasized that both the active path of prayer and the passive path of waiting on God remain in creative tension with one another and are mutually necessary:

This first night is the lot of beginners, at the time God commences to introduce them into the state of contemplation; it is a night in which the spirit of man also participates. . . . The second night of purification takes place in those who are already proficient, at the time God desires to lead them into a state of divine union. This purgation, of course, is more obscure, dark and dreadful.40

 path), and the one of abstention from movement (practiced by more experienced contemplatives)—is sufficient and complementary.41 Each way can become a means for finding reconciliation with ultimate reality, and each can move the practitioner (metaphorically) both upward and downward.

That his darkness is reoriented toward awareness of God becomes clearer if one juxtaposes the spiritual discipline of each third and centering movement. In the third movement of East Coker, after the poet takes a Miltonic descent into the darkness of death, a meditative voice will resurface: “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / Which shall be the darkness of God.” In the third movement of The Dry Salvages, after beginning with Krishna’s teaching that the future is futureless (since we are not the same people in the future), the poet is brought to consider past and future with “equal mind.” And in the third movement of Little Gidding, after meditating on the three conditions of attachment, detachment, and indifference, the poet will speak about becoming “transfigured, in another pattern.” The images in each of these centering passages move from the external world into inner silence, from what we can know to what is unknown, and from descent to purification. By holding each of these third movements together, the poet’s interspiritual path moves from self-disappearance into darkness, from self-transfiguration into actionless action.

Kingfisher’s Wing (Burnt Norton IV)

Burnt Norton began with a “heart of light” vision “at the still point of the turning world,” then descended into a “world of perpetual solitude,” where the spiritual practice offered is characterized by destitution of property, desiccation of senses, evacuation of fancy,  two movements and deepens the spiritual practice related in the third. And while it may be too provocative to suggest that the whole meaning of the quartet is embodied in this movement, the possible implications of that suggestion do not become clear, or really useful, until we have read through the poem more than once.

Since the fourth movement of Burnt Norton is so compressed, it is helpful to read it in its entirety.

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher’s wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.42

This entire passage, it has been suggested, focuses on death and burial. But is that all? While the bell’s clanging marks the disappearance of the sun, it would have reminded him of its monastic context, where the bell also signals a call to prayer, a call to break out of ordinary time. During the Mass (as Eliot knew it), a bell was rung at the moment when the bread and wine were consecrated and became the transubstantial body and blood of the risen Christ. A powerful ambiguity emerges: the bell announces the death of the day (and by implication hastens a necessarykind of dying) and yet is accompanied by images of new life and the hope that a sunflower will soon greet the new dawn. The sense of this interlude is evoked by a single, isolated word—“Chill”—around which sunflower, clematis, and fingers of yew intertwine. The single, monosyllabic sound achieves more than just a linguistic effect. It seizes his spirit. One emerges from the darkness of the preceding section with a double sensation: the cold extinction of death and the delicate warmth of nature’s light. It is helpful here to note that Eliot associated the yew tree, often found in English churchyard burial sites, with both death and new life in resurrection.

In response to the redemptive question—will the sunflower, will the clematis turn to us?—the kingfisher answers “light to light.” As perceived in the rose garden, yet uniquely here, a visionary light breaks through the clouds. From a grave darkness, light beyond light glances off the kingfisher’s wing. The contrast between “has” and “is still” pulls us into a present heading toward a redeemed future. At the same time, the “still point” arises from the reciprocity between poet and kingfisher and radiates the cusp between present and future, where seeming opposites are held in creative tensions. While some commentators emphasize that the kingfisher in folklore represents Christ (the fisher of men, whose light reflects the divine light and defeats the powers of darkness), the poetic stress is not only on the “kingfisher,” or on the “light” reflected off the kingfisher’s wing,43 but on their relationship. One commentator has suggested that “the light of the kingfisher passage is the light of the illuminative way. The logic of this is simple. If the darkness of the first lines of this passage represents the night of the senses, which lies at the entrance of the illuminative way, the light . . . is part of the total characterization of the illuminative way that also involves the yew.”44

At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that these disclosures are occasional and relational rather than progressive and individual. “They occur as sudden and discontinuous eruptions generated by encounter, which are subsequently covered over or subsumed under the poet’s restatement in the old metaphysical language.”45 At the same time, our understanding of the disclosures can be enriched through comparisons. In devotional  moments like these, at the center of the rose garden and here at the center of the turning world, a “heart of light” still point quickens the contemplative’s soul.46

The Coexistence (Burnt Norton V)

The fifth movement of each quartet brings forth the “one-end/one-way” unitive awareness hinted at throughout that quartet. The poet now attempts to reconcile, albeit provisionally, the apprehended wisdoms and spiritual practices already introduced. Poetic and purgative movements have activated a sanctuary for the soul and, in the midst of an intellectual and emotional struggle deep within the self, a unitive presence emerges. Concurrently, it begins to feel as if the conflict between time and the timeless has been reconciled. Still, as it will continue, the poet reflects on the troubling question of how words can evoke redemptive possibility drawn from immediate experience.

Recalling the rhetorical difficulties of his own verbal process, he says:

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.

The poet’s only hope, since he must work with language, lies in discovering verbal patterns that can glimpse, if only briefly, the deeper insights arising from silence. Throughout the Quartets, poetry arises from this silence and ultimately—contemplatively—evokes and embodies its deeper significances.47 Using words to “reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in  and movement. This stillness is not just the absence of sound,

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now.

The dynamic image of “the co-existence”—like the images of “a further union, a deeper communion” in East Coker V, the “impossible union” inThe Dry Salvages V, and “the fire and the rose are one” in Little Gidding V—juxtaposes seemingly differing elements in ways that allow the joined differences to fructify in the poet’s imagination. Here, light and darkness, words and silence, music and stillness, end and beginning are, temporarily at least, engaged. Simultaneously, their differences become included and transmuted in the poet’s unitive recognition.

What Eliot affirms here, although tentatively, is both the impossibility of transcending the limits of language and the drive to do so despite that impossibility. Eliot reflected on this urge to write poetry that transcended itself in an unpublished lecture called “English Letter Writers.” He wrote that he aimed

to write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry, poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry, this seems to me the thing to try for. To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to get beyond music.48

In fact, this may well serve as a partial “statement of intent” for theQuartets. No longer just poet, the spiritual pilgrim descends into inner stillness, into the quietude of the soul, and returns to articulate the practices of renunciation, purgation, devotion, and faith. While rhythms of stillness and silence perpetually move beneath the verbal patterns of Burnt Norton,

. . . 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. Shrieking voices

Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,

Always assail them. The Word in the desert

Is most attacked by voices of temptation,

The crying shadow in the funeral dance,

The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

While continuing to lament the intrinsic limitation of words, in the midst of this apprehension he shifts focus from the mutability of words to “the Word,” an interplay between the incarnate logos of the Greek (Heraclitus) and Christian (St. John) traditions. Recalling closely analogous lines fromAsh-Wednesday—“Where will the Word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence” (CPP 65)—enriches an understanding of this section. Interior silence, it is implied, the quiet force of contemplative practice, is here called for as an antidote to the absence of the transforming Word. The Word—both the Heraclitian speech-with-meaning rising dialogically from the “genuine we” that is common to all and the incarnation of divine always willing to enter into unconditional, situation-specific dialogues with others, which are embodied in his parables and his life. For this reason, one realizes the importance of reciprocal relationships for Jesus, as exemplified in his saying, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them” (Matthew 18:20). That is, Jesus both recognized and embodied the spirit of thelogos.

In the poet’s spiritual quest, restimulated by Burnt Norton’s “first world” rose garden epiphany, Eliot discovers, or comes to the threshold of discovering, that remembering and retrieving in his life “the still point of the turning world” (BN II)—the Word (logos)—will liberate him from the attachments and sufferings of temporal existence. In the process, and here I disagree with William Spanos and others who argue for “absence” rather than “presence” at the still point, the poet recognizes the liberating coexistence of absence (timelessness) in presence (“the end and the beginning were always there”). The poet realizes that escaping the life-diminishing limitations of remaining caught in “the aspect of time” is quickened by retrieving remembered moments (“timeless and undesiring”)—themselves temporal, and therefore in need of “a grace of sense,” of “concentration / Without elimination” (BN II)—and in the process allowing the fractious splinters of one’s thoughts, feelings, dissatisfactions, insights to disappear at the still point.

Ironically, by virtue of the threatening voices of temptation and destruction, self-pity, existential doubt, and mistrust, that populate clockwork time, the spiritual quest is deepened. Following his attestation of the redemptive Word, the poet shifts to dynamically short, discursive lines to exemplify its associated behavioral consequences.

The detail of the pattern is movement,

As in the figure of the ten stairs.

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.

In his continual search for the rhetorical pattern’s detail that matches his intenser feelings, the poet recalls St. John of the Cross’s “figure of the ten stairs,” or ten rungs, of the mystical ladder of love, representing spiritual ascent in our temporal lives. The first five stages toward contemplative realization of divine love are stages of the Dark Night of Faith:

1. Love which causes the soul to languish in desire.

2. Love which actively seeks God.

3. Love which works fervently toward union with God.

4. Love which causes habitual suffering for God, without weariness.

5. Love which desires God.

The second five are those stages on the illuminative way toward becomingunited with God:

6. The soul runs to God and touches him again and again.

7. Love which is vehement, without judgment or restraint.

8. The soul grasps and holds fast to God.

9. The soul is burned with sweetness in God.

10. Whole assimilation/clear immediate vision of God/going forth from the flesh/becoming like God.49

Involving faith, hope, and union, the secret of the ladder, according to St. John, refers to the spiritual fact that it may be used for both ascending and descending, that descending is ascending and ascending is descending, since, to paraphrase the Beatitudes, one who humbles oneself is exalted. When ascending-and-descending  step of this secret ladder of love causes the soul to become wholly assimilated to God, by reason of the clear and immediate vision of God which it then possesses; when, having ascended in this life to the ninth step, it goes from the flesh.”50 Contemplation of God in stillness only seems to leave the contemplative within the limitations of temporal existence “between un-being and being.” God’s unconditional love, however, is beyond time, and Eliot’s vision of perfect love in Burnt Norton assimilates the soul to this love.

Reflecting the ecstasy and terror of contemplative union, the last lines ofBurnt Norton reaffirm manifestations of the still point.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

From a time-bound “shaft of sunlight,” there rises in memory—briefly and passingly—a poignant recollection of a timeless moment (“Quick now, here, now, always”) marked by children’s laughter.51 This recalled glimpse of the rose garden event intuits redemptive life, to begin with, by reminding him to become fully present in the succession of nows. “What might have been” (i.e., the mythic garden of Eden) and “what has been” (i.e., the mystical adventure of the soul) “point to one end, which is always present.” In the “first world” of inner stillness, time past and time present in-fold and transmute into Edenic experience and are subsequently recalled through intuitive apprehension and then brought, in a different