Presentation East Coker II

NOTE: I have some illustrations and stuff to share but my scanner ate it so now I need to find a way to cheaply digitize things that wont make Sara Mast scalp me.


My section is on East Coker II with the omission of a few lines at the beginning and end of the section.

This is my part:

Deployed in constellated wars
Scorpion fights against the Sun
Until the Sun and Moon go down
Comets weep and Leonids fly
Hunt the heavens and the plains
Whirled in a vortex that shall bring
The world to that destructive fire
Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.
It was not (to start again) what one had expected.
What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

In summary, this section seems like a break from naturalistic poetic versing and a recognizing of the very limitations of language in helping achieve the serenity that Eliot equates to happiness. With it, comes the question, if knowledge and experience are not the paths to wisdom, how does one achieve wisdom? In recognizing the immensity of an environment both physical and mental, a viewer must understand their part in the whole system which mirrors and functions similarly (simulates) the natural world. There is no insulation in decadence from the folding cycle of life, death, destruction, and relapse that exists.