we are glad to be scattered

leaving it to chance

Last year I told somebody I’ve met once or twice—who happened to be passing through Where I Live USA and stopped for a coffee—that I thought T.S. Eliot was “the dweebiest poet whose work I love.” That is, there are no doubt dweebier poets, but I do not love them. I love TSE.

I should say that my image of Eliot the man is mostly shaped by Carole Seymour-Jones’s book Painted Shadow, which is about his first wife, Vivienne. That book is not really all that good because (as I recall) Seymour-Jones spends a lot of time trying to prove that Eliot was gay and presumably (?) that was why he was a bad husband.

But lots of men have been bad closeted gay husbands without reaching the heights of T.S. Eliot. They just cheat! That’s normal. Eliot—in addition to starting the process of separation from his wife while in another country—avoided her to such an insane degree you’d think an old witch woman had pulled him aside on the street to tell him if he ever made eye contact with her again he’d die. Thus:

[Vivienne] continued to call [at Eliot’s offices], “a slight, pathetic, worried figure, badly dressed and very unhappy,” who screwed up her handkerchief as she wept, recalled Bridget O’Donovan, Eliot’s secretary from 1934 until 1936. O’Donovan, who was in love with Eliot herself, knew her duties. She went downstairs to the foyer, where Vivienne sat weeping in the corner, and explained that it was not possible for her to see her husband, but that he was quite well. Eliot, meanwhile, was slipping down the backstairs out of the building; sometimes he hid in the lavatory.

Vivienne would go to Eliot’s plays, confronted him at a book fair, and even had a hat which advertised Murder in the Cathedral (a play she saw “nine times”).¹ Eliot sent bailiffs to their old apartment to seize possessions he wanted. And then there’s Emily Hale, and so on. However, I come here not to bury T.S. Eliot, just to mess up his hair a little. I’m glad I never knew him, because I imagine knowing him would have made his poetry unreadable for me, which would have been a great loss.

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It’s Ash Wednesday, which is why I’m thinking about T.S. Eliot, his poetry, and his various antics. Despite being a person who grew up in a house where I could have simply read some T.S. Eliot out of a book at basically any time, I, for whatever reason, read the poems of his that were in the public domain and thus online. Most of the poetry that easily springs to mind in my day to day life comes, I think, from the various online poetry sources that I kept track of at this time, like the long, long defunct blog “The Wondering Minstrels.”²

In addition to reading these online poems over and over—as if they were some sort of texts from a lost civilization about which nothing more could be known, instead of (again) poems that were in books that were probably in my very own home—I would carefully copy and paste anything that struck me as a good epigraph for a chapter of a novel into a WordPerfect document that I’m almost positive was called something like “good quotes.” I probably copied, conservatively, at least two thirds of “Ash Wednesday,” because its language thrilled me.

At the time, I’m not sure I even slightly understood what it meant to say “I do not hope to know / the infirm glory of the positive hour” or what it meant to hope to turn again or any of the rest of it.³ I certainly had already accumulated regrets at that point in my life, some of which could eat into me very deeply and even keep me awake at night. But I did not associate them at all with the poem.⁴ Reading it now, listening to Eliot read it, I understand it better.

I only have affection for this time in my life. Over the last few years I’ve tried to understand my “process” (sorry) and I do think a big part of it, probably formed at this time, is openness to randomness and serendipity, that sometimes what is valuable to one’s thinking is valuable because you find it at the right time and not because it is where you’d be guided by expert opinion.

Of course this can’t be everything. You cannot always operate guided by instinct and luck, you do have to do “the reading” or the homework or the fieldwork or whatever the grindstone of your particular subject might be. But even when working in ways that do have to be so guided, I try to preserve some place for chance. I loved so many poems that I read so many times that showed up in my life for no reason. What a gift.

For a piece I’ve been working on I’ve been trying to use an AI chatbot to do different things for me (right now I am trying to get it to act like my personal Jungian analyst—it’s not going well). The more I’ve read about AI and LLMs and tried out the chatbot, the less anxiety I feel about the topic. But I also find it very boring.

If I ask it to give me a reading list on a topic, it will give me a perfectly adequate one that is (probably) made up of things that actually exist, like these results for the prompt “what are some of the best English language poems about regret?”:

But they aren’t my poems. They’re just poems. I mean they are good poems and some of them are poems I love.… Still. They aren’t mine, you know? It’s hard to explain.

1. The other big claim of Seymour-Jones’s book is that Vivienne, despite being eventually institutionalized, was never crazy, but, again as I recall, rather made to look crazy by circumstances. Revisiting the passages I highlighted back when I read this book, I remember both feeling at the time like this action was #relatable and not crazy—

[A] few days later, on 30 November, Vivienne visited the Mercury Theatre to watch Murder in the Cathedral, which had transferred from Canterbury to Ashley Dukes’ studio theatre. Once again she was a conspicuous figure, sitting in the stalls beside Aldous and Maria Huxley and Sybille Bedford. It was an encounter which Sybille Bedford remembers as “terrifying.” Gaunt and swaying, still smelling of ether, her make-up misapplied, half recognising people and half not, Vivienne made such an intense impression on Sybille that she was forced to leave the room and have a brandy. Like “wrong’d Aspatia,” Vivienne refused to stay locked in her charnel vault, but issued from the shadows to haunt Tom. She watched the play at least nine times.

—and (now) also I think… yeah she does not seem to be well, does she.…

2. Sometimes you found things through odd sources, as in fact I still do, i.e. I discovered the existence of Swinburne through a JournalFen called “Limyaael’s Fantasy Rants.”

3. My favorite Eliot poem was, and remains, “La Figlia che Piange,” which I think I did understand.

4. Though I did associate them with other poems, like this one by Richard Wilbur:

Well, I was ten and very much afraid.
In my kind world the dead were out of range
And I could not forgive the sad or strange
In beast or man.