A little tidbit of East Coker... stupid GRE

Well from the looks of other blogs, I missed out on a pretty excellent group presentation. Forgive me, I had to be sacrificed to the Gods of Standardized Higher Education and take the GRE. I'm so happy to say all of the knowledge of the last 5 years was packaged up into a little 4 hour chunk and spit out onto a Educational Testing Services computer to be compared with all of the other 4 hour chunks of students across the nation in efforts to determine worthiness to continue higher education.

But anyway back to the much more important matter.

I wanted to highlight a little passage that struck me in East Coker. It comes during the scene of the Dance of the Dead. Because this poem is so damn confusing I can only manage it in miniature chunks while the rest of it just flows over my head.

"Keeping time

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and the constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet Rising and Falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points, and another day"

This part of the poem initially struck me because of the thought of the dead keeping the time of the living. Living people have a insatiable fascination about time. Always, time for work, time for school, time for dinner, time for that incredibly important meeting. What struck me is all the dead have is time...an unlimited amount of it...to think, to ponder, to reflect on, if i were to guess, life. But Eliot says its the dead who keep time "as in their living in the living seasons." Switch a few of the letters around in that line and it reads. Its the dead who keep time "as if they're living in the living seasons." The dead keep the time of the seasons, constellations, milking, harvest and love. The dead keep the time of all the shit thats really important in life while the living keep time of meaningless appointments. The living keep dayplanners while the things worth keeping time of, i.e. seasons, constellations, and love, drift right on by without much notice.

It's like, Groundhog's Day. Bill Murrey's character only realizes the important things until after he's witnessed them thousands of times. The Dead have infinite time to figure out these important things and then fixate on them in ritual dance so as if to never lose them, while the living experience them in full flesh and blood only to disregard them during the never ending quest for "dawn points, another day."

"Still points" exists in the minutia of the world. It's a shame, i'd imagine Eliot would argue, that we walk right by them everyday. I think Joyce would agree because the greatest epiphany can come from patio furnature.