T.S. Eliot on Resistance

(Originally posted in 2011.)

It’s been a pretty rough day. I’ll just note that our puppy, Beckett (she’ll always be a puppy) went to the hospital today. She’s going to be okay, and we’re very grateful. And maybe it’s the unrent emotion of the day and my exhaustion making me so particularly available to Mr. Eliot’s words this evening.

I went looking in Anne Bogart’s book and then, you act for something to write about. The first page I opened to contained a bit of the fifth section of "East Coker" from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. I doubt I’ll need to explain its relevance to our work here.

And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

“A raid on the inarticulate.” Amazing.

And now, here, in 2022, I see the cycle coming around again.
Another new beginning.
Another attempt at clarity and articulation.