Overcoming obstacles and T. S. Eliot

I came across a quotation from the last work of T. S. Eliot that I really liked. Perhaps I already wrote to you about it. There were three that I found and that spoke to me. I actually like a couple so well that I put them in calligraphy in my Art Journal with an eye to doing some artwork on them at some point. When I was in college for the first time, in my 20's, I studied The Wasteland, which of course is what Eliot is most famous for writing. Later, of course, his lasting fame would be cemented by his Old Possums Book of Practical Cats which became the still popular musical Cats!

The quotations sent me on an old college style research mission which was complicated by the fact that I can't read books anymore due to my visual disability. So I searched my free library app - Hoopla - for a biography of T. S. Eliot on audio book. No luck. Then I tried my subscription to audible - again - no luck. I could get readings of his poetry but no biography on audiobook. I searched amazon, then pbs for a documentary - doors closed.

Then, I was talking on the phone with my sister and she was watching something on YouTube and I got the idea to search there and found a great documentary critiquing his work by literary scholars. It was so interesting and informative. Although The Wasteland is touted as his post World War exploration of the emptiness and despair of people after the devastation of the war, Eliot himself said it was more about his emotional state after his separation from his first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood. She was described by all their contemporaries as intensely mentally unstable. Virginia Woolf said she was like a bag of ferrets around Eliot's neck./>

Although she had been experienced in love and life; it was said that Eliot was probably a virgin. He was besotted but she was so mentally unstable that he had to flee back to the US and take a teaching job at Harvard for a year to get away from her. He got legally separated from her and never saw or spoke to her again. Her brother had her committed for life and she died in the asylum at the age of 58. What a tragic story.

Having had a mentally unstable spouse, I can clearly feel Eliot's pain and confusion, despair, and betrayal She had also betrayed him with an extra marital affair with a friend and mentor of his! What is wonderful about this story though. is that Eliot (a famously shy and introverted man) turned his pain into art, used writing as his diversion from mental suffering and turned that negative energy into creativity. One of the things they mentioned in the documentary was that Eliot and contemporaneous poets were called 'landscape' poets because their experiences and the works were grounded in the natural world around them. One of the scholars said you could follow the Four Quartets right around the gardens and the property around the estate where it was written and the tiny chapel in little Giddings. It really made me think about PLACE in our lives.

Today, when I felt listless and uninspired, lethargic and flat, I got in the car with my dog and we drove to a park where I used to live when I was married, and then to a park along the Delaware River where I went daily with coffee on my breaks at school when I taught in that riverfront town. These rides which I take frequently always feel like hauntings to me. The scholars also mentioned Eliot's obsession with time and how we are trapped in time though we have the concept of infinity.

They mentioned many lines in which he reiterates that the past is alive in the present and the future exists in the past and the present as well. It made me think of the Faulkner quote which doesn't go quite as far: "The past is never dead; it's not even past." Which is true in a sense but only, to me, in the sense that it exists like a well worn garment in the closet. It is still there and bears the wear and tear of its use, but we aren't wearing it anymore. To me it is more ghostly than powerful. It exists like invisible waves, magnetism, electricity, radiation, gravity.

The sun is shining here today, a break from the gray filmy foggy days of the past week. I was just gathering the tools I have for the quilting class i am signed up for beginning next week. I have lost some of the shiny hope I had because I thought from the description that it was a traditional quilting class but apparently it is a modern traditional class and we use sewing machines. Well, I will give it a chance anyhow. I had to reserve a sewing machine (I am not dragging mine over there) and tomorrow I have to go spend money on some 'modern' quilting supplies - special cutters and rulers. It is getting much too much of a 'mathy' feel. There will be 5 weeks of it! I have rarely to never signed up for something and then not shown up or finished the course. I hope this doesn't turn into something I dread - the last ones I didn't continue with were fitness classes!

By the way, T. S. Eliot finally achieved a happy marriage at the end of his life with his secretary, half his age, who had been a devoted fan of his since her adolescence. She gave him a new lease on life in his last decade and spent her life devoted to his literary legacy. Fortunately, in recompense, the money from the royalties of "CATS" kept her financially well off.

Happy Trails in the past, the present and the future!

wrightj45@yahoo.com