Class Notes 1/22

Class Notes from January 22nd

See Jenny Lynn's blog to see the picture of the box circle rose garden.

Group presentations are coming way earlier this semester. Each group will be experts on their section of the Four Quartets and inform the class in an interesting and entertaining way. Each presentation should be about 45minutes. We can use visual aides on the smart cart.

Seriously we are forbidden to read Nick's blog, for now.

We listen to the Van Morrison Piper at the Gate of Dawn song, which can be accessed in my blog entry: Class Notes 1/20.

Eliot, East Coker
"In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie-"

Working with the epiphany inductively - working the details towards the general

Abby disagrees with Eliot, for her food is a source of epiphany
Notice the lunch basket in The Wind in the Willows, 'coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater-'

Eliot - Dry Salvages
"The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has."

Sublime (also the name of a band), not only a great experience, but painful
awesome, an overused word........notice awful.
My idea of a sublime experience is an experience where you might try to explain it to someone, but words cannot begin to describe what happened, so you just say, 'you had to be there i guess' same goes for a funny experience or joke that you have to be in the moment to really get it and trying to explain it to someone ruins it.

Eliot and Taylor agree that epiphanies are ineffable....see Taylor's blog

Eliot - East Coker
"So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. 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."

google "right action"

Eliot - Dry Salvages
"And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil."

Blog assignments:
- this weekend, draw out a definition for epiphany from Wind in the Willows chapter 7