Words.

I’m hungry for books to read at the moment and crime fiction has suddenly lost its appeal. About time really; I’ve been stuck in the crime loop for ten years. Before that it was a decade of tracts on esoteric philosophies or pop psychology, interspersed with Doris Lessing, and the occasional Aga saga as light relief. I don’t anticipate this deviation from novels lasting long but whilst it does it’s hard to know what it is I want so I spend a lot of time wandering round my depleted stock of books late at night, thumbing through this and that, trying to settle to something. Yesterday I re-read ‘The Family Reunion’ remembering the first time I was introduced to Eliot in the Sixth form. The English ‘A’ level group read it through together and I was always cast as Agatha. Though it was hard to understand I think I got as much from it then as I do now and I loved the enigmatic imagery. A lifelong love affair with T.S. Eliot and obscure poetry was born. I’m not a Pam Ayres fan for instance. I really like stuff I don’t understand but which gives me the feeling of being on the edge of understanding not what the poet meant but a new vista for myself. I love uncomfortable juxtapositions of ideas, warped ways of seeing old truths so they create some unexpected concept, or an insight I have never had before. It’s what all artists want to do, but few truly succeed.

From the Sixth form days I remembered these passages:

Harry: Changed? nothing changed? how can you say that nothing is changed?
You all look so withered and young.

Later he says:

Harry: You are all people
To whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact of external events. You have gone though life in sleep,
Never woken to the nightmare. I tell you life would be unendurable
If you were wide awake. You do not know
The noxious smell untraceable in the drains,
Inaccessible to the plumbers, that has its hour of the night;
you do not know
The unspoken voice of sorrow in the empty bedroom
At three in the morning. I m not speaking of my own experience, but trying to give you
Comparisons in a more familiar medium. I am the old house
With the noxious smell and the sorrow before morning,
In which all past is present, all degradtion
Is unredeemable. As for what happens -
Of the past you can only see what is past,
Not what is always present. That is what matters.

In another place:

Agatha: The eye is on this house
The eye covers it.
There are three together
May the lives be separated
May the knot that was tied
Become unknotted
May the crossed bones
in the filled up well
Be at last straightened
May the weasel and the otter
Be about their proper business
The eye of the daytime
And the eye of the night time
Be diverted from this house
Till the knot is unknotted
The crossed uncrossed
And the crooked is made straight.


Agatha: Shall we ever meet again?
And who will meet again? Meeting is for strangers.
Meeting is for those who do not know each other.


Agatha: In a world of fugitives
The person taking the opposite direction
Will appear to run away.

And near the end:

Harry: I must follow the bright angels.

(He means the Eumenides who have thus far pursued him through his life and his fear of them meant he only perceived them from the corner of an eye, but now, in the place he hoped finally to escape from them, they show themselves fully so he knows he can’t pretend any longer. He leaves the place of his childhood where everythiong has stagnated, held in place by lies and the sleep of those who do not wish to see. He leaves, determined to embrace his Fates.)

Where does one go from a world of insanity?
Somewhere on the other side of despair.