October 31, 2005
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Balance
“An asymmetrical balance is sought since it possesses more movement.
This is achieved by the imaginary plotting of the character upon a
nine-fold square, invented by some ingenious writer of the Tang
dynasty. If the square were divided in half or in four, the result
would be symmetrical, but the nine-fold square permits balanced
asymmetry.”– Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy,
quoted in Aspen no. 10, item 8
“‘Burnt Norton’ opens as a meditation on time. Many comparable and contrasting views are
introduced. The lines are drenched with reminiscences of Heraclitus’ fragments on flux and
movement…. the chief
contrast around which Eliot constructs this poem is that between the view of time as a
mere continuum, and the difficult paradoxical Christian view of how man lives both ‘in and
out of time,’ how he is immersed in the flux and yet can penetrate to the eternal by
apprehending timeless existence within time and above it. But even for the Christian the
moments of release from the pressures of the flux are rare, though they alone redeem the
sad wastage of otherwise unillumined existence. Eliot recalls one such moment of peculiar
poignance, a childhood moment in the rose-garden– a symbol he has previously used, in
many variants, for the birth of desire. Its implications are intricate and even ambiguous,
since they raise the whole problem of how to discriminate between supernatural vision and
mere illusion. Other variations here on the theme of how time is conquered are more
directly apprehensible. In dwelling on the extension of time into movement, Eliot takes up
an image he had used in ‘Triumphal March’: ‘at the still point of the turning world.’ This
notion of ‘a mathematically pure point’ (as Philip Wheelwright has called it) seems to be
Eliot’s poetic equivalent in our cosmology for Dante’s ‘unmoved Mover,’ another way of
symbolising a timeless release from the ‘outer compulsions’ of the world. Still
another variation is the passage on the Chinese jar in the final section. Here Eliot, in a
conception comparable to Wallace Stevens’ ‘Anecdote of the Jar,’ has suggested how art
conquers time:Only by the form,
the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.”— F. O. Matthiessen,
The Achievement of T.S. Eliot,
Oxford University Press, 1958,
as quoted in On “Burnt Norton”
