A durational dance work exploring time, distance & memory through T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets

Monday 26 April 2010

Love is most nearly itself/When here and now cease to matter...

Mrs A has reminded me that the last section of East Coker is part of the 'edited highlights' speech she has arranged to be read at her own funeral. This is touching and comic by turns. We laugh at my suggestion that I will now be able to read the whole of the Quartets and perform contemporary dance simultaneously. A marathon of live art for the mourners.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before or after
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered

[Old stones? With weird synchronicity I was learning this section when dancing at Pentre Ifan for Cathy with Resondance]



There is a time for the evening under starlight
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

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Journey back from Bristol today:
St. Wertburghs to Fownhope in about an hour and three and a bit Quartets...
Burnt Norton M5 junctions 15 to 13 (a bit of speeding)
East Coker Junction 13 to 11A (ish)
The Dry Salvages A40 to Highnam and beyond
Little Gidding tailed off before Newent...

Saturday 24 April 2010

April is the cruellest month...

...when you have to spend it learning the entirety of the Four Quartets, word perfectly. OK, so it's a self-imposed challenge, and nobody will know but I will, and so will Mrs A (mother), so it matters.

I was hoping that I'd use this page to mark off, section by section, the arduous-but-oddly-masochistically-pleasurable process of committing these endless words to my head, but I reassure myself that like most healthy people I've been rather too preoccupied with living and breathing and learning to actually blog (I am so over the split inifinitive thing now; besides, 'to blog' seems to be far too modern an infinitive to be sticklery about) and probably no-one with a functioning self-indulgenceometer is reading this anyway.

Anyway, I'm already three quartets down now, three quarters through - finished The Dry Salvages this morning and strolled on into Little Gidding - but no-one to share my triumph except the walls and windows of my caravan, the car, the M5 (with the window down), the studio, the hedges of my running routes, Merlin's ears, all bristling and singing with Eliot's words. Some of them I didn't even know (Mrs A would be appalled) and had to look up...

inoperancy, appetency, eructation (Burnt Norton)
hebetude, grimpen, Almanach de Gotha (WTF?), l'entre deux guerres (never did French) (East Coker)
seine, groaner (The Dry Salvages)
sempiternal (Little Gidding)

It makes me feel like Eddie Izzard's reluctant-cat-in-training: 'Hm. Interesting words...'

Great: widening my vocabulary with words that make me even less comprehensible and make one [ironic] sound like even more of a 1940s academic.

I feel like I'm having an intense relationship with a long dead poet [even] more verbose than me...

I feel like my rhythms are being dictated by these lines constantly looping in my head ('the fever sings in mental wires')... they seep in through cracks in my conscious thought and fill my mind like groundwater ('And the groundswell, that is and was from the beginning/clangs/the bell')

I feel like I'm drowning in someone else's words ('those who were in ships and/Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips'), but they're so wonderful, so true, so universal, they're saying as articulately and succinctly as words can, what our flesh already knows.

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future
Only through time time is conquered.

Friday 16 April 2010

time present and time past

Once upon a time there was a little girl & a liberal intellectual mother & a house full of books...

Looking for a book to read one day, the little girl (age 6; maybe just a little bit precocious) stumbled upon a little paperback so slim, she thought it must be a story for children. Her mother said it wasn't, but when she opened it up, the words looked easy enough, in short little lines & so she started reading out loud to her surprised, laughing mother:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally [this word was a bit hard] present
All time is unredeemable... [and she might have stopped here because she definitely hadn't seen that word before]..."

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This work was originally conceived as a reflection on our perception of time. Reading and listening to the work of the Eagleman laboratory, I was drawn to the notion that our perception of time is determined by the density at which we lay down memory

"When you’re a child, everything is new, so you’re laying down very dense memories about everything that’s going on. By the time you’re older you’ve seen it all before; your brain doesn’t have to write as much stuff down. So when you get to the end of a childhood summer and you look back it seems like it took forever. But when you’re an adult and you look back, you just haven’t written down that same density of memories, so it seems like it flew by. You can make your life seem longer by doing things that are novel each day."

Inevitably, thinking about time, I found myself returning to Eliot's Four Quartets (maybe because I imprinted it on my memory at such a tender age) and got no further. First published together in 1944, they are some of the most famous and well-regarded twentieth century poems to deal with the nature of time. But they hold an equal (and related) significance for my small family as a unifying thread that has (until now) surreptitiously linked our lives with colourful stories. In particular, our one slim copy of these poems is rich with such traces: the scribbled marginalia of my mother’s literary analysis; her biro-ed (and comically posh) lessons in the use of punctuation (for me, age 7) on the frontispiece; the notes she later wrote on page 45 for her own mother’s epitaph. This was also that the volume that I'd picked up age 6, deceived by its slimness. All this on the faded armchair where I was so often read to, or slipping down the side of, lulled to sleep by my mother’s sonorous voice on another endless telephone call. One volume, three generations of women, one cat (called Eliot), a telephone and a lot of talking out loud….

All this weaves together the time and distance that now lies between me and my mother (who doesn't travel beyond her self-imposed forcefield at a 10 mile radius of Aberystwyth) and my hometown, geographically, and between who we are now and who we were then, temporally.

So that's it, my starting point: one huge and hugely famous set of four long poems, in two battered copies (one here, one in Aber), a mother and a daughter (one in Aber, one here), a mobile phone and three scores: (1) IWILLLEARNALLTHEWORDS (2) i will move and speak at the same time (3) when i can't speak any more, i will listen to my mother (for the first time, ever).

Like the little bird, listening in the tree.


my grammar and punctuation lessons (age 7)


mum's literary marginalia

my mother's notes for my grandmother's epitaph (in Welsh)