Hey any help with this little speech by Thomas in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral?
"They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.
They know and do not know, that action is suffering
And suffering action. Neither does the agent suffer
Nor the patient act. But both are fixed
In an eternal action, an eternal patience
To which all must consent that it may be willed
And which all must suffer that they may will it,
That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action
And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still
Be forever still".
7 comments:
Sounds like the chicken and the egg enigma towards action and suffering. Sounds like a handcart on its side with the wheels spinning. Movement is going on but nothing is going anywhere.
From popular science:
From the perspective of eternity, there is no such thing as cause and effect. The arrow of time is all that distinguishes between action and reaction - they are otherwise equal and opposite.
From my hazy recollection of the end of The Great Divorce and the end of Perelandra:
The whole motion of history describes lines in a tapestry, which from the eternal perspective is still and unchanging - it is only someone tracing a thread who sees knots as changes of colour and intersections, as milestones rather than landmarks.
Getting all postmodern:
Either view (time as time, time as just another dimension) is valid - they know and do not know.
wow, thanks Alan. I think there is something like this in Eliot... but "the pattern is the action?" Can you really describe providence as a wheel?
What Tex said. I suspect that the wheel is just a convenient poetic subject: something that has circular motion, which is endless but doesn't go anywhere. It has connotations of revolution - the wheel turns, and those who were on top are now at the bottom, and vice versa. If I was writing an English essay, I'd say it also has handy echoes of juggernauts and Catherine wheels (i.e. religious death), but High School was a while back.
I would be surprised if Eliot were endorsing the Hindu cyclical view of history, where everything has already happened and will happen again in a few millenia. He seems to be saying rather that everything has already been willed by God - that we trace out God's will in time, but that he views it as a perfect whole, and has willed the causation: "the pattern is the action and the suffering".
So why say wheel if that's what he really means? C.S. Lewis speculated in The Screwtape Letters that humans are beings in time with an awareness of eternal things, and that this leads us to think and act cyclically - annual feasts, seasons, church on Sunday, daily prayers, and so on. On that view, I guess Eliot can use "the wheel" to convey an idea which is barely wheel-like at all - because our poetic brains can't deal with eternity neat.
Wheels also suggest clockwork, which suggests (to me) a mechanistic creation that is just following its provided causatory path - God is not active so much as providential in a "classical physics" worldview. I don't know when Eliot wrote Murder in the Cathedral, but I'd hardly expect him to have integrated the ideas coming from quantum physics in the 1920s-50s on God "playing dice with the universe" (which Einstein hated the thought of).
Did all of that make sense? In short, I think the answer to your question is "No".
I have just finished reading Bleak House, and I am sure I recall Dickens using at some point an image of a wheel to illustrate Providence.
Although a quick search through defied me to find it.
Another dim memory, is the wheel image is certainly of medieval usage...
and it fits the lowering/raising imagery that is so frequent in the Bible.(?)
There's also the wheel in the Tarot pack in 'The Burial of the Dead' (Wasteland).
The 'turn and still be forever still' (to me) reinforces the two different perspectives on time.
bah... probably no help, but fun to revisit :)
Thank you so much for opening for me again the incredibly rich mine of T.S. Eliot. It was actually in contemplating the next entry into my own blog that I searched out this passage and encountered your blog. Though I would like to have a year to study this, here are my preliminary thoughts.
To do or not to do, that is the question. We are back to Hamlet again as one of the favorite references (directly or indirectly) of Eliot. From "The Love Song of J Alfred Proofrock:"
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
............................
But the actions Eliot contemplates here and as reflected in the contemplated daily actions of the chorus in this play, are trivial as we nurture our "illusions" of action. Again from Prufrock:
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
These are similar to the "momentous" decisions the chorus (we) face as we go on "living and partly living."
While there is much, much more to contemplate in all of this, I believe what this passage is saying from a Christian perspective is that in the final analysis WE are not important. Our action is an infinitesimal part of a bigger action of which we are only dim reflections. It's not about us. And I think that may speak to the issue of martyrdom here. Your observation that the current middle eastern suicide bombers are prepared for their experience by imagining the benefit to themselves (in this case a peaceful end.) I think this would be one of those ways in which Eliot sees us "doing the right thing for the wrong reason." His dilemna is that even something as self-sacrificial as martyrdom may be the "wrong" action. For this reason he spends the middle part of the play struggling to identify what "the perfect martyrdom" of Jesus was all about. (All of this, of coarse reflects and unapologetic Christian perspective. "Though I give my body to be burned, and have not love...." is another expression of the same issue.
I believe, what this passage ("that the wheel may turn....")is telling us, is that our most momentous actions are really no action at all when compared to the infinite action which is at the center of the universe of all action. Our worth, our value, and the value of all our action is defined and measured within the context of the One whose action is beyond us and yet within our own action. Our action acquires its meaning only in relationship to that ACTION when it becomes both an expression of and a reflection of that action. "Herein is love (the only action that counts), not that we loved God, but that he loved us and gave his son...."
Thanks again for sharing your own journey with us through this blog.
Reading back, I realize that I could have left a reader unclear about the words of Hamlet. It is of coarse important that while Hamlet is a very important background for Eliot, the contrast is also the key to what Eliot is saying to us, and that is part of the meaning of this passage. Eliot is both exploring and turning on its head the Hamlet dilemna which is, of coarse, "to be or not to be."
Post a Comment