East Coker and the Warm Dark

I’m sitting for a while, again, with T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

There are words, images in these four poems that regularly slice me to pieces and relieve me of distortions I am too easily entangled by in the course of a day.

Sometimes I can only read a sentence or two at a time because I am so struck, so stunned, so uncovered, so exposed to myself.

This, from the second poem, East Coker, this morning:

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theater,

The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed,

With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I said to my soul, be still.”

Be still.

Be still.

The stillness allows the next words to sink in deeper.

“And let the dark come upon you”

The dark that we might only encounter through a night of insomnia, the world around sound asleep, the night animals surrounding the house.

The throb of my own heart beat.

The presence of everything that I cannot see, know or control.

The stillness so thick I can only anchor myself with a silent chant or mantra:

And all manner of things shall be well, or Have mercy on us all.

I find the sun gods and the gods of mere light alienating and intolerable. The only gods I feel contained by are the ones that include the night, the silence, the dead, the wilderness.

“As in a theater, lights extinguished”

I grew up in a community theater, my first family of choice and a haven from the flabbergasting chaos of my actual home. Run by a group of old queens in a pick up truck and gun rack town.

I spent weekday afternoons and evenings there, doing my homework on the threadbare fake velvet fold up theater seats, waiting for my scene to be called to rehearse. On Saturdays I’d spend the whole day, painting flats, washing paintbrushes, sorting props, changing gels and gobos.

And when the work was done I would sneak off to the unlit wings, and wrap myself in the curtain blacks, spinning myself into a complete cocoon of darkness. A dark so dark that it made no difference if my eyes were open or closed.

I would open my eyes as wide as wide can be and let the warm dark pour in and out and in. My fully dilated pupils a portal between the inner world and the outer world, which in that moment, were exactly the same thing.

“A movement of darkness upon darkness”

I remember once in my cocoon hearing the old woman muralist who painted landscapes on the back wall say something to another adult about how “…we are all expendable after all..” and although I was only eleven I became furious.

I unwrapped myself and stomped my foot and said:

“You are wrong! You are not expendable!”

She looked at me like I had twelve heads, and I modulated my tone:

“Nothing and no one is expendable. I know that. I know that.”