Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become insubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger —
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
~ T.S. Eliot
Photo: David Whyte
The epigraph means: “What place is this, what region, what area of the world?” ~ a quotation from Seneca's Hercules Furens (The Mad Hercules), Act 5, line 1138 , where Hercules is so disoriented he doesn’t know where he is, and asks, “Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?”
“Marina” was inspired by on a minor play written in part by Shakespeare, “Pericles, Prince of Tyre.” (It is like Eliot to scour obscure sources). Marina is the only daughter of Pericles. She was born onboard a ship — hence her name, meaning “of the sea.”
~ “Pericles at the end of the play is reunited with his daughter who presumably died soon after birth. Pericles, distraught, travels the ancient world. At the end of the play the ruler of Mytilene sails to the ship and comes onboard. He suggests bringing to Pericles an extraordinary woman, a maid, who may by her presence and singing save Pericles from his despair. Of course that woman is Marina, who, as Pericles discovers in a very touching discovery scene, is not dead but is reborn to him. The whole story is wrapped in the symbology of the sea and water, and a mystical notion of rebirth. In Eliot’s poem there is also the power of memory as a restorative agent.” ~ Richard Mennen (slightly modified by Oriana)
Marina singing before Pericles, Thomas Stothard, 1825There is a similarity between a passage in Marina and one from Burnt Norton.
From Marina:
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
From Burnt Norton, the first of The Four Quartets:
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.
**
So much for the easy part. What can we make of the part that is different and yet so Eliotesque, i.e. the second stanza condemning the worldly? Well, the stanza condemns the worldly: those who are power-hungry and violent, those who are vain, the self-satisfied, and those given to the pleasures of the flesh and thus “suffer the ecstasy of the animals” — a thought-provoking phrase.
Of course we are all against violence and vanity, but I am not so sure about quiet contentment and appreciating physical pleasure — unless it’s in excess, i.e. overeating or otherwise obsessing about food (as for sex, it seems to me that erotic deprivation is a more serious problem, breeding all manner of evil).
But let me not argue with Eliot. Fine, let us condemn foodies as shallow, and those who prepare for debates by styling their hairpieces. They are insubstantial next to the lasting beauty of the ocean and fog. Next to beauty, period. This poem strikes most readers as completely obscure, and yet it’s possible to love it without being able to say what on earth it’s trying to say. Why? Because it’s beautiful.
I could babble on the possible meaning of “under sleep, where all waters meet.” But I don’t wish to make my reader a receptacle for babbling, literary, mystical, or psychological (all these categories fuse, especially during sleep). Though Eliot might not approve, I want the reader to feel sheer delight of the imagery and the verbal music:
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
~ it’s interesting to see that the lack of punctuation heightens the sense of rapture. Ah, the rhythm? Are you levitating yet? If not, read it again and again. With poems like this, re-reading for the ecstasy of the esthetic mind is the only way.
Oh yes, besides beauty there is also a sense of hope. The ship, like an aging body, is falling apart, but the speaker celebrates a new life opening to him. The daughter, a symbol of the eternal feminine, has been restored.
There is a wonderfully subtle invocation of childhood, a hint of it, really:
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Note the alliteration and consonance of laughter, leaves, and sleep and all. The “l” sound is a semi-vowel, and it lends beauty to words. English is not as rich in vowels and thus not as musical as, say, Italian or Russian; but it has a lot of words containing the “l” sound — willow or allow — and those are quite beautiful.
There is also a repetition of s, w, and t, intensifying the music.
And not various other repetitions:
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
These images of decay are followed by images of hope:
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
and the last stanza echoes the beginning:
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
The first stanza referred to the return of memories; the last stanza has the woodthrush calling to a new life opening before Pericles.
“Daughter” is the last word of the poem. Besides being the eternal feminine, a daughter is a child, symbol of a new life; in addition, she bears the potential of herself becoming a mother, producing more new life. But we know that Eliot is not concerned with biological fertility. The new life could be understood as his conversion to Anglicanism. Marina is a figure of grace, a female savior that may make us think of Dante’s Beatrice, or indeed of the Virgin Mary (one of Mary’s epithets was Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea).
But to see it only as a record of Eliot’s conversion — though correct in terms of biography — would be to narrow down the poem in an insufferable way. A new vision, a new purpose, a fresh beginning, a surge of creativity — this can happen at any age. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote a novel about a ninety-year-old who falls in love for the first time.
We also need to consider the possibility that the “new life” is actually death and whatever may await beyond it. It’s possible to defend the thesis that all poems are in some way about poetry, and all poems are in some way about mortality. Pericles is nearing the end of his “life’s journey.” His ship is in poor shape; it won’t serve much longer.
But note that there is a mention of “new ships.” Pericles is apparently not thinking of ceasing to travel and settling down with Marina — unlike King Lear, whose last deluded fantasies are about being happy in prison with Cordelia. No, Pericles will have new ships — new means of travel, probably to be understood strictly as a metaphor.
And religious conversion is often called “dying to your former life.”
But that’s just it: the dying is metaphorical. It’s dying to the appreciation of the things treasured by the worldly, such as power, wealth, and fame. It’s dying to sensual pleasures and awakening to “higher” pursuits, such as obedience to a religion. And the worldly pursuits are themselves a kind of death:
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Renouncing the worldly pursuits, then, can be seen as a “new life.”
However we understand the “new life,” that’s the unavoidable interpretation of the poem: a new life, a rebirth symbolized by the restored daughter — and perhaps also by the newly perceived beauty of nature. To me, that beauty is primary, as expressed through the beauty of poetic language. The poem is a kind of magical incantation — note the use of repetition, a musical device.
I took a seminar on Elliot, and remember remarking about Marina, “This is such a beautiful poem.” The professor was displeased, judging by his facial expression, but mercifully said nothing. A couple of students seconded me. I found the poem breathtakingly beautiful, its rhythm hypnotic. I kept re-reading it, omitting the didactic second stanza. I was intoxicated with the pines, the fog, the woodthrush.
And no, I didn’t care if the “real” theme was a religious conversion, or if the new life was in fact the expected afterlife, Pericles being old and dying. I cared about lyricism.
Lyricism: nature imagery and skillful repetition, which creates music. Lyricism seduces the reader to keep on reading and re-reading.
And that’s what every poet wants: to be read and read and read.
**
(As for the close father-daughter relationship, in Shakespeare, in literature in general, and in life, that’s a huge separate issue. Is it good for a daughter to be a spouse surrogate?
When it comes to sons and mothers, we are more confident in being wary of excessive attachment, especially if the mother is frustrated in her marriage. Fathers and daughters? The daughter rather than wife at the father’s side as he campaigns for office? We try to stay out of it.
There is the kind of healthy parental love that seeks to give, to nurture the child. Then there is the kind that seeks mainly to take — to receive adoration in the absence of more appropriate love. Let’s end it there, and enjoy Eliot’s poem for its nature imagery.)
**
A SENSE OF THE SACRED
“When I am asked if I'm religious I always reply, ‘Yes, I'm a devout musician.’ Music puts me in touch with something beyond the intellect, something otherworldly, something sacred.” ~ Sting, Berklee College of Music commencement address in Boston, May 15, 1994
Music does that to me too. I love music, including verbal music. In poetry, it’s verbal music that makes me feel enchantment more than imagery and other elements of the art.
Like many non-theists, I have a strong sense of the sacred which surfaces when I am in contact with beauty in any form. Should anyone ask if I am religious, following Sting I’d reply, “Yes, I'm a devout poet and a lover of beauty.”
(Note that this is very much like Joseph Campbell’s “Follow your bliss.” I'm glad that we are developing new perspectives on how to live, what to worship. As Ginette Paris observed, “It’s still early after the death of god,” and varieties of positive secular life philosophy need time to develop. Eventually the statement that “atheists don’t believe in anything” will be recognized as ridiculous.)
*
So true. One of the wisest things he said, it's little known. What this quotation hints at is sheer torment (which Dostoyevski experienced in his first marriage). There is such a difference between being in love with the wrong person and loving the right person.
When you are in love with the wrong person, the wrongness keeps on growing, along with the sense of enslavement — and hatred begins.
Everyone needs to be educated about the predictable stages of love. Dopamine-based infatuation always wears off — the brain can sustain only so much excitement and insanity, however glorious it may feel at first. The good news is that oxytocin-based attachment love can continue deepening.
Photo: Lee JeffriesGALILEO SHOWS THAT DANTE’S INFERNO WOULD COLLAPSE
(nor could Satan be simply a giant man)
~ “In 1588, when Galileo was a 24-year-old unknown, a medical school dropout, he was invited to deliver a couple of lectures on Dante’s “Divine Comedy.” Many in Galileo’s audience would have been shocked, even dismayed, to see this young upstart take the stage and start poking holes in what they believed about the poet’s meticulously constructed fantasy world.
Ever since its 1314 publication, scholars had toiled to map the physical features of Dante’s Inferno — the blasted valleys and caverns, the roiling rivers of fire. What Galileo said, put simply, is that many commonly accepted dimensions did not stand up to mathematical scrutiny. Using complex geometrical analysis, he attacked a leading scholar’s version of the Inferno’s structure, pointing out that his description of the infernal architecture — such as the massive cylinders descending to the center of the Earth — would, in real life, collapse under their own weight. Later, Galileo realized the leading rival theory was wrong, too, and that even the greatest scholars of the time simply didn’t understand how real-world structures worked.
Debating the mechanics of the Inferno might sound like intellectual horseplay, the 16th-century equivalent of MIT cafeteria debates about the viability of “Star Trek” teleporters. But there was more to the lectures than this. The insights Galileo gleaned from analyzing Dante’s measurements in fact anticipated a vital principle of structural engineering. By asserting that you cannot create a giant Lucifer by super-sizing the model of a man — that increasing an object’s magnitude would create a whole new set of structural and material imperatives — Galileo was paving the way for the construction of everything from ocean liners to skyscrapers to Macy’s parade floats.
Galileo, a notorious contrarian, would likely have appreciated Peterson’s theory, which goes against everything we think we know about this stony rationalist. It also contradicts the notion — dearly held by practitioners of the humanities and sciences alike — that fact is fact, art is art, and never the twain shall meet, at least not in any meaningful way. As Peterson likes to point out, in Galileo’s time no such division existed. “Galileo’s thought,” he says, “[drew] directly on the kind of imagination that we associate with the arts.”
In fact, Peterson adds, if Galileo hadn’t given himself over to the “triumph of artifice and imagination” of the poetry he loved, he would never have achieved the insights that shaped the Scientific Revolution, and by extension the modern world. Art, he says, “was the only place this kind of invention could come from.”
As for the fact that he is making claims that run contrary to conventional wisdom, this doesn’t bother Peterson at all. “Galileo himself was always quick to imagine contrary-to-fact situations,” he says. “I think that part of his interest in Copernicanism — the idea that the Earth moves — is that it seemed so contrary to fact, so paradoxical.”
In this regard, at least as Peterson sees it, Galileo has more in common with today’s quantum theorists, whose work requires mad leaps of logic, than he does with the generations of by-the-numbers physicists he inspired. The world’s first true scientist, the professor tells us, understood that it takes a man of reason to provide the proof, but only a fantasist can truly reimagine the universe.” ~
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXC8DWkw4hg
So: Galileo examines the physics of Dante’s hell and discovers scaling laws. You can’t triple a horse in size and have a viable animal. The shape needs to change to sustain the weight. The more I think about Galileo, the more terrific he appears — making his telescope, writing in code to Kepler. You did science at the risk to your life.
“THE EMPIRE NEVER ENDED” ( but was continued by the Catholic church ~ P. K. Dick)
~ “To my thinking Roman Catholicism is not even a religion, but simply the continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinated to that idea, faith to begin with. The Pope seized the earth, an earthly throne, and grasped the sword; everything has gone on in the same way since, only they have added to the sword lying, fraud, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, villainy. They have trifled with the most holy, truthful, sincere, fervent feelings of the people; they have bartered it all, all for money, for base earthly power. And isn't that the teaching of Antichrist?” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Idiot
DONALD TRUMP AND THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL PREACHERS
Think about all those prosperity gospel preachers. The ones who brag about their wealth, fly in private planes, and tell their followers how they can eventually achieve the same lifestyle (even though that’s never going to happen) if they just believe. It’s a world in which Pastor Creflo Dollar can beg for a $65 million plane and Pastor Steven Furtick downplays his $1.7 million mansion by saying “it’s not that great of a house.”
When you think about it, that’s the same world Donald Trump inhabits.
Blogger Zack Hunt: Donald Trump is the perfect prosperity gospel candidate.
Like the prosperity gospel itself, he’s the walking antithesis of the actual gospel. Greedy, self-serving, manipulative, and hostile towards critics, I can’t think of a presidential candidate more fitting for these pastors to idolize.
He’s the prosperity gospel incarnate: crude, materialistic, and antithetical in every way to the life and teaching of Jesus.
And, like those other preachers, he’s far more interested in spreading his own brand than trying to help the poor. It’s frustrating how many people don’t realize this game is taking place right in front of their eyes because they’re too distracted by all the money.
It’s no wonder the same sort of people who believe praying to God (or giving “seed money” to “pastors”) will improve their socioeconomic status are the ones who think a Trump presidency will solve many of their problems. They’re not thinking critically about the matter because they’re blinded by the braggadocio.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/10/01/what-donald-trump-has-in-common-with-prosperity-gospel-preachers/#disqus_thread
Perhaps this is the answer to the riddle of why the Religious Right has embraced Trump, a blatant sinner who is the antithesis of the teachings of Jesus. Those teachings have been abandoned already decades ago in favor of the “prosperity gospel.”
Each cultural group remakes Jesus in their own image. In the words of The New Yorker: “To the Puritans who settled the Colonies, Jesus was a marginal figure, and the Old Testament more important than the New. In the four centuries since, however, he has slipped the bonds of Christianity altogether to become icon and brand, as American as Mickey Mouse or the Coca-Cola bottle.”
Thus, the “American Jesus” is not the figure described in the New Testament. He stockpiles guns, waves the Confederate flag, encourages paying no taxes (so much for “rendering unto Caesar”), and despises the poor as “losers” (but this can of course change if they send “seed money” to the right church).
And of course, since the end of the world is imminent, and, in the words of Paul, “we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air,” this Jesus cares nothing for the earth. The earth is irrelevant: let’s burn coal and cut down all the forests.
But in terms of the more traditional Jesus who drives the merchants and money-changers from the temple, says it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, who champions poor and the meek, and treats women as full human beings — I’ve lost track: has anyone called Trump the Anti-Christ yet? His ego comes close to Yahweh's. Imagine if Yahweh could tweet . . .
This brings us to a larger issue:
“IT WAS CHRIST WHO KILLED JEHOVAH” ~ Will Durant
~ “Periodically in history man’s conception of God changes as man’s knowledge and moral sense improve, and these epochal transvaluations can upset not only philosophers but also whole nations and eras. We live in such an age, when the revelations of science, of history, and of the ethics of Christ have made it impossible for developed minds to believe in that “grim beard of a god” who frightened our forebears into decency. In this sense it was Christ who killed Jehovah.” ~ Will Durant, “Fallen Leaves”
(Freud would probably appreciate the conclusion that Christ killed Yahweh. A son’s task is to kill his father, in a symbolic way.)
~ “Will Durant, raised a Catholic, did not believe in a personal god, but admired the ethical teachings of Christ. Ariel Durant, raised in a Jewish family, wrote this in In A Dual Autobiography by Ariel and Will Durant (1977): “We never deserted our faith for any other, but we lost most of it as we rubbed against a harsh and increasingly secular world . . . my Uncle Maurice helped to free me from such nonsense, and awoke in me a desire to read books and enter the world of thought.” ~
Oriana:
Who wouldn’t want a GOOD deity to exist? Or at least a fairly decent one? One who wouldn’t let children die of brain cancer or a once-loving mother no longer recognize her children because of dementia? But if the conquest of terrible diseases happens, it will be due strictly to progress in medicine, not to an improvement in god’s morality, or a change in his “mysterious ways.” For all the severe brainwashing I was subjected to, I never failed to see that god (Yahweh, that is — he was the one with real power) was evil.
What a relief, later, to see that the god of my childhood was not evil. Instead, he was fictional, a projection of human vengefulness. When I fully and completely understood it at the emotional level, I felt a huge wave of joy. “The monster doesn’t exist! He really doesn’t exist!” I kept shouting in my head. Whenever I think of it, I still experience an echo of the euphoria.
By the way, I abhor Zeus and Wotan too — pretty much all the archaic gods are monstrous tyrant deities, the bully gods. Even goddesses were not that sweet — Isis might be an exception, a nurturer above all.
But then, the way the “American Jesus” has been twisted to stand for the opposite of the gospel teachings, we get this statement about Trump from two of his “Trumpettes”:
“We finally have this god that’s gonna come down and help us all.”
http://nbcnews.to/2dxQErb
AGAINST THE IMPERIAL EAGLE
~ “Benjamin Franklin had urged that the new States should take the turkey as their bird, representative of a domestic peace and prosperity, and he protested strongly that the eagle stood for the ambitions of rapacious and murderous empires. Imperial Rome had subjugated a world to the law and order of its Caesars under that winged predator; and wherever the arrogance of world dominion goes the eagle appears on its standards. Franklin, who thought abruptly and realistically, knew the powers of the insignia, and he argued for the turkey cock in his domestic pride. We almost snicker. In our sense of how inappropriate the turkey is, we can see how much our own sense of dignity has departed from that of men like Franklin and how much it demands the Mithraic imperium of the Bird of War.” ~
~ Robert Duncan
Wild turkeys, photo by Daniel Patterson*
I got to see them myself! A wild turkey at Zion National Park, near a shuttle stop
DO WE NEED “ARCH SUPPORT”?
The notion that sport shoes and inserts should keep the human arch stiffly supported is a decades-old assumption that could use some rethinking, according to a British gait analyst who has closely studied more than 25,000 footsteps of healthy people.
In fact, the varying patterns of foot pressure seen among the human volunteers looked a lot like the patterns seen in the footfalls of two bonobo chimps and an orangutan that the scientists had take the same test. As agile tree-climbers, these nonhuman great apes might have been expected to have much more flexible feet, Crompton says.
Among the humans, the outer arch seemed to flatten in about 7 percent of all the footsteps, which conventional assumptions would have suggested was bad — unstable. And most of the volunteers, Crompton says, had at least one step from each foot that, if judged under conventional evaluations in a foot clinic, would have flagged them as possible candidates for treatment for fallen arches.
There was nothing wrong with any of these feet, the scientist emphasizes. It's our definition of normal that needs to change.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/08/20/213882836/golden-arches-human-feet-more-flexible-than-we-thought
ending on beauty
AUTUMN JUSTICE
Gray-haired lovers walk under everlasting trees
down a path littered with the the crunchy
fingers of the gods and Caesars.
~ Zbigniew Herbert (tr Oriana Ivy)
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