Here is my final post - for now - on the poem Burnt Norton by TS Eliot.
In it I include some clips from the longer videos I published last Friday by way of introducing the poem, which I go on to read out in parts.
The reason I am doing this is because Eliot’s work and life in general and this poem in particular can help you to understand what is wrong with our world and what is missing from our lives - and how to restore it all.
We are encouraged to consider all the wisdom of our culture, religion and ancestors as the work of a bunch of outmoded fuddy-duddies having no value beyond a grotesque historical curiosity.
This is because that wisdom is superior to the trash we are supplied in its place today - a point which I think is amply demonstrated in Eliot’s Burnt Norton.
It is a poem about the destruction that is sin, that we may freely choose it or redemption. It presents an alternative to the condition of modern man who is liberated from objective morality and meaning into the trap of the self.
This, of course, is called progress today.
THE CULT OF PROGRESS
One reason the progressive cult of the self wishes to do away with all the old ways is they led us to the truth - and not towards its contradiction.
This is the reason anything true about mankind and his nature is coded as outrageous and outmoded, as all our beliefs are to be supplied by a system which makes belief in itself.
What are these beliefs? What do they mean for us in politics, economics and religion, and why are they not true?
These questions are profound and are essential to understanding what is meant by civilisation, what has been lost in our modern mass culture, and how we might restore it.
Equality, morality, progress
The project of standardising the world into a single global system requires a sort of artificial culture to be manufactured, which replaces reality based beliefs with fantasies convenient to standardisation of belief, custom, culture and religion.
One of these is equality. We are told all men and women are equal, which is not true. We are told all customs and cultures are of equal civilisational value, and all morality and indeed what is taken to be true is simply a matter of preference.
We are told it is a virtue to believe that no preference is superior to another as all is merely perspective, and there is no ultimate reality, truth or nature of being against which to measure them.
The political belief in equality equalises us all into a universal nothing, qualified only by the desires mobilised by the cultural production of products to excite and match them.
I went on about how modernity limits and does not liberate man here:
We are sold into this one dimensional manhood by promises of equality, which results in the equalisation of the wicked with the just, the foolish with the wise, the ignorant with the informed and the prudent with the incontinent. It is a fool’s paradise which leaves us with nothing to believe in but ourselves - and our self is simply a product of the beliefs which supply us into this profound moral, cultural, intellectual and spiritual poverty called progress.
Some effects of this cause
The beliefs made commonplaces in our artificial culture produce a collective limitation of the perspective and value of human life. It is basically limited to the product line of modern belief.
Here I explained how modern “ethics” are an example of the way down for Man generally, debasing him by means of the production of an arithmetic of desire as a replacement for objective moral truth.
Equality is a false idol. The idolatry of equality deprives us of the fact that some men see farther than others and that many simply cannot see at all.
This is one way of making the world blind to moral evil and to the production of destruction in the name of progress. It is combined with the babble of modern communication, which saturates our inner lives with a constant stream of unedited perspectives refined by an algorithm designed to produce maximum absorption of attention, resulting in a sort of dependency on the neurochemical reward secured by rejecting reality for the visions of the black mirror.
This is what is trilling in the wire in the blood in Eliot’s Burnt Norton.
What is trilling in the wire in our blood is the way down. What is the way up?
Here I went on about Kenneth Clark’s two types of art by way of an answer.
There is a lesson for the restoration of the meaning and purpose of our lives in this great poem, which is why I recommend you struggle to understand it.
Here I read out the first part of Burnt Norton.
Here I am reading out part two - which contains that marvellous line about the wire in the blood:
Eliot’s poem is significant for many reasons.
One is the presentation of the fullness of human life afforded by the re-recognition of the supernatural, which leads us to Christ, against the lifelong paroxysm of Prufrock whose permanent paralysis of indecision and purposeless anguish is typical of the atheist Modern condition of Man.
This is why you should read Eliot, as I explain here:
The poem as poetry changes its metre and music, shifting us from the outside immediate world, into the internal world of man’s trilling blood, and out again into the vast expanse of an eternity whose sense is only to be calibrated by the landmark in our history that is Christ.
Burnt Norton is a breathtaking vision of the ultimate reality which we so often disremember due to our absorption in what we call our selves.
This is what awaits us in later parts of the poem, and is also found in its conclusion which I read out here:
To glimpse the world as presented in Burnt Norton is to be enthralled by the ultimate reality which Eliot’s bird says humankind cannot too much bear.
It is better to try to bear this reality than not, as the alternative is the prison of the self, circumscribed by its insatiable desires, in a state of internal exile from the glory of all there is beyond us and our petty little revisions.
The work of Eliot can help you nourish your soul amidst a culture which is doing its utmost to encourage you to dispose of it, as I argue here:
I am trying to help you look beyond yourself and the terrible fool’s bargain of the liberal modern condition to what is in fact reality. This will help you to understand that the counter-civilisational revolution we inhabit is basically an argument with reality, and that is why is it falling apart - as reality is permanent, and though so also is the folly of man, his monuments to himself do not endure because they are erected on vain fantasies which are clearly incapable of explaining our being in the world, its timeless and changeless nature, and can certainly never replace it.
The limits of the cult of Man are visible in the failed religions of himself he has invented in the last century, the last of which is the one we inhabit - Liberalism.
In Church and State we are presented with the worship of the idols of this counter-reality and counter-civilisational cult, whose refusal to accept the limits of the changeless nature of man and of reality have produced a conflict with those limits it can neither contain nor control.
The history of the revolutionary cult of man is ending not in the victory proclaimed by Fukuyama but in a tragic farce. Eliot’s life and work help you understand what a religion of man really is, and how and why it is utterly destructive to the meaning of your life and its order.
Burnt Norton will help you to see what has always been there, but which has been subtracted from your picture of yourself and the world by the manufacture of mass belief in alternatives to the truth convenient for the aims of the ruling elite, whose machinery of crisis management is finally breaking down.
If you would like to support my work in the service of sanity you can do so here:
If you would like to radicalise your friends with this sort of reality-based propaganda you can do that here as well:
I was only introduced to this poem recently, as I studied The Confessions of St. Augustine. A few years ago I gave myself a sort of motto which I stated as “Do what is in front of you.” It works for a number of reasons, particularly if you do not “schedule” too much of life beyond obligatory acts and self-disciplinary habits. If you give yourself plenty of time surrounding these acts, you are free to do beautiful things on your way to and from. Sometimes these beautiful things require sacrifice and patience, which serves to make them all the more beautiful.
Lovely stuff Frank! Always worth going back over Tom's poems. You mentioned Rothko and Pollock....I was reminded too of Andy Warhol - apparently he was a devout Catholic ..makes you wonder if his Campbell soup stuff was actually a 'cry in the wilderness of industrial modernity'.