Four Quartets - 'At the still point, there the dance is'

I love the echoes of other poems in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.  Not just of Eliot's own words, but words and lines from the past.  His allusions are often esoteric, and hard to pick out.  Sometimes they steal right past you, repeated readings required before you are able to track them down.  Tennyson's 'mouse from behind the mouldering wainscot' turns up twice in Four Quartets, and Keats' 'country green' and 'sunburnt mirth' contract into 'Little Gidding's 'country mirth'.  The latter leaves me feeling particularly bashful as it took far too long for the prickling of my consciousness to reveal lines from the poem that gives my blog its name.  And then Eliot's direct lifting - 'Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal' -  of those adorably simple lines from the anchorite Julian of Norwich, the calming mantra of 'All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.'  Yet knowing these things and being aware of their sources is not in any way essential to the poem's power. 

'Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened'

It's a difficult poem.  And difficult in a different way to The Waste Land, a poem that you need to work at in order to get to grips with it.  The Waste Land demands careful and deep excavation.  Four Quartets, however, tells you – quite literally – that reason is overrated.  To revel in the pleasure of the poem's paradoxes, its calming almost Gnostic utterances, is a great way to approach it.  But shutting down from rationalising and thought is something that can be a lot more difficult than you'd think.  Thus the news that the poem was to be set to dance at the Barbican, caused me to snap up tickets immediately.  To follow dancers and enter the meditative state that the poem prescribes seemed to me a great way to experience the words anew.  After all, I thoroughly enjoyed my excursion into dance two years ago with Wayne McGregor's Woolf Works, dancing set to the words and themes of four of Virginia Woolf's major novels, and to the arresting music of Max Richter. 

'Words strain / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish'   

Here it is Pam Tanovitz taking Eliot's words and choreographing nine dancers to accompany them.  And whilst the skills and professionalism of the dancers were not in doubt, their erratic backwards and forward motions, seemingly without a pattern, left me cold and rather confused.  I know little of dance and ballet.  That is, of course, my problem.  Yet here, unlike with Woolf Works, I could not fasten the movement and music onto the words.  Yes, I know that those forward motions, ones that cleverly seemed to move backwards at the same time, were a great way to reflect the temporal contradictions of Eliot’s poem -

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.

- but this only works a few times and the trick grows tired.  And it's not as if the poem doesn't want to move.  It contains many references to dancing, but these never quite connected in my head.  The movements often seemed to lack grace and poise, the thudding and squeaking and scraping of feet – albeit certainly nimble feet – uncomfortably audible in the large auditorium.  Again, let's stress that mea culpa - I know little of dance.         

'What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning'

Looking back on the evening, the most revealing moment, and one that the public performance of this poem makes possible, are the lines that draw the audience back into the present.  The soft wave of laughter that washes gently around the auditorium at the following lines, show just how difficult it is to step out of time and enter a realm free of the shackles of our own prosaic day to day existence. 

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations

And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence

And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen

Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about

What worked for me was almost switching off from the dancing, pushing it towards the periphery of my vision, and dwelling on the words.  In fact, the American actor Kathleen Chalfant's recital of the poem was just perfect.  Note perfect - quickening when necessary, slowing and enunciating at moments of emphasis - and the words gradually began to lull me into the state of timelessness that the poem strives towards.  At the close of 'Little Gidding' – a section that I read out at my grandma's funeral a year or two before the exact same words found their way into Margaret Thatcher's eulogy – Chalfant's voice faltered and began to crack with the emotion that they carried. 

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.

The weight of reading the entirety of this incredible poem, and simple words that have a real ability to catch you out, suddenly rendered the evening worthwhile. The dancing may have left me muddled, but the timeless (pun intended) lines left me rapt.