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.