It is days like today that make me wish BYU-Idaho had no credit limit and that I could stay here indefinitely and reign supreme in lifelong studentdom. It had something to do with Brother Samuelson's EXPO marker trail in the form of a treetop that made my hand, uncharacteristically, raise slightly above my unwashed bed-head. My voice fluttered and my chest fell deep. Never do I feel the limits of language wrap around me so tight than I do on days like today. The hurricane dance pliéd right behind my eyes, but I fumbled with the words just like the chest pass Amity Finch delivered to my chubby, 12-year-old fingers. The ball fell to my feet and rolled under those familiar, wood, extendable bleachers. But today, I'm going to lower my body on to that split-pea soup gymnasium floor and fish that orange menace out from the muck because I know if I don't I'll have another pillow barricade night. The dark figure standing in the corner tickling my spine with its shadow. So, today I'll let that beam behind my mind's eye proliferate and glow and hopefully it will fit somehow, somewhere.
T.S. Eliot wrote in Burnt Norton:
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.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. ...
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present....
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf...
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. ...
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present....
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf...
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Eliot isn't the easiest to understand, but he is also quoted as saying, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood". Today, for me, these words did just that. This poem speaks to me of the fleeting nature of time. "All time is unredeemable". We can never get it back. It seems to move around us like a hurricane. To our left and our right, life is being uprooted and tossed willy-nilly into the neighbor's yard. The beauty is when we can find the eye of the storm and dance inside where all time is present and gone. "Where past and future are gathered". The beauty is when we are in a state of awarness of that swirling danger, yet we reach out to those we love, or that which we love, and dance the dance. Without the dance there is no still place and without the still place there is no dance. "Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."
The dance. The still dance that forms that eye around our love and passion. That still dance that gathers all things together, around, and inside. So, here's to you and me and to our finding of that still dance.
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