The Monday Muse

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot: Four Quartets - Little Gidding

The photo above was taken at Trelissick Garden nr Truro in 2010 and was part of the 'You are Here' exhibition that brings together site-specific artifacts designed and built to define a sense of space. Created by level two students on the BA(Hons) Contemporary Crafts course from University College Falmouth. This peice was made out of discarded spectical lenses and was meant to make you see the landscape differently. 

The  quote is from section V of Little Gidding which is part of the Four Quartets by T.S.Eliots. I've never known for as long as I can remember what this poem really means. It's one of my Dads favourites and as a result I find these lines often stray across my mind, usually when I'm a little unsure of where my life is taking me or just out on a long walk to nowhere in particular. My Sister reminded me of it this week as she had been drawn to sit and read it again and still wasn't sure what it all means. However she like me takes a strange comfort in that bewilderment.

The idea you should find yourself on a path and return to the place you started from and know it for the first time reminds me strangely of the passage from 'Pooh and Piglet nearly catch a woozle', where they keep finding more footprints in the snow, which are in fact their own because they are walking round in a circle. Pooh Bear (with his strong imagination) thinks they are being joined by more woozles and Piglet timidly remembers something that he forgot to do yesterday and shan't be able to do tomorrow to avoid confronting whatever a woozle is!  I hope this means we're not all catching our tails. I like to think it means that we don't know where one thing ends and another begins. I find this sentement a comfort whenever I feel my world closing in, that there are still new horizons to be explored and that:

'What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.'

You can check out the whole of the poem online and read other peoples reviews on it and make up your own minds. I'm also a big fan of his less perplexing work Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats which is a collection of whimsical poems about feline psychology and sociology, published by faber and faber which was the basis for the musical Cats.

The poems were written during the 1930s and included by Eliot, under his assumed name "Old Possum," in letters to his godchildren. Eliot, front flap. Larson. They were collected and published in 1939 with cover illustrations by the author, and quickly re-published in 1940, illustrated in full by Nicolas Bentley. It has also been published in re-illustrated versions by Edward Gorey (1982) and Axel Scheffler (2009).