Dwelling Poetically: Four Lectures on Poetry, Disclosure, and the World’s Midnight (May 18–19, 2026)

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Dwelling Poetically

Four Lectures on Poetry, Disclosure, and the World’s Midnight

May 18–19, 2026

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The Powers

On Hölderlin, Heidegger, and the Poetic Disclosure of Being

I. The Poet and the Powers

I want to give this lecture as a gift, on Hölderlin and the late hymns — Patmos, The Rhine, and one of my personal favorites, Bread and Wine. What we need to reach is beneath Heidegger and beneath Nietzsche. The difficulty Heidegger encounters at the turn of the Second World War, and in his work with Hölderlin, which becomes the substance of his late period, is that the gods in Hölderlin, as Nietzsche and Heidegger refer to them with a sort of philosophical distance — and of course Nietzsche was himself, to a degree, a practicing and practiced poet — are something Heidegger and Nietzsche are trying to re-enter: the state of experience that Hölderlin is inhabiting, and simultaneously remarking upon as it is leaving.

This is the primary difference and the dialectical tension between philosophy and poetry: that philosophy is remarking upon the poetic condition — the dwelling poetically. Philosophy itself, in many ways, is born from the dialectical splitting of that condition. This goes all the way back to Heraclitus, and to several strains of the ancient Hindu mystical tradition. It is also a large part of what I have encountered in the Dao and in ancient Buddhist poetry.

The gods in Hölderlin are not the classical gods of Greek mythology used as poetic decoration. They are the actual powers. We hear this echoed in the Western tradition as “powers and principalities.” When we are discussing the powers, we are speaking of the forces themselves as they are manifest in sky, earth, fire, river — that move through the landscape, through human history, and through the human body. This is important because it returns us to the ground of human experience: the sight which is seen, the body which is felt, the air which is breathed, the water which is drunk, the food or meat or bread which is ingested.

This is the transformative condition of being in time, as a perpetual overturning — what Heraclitus, the poet-philosopher (at least insofar as we remember him through his fragments), would call the measures of fire.

II. Disclosure and Danger

Hölderlin’s work — and this is the historical condition of visionary poetry, by which I mean something closer to shamanic or medicine poetry — is an attempt to name an encounter, and to survive the encounter, with these forces. This is what Heidegger refers to very explicitly as disclosure. The poetic relationship to being is a position of danger. By danger I mean that life and death themselves are a membrane: a permeability of a condition which is provisional. The human condition itself is provisional, in that the materials and requisites for that condition are themselves highly temporal, and potentially destabilized by the basic forces at work — the powers, the forces of sky, earth, fire, river.

This is Heidegger’s hermetic turn in his late period, where he withdraws from the institutional religious education of Nazi Germany and pursues absolutely his project of listening to the poets. The essay is What Are Poets For?, and there are the books on language and poetry, his encounters with Trakl just as with Hölderlin.

He is realizing this poetic being in time, which is immanence — “man poetically dwells within being” — and this sphere of virtue, which is the sphere of world, has no ability to accept the provisional architectures. This is not only civilizational, but symbolic, as well as the mysteries of being. The human condition is inhabited, and yet it is not the absolute. It is a place within the poetic dwelling wherein man gazes back upon this unfolding phenomenon and thus realizes that there is a deeper substrate — what I would call the powers.

These powers are simultaneously the self in a cosmological way, and highly impersonal: they do not exist through any one being or form, and yet they are all beings and forms. Without mediation, the poet steps into this immanent relationship and thus discloses being through the necessity of articulation. This is the true disposition of the poet — that the poet must articulate the relationship to being. And this is not something outside of the privacy of that relationship.

Within the encounter, locally manifested powers are caught in the act of moving through the world, which is native to speed, which is native to language. Language itself is required. This returns us to Heidegger’s gloss on the innocent vocation of poetry: innocence toward language is fundamental to the poetic pursuit. Language itself has not been subsumed to any task other than to articulate that which it is, or to be that which it is — which is the state of disclosure.

These unnameable forces are fundamental to world history: to the Vedic, to the Greeks. This is not a conceptual condition. The paradox of the great work, the visionary work, is that in Hölderlin the language itself, in its expressed condition or quality, is provisional — to elucidate the shining of this beingness. The poem is a structural architecture of necessity, bringing about this relationship of the powers, or this expression of the powers through that which they have produced provisionally, which is being itself in time.

This is a shattering. It is an ontological shattering of the bounds of the presupposed self, which is necessarily a mystical tradition. When Heidegger asks what use the poets are, or what are poets for, he is asking in the midst of the historical condition of modernity itself, which has denied and exiled its shamans, its mystics, its medicine people. The relationship to being, insofar as it is not productive or functional or economical — insofar as it cannot be leveraged — has been shadowed, exiled, and removed from the social and civilizational architecture of modernity, which is a ruthless industrial-technological efficiency. We see this articulated at one of its peaks, at least in the mid-industrial age, in Nazi Germany.

III. The Crisis of Modernity

This is why the crisis in Heidegger is so immense — that this being torn from the immanent relationship, which is always already the province of the poet, the medicine person, the one who dwells within this immanent, articulating, yet inarticulable landscape of the powers as they course through being itself. This relationship, which was formerly a way of communally relating to being in time, the condition of nature — itself the human condition and the condition of human nature — its removal is the technologization of being, which is then a redefinition of what it is to be human. And, additionally, a redefinition of what nature itself is, what nature is for. To ask what the poets are for is to ask what nature is for. The question itself, implicitly and explicitly, is asking what has become of human time. And it has been technologized and instrumentalized to the absolute, into the bone.

The urgency of the return of immanence is itself the question of — we could say, in the Western tradition, the return of God — but in a more fundamental, natural condition, the return of the presence of the powers. These cannot be leveraged. They cannot be obtained. They course through nature. They do not reside in any one principality, in any one province. They are themselves shining. This is a profound aspect of Hölderlin.

Nature’s gleaming is higher revealing. The powers shine through nature, and yet cannot be possessed or obtained. They are the most present and immanent concern in the encounter, in the poet’s rendering of the forces that move beneath the ordinary human experience, beneath being in time. This is the glimmering or diamond river of the eternal that Plato calls time.

IV. Ensoulment and the Symbolic

This is the question of hearing and being truly as indwelling. The loss of the presence of the powers is the loss of the civilizational ground in which there is even a possibility of meaningful relationship to being — the loss of what the ancients called ensoulment, where being is entwined with being at the level of beingness. Nature is not acquired, possessed, or instrumentalized; it is the fundamental intercoursing relationship.

Precisely that which enables poetry — the symbolic function of language, whether letter or number — is, I have argued in past essays and works, the beginning of this cascade, this teleological movement, whose endpoint is abstraction, which is instrumentalization. Being itself has moved out of nature and into a symbolic realm of exchange, in which the powers themselves are vacated. The powers do not live in symbology; they live in the immanence of being, which cannot be acquired.

This is the paradox of the great work of poetry: that the powers course through it, and yet the symbols themselves, like the human body, are provisional architecture for the presence of being — a temporary house. Poetic dwelling.

V. Proximity to Death

This is understood very well in a pre-modern and pre-romantic sense. The poem is moving through life, and the poet dwells closest to this source — on the verge of non-existence in a formal sense. This is proximity to death, which we can understand quite well in the dwelling of the Romantics themselves, in Keats or in Shelley. Dwelling in proximity to death is not dwelling in proximity to the end of man, but dwelling in proximity to the beginning of being.

Dwelling in proximity to death is the foundation of the pre-modern ethos. The loss of that dwelling is the foundation of the modern. And here I will not say ethos — I will say the modern rigor mortis, which is the stilling of the powers, the being away from the powers, the instrumentalization that one could call the logging industry.

This is a perceptual power primarily, and I am articulating it in a symbolic sense. When we return the symbolic function, we return this sword to the stone of history, so to speak. The symbolic function in its return — as we see in Georg Trakl, as we see in Hölderlin — we are witnessing a long end. A long end to the birth of the symbol, and the return of this vast complexity, which is the unfoldment of the symbolic dimension, which is itself all of language: letters, numbers, hieroglyphs. They are being returned to the pre-symbolic immanent, which is itself a death.

VI. Absence Worse Than Death

This produces what I would call the great existentialist tradition, which is a response to the crisis of modernity. I would include here everything from Dostoevsky to Clarice Lispector. The response to the catastrophe and the crisis of modernity — that is, to the utter abandonment of and from the powers — is not death, but absence. An absence which itself is profoundly worse than death. Being itself, and the relationship from being, has been vacated and removed from the earth.

The very traditions that once facilitated this relation have themselves been vacated, thrown under the wheel of this emergence of industrial-technological modernity, which is absolute instrumentalization. This is the downstream crisis of everything — relationship to ecology, included. This is the murder-suicide of the possibility of being, of any relevance of the experience of being human.

So it is the question of these powers. They care not and want not for man, or for the concerns of man, or for the presence of man within them. But the severance of man from them is the existential, ontological, political crisis of modernity. Absolutely. And this severance is specifically concerned with the mortality of the poet, which is proximity to the membrane of being, which is the breaking apart of the institution of the usable, the abstracted, the functional, the possessive, the standing inventory of the self.

VII. The Poet as Clearing

This poetry — whether we call it a shamanic tradition or a mystical tradition — is the making accessible of the powers, without diminishment. The poetry is a diamond, or a prism, through which to gaze; the powers are thus made themselves immanent, visible, clear. This is the function of the prophet, the mystic, who writes the texts which articulate God, which then become the civilizational foundations and frameworks of world history.

Just as Blake maps the powers in mythological form — these powers cannot be reduced. The poet is a clearing, a place of disclosure through which the powers run. This is an obliteration. It is the long-standing death of the Western philosophical self.

It is a movement deeply toward and into the Tao. But there is no obliteration of violence. The mountain simultaneously exists, and the powers are behind it in such a way that the mountain itself does not exist. The acquisition of the symbolic dimension is utterly futile. The poet speaking the mountain is already a relinquishing.

This is profound relationship — death, and a knowledge of life which does not exclude death, but rather knows that life itself in any given form is provisional. This is the nature and essence of the linguistics of prophetic and visionary poetry.

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Thinking with Language

On T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

I would like to continue our lecture series on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and begin a discussion of the method of inquiry: that Eliot thinks with language, and that language itself in Eliot’s poems moves differently than a crafted architecture. The Four Quartets, as a turn of Eliot’s, is a profound turn toward ontological and existential authenticity. The Quartets are Eliot’s exploratory attempt through language. As he says:

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate…

And the point upon which the entire quartet turns: In my end is my beginning. In my beginning is my end.

As we have discussed with Trakl, and as we have moved through Hölderlin, Eliot’s expanse — a continually iterative process through The Waste Land and through The Hollow Men — is an expanse Eliot refuses to calm. In this refusal to calm, we are allowed to experience the path toward the ontos: the way Eliot weaves through the garden, through history, through time. This descent that Eliot undertakes into the darkness:

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

This is the one way, and the other

Is the same, not in movement

But abstention from movement…

Eliot seeks to take us into the buried day, much as Trakl does. This is the great similarity they share. Eliot’s path is a weaving, which is allowed in the poem itself being utterly irrelevant — as it is explicitly stated, self-consciously, throughout the Quartets — that the poem itself is the way through toward the ontos. And the ontos emerges, as with Trakl, through this sophistication of the innocent pursuit of poetic language. Twenty years of this pursuit and attempt, which finally breaks Eliot open into a communion at which he stands: In my end is my beginning. He stands upon a poetic innocence. And we watch Eliot’s language break in the poem.

This is what is so crucial — that we get the true inquiry of the poet toward the ontos, which is the possibility of disclosure. This possibility opens in Eliot, and it opens through his pursuit. Eliot is extremely well-versed in ancient history and ancient philosophy, especially ancient Hindu philosophy. The pursuit is Eliot’s working of the poem down to the bone, down to the ontological bone of existence, into a deeper communion in which the poem ultimately collapses into the clanging of the bell, the groundswell that is and was from the beginning, where time stops and time is never-ending.

This is Eliot falling into the music of poetry, the coming-about of being through the poem. He must descend through his own linguistic markers. We have the references to Krishna. The Quartets themselves are stations — historical, material — which Eliot visits and knows, and through which he descends. He descends through history. He descends through the body of the earth, which becomes the body of the poem, into the possibility of the powers.

This is where, at the very end of the Quartets, it gets extremely explicit:

Driven by daemonic, chthonic

Powers. And right action is freedom

From past and future also.

…the life of significant soil.

Here the past and future are conquered, reconciled. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. The poem itself is the space for this possibility. This is what we understand in Hölderlin, what we understand in Trakl: the poem is a clearing, an opening into the ontological possibility of the union of that which is not, but is, fundamentally, in a way that is quite ineffable. As Eliot states explicitly, the possibility of approaching this ineffable condition emerges through the work of the poem and the working of the poem.

And this is where, with Eliot, we receive something revolutionary: an authentic confrontation with the act and the working of language, unremoved. The process of thought in and through which Eliot descends — wherein we open in the rose garden, and he descends into the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery and the unseen eyebeam crossed, as he looks down into the drained pool, to find what humankind cannot bear, which is very much reality.

We are given the kinks and the bumps, the worn and the unsmoothed nature of Eliot’s thought process. You are given, in Eliot — and perhaps in no greater moment than in the Four Quartets — access to the raw, unfiltered process of thinking through language, which itself does not privilege any one mode of ontological revelation. Everything from Hampstead and Putney to descending lower into the world which is not world. There is philosophical thought, historical thought, musical thought. In the advanced state of Eliot’s working with language — the smithing of language, what we would call the poetic practice — these different modes are no longer privileged. They intercourse to give way, to gain way, to the ontos, to the revelation and disclosure of being.

This is a profound state. A vulnerability in which Eliot’s thought has thought itself. Thinking through language is descending into a translucence, where the thought itself strips itself of narrative identity, of self, of self-awareness and self-consciousness, as Eliot attempts to find the possibility of the opening of poetry in his language, as the poem itself descends at the still point — toward the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is.

That Eliot attempts to find this mode of consciousness is continually grounded in and through land, in history — the Rose Garden, Highgate, Primrose Hill — and even still, this attempt to ground, after the kingfisher’s wing. To ground: that there is world not world. There is a profound darkness and stillness toward which words and music can reach — as a Chinese jar still moves perpetually in its stillness. Nor the stillness of the violin.

Eliot’s poetry is fundamentally a poetry of reckoning with the silence and stillness of the point upon which all movement turns and ends:

Love is itself unmoving,

Only the cause and end of movement,

Timeless, and undesiring

Except in the aspect of time

Caught in the form of limitation

Between un-being and being.

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always—

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

This is a state of consciousness. It is a state of perception, a way of being in the world, a way of being in time, which itself is the poetic mode of the opening of the possibility of disclosure through the innocent act of poetry. Eliot, as we know, was a banker, and lived a relatively normal human life. The practice of poetry, in Eliot’s terms, is to open up the possibility of this field by descending through his linguistic and languaging practice to speak being out into the open field. On a summer midnight, you can hear the music.

Eliot’s attempt to open this field — the vulnerability and accessibility of it (and by accessibility I do not mean that the language itself is easy or the process of following the languaging is easy, but that the language itself makes accessible the path toward being which Eliot undertakes in the Four Quartets) — is a thinking through, a descent into the ontological opening and the possibility of the approach.

In doing so, Eliot is not only evoking time and space, history and place, but through them descending into the wisdom:

The houses are all gone under the sea.

The dancers are all gone under the hill.

…

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters…

This is the loss of space and time, and the descent of the soul into this fundamental, abiding darkness, which, Eliot says, shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, the lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed.

Eliot’s descent is a descent into transformation and the transformative state, wherein he says to his soul:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,

For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith

But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought…

This is a vacation, a vacancy, that Eliot is making — hollowing out the self, perception, the seeming light of being — to allow for poetry to enter. This is the clearing of the vessel, the channel, of the poet, to receive the song of being, or the sound of being, or the sight of being. This is precisely what is meant by poetry as clearing. Twenty years largely wasted… trying to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start. What this process is, is a process of vacation. With shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling…

What Eliot is articulating is that, as we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. This is the possibility of the richness of disclosure availing itself through the degradation of Eliot’s poetic practice. There has been a symbolic richness in Eliot’s study and participation in the innocent practice of poetry, in which he has been pursuing the availment of being, the space of the clearing in which being can emerge through the poetic act. But it is precisely in the degradation of time, and in the amassing of failure — the bodies of the poems, which have arrived in different kinds of failures — that has broken open Eliot’s practice into the Four Quartets, into a vulnerability and innocence as a state of being, a way of being in time. An openness, an availability of perception, toward and through which the symbolic mode of Eliot’s linguistic practice — all of his knowledge, all of his study — is discharged in a way in which no significant status is being availed to any of this material. It is discharged toward the sole purpose of authentic unveiling of being.

The poem and the linguistic act therefore have no meaning. They are the attempt, and the attempt alone, to articulate the inarticulable.

This is why the themes of renunciation and enunciation are so profound in the Four Quartets. Eliot has opened up enough ontological space, in the clearing of his perception, to witness the failing powers at hand. His predecessors are The Hollow Men and The Waste Land — enough of this degradation has become available to Eliot’s thought, which has itself, as he states explicitly, become a modesty of thought, a trying of thought. There is only the fight to recover what has been lost, and found and lost again and again.

This is a profound opening in the possibility of Eliot’s thought, which then makes the disclosure of being available to a degree that, in Eliot’s œuvre, is exceptional — his masterwork. This is the wisening of Eliot’s practice. That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here. You are not the same people who left that station or who will arrive at any terminus.

Eliot is thinking toward the same state Trakl thinks toward: the clearing of being in the transformative state, in which that which was no longer is. There is a grieving, a melancholy, a contemplation of this action that occurs in time. And the time of death is every moment.

This contemplation of death is, of course, the ancient and trans-historical philosophical practice. As it enters into and becomes available in the languaging of the poet, in the thinking of the poet: the dark throat which will not reject them, or wherever cannot reach them, the sound of the sea’s bells, perpetual angelus.

All of language, all of the sedimentary history of Eliot’s language and languaging practice — as one of the great modernists, one of the most well-versed modernists, theologically and philosophically and historically — all of it must become available to be broken and rent in this process, to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time, an occupation for the saint — no occupation either, but something given and taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

This is the exceptional rendering of Eliot’s thought, which collapses under the necessity of the revelation of the ontos, and makes available the total vulnerability of poetic thought, which is to stand in the clearing as being itself. This availability comes through, precisely, the cultivation of this profound aesthetic, symbolic, poetic practice — which is then collapsed.

The collapse of Eliot’s practice in his late works — especially the Four Quartets — is a collapse into the necessity of innocence, which Hölderlin articulates and which Heidegger later picks up. Without the assembly in and through historical time, both of Eliot’s lived experience (these Quartets are grounded in literal spaces in time which Eliot experiences) and of the practice of this poetic act of clearing — to create, as a fomentation in the body and life of the poet, the possibility of a disclosure event such as the Four Quartets — the meaning of being could not become apparent through them. As Eliot is so concerned with Krishna, the face of being itself becomes apparent, where otherwise it is veiled.

Where otherwise there are the trees and the hills, the distant panorama, the bold imposing facade — all being rolled away. We see this in Eliot’s listing of the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors… the sun and moon… nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury. I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God.

This is the breaking of the phenomenological space of experience, which is the cultivated perception and the ontological position of the poet, in the loss of distance between the poet and being itself. The poet is no longer apart from being, observing and remarking upon it, but is absorbed into being. This is the danger Hölderlin articulates: the danger of the closure of space, which is the presence of this realization — that the field of being is opened. And in as such, the poet’s identification with it is simultaneously a profound descent from that which is appearing to be life in the phenomenological world, down into this timeless dimension. This world of perpetual solitude, world not world.

Eliot’s practice is framed explicitly as a theological practice, as a practice which is saintly. This is an essential observation on Eliot’s part: that the practice of poetry is a saintly practice. Heidegger observed this as well in Hölderlin — that, as legislators of the world, the poetic practice is a saintly practice of descent into the ontological foundations of being. That which is beyond and before appearance. Towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden… through the first gate, into our first world… Shall we follow the deception of the thrush? Into our first world. There they were, dignified, invisible, moving without pressure, over the dead leaves.

This is Eliot giving us his moment of Dante and Virgil at the threshold, the gates of hell, giving us this movement through the vibrant air. He examines the roses in the garden, looks down into the drained pool. We have a series of firmly grounded observations of experience: the circulation of the lymph… the drift of stars… summer in the tree… we move above the moving tree and light upon the figured leaf.

And this historical and material presence of space and body is the accessibility and the accession of what Eliot comes to, which is the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless. A white light still and moving. In this attempt to articulate the essential, ineffable state of being in perception. This is something of a classic poetic move — not so much a structural or syntactical move as a move of perception.

The mode of being in poetry — or poetically dwelling — is a descent into this veiled state, beyond the veil of phenomenon, into the essential, the foundational. The gift of Eliot’s poetry, which perhaps we will go even deeper into at some point, is that we are given his thought. And his thought, which is no longer concerned with poetry or the poem in terms of architecture or aesthetic structure, is given to us in a vulnerability, in a penitence, in a renunciation, which is languaging brought to bear unbroken toward this process of unveiling. The process itself of unveiling is the sacred — the sacred poetic act. To only leave the moments of the presence of ontos would be to betray the poetic task, the task of returning to this place of dwelling poetically. The music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.

This movement, which is a structural movement of vulnerability — in large part Eliot’s trajectory as a poet — is what makes Eliot so unique in the at-large poetic history. It does not require a perfection of disclosure of being. It is a process of disclosure through descent down into dwelling poetically. And this is the cycle of the Four Quartets.

Not only is this process being depicted — the descent through the Rose Garden, through history, through the historical markers which are Eliot’s four stations — but the process itself is Eliot making himself available to being. Entering into the ontological mode of disclosure, which is the poetic state, drawing himself down from the everyday into a state of availability, a state of perception which is being cultivated. The richness of which the poem is the detritus, or the cast-off.

This is the practice which, as Eliot states, is saintly, because it is a communion with being. Even as he observes the frigid purgatorial fires, the dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food. Again, deeply Christian literature. The cultivated state, the mature state — twenty years of languaging failures — the mature state of entering into this field of perception, is itself the gift, the riches, the Plutus of Eliot’s work. The gift and the riches of the Four Quartets, which are far richer than any worldly thing. Because they themselves are the authentic disclosure, and they give us the possibility of disclosure and the path through disclosure in the languaging of the mature poet.

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The Refinement of the Poetic Being in Time

Eliot, Trakl, and Late Style

I want to go deeper now into Eliot’s Four Quartets, and in doing so to bring about an understanding of Eliot himself as the refinement of the poetic body, which is the aperture of dwelling. We are jumping off, as we have been, from Heidegger’s late explorations — not only of Hölderlin but of Trakl — and from one of the primary lines of Hölderlin’s that obsesses Heidegger: man dwells poetically upon the earth. This is why Heidegger turns to Hölderlin when he does, in 1936 and 1937: the poet’s disclosure, a lived, felt, experienced, and attended proximity to being, is to be considered the hearth of poesy.

We are going to get into how Eliot himself is the practice of this relationship to being — to suggest that the poetic endeavor is itself a practice, a practicing, a practiced relationship to being, through this action and engagement of languaging and thinking through languaging. Especially thinking through languaging in its most fundamental sense — to return to Heraclitus — as a poetic innocence that is toward being absolutely. Which is the unity of the philosophical and the poetic question absolutely, which is fundamentally existential: what is being, and what am I being?

Authenticity and Vulnerability

This becomes legible in the particular authenticity and vulnerability of Eliot’s Four Quartets. What do I mean by authenticity and vulnerability? Transparency of thought, the bare expression of the possibilities in the human condition, by way of a linguistic leveling and flattening — which, for Eliot in the Four Quartets, is the zero point, the negation, the destitution descending into perpetual solitude, world not world — to leave the twittering world.

And yet, notably, Eliot takes the symbolic language of the twittering world, which to him has become flesh and blood appendage, which is the act of poetry he has pursued for twenty years of trial, error, failure, and error — which has a deep element of Beckett in it, surprisingly enough. These works come about in very similar scopes of time, in this era of World War II transformation and rubble. What is being stripped away is not the practice of the poetic artist, but rather all that stands between the practice of the poetic artist and disclosure. Eliot in the poem, as in life, is destroyed and wasted by time. And being laid to waste by time reveals what is beneath.

Time within time, time out of time. Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter. The embodied wisdom of the desolation wrought in Eliot’s life and time, as in Beckett’s, is what reveals the richness and the riches of the authenticity of this disclosure. Which is Eliot laying down the arms of the poetic method, utterly, toward being — itself a surrender of the gift that has been cultivated, this twenty years of failure and attempt in languaging that Eliot explicitly states. This is not a moment of self-consciousness — rarely seen in the poetic craft — because it is a moment of admission: that every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure. Which is almost ad verbatim a repetition of Beckett, or a pre-elucidation of what Beckett will come to say. Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.

Late Style

This broken openness is well discussed by Edward Said in his text Late Style — and we could describe the Four Quartets patently as Eliot’s end-of-life positional movement, which Said approaches frequently in a musical direction, particularly with Mozart and Beethoven. It is the cultivation, to use the metaphor in Eliot’s Four Quartets, of this garden of poesy: the linguistic possibilities, the refinement of the symbolic method, the refinement of this way of poetic thinking. The leveling of the grounds of thought across scales — time and space, history and philosophy — these forms of knowledge that have been cultivated obsessively, again, in terms of the pursuit in the Renaissance mind. Obsessively by T. S. Eliot throughout his poetic career.

His orientation toward poetry is, first and foremost, the orientation of a true poet — toward being itself. This is, as Eliot describes it, a practice. The language moves through Eliot’s practice via the Christianity of his time. It is a movement simultaneously toward God and toward the point, the still point of the turning world, which is God. Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is. Neither arrest nor movement. Do not call it fixity, where past and future are gathered.

The possibility of this late style — to work with Said a little bit here — is that there is a deep fermentation that comes to bear in this political and historical moment of Eliot’s time. The pamphlets of the Four Quartets are distributed at the beginning of the 1940s. Deep into Eliot’s poetic career and deep into Eliot’s life. To use the term, Eliot gives up the ghost of his poetry. The poetry is broken open to its first service. This refinement of the poetic being is that Eliot, in a way that is atmospheric to Trakl, comes to the garden of death and lays bare these powers.

These powers are a way of seeing. A way of being in time, and a way of attention. When we read the Four Quartets, we are reading Eliot’s attention to being in time, this cultivated attention of being. This is embodied. It is a way of seeing, a way of looking. And further, the capacity Eliot has cultivated to express, to make legible, this ontological confrontation or revelation that Eliot is having through time, through history, and through the experience of being human. The path of navigating the charnel house of history. Houses rise and fall, crumble and are extended, and in my beginning is my end, in succession. This is realization being inscribed into the poetic form.

Disclosure as Wealth

To return again to Heidegger and Hölderlin — this disclosure is what is essential. It is the riches and the wealth of life. But it is simultaneously something that cannot be owned or obtained. The innocent act of poetry is a way of being — a dwelling poetically upon the earth. It is not, in Heidegger’s terms, in the virtue of a technocratic or industrial virtue of obtaining, of movement, of action. This is something Eliot understands extremely well in the Four Quartets when he speaks about the still point of the turning world and descending into the darkness, which is not the twittering of the world.

When Eliot’s provocations and invocations come — in that open field, if you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, on a summer midnight, you can hear the music of the weak pipe and the little drum and see them dancing around the bonfire — this is Eliot gesturing into and toward time within time, this timeless state of revelation. What is the late November doing with the disturbance of the spring and creatures of the summer heat, snowdrops writhing under feet… He asks the question. And he evokes the answer.

What is time doing? What is within time that is gleaming, in Hölderlin’s terms? What is being? To reveal or revelate being is itself dwelling poetically in time, which is available at all times, particularly through the cultivation of experience as in dwelling poetically. This is a practice. This is why writing poetry is a practice.

And this is why Heidegger asks the critical question: what are poets for in the midst of the world’s midnight? Because the world’s midnight is eternal at the deepest level. It is an eternal midnight of a perceptual failure of being. Time itself is the perceived overgrowth of forms, and these forms appear impenetrable to the human nervous system and to the human developmental stage. Poetry is the deploying of the perpetual relationship between the refinement of experience and the iteration of the symbolic method, to break into time and to experience the eternal through time. To incorporate time and the human experience into the wisdom. Not only the knowledge of dead secrets…

Humility and Ground

Knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,

For the pattern is new in every moment…

We are only undeceived

Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.

In the middle, not only in the middle of the way,

But all the way, in a dark wood…

In a bramble,

On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,

And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,

Risking enchantment.

An allusion to Dante — a dark wood. The enchantment aspect is critical. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill. This is an enchantment of the vacancy in the void brought about by the ontological loss — the loss of the ground, which Heidegger calls the Abgrund, the void, the abyss — that is pulled out from beneath knowing. Every evaluation of all we have been in every moment is new and shocking. This is a return to dwelling poetically.

Which for Eliot is deeply entwined with a relationship to God, a relationship to being. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. This is the state of being of the poet, which is the dangerous proximity to disclosure, which is actual intimate relationship — an infolding within relationship.

There is a deeply suggestive image — I cannot place its exact source — of a statue, I believe a statue of Christ, that has been reabsorbed into a tree. This is a deeply symbolic and signifying image for our project. The movement of Christ that Eliot is describing, the relationship to being, is deeply sacramental. The dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food: in spite of which we like to think that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood — again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

Eliot is with the human experience. This is not a disavowal of being in time. It is a deepening of being in time. Never does Eliot leave history. Never does Eliot leave the Statesman, the Stock Exchange Gazette, the sun and the moon. This deepening of being in time is the incorporation of the appearance of time, the appearance of the human experience, into the moment of revelation in the hedgerow or the rose garden.

Where is the summer, the unimaginable zero summer? If you came this way, taking the route you would be likely to take from the place you would be likely to come from… Every single moment in the Four Quartets is a path in. Every historical moment, every object relationship, is a path in to relationship to being. This is the gift. This is the treasure. This is the wealth of poetry which Heidegger identifies, absolutely correctly, at the moment of the world’s midnight — the industrial-technological turn, which has only accelerated in the hundred years since he decried this abyss as a historical condition. A condition accelerating, which began before Heidegger and has continued after his project.

The Gold

This way of being is the gold itself — to use an alchemical term. The gold, or the transformation of the human being into being. These dead men more than the dying. Why should we celebrate these dead men more than the dying? We cannot revive old factions, we cannot restore old policies or follow an antique drum. Whatever we inherit from the fortunate we have taken from the defeated — what they had to leave us, a symbol: a symbol perfected in death.

What Eliot is saying is that there is a possibility. A way into being through the cultivation of this poetic relationship, through the cultivation of perception — which is dwelling poetically, the practice of poetry. The restoration of the ground, the ontological ground, which appears split in history via false valuations, or attempts at identification which are impositions of false difference. These are not descents into the still point. They are not descents into the darkness. The dancers have fled and the houses have fled into the abyss, into the void. These are not these descents. These are, first and foremost, spiritual descents of confrontation with the ontological ground of being itself. The pursuit of this descent — Eliot, like Shelley, and in many ways also like Trakl — is a symbol perfected in death.

Eliot, in the completion of the Four Quartets — the writing of them and the experience of them — leaves and gives the wealth of the transformational artifact, the transformational script. This is why he quotes Heraclitus. Why Heraclitus is explicitly and implicitly referred to. To be redeemed from fire by fire. Consumed by either fire or fire. What we call the beginning is often the end. It is to step into this relationship via the sacrament itself of language and languaging.

The Aperture

When I have spoken here of authenticity and vulnerability as transparency of thought — this is Eliot’s thinking through languaging as living process, living procedure, which is the aperture, which is a process of relationship in time to being. This is laid down before the poem. This is why, with Eliot, the Four Quartets is not a poem. It is an act of poetry. It is an act of the poetic mind cultivated at this level of profound — I won’t say mastery, I will say profound engagement — via the pursuit. The arms are entirely laid down at this advanced languaging path. Twenty years of failure has been laid down before the true soul-task, which is disclosure of being.

What Eliot gives us is the world. The whole world. The world that is unbroken — from the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone. Primrose, the Dry Salvages, the wounded surgeon. The Directory of Directors. Lavender spray. Mars. The whole world is integrated and incorporated into the poem as itself this disclosure of fire, of being, of now and in England.

If you came this way,

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season,

It would always be the same: you would have to put off

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

This is one of the most profound philosophical statements that is possible — but it is made possible through the poetic act. To understand this is crucial. This is a thinking through languaging whose only requirement is ontological communion with being. This is why Heraclitus is our poet-philosopher of the first order. The only commandment is disclosure and communion. With the ontos.

The Saintly Path

This is why Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, reads as profoundly religious, profoundly spiritual. The preoccupation here is with the saint, with the saintly path. The saintly path is not — to mistake it as moral or ethical or religious would be to confuse the function of poetry. The poetry itself, and the writing of the poetry, is simultaneously a document of disclosure and the cultivation of the instrument of disclosure itself. The actual body is the living and dwelling of being upon the earth — in form, in the nervous system, in the somatic register. This is why I say somatic attunement: the lived constraint of being in time, the body in presence, broken open through the wandering of this way, which is the wilderness — to say with Dante.

Eliot, in his time as Dante in his, comes upon this broken openness of history, of the body, of existence, of the condition. The poetic path, as Heidegger correctly elucidates, is non-negotiable. It is the only question of this cultivation. Because it is the question of what is being, and therefore how is being in time even possible? How is a meaningful relationship to being even possible? Because if there is no meaningful relationship to being, there is not. And this is what Eliot laments, laments and laments, before he is broken open in the Four Quartets, in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men.

For myself, The Waste Land and The Hollow Men are very, very barely read or encountered as much as the Four Quartets are a poetic achievement of the first order. Because Eliot descends. He lives on the battlefield, or the ground of the dead, or in the wake of the war, in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. But Eliot embarks truly on the descent, and avails himself of the descent, which is the profound surrender into the world of perpetual solitude, destitution of all property, desiccation of the world of sense, evacuation of the world of fancy, inoperancy of the world of spirit. This is the one way.

Time and the bell have buried the day, the black cloud carries the sun away. Eliot avails himself of death in life. Chill fingers of yew be curled down on us.

Eliot and Trakl

This is the ineluctable, profound relationship between Eliot and Trakl. Trakl inhabits this death and life. It suffices to say, in many ways, he remains there. Eliot moves through this turning point. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.

The remainder of the I is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Four Quartets. Eliot is thinking through languaging, whereas, very often, Trakl will disappear through languaging. This is an interesting question of the presence of the one who is thinking, between Eliot and Trakl.

Eliot is a very cerebral poet. Thinking through languaging for Eliot is, by and large, a process of his great intellect, which avails him a degree of cognitive distance even as he experiences the desecration, the desiccation. Eliot thinks very much so like one who is deeply, deeply educated, because he is.

With Trakl, what we have — and perhaps what is so profoundly dark and disturbing about Trakl’s poetry — is that it is nearly entirely embodied. The population of the symbolic mode and register is Trakl’s experience. Of the descent into destitution, desecration. Trakl is not contemplating this process. Trakl is experiencing it, as in a total submergence. He is submerged in this descent into the abyss.

Trakl dies quite young, whereas Eliot’s poetic pursuit continues for decades. To me this is the primary difference: that what we get, and what we have lost — which is a profound loss — is the full fulmigation of Trakl’s poetic pursuit through maturity. Whereas the Four Quartets themselves would not have been possible without this steepening and deepening of twenty years of failed attempts of thinking through languaging. Toward which Eliot lays all to bare, lays his burden down, in the Four Quartets. Laying the burden down as in a total surrender toward the ontological project, which is the loss of the poem.

The poem itself is matterless or meaningless. It is that which is stripped off. It is the clothes which remain as Eliot steps into the sparkling, gleaming river of being. Plato’s river of time — that time is the moving image of eternity. This is what is pierced by Eliot. This is why the Four Quartets themselves are an immortal document. Truly, an immortal document. Even if and as language dies and the symbolic order is totally rent down to the genome — it is a document of what is possible in being human. Not only that disclosure itself can be transmitted via an advanced, highly articulate symbolic register cultivated over decades, a lifetime. Which is the gift — a lifetime of the genius of Eliot, the Renaissance mind of Eliot, brought to bear in the Four Quartets, which is a transformation of the experience of being in time.

Not only that this document of disclosure is possible and attendable, and that it is attended — but that Eliot himself is what is being communicated here. He is the dwelling poetically which has been refined unto the breaking open. Which is the true register: the laying down of the concerns of thinking in any which way, or languaging in any which way. Languaging at once, in this maturation, this profound spiritual and existential maturation — the entire process of the ordinance and ordinancy of the symbolic register is laid bare, absolutely, in this great master. It is itself a document of the richness of Eliot’s thinking through languaging, which is itself a document of the spirit, which is the way of being of Eliot in time, made possible by his pursuit. The allowance to be broken open toward the innocent project, the process of poetry. And to dwell authentically in being and time.

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Dwelling Poetically

The Vocation of the Poet

Now we are into the question of dwelling poetically. Eliot’s Four Quartets is a document — poetry is a document — of the act of dwelling poetically upon the earth, with Hölderlin and Heidegger’s inquiry. This is the fundamental question that unites poetry, philosophy, and the fundamental existential human condition: that to dwell poetically upon the earth is to be in union with being.

The act of poetry is really just a forebearer, a process, in this descent into the nightfall, to say it with Eliot. The murmuring shell of time — you are not those who saw the harbour receding, or those who will disembark. Here, between the hither and the farther shore, while time is withdrawn, consider the future and the past with an equal mind. Eliot is providing the structural beams, the architecture of this process. This poetic procedure of the descent into being, in this dangerous union — which is ultimately a dissolution of the poet, of the one who is being, the one dwelling poetically.

This is what being a poet is. Being a poet is not necessarily the act of writing poetry, although the act of writing poetry can be — and often is — in relationship to dwelling poetically. Because writing poetry, again, is a languaging, a thinking through languaging, by which one comes into the way. As Dante says, he came upon this forest in his middle age, which becomes the transformational aperture into the descent with Virgil, his guide, into hell — to strip away, in an Inannic sense (the goddess Inanna), to strip away the world and to come upon the raw stump, the raw post, of being itself. Which is a somatic interlocution, being in time, the raw nerve with the timeless or the eternal — the dripping blood our only drink, the bloody flesh our only food. Dwelling poetically.

The Way of Dispossession

The poem itself is oblivion. The poem itself is the way by which Eliot arrived. And this is critical.

You must go by the way wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know,

And what you own is what you do not own,

And where you are is where you are not.

Eliot is blowing away worldliness — the way of dispossession. Poetry itself is a caustic force, a caustic element against the worldliness Eliot wails against throughout his poetic career — this worldliness of the twittering, the distraction within distraction within distraction, which is the way of avoiding this descent into the world of perpetual solitude. The way of avoiding the descent into which Trakl is dragged, which Eliot contemplates and surrenders to. This is the pursuit of the poet. The pursuit of Shelley.

Why is this the pursuit of the poet? Because it is the failure of the world’s way, which is the way of virtue — as Heidegger says, the technologization, the standing inventory, the industrialization, the productization of being into extractable, commodifiable forms — which to the poet is unbearable, which is not compatible with the neural architecture of the poet.

The poet, as I have suggested in the Renaissance Mind architectural essays and lectures, is a neural sensitivity. It is a literal architectural body which is sensitive to being, sensitive to existence, sensitive to the powers. It is thus incompatible with the worldly symbolic order — and yet uses the worldly symbolic order, whether that is English for Eliot, or German for Trakl and for Hölderlin, to enter into the realm of the powers. Which is also the realm of the shades, which is also the transformative — that being itself is in and of and as the Transformer. It is neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards; there the dance is at the still point. It is the transformation itself.

Heraclitus and the Epigram

This is why Heraclitus is essential. Although the Logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own. The way upward and the way downward are the same. Heraclitus. These are the epigraphs of the Four Quartets. Why? Because Eliot understands Heraclitus at the most fundamental level. Because Eliot and Heraclitus are one in the practice of poetry. Heraclitus, the philosopher-poet himself. Eliot, philosopher-poet, especially in his relation to Hinduism and Christianity.

Why the epigraph? The epigraph is the architectural key to the work. We ask this of Shelley as well, because the epigraph is absolutely important to all of Shelley’s works. He chooses these very deliberately, because they express his current iterative stance toward being.

Although the Logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own. This is the twittering world. Distraction upon distraction upon distraction. This wisdom of their own is manufactured to avoid the descent. The way upward and the way downward are the same. Toward spirit and toward the soul, in medieval and ancestral terms. The descent into hell is the ascent upward to spirit, as is articulated again in Dante. This descent — this Inannic movement — is essential.

Descend lower… into the world of perpetual solitude. Abstention from movement, while the world moves in appetency on its metalled ways of time past and time future. Eliot is saying we are broken from the world, desiccated from the world of sense, evacuated from the world of fancy, an inoperancy of the world of spirit. The poet is broken from the world in this descent, and it is unavoidable to the poet. Unavoidable. It is itself the passion and pursuit which is the being of the poet. It is ineluctable from the being of the poet. It is the architectural, neural, actual, existential condition of the poet. The poet is called by being itself — being in time itself, the very being of the poet, is called to poetry as in the union with being, which it cannot accept. It is constitutionally unable to tolerate the world of fancies, the twittering world, the distraction upon distraction upon distraction.

The Vocation

This descent is itself the vocation of the poet, the absolute vocation. The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill. It cannot be accepted. Dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark. Captains, merchant bankers. The vacant into the vacant. The interstellar spaces. Patrons of art, statesmen and rulers.

Eliot is listing, like an ancient Hindu sage — in the Dasbodh, for instance — listing all that comes into not-being. The poet comes the way of not-being to discover what is. In the obliteration, the destitution, Eliot moves through The Hollow Men and The Waste Land, and through his time of the world wars. Historically and existentially, absolutely, into the destitution. The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. As we grow older. This is what is required.

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

This is critical. Eliot is moving into being in time. This is not the being in time of linear historical movement. This is the being in time of actual embodied participation in being — rooted in the still point of the turning world, and yet still moving into another intensity for further union and deeper communion.

This is the sensitivity of the poet, which is the penetration. It is the movement of the poet into the danger, to work with Hölderlin. Into the danger which is the union — and this union is necessarily also a dissolution. The poet is dying into life via transformation. The poet no longer exists but in the poetic act, which is what is left behind in this dying into life. A further union, a deeper communion. In my end is my beginning.

The Only Thing That Matters

So we ask again: dwelling poetically. This is the only thing that matters. All else: shades, distraction upon distraction upon distraction. Eliot strips this away. As does, explicitly — without even a decrying of it — Trakl’s embodiment of his time. Trakl’s existential body, his architectural being in his historical time. Not even decried — it is not there, it is not present. Trakl is moving into communion, and the symbolic register in which he is articulating is a descent into that which is prior to the presumed. Into being — of that which is his being — and penetrating into the substructure which then opens up.

Again, the way upward and the way downward are the same. It must be destroyed, desecrated. This is critical to Eliot, and Eliot explicitly states this over and over. The destruction and desecration articulated in the Four Quartets are an utter necessity. They are required. The poetic vocation itself is a violence against the world. This is essential. It is a violence that is uncaring, an unattached devotion. The failing pride or resentment at failing powers, the unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless. A drifting boat with a slow leakage. The clamour of the bell of the last annunciation. There is no end of it, the withering of withered flowers. The movement of pain that is painless and motionless. The movement into the prayer of the one Annunciation. Absolute, absolute, the dwelling poetically.

The Danger

This absolute vocation is the danger. The danger that both Eliot and Trakl face. An existential danger, as well as a historical danger, which we understand with Dante. Because it refuses. It cannot accept.

Eliot carves through the charnel house — the detritus, so to speak, the charnel house of history — into the shining, the gleaming. This is what is so beautiful and so maximal about Eliot’s Four Quartets in relation to some of Hölderlin’s shorter works, or Trakl’s: that Eliot is incorporating the ruins of all time. Through the ruins of all time we see.

The moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning,

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

He is telling you explicitly: Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. Here the past and future are conquered, and reconciled. This is the poetic practice. The act of being in time, poetically dwelling — dwelling poetically — as a practice, as a discipline, as even a penitence. As a way. This is, again, the Annunciation, where he continually returns to the Annunciation, the spiritual act.

And right action is freedom from past and future also. This is the relinquishing of the coils. We, content at the last if our temporal reversion nourish the life of significant soil. We are only undefeated because we have gone on trying.

The Life of Significant Soil

What does this mean — the life of significant soil? In the ancient Greek, in the Heraclitean, this would be Pluto, or Plouton. The riches, the wealth of the underworld. Deeply connected to Dante. Also the god of transformation, the god of change, the god of death. We are moving into the essence, the groundswell of the fire, in the Heraclitean. The transformation itself is the still point of being. It is that which is gleaming, yet unseen. Neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards, at the still point, there the dance is. But what is that being? How do we come into relationship with it?

Hölderlin and Heidegger tell us: man dwells poetically upon the earth. Not — man should dwell poetically. Man is dwelling poetically upon the earth. It already is. It is the first condition. It is the first condition upon which merit is transposed, virtue is transposed — world of sense, world of fancy, property.

The act of the poet is the descent through history. There is the Botticelli painting of the map of Dante’s hell. It is extremely powerful because it is sedimental. What is being shown is that history itself is a body. It is a landedness. It is a geology and a geography traversed by the human being in time — genetically, architecturally, as a somatic neural system, a synaptic system, but also culturally and civilizationally, as a symbolic code, an architecture and way of being in time.

Which is, exceedingly in Eliot’s time, as in Heidegger’s, in Hölderlin’s, in Shelley’s, in Trakl’s — a time of standing inventory of being. Being itself is utility. This is a profound, profound, profound spiritual death, that being in time poetically can only reconcile. This is the only reconciliation. Because it is the truth. And it is not a reconciliation — it is a return to the foundations, the ontological root of being. We do then experience the possibility of meaning in relation to being, in the face of a meaningless, destitute time which has been utilized by a symbolic order of consequence. Profit. Use.

How Do We Experience the Possibility of Being?

How do we experience the possibility of being? Poetry does not matter. It is an entrance, as we understand in Dante. A gateway, a gate to hell. This is deeply connected to Eliot, utterly deeply connected to Eliot. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Explicitly, what is articulated by Eliot in the descent into the world of perpetual solitude, destitution of all property, internal darkness, deprivation — is a movement toward the outgrown, a movement toward the void. This is the danger we understand deeply in Trakl. The danger of this descent from the twittering world, the world of distraction. Because all there is, is to come face to face with being, toward disclosure. The possibility of meaningful life and meaningful relationship — but it is descent, and destitution, deprivation and desiccation. All property, the world of sense, the world of fancy. Abstention from movement, while the world moves in appetency on its metalled ways of time past and time future. The poet goes this way because there is no other.

Eliot the banker.

Why the Poet?

Why does the poet know this? Why does the poet see this? This is a much deeper question, to me, than what are poets for. The poet is for no use. Although Heidegger’s essay is essential for his time. One of, I think, the most important philosophical essays of the twentieth century. Along with works of Simone Weil and Camus’s lecture on the human crisis.

Why? Why the poet? The poet is the one open to disclosure. Disclosure penetrates. It is a permeable membrane of being in time. This is an architectural, neural, somatic, embodied condition in which there cannot be tissue stuffed into the gaps, in the poetic sense. The eyes and the ears, the nose and the mouth, the body itself, have an aperture. A perception that is pierced by light, that is penetrated at all moments by being. Being itself cannot accept the destitute and destituting symbolic order of the world, which is distraction upon distraction upon distraction, twittering.

It is itself descending and descended as in its very existence. Disclosure is something primary to the actual neural, synaptic, and somatic architecture and aperture of the being itself — which is dwelling poetically to such an extreme extent, to such a fundamental extent, that there is something of an irreconcilable difference, wherein the symbolic order of the world cannot be incorporated.

The Admixture

And so it is admixed. This is how we achieve poetry. Poetry is a destitution from the sense-order of the world. Even as it uses the language of the communal, it cannot accept the absurd of the world — and evokes instead the strange, sublime, and subliminal architecture of being out from under the denial code of world.

Most do not hear the darkness in this twittering world. World, not world, but that which is not world; internal darkness, deprivation and destitution of all property, desiccation of the world of sense, evacuation of the world of fancy. These are not merely semantic words. While the world moves in appetency on its metalled ways of time past and time future — it is a refusal, a denial, a movement downward. Not horizontally into virtue, which is being of and in the world, but downward into being itself. Abstention from movement.

Poetry is going down into oneself. The stillness. As a Chinese jar still moves perpetually in its stillness. Words, after speech, reach into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, can words or music reach… Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, not that only, but the co-existence… Eliot is trying to say the unsayable. It is a way of meditating upon. It is the circling of the still point until finally the language collapses into the still point itself.

This meditation is proximity into union, proximity into communion. Eliot is describing that this is a practice. We must be still and still moving into another intensity for a further union, a deeper communion through the dark cold and the empty desolation. Twenty years trying to use words. Old men ought to be explorers, here or there does not matter. Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter.

Subtonic, Sub-tectonic

This is critical to understanding what Eliot is telling us about the vocation of poetry and the vocation of the poet. The poet is something beneath the world. Subtonic. Sub-tectonic. It is itself the deeper, most essential existential relationship to being, which is using the symbolic code of the world — everything from the tree to the letter to the genome of the human being — to collapse this existential relationship at its structural foundation. To collapse symbolism, to collapse the symbolic code. The symbolic iteration of the human being in the genome, the tree, all that appears to be, is melted away by the infernal method of Blake. These are structural elucidations of what poetry is.

Poetry is nothing but a being, a way of being, an aperture, a way of seeing, a life. This is what Blake is telling us. This is what Eliot is telling us. This is what Hölderlin is telling us. This is what Heidegger is asking, because it is so necessary. And it is never more necessary than it is now, as it always has been.

Because if we do not have poetry, we do not have life. We have death in life. We have destitution, absolute absolution, which appears to be worldly wealth or worldly constancy, but is in fact living death — which is itself worse than the descent into death that Eliot shows and tells and avails us of, which Dante shows and tells and avails us of.

The One Annunciation

The poet itself, the poetry itself, is a descent into destitution to come into communion with being. This is understood theologically, by figures as diverse as Meister Eckhart, the Buddha, and Christ. This is a spiritual, theological movement toward the ontos, toward being itself, toward God, absolutely. The primordial unity, the absolute unity. Only the hardly, barely, prayable prayer of the one Annunciation.

A-n-n-u-n-c-i-a-t-i-o-n.

This is the one movement of life that avails life itself — the possibility of life, the lived experience of life — dwelling poetically upon the earth. It is the destitution of virtue. It is the death of industry, the death of technology, the death of all unto the surrender of what always was: technology, poetry, the body, the genome, the bird, the song, into this utter collapse of total ontological presence and communion with being.

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning,

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts.

Eliot is giving us the only possibility. The only life.

Appendix: Substack lecture editions not fully carried into the compiled series text

Appendix edition — T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Thinking with Language (May 18, 2026 Lecture) (2026-05-18)

Substack lecture post https://davidbussellarchive.substack.com/p/ts-eliots-four-quartets-thinking; 41% of its passages appear in the compiled series text above.

T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets: Thinking with Language (May 18, 2026 Lecture)

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T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets : Thinking with Language

So I’d like to continue our lecture series here on T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and begin a discussion of the method of inquiry — specifically that Eliot uses thinking with language, and that language itself in Eliot’s poems moves differently than a crafted architecture. That the Four Quartets themselves, as a turn of Eliot’s, is a profound turn toward ontological and existential authenticity. And that the quartets themselves are Eliot’s attempt — an explorative attempt through language. As he says, “trying to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure, because one has only learned to get the better of words for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture is a new beginning.”

And my point of movement, upon which the entire quartet turns, is: “for in the ending is my beginning.” And Eliot’s exploration, as we’ve discussed. And also I’ll state it here, just to pull up the poem: “in my beginning is my end.”

As we’ve discussed with Trakl, and we’ve moved through Hölderlin as well, the Eliot’s expanse, which is a continually iterative process through The Waste Land and through The Hollow Men , it is an expanse which Eliot refuses to calm. And in this refusal to calm, what we are allowed to experience is the path toward the ontos — the way that Eliot weaves through the garden, through history, through time. This descent that Eliot undertakes into the darkness: “descend lower, descend only / into the world of perpetual solitude, / world not world, but that which is not world, / internal darkness, deprivation / and destitution of all property, / desiccation of the world of sense, / evacuation of the world of fancy, / inoperancy of the world of spirit; / this is the one way, and the other / is the same, not in movement / but abstention from movement.”

Eliot seeks to take us into the buried day, much as Trakl does. And this is the great similarity that they share — is that Eliot’s path is a weaving, which is allowed in the poem itself being utterly irrelevant. That, as it is explicitly stated in a self-conscious way through the quartets, that the poem itself is the way through toward the ontos , and that the ontos emerges, as with Trakl, through this sophistication of the innocent pursuit of poetic language. As Eliot states in the quartets, twenty years of this pursuit and the attempt, which finally breaks Eliot open into this communion at which he stands upon — “in my end is my beginning” — in which he stands upon a poetic innocence. And we watch Eliot’s language break in the poem.

And this is what’s so crucial — is that we get the true inquiry of the poet toward the ontos , which is the possibility of disclosure. This possibility opens in Eliot, and it opens through his pursuit, as we’ve discussed again with Shelley. The pursuit of the Renaissance mind, as we understand — Eliot is extremely well-versed in ancient history and ancient philosophy, especially ancient Hindu philosophy. This pursuit is Eliot’s working of the poem down to the bone, down to the ontological bone of existence, into deeper communion in which the poem ultimately collapses into the clanging of the bell, as the ground swell that is and was from the beginning, where time stops and time is never-ending.

This is Eliot falling into the music of poetry, the coming about of being through the poem. And he must descend through his own linguistic markers. So we have the references to Krishna; the poems themselves, the quartets, are stations — historical stations, material stations — which Eliot visits and knows, and he descends through history. He descends through the body of the earth, which becomes the body of the poem, into the possibility of the powers.

And this is where it gets extremely explicit at the very end of the quartets: “driven by dæmonic, chthonic powers. / And right action is freedom / from past and future also. / […] the life of significant soil.” Here are the past and future conquered, reconciled. Here the impossible union of spheres of existence is actual. And the poem itself is the space for this possibility. And this is what we understand in Hölderlin, what we understand in Trakl — is that the poem is a clearing, it is an opening into this ontological possibility of the union of that which is not, but is, fundamentally, in a way that is quite ineffable. As Eliot states explicitly in the quartets, the possibility of approaching this ineffable condition emerges through the work of the poem and the working of the poem.

And this is where, with Eliot, we receive something that is revolutionary — in that it is an authentic confrontation with the act and the working of language, which is unremoved. That the process of thought in and through which Eliot descends, wherein we open in the rose garden — that he must descend into the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery and the unseen eyebeam crossed, as he looks down into the drained pool, to find what humankind cannot bear, which is very much reality.

And we see and we hear and we are allowed to bear the kinks and the bumps, and the worn and the unsmoothed nature of Eliot’s thought process. You’re given in Eliot, throughout his career — and perhaps in no greater moment than in the Four Quartets — access to the raw, unfiltered process of thinking through language, which itself does not privilege any one mode of ontological revelation. Everything from Hampton and Putney to descending lower into the world which is not world. There’s the philosophical thought, the historical thought, and the musical thought, which themselves, in the advanced state of Eliot’s working with language — the smithing of language, which we would call the poetic practice — in this advanced state, these different thought modes are no longer privileged, but instead are intercoursing to give way, or gain way, to the ontos — to gain way into the revelation and disclosure of being.

This is a profound state. A vulnerability in which Eliot’s thought had thought itself. Again, thinking through language is descending into a translucence, in that the thought itself is stripping itself of narrative identity, stripping itself of self, and stripping itself of self-awareness and self-consciousness, as we see in Eliot’s attempt to find the possibility of the opening of poetry in his language, as the poem itself descends at the still point — and toward the still point of the turning world. “Neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards… at the still point, there the dance is.”

That Eliot attempts to find this mode of consciousness is specifically and continually grounded in and through land, in this history — the Rose Garden, Highgate, Primrose — and even still, this attempt to ground “after the kingfisher’s wing.” Ground, that there is world not world. That there is a profound darkness and stillness towards which can music or words reach — “as a Chinese jar still moves perpetually in its stillness,” nor stillness of the violin.

Eliot’s poetry is fundamentally a poetry of reckoning with the silence and stillness of the point upon which all movement turns and ends. “Love itself is unmoving, / only the cause and end of movement, / timeless, and undesiring / except in the aspect of time / caught in the form of limitation / between un-being and being. / Sudden in a shaft of sunlight / even while the dust moves / there rises the hidden laughter / of children in the foliage / quick now, here, now, always — / ridiculous the waste sad time / stretching before and after.”

So this is a state of consciousness. It’s a state of perception. A way of being in the world, and a way of being in time, which itself is the poetic mode of the opening of the possibility of disclosure through the innocent act of poetry. As we know, Eliot was a banker, and lived a — we could say — a relatively normal human life. And the practice of poetry in Eliot’s terms is to open up the possibility of this field by descending through his linguistic and languaging practice to speak being out into the open field. “On a summer midnight, you can hear the music.”

Eliot’s attempt to open this field, and the vulnerability and accessibility — and when I say accessibility, I don’t mean that the language itself is easy or the process of following the languaging is easy, but that the language itself makes accessible the path toward being which Eliot undertakes in the Four Quartets. That he must think his way through, which is to say a descent down into the ontological opening and the possibility of the approach.

And in doing so, Eliot is not only evoking time and space, history and place, but through time and space, history and place, descending down into the wisdom. “The houses are all gone under the sea. / The dancers are all gone under the hill. / […] dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark, / the vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, / captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters.”

This is the loss of space and time and the descent of the soul into this fundamental, abiding darkness, which, he says, “shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre, / the lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed.”

So Eliot’s descent is a descent into transformation and the transformative state, wherein he says to his soul: “be still, and wait without hope / for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, / for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith / but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. / Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought.”

This is a vacation, a vacancy, which Eliot is making and hollowing out into the self, into perception, and into the seeming light of being, to allow for poetry to enter. This is the clearing of the vessel, or the channel, of the poet to receive the song of being, or the sound of being, or the sight of being. This is precisely what is meant by poetry as being a clearing. “Twenty years largely wasted… trying to use words, and every attempt is a wholly new start.” What this process is, is a process of vacation. “With shabby equipment always deteriorating / in the general mess of imprecision of feeling…”

What Eliot is articulating is that, as we grow older, the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. This is actually the possibility of the richness of disclosure availing itself through the degradation of Eliot’s poetic practice. That there has been a symbolic richness of Eliot’s study and participation in the innocent practice of poetry, in which he has been pursuing the availment of being, or the space of the clearing in which being can emerge through the poetic act. But it is precisely in the degradation of time, and the amassing of failure — which is to say the bodies of the poems, which have arrived in different kinds of failures — that it has broken open Eliot’s practice, which is the Four Quartets , into a vulnerability and innocence as in a state of being, in a way of being in time, which is an openness and availability of perception toward and through which the symbolic mode of Eliot’s linguistic practice — all of his knowledge, all of his study — are discharged in a way in which there is no significant status being availed to any of this material. It is being discharged toward the sole purpose of authentic unveiling of being.

And thus the poem itself and the linguistic act have no meaning — that they themselves are the attempt, and the attempt alone, to articulate the inarticulable.

And this is why the theme of renunciation and enunciation are so profound in the Four Quartets. That Eliot himself has opened up enough ontological space, in the clearing of his perception, to witness the failing powers at hand. And this is his predecessors, which are The Hollow Men and The Waste Land — that enough of this degradation has become available to Eliot’s thought, which has itself, as he states explicitly, it is a modesty of thought, and a trying of thought. “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / and found and lost again and again.”

That this is a profound opening in the possibility of Eliot’s thought, which then makes this disclosure of being available to a degree which, I believe quite clearly, in Shelley’s œuvre — or in Eliot’s œuvre — is exceptional, and itself his masterwork. This is the wisening, or the wisdom, of Eliot’s practice. “That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.” “You are not the same people who left that station / or who will arrive at any terminus.”

And this is Eliot’s thinking toward the same state that Trakl is thinking toward, which is the clearing of being in the transformative state, of which that which was, no longer is. And something of the grieving and the melancholic and the contemplating of this action, which occurs in time. “And the time of death is every moment.”

So this contemplation of death is, of course, the ancient and trans-historical philosophical practice. As it enters into and becomes available in the languaging of the poet, or the thinking of the poet — “the dark throat which will not reject them, / or wherever cannot reach them, the sound of the sea’s bells / perpetual angelus.”

That all of language, all of the sedimentary history of Eliot’s language and languaging practice, as one of the great modernists — one of the most well-versed modernists, both theologically and philosophically and historically — that all of this language must become available, to be broken and rent in this process and practice, to apprehend “the point of intersection of the timeless / with time, [as] an occupation for the saint — / no occupation either, but something given / and taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”

“For most of us, there is only the unattended / moment, the moment in and out of time, / the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, / the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning / or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / while the music lasts.”

This is the exceptional rendering of Eliot’s thought, which collapses under the necessity of the revelation of the ontos , and makes available the total vulnerability of poetic thought, which is to stand in the clearing as being itself. And this availability comes through, precisely as we’ve discussed in a historical sense, the cultivation of this profound aesthetic, symbolic, poetic practice, which is then collapsed.

That the collapse of Eliot’s practice in his late works — especially the Four Quartets — is a collapse into the necessity of innocence, which Hölderlin articulates, and Heidegger later picks up on. And that without the assembly in and through historical time — of not only the lived experience of Eliot, which of course these quartets are grounded in literal spaces in time which Eliot experiences, but the practice of this poetic act of clearing — to create, as a fermentation in the body and the life of the poet, the possibility of a disclosure event such as the Four Quartets , in which and through which the meaning of being becomes apparent. And, as Eliot is so concerned with Krishna, the face of being itself becomes apparent, where otherwise it is veiled.

Where otherwise there are the trees and the hills, the distant panorama, the bold imposing facade, all being rolled away. And we see this in Eliot’s listing of “the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors… the sun and moon… nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.” “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you / which shall be the darkness of God.”

This is the breaking of the phenomenological space of experience, which is the cultivated perception and the ontological position of the poet, in the loss of distance between the poet and being itself. That the poet rather is not apart from being and observing and remarking upon it, but absolutely absorbed into being. And this is the danger which we’ve discussed, and I will discuss again, that Hölderlin articulates. That it is the danger of the closure of space, which is the presence of this realization — that the realization of being, or the field of being, is opened. And in as such, the poet’s identification with it is simultaneously a profound descent from that which is appearing to be life in the phenomenological world, down into this timeless dimension. This world of perpetual solitude, world not world.

And this is Eliot’s practice which is framed explicitly as a theological practice, as a practice which is saintly. And this is an essential observation on behalf of Eliot — that this practice of poetry is a saintly practice. And Heidegger observed this as well in Hölderlin, and that it is first and foremost — that, as legislators of the world, the poetic practice is a saintly practice of descent into the ontological foundations of being. That which is beyond and before appearance. “Towards the door we never opened / into the rose-garden… through the first gate, / into our first world…” “Shall we follow / the deception of the thrush? Into our first world. / There they were, dignified, invisible, / moving without pressure, over the dead leaves…”

This is Eliot giving us his moment of Dante and Virgil at the threshold, or the gates of hell, giving us this movement through the vibrant air. That he is examining and looking at the roses in this garden, looking down into the drained pool. And that we have a series of firmly grounded observations of experience. “The circulation of the lymph / […] the drift of stars… summer in the tree… / we move above the moving tree / and light upon the figured leaf.”

And this historical and material presence of space and body is itself the accessibility and the accession of what Eliot comes to, which is the still point of the turning world. “Neither flesh nor fleshless.” A “white light still in moving.” In this attempt therein to articulate this essential, ineffable state of being in perception. And this is the something of a classic poetic move. And it’s not so much a structural or syntactical move as it is a move of perception.

That the mode of being in poetry — or poetically dwelling — is a descent into this veiled state, beyond the veil of phenomenon. Into the essential, into the foundational. And the gift of Eliot’s poetry, which perhaps we’ll go even deeper into at some point, is that we’re given his thought. And his thought, which is no longer concerned with poetry or the poem in terms of architecture or aesthetic structure — that we are given his thought in a vulnerability, in a penitence, in a renunciation, which is the languaging brought to bear unbroken toward this process of unveiling. In that the process itself of unveiling is the sacred. It is the sacred poetic act, that to only leave the moments of the presence of ontos would be to betray the poetic task, or the task of returning to this place, of dwelling poetically. “The music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / while the music lasts.”

So this movement, which is a structural movement of vulnerability — which is, in large part, Eliot’s trajectory as a poet — this movement of vulnerability is what makes Eliot so unique in the at-large poetic history. And it is not requiring a perfection of disclosure of being, but rather it is a process of disclosure of being through descent down into dwelling poetically. And this is the cycle of the Four Quartets.

And that not only is this a process which is being depicted — as in the descent through the Rose Garden, and the descent through history, and the historical markers which are Eliot’s four stations — but that it is itself the process of Eliot making himself available to being. The process of entering into the ontological mode of disclosure, which is the poetic state, drawing himself down from the everyday into this state of availability, which is a state of perception which is being cultivated, which is the richness of which the poem is detritus, or cast-off.

And this is the practice which, as Eliot states, is saintly, because it is a communion with being. That even as he observes the frigid purgatorial fires, “the dripping blood our only drink, / the bloody flesh our only food.” And again, this deeply Christian literature. That it is the state which is cultivated, which is the mature state, again as he says — twenty years of languaging failures — the mature state of entering into this field of perception, which is itself the gift or the riches, the Plutus of Eliot’s work. The gift and the riches of the Four Quartets , which are themselves far richer than any worldly thing. Because they themselves are the authentic disclosure, and they give us the possibility of disclosure and the path through disclosure in the languaging of the mature poet.

So thank you.

Appendix edition — The Powers: On Hölderlin, Heidegger, and the Poetic Disclosure of Being (May 18, 2026 Lecture) (2026-05-18)

Substack lecture post https://davidbussellarchive.substack.com/p/the-powers-on-holderlin-heidegger; 25% of its passages appear in the compiled series text above.

The Powers: On Hölderlin, Heidegger, and the Poetic Disclosure of Being (May 18, 2026 Lecture)

On Hölderlin, Heidegger, and the Powers

A Lecture on the Late Hymns and the Poetic Disclosure of Being

I. The Poet and the Powers

So I want to give you a lecture here, ideally as a gift, regarding Hölderlin and the late hymns — which would be Patmos , The Rhine , and one of my personal favorites, Bread and Wine. What we need to get to is beneath Heidegger and beneath Nietzsche, which I think — the difficulty Heidegger experiences at the turn of World War II and his work with Hölderlin, which ends up becoming pretty much so his late period itself, is that the gods in Hölderlin, as they’re referred to with a sort of, again, philosophical distance by Nietzsche and Heidegger (and of course we know Nietzsche was, to a degree, a practicing and practiced poet), is that Heidegger and Nietzsche are attempting to re-enter the state of experience that Hölderlin is inhabiting and simultaneously remarking upon — that it is leaving.

And so this is the primary, I would say, difference and the dialectical tension between philosophy and poetry: that philosophy is remarking upon the poetic condition, which is, again, the dwelling poetically. And that philosophy itself is, in many ways, born from what I perceive to be the dialectical splitting of that condition, which goes all the way back to Heraclitus, and several strains of the ancient Hindu mystical tradition. This is also a large part of what I’ve encountered in the Dao and with ancient poetry in the Tao and the Buddhist tradition.

That the gods in Hölderlin are not the classical gods of Greek mythology as poetic decoration. They are the actual powers. And we hear this referred to in the Western tradition as “powers and principalities.” But when we’re discussing the powers, we are saying the forces themselves as manifest in sky, earth, fire — that move through the landscape and through human history and through human body. And this is important because this, again, returns us to the ground of the human experience, which is the sight which is seen, the body which is felt, the air which is breathed, the water which is drank, and the food or the meat or the bread which is ingested.

And this is the transformative condition of being and being in time as a perpetual overturning — as Heraclitus, the poet-philosopher (at least insofar as we remember him and his fragments), would call the “measures of fire.”

II. Disclosure and Danger

And that Hölderlin’s work itself — and this is the historical condition of visionary poetry, and when I say visionary, I mean something closer to shamanic or medicine poetry — is that Hölderlin’s work itself is an attempt to name an encounter and survive the encounter with these forces. And this — what Heidegger refers to very explicitly as disclosure — and that the poetic relationship to being is a position of danger. And when I mean danger, I’m talking about that life and death themselves are a membrane; it’s a permeability of a condition which is provisional, and the human condition itself being provisional, in that the materials and requisites for that condition provided are themselves highly temporal, and potentially destabilized by the basic forces at work, which, again, as I would refer to them here, are the powers — forces of sky, earth, fire, river.

And what we recognize — this is Heidegger’s hermetic turn in this late period, where he again withdraws from the institutional religious education of Nazi Germany and pursues absolutely this project of listening to the poets. Again, the essay is What Are Poets For? , and the books on language and poetry, his encounters with Trakl, just as they are with Hölderlin.

He is realizing this poetic being in time, which is immanence — which is, again, “man poetically dwells within being” — and this sphere of virtue, which is sphere, again, of world, that has no ability to accept the provisional architectures. And this is not only civilizational, but symbolic, as well as the mysteries of being. Which is to say that the human condition is inhabited and yet it is not the absolute. It is a place within the poetic dwelling wherein man gazes back upon this unfolding phenomenon and thus realizes that there’s a deeper substrate, which, again, I would call the powers.

That these powers themselves are simultaneously the self in a cosmological way, and highly impersonal — that they do not exist through any one being or form, and yet they are all beings and forms. Without mediation, the poet steps into this immanent relationship and thus discloses being through the necessity of articulation. Which I would say is the true disposition of the poet: that the poet must articulate the relationship to being. And this is not something that is outside of the realm of the privacy of this relationship.

There, within the encounter — locally manifested powers caught in the act of moving through the world, which is native to speed, which is native to language. And that language itself is required. And this goes back to the Heidegger glossing of the innocent vocation of poetry, and that innocence to language is fundamental to the poetic pursuit — is that language itself has not been subsumed to any task other than to articulate that which it is, or to be that which it is, which, again, is the state of disclosure.

These unnameable forces, again, are something that are fundamental to the world history. To the Vedic, to the Greeks. That this is not a conceptual condition. This is the paradox of the great work — or the visionary work, the visionary poet — is that in Hölderlin, the language itself, in its expressed condition or quality, is provisional — to elucidate the shining of this beingness. It’s that the poem itself is a structural architecture of necessity, to bring about this relationship of the powers, or this expression of the powers through that which they have produced provisionally, which is the being itself in time.

And this is a shattering — it’s an ontological shattering of the bounds of the presupposed self, which is necessarily a mystical tradition. And of course we ask — when Heidegger asks, “What use are the poets?” or “What are poets for?” — he’s asking this in the midst of the historical condition of modernity itself, which has denied and exiled its shamans, its mystics, medicine people. That the relationship to being, insofar as it is not — let’s say — productive or functional or economical, that it cannot be leveraged, it has been shadowed, exiled, and removed from the social and civilizational architecture of modernity, which is a ruthless industrial technological efficiency, which we see articulated at one of its peaks, at least in the mid-industrial age, with Nazi Germany.

III. The Crisis of Modernity

And this is why the crisis in Heidegger is so immense — that this being torn from the immanent relationship, which is always already the province of the poet, or the medicine, which is the dwelling within this immanent, articulating, yet inarticulatable landscape of the powers as they course through being itself in the various different manifestations.

That this relationship, which was formerly a way of communally relating to being in time, the condition of nature — which is itself the human condition and the condition of human nature — this removal is the technologization of being, which then itself is a redefinition of what it is to be human. And additionally, a redefinition of what it is, I suppose — what is nature? What is nature for? So to ask what the poets are for is to ask what is nature for. This question itself is implicitly and explicitly articulating what has become of human time. And it has been technologized and instrumentalized to the absolute, into the bone.

And this urgency of the return of immanence is itself the question of — we could say, you know, perhaps in a Western tradition, the return of God — but in a more fundamental condition, as in a natural condition, the return of the presence of the powers. Which are themselves not leverageable, that they cannot be obtained, that they themselves are coursing through nature, and that they themselves do not reside in any one principality, or in any one province. That they are themselves shining. This is a profound aspect of Hölderlin.

Again, that nature’s gleaming is higher revealing — that these powers themselves are shining through nature, and yet cannot be possessed or obtained, and yet they are. They are the most present and immanent concern in the encounter of, and in the poet rendering of, the forces that move beneath the ordinary human experience, or that move beneath being in time. And this is the sort of glimmering or diamond river of the eternal that Plato would call time.

IV. Ensoulment and the Symbolic

This is the question of hearing and being truly as indwelling. The loss of the presence of the powers is the loss of the presence of the civilizational ground in which there is a possibility of meaningful relationship to being — and furthermore, that life itself has a sense of, as it would be called in the ancient, ensoulment , where being is entwined with being at the level of beingness. That nature is not acquired, possessed, or instrumentalized, but rather that it is the fundamental intercoursing relationship.

And precisely that which enables poetry — which is the symbolic function of language, whether that be letter or number — is the beginning. I’ve argued this in past essays and past works. The beginning of this cascade, this teleological movement, the end point of abstraction, which is instrumentalization. That being itself has moved out of nature and into a symbolic realm of exchange, in which the powers themselves are vacated. That the powers themselves do not live in symbology, but rather they live in the immanence of being, which cannot be acquired.

This is the paradox of the great work of poetry: that the powers course through it. And yet the symbols themselves, like the human body, are provisional architecture for the presence of being — a temporary house. Poetic dwelling.

V. Proximity to Death

And this is understood very well in a pre-modern and pre-romantic sense. That the poem is moving through life, and that the poet dwells closest to this source — is that the poet is on the verge of non-existence in a formal sense. And this is proximity to death, which we can understand quite well in the dwelling of the Romantics themselves, whether we want to say Keats or Shelley. Is that the dwelling in proximity to death is not, rather, dwelling in proximity to the end of man, but dwelling in proximity to the beginning of being.

And this dwelling in proximity to death is the foundation of the pre-modern ethos. And the loss of the dwelling in proximity to death is the foundation of the modern. And here I won’t say ethos — I will say the modern rigor mortis , which is the stilling of the powers, and being away from the powers, and the instrumentalization, which you could call the logging industry.

And this is a perceptual power primarily. And I’m articulating this, again, in a symbolic sense. And when we return the symbolic function, we return this sword to the stone of history, so to speak — the symbolic function in its return, as we see in a Georg Trakl, or as we see in Hölderlin.

We’re witnessing a long end — a long end to the birth of the symbol, and the return of this vast complexity, which is the unfoldment of the symbolic dimension, which is itself all of language: letters, numbers, hieroglyphs. That they are being returned to the pre-symbolic immanent, which is itself a death.

VI. Absence Worse Than Death

[This] produces what I would call the great existentialist tradition, which is a response to the crisis of modernity. Here I would include everything from Dostoevsky to Clarice Lispector. That this response to the catastrophe and the crisis of modernity, which is to say the utter abandonment of and from the powers — which is not death, but it is absence. An absence which itself is profoundly worse than death. And that being itself, and the relationship from being, has been vacated and gone and removed from the earth.

That these very traditions that once facilitated this relation have themselves been vacated, or thrown under the wheel of this emergence of industrial technological modernity, which is absolute instrumentalization. And this, of course, is the downstream crisis of everything — relationship to ecology. And this is itself the murder-suicide of the possibility of being, [of] any sort of relevance to the experience of being human.

So it is the question of these powers. That care not and want not for man, or the concerns of man, or the presence of man within them — but rather that the severance of man from them is the existential, ontological, political crisis of modernity. Absolutely. And that this severance is specifically concerned with the mortality of the poet, which is proximity to the membrane of being, which is the breaking apart of the institution. Of the usable, abstracted, functional, possessive, standing inventory of the self.

VII. The Poet as Clearing

This poetry, again — whether we want to call this a shamanic tradition or a mystical tradition — is itself the making accessibility of the powers. Without diminishment. That the poetry itself is a diamond, or prism, through which to gaze, and the powers are thus made themselves immanent, visible, clear. This is the function of the prophet or the mystic, who writes the texts which are articulating God, which then become the civilizational foundations and frameworks of world history.

Just as Blake maps the powers in mythological form — that these powers themselves cannot be reduced. And that the poet is a clearing , a place of disclosure through which the powers run. And this is an obliteration. And this itself is a long-standing death of the Western philosophical self.

This is a movement deeply toward and into the Tao. But — there is no obliteration of violence. That the mountain simultaneously exists, and that the powers are behind it in such a way that the mountain itself does not exist. That the acquisition of the symbolic dimension is utterly futile. That the poet speaking the mountain is already a relinquishing.

And this is profound relationship — death, and a knowledge of life, which does not exclude death, but rather that life itself in any given form is provisional. And this is the nature and essence of the linguistics of prophetic and visionary poetry. Thank you.

Appendix edition — The Refinement of the Poetic Being in Time: Eliot, Trakl, and Late Style (May 19, 2026 Lecture) (2026-05-19)

Substack lecture post https://davidbussellarchive.substack.com/p/the-refinement-of-the-poetic-body; 49% of its passages appear in the compiled series text above.

The Refinement of the Poetic Being in Time: Eliot, Trakl, and Late Style (May 19, 2026 Lecture)

The Refinement of the Poetic Being in Time: Eliot, Trakl, and Late Style (May 19, 2026 Lecture)

So I want to [go] deeper now into Eliot’s Four Quartets. And in doing so, bring about an understanding of Eliot himself as the refinement of the poetic body, which is the aperture of the dwelling. And we are jumping off here, as we were and have been, from Heidegger’s late explorations — not only of Hölderlin, but of Trakl. And understanding one of the primary quotes which obsesses Heidegger of Hölderlin’s, that “man dwells poetically upon the earth.” And this is why Heidegger asks of Hölderlin when he does and as he does, in 1936 and 1937, the poet’s disclosure — a lived, felt, experienced, and attended proximity to being, to be considered to be the hearth of poesy.

And we’re going to get into here, again, how Eliot himself is the practice of this relationship to being. And to suggest that this poetic endeavor is itself a practice, and a practicing, and a practiced relationship to being, through this action and engagement of languaging and thinking through languaging. And especially thinking through languaging in its most fundamental [sense] — to return to Heraclitus — as a poetic innocence that is toward being absolutely. Which is the unity of the philosophical and the poetic question absolutely, which is fundamentally existential, which is: what is being, and what am I being?

Authenticity and Vulnerability

So. This comes about, and this is legible, in the particular authenticity and vulnerability of Eliot’s Four Quartets. And so what do I mean by authenticity and vulnerability? I mean transparency of thought, the bare expression of the possibilities in the human condition, by way of a linguistic leveling and a flattening, which is, for Eliot in the Four Quartets , the zero point or the negation, the destitution descending into perpetual solitude, world not world — “to leave the twittering world.”

And yet, notably, Eliot takes the symbolic language of the twittering world, which to him has become flesh and blood appendage, which is the act of poetry which he has pursued for twenty years of trial, error, failure, and error — which has a deep element of Beckett in it, surprisingly enough. That these works come about in very similar scopes of time, in this era of World War II transformation and rubble. That what is being stripped away is not the practice of the poetic artist, but rather all that stands between the practice of the poetic artist and disclosure. Which is to say that Eliot in the poem, as he was in life, is destroyed and wasted by time. And being laid to waste by time reveals what is beneath.

Time within time, time out of time. “Love is most nearly itself / when here and now cease to matter.” And this embodied wisdom of the desolation which is wrought in Eliot’s life and time, as it is in Beckett’s, is what reveals the richness and the riches of the authenticity of this disclosure. Which is Eliot laying down the arms of the poetic method, utterly, toward being. Which is itself a surrender of the gift that has been cultivated — again, this twenty years of failure and attempt in languaging, which Eliot explicitly states. And this isn’t a moment of self-consciousness, [as] is rarely seen in the poetic craft, because it is a moment of admission: that “every attempt is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure” — which is almost ad verbatim a repetition of Beckett, or a primary and pre-elucidation of what Beckett will come to say. “Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.”

Late Style

And this broken openness is well discussed by Edward Said in his text Late Style , which is — and we could describe the Four Quartets patently as — Eliot’s end-of-life positional movement, which Said approaches frequently in a musical direction, particularly with Mozart and Beethoven. Which is the cultivation, to use the metaphor in Eliot’s Four Quartets , the cultivation of this garden of poesy , which is the linguistic possibilities, the refinement of the symbolic method, the refinement of this way of poetic thinking. Which is the leveling of the grounds of thought across scales, time and space, history and philosophy — these forms of knowledge that have been cultivated obsessively, again, in terms of the pursuit in the Renaissance mind, which I’ve previously stated. Obsessively, by T.S. Eliot throughout his poetic career.

And that his orientation towards poetry is, first and foremost — being a true poet is toward being itself. Which is a deeply — as Eliot describes it — practice. This language is moved through Eliot’s practice via the Christianity of his time. And this is a movement for him simultaneously towards God and towards the point, the still point of the turning world, which is God. “Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is. / […] Neither arrest nor movement. […] / Do not call it fixity, / where past and future are gathered.”

And the possibility of this late style — to work with Said a little bit here — is that there is a deep fermentation which comes to bear in this political and historical moment of Eliot’s time. These pamphlets themselves of the Four Quartets being distributed at the beginning of the 1940s. Deep into Eliot’s poetic career and deep into Eliot’s life, wherein — perhaps to use the term — Eliot gives up the ghost of his poetry. That the poetry itself is broken open to its first service. That this refinement of the poetic being is that Eliot, in a way that is kind of atmospheric to Trakl, comes to the garden of death and lays to bear these powers.

And these powers are a way of seeing. They’re a way of being in time, and a way of attention. And that when we read the Four Quartets , what we are reading is Eliot’s attention to being in time, this cultivated attention of being. And this is embodied. This is a way of seeing, a way of looking. And then furthermore, the capacity which Eliot has cultivated to express, [to] make legible, this ontological confrontation or revelation which Eliot is having through time, through history, and through the experience of being human. Which is the path of navigating the charnel house of history, so to speak. Houses rise and fall, crumble and are extended, and “in my beginning is my end,” in succession. This is realization being inscribed into the poetic form.

Disclosure as Wealth

And to return again to Heidegger [and] Hölderlin — this disclosure is what is essential. It is the riches and the wealth of life. But it is simultaneously something that cannot be owned or obtained. Again, the innocent act of poetry is a way of being — a dwelling poetically upon the earth. And it is not, again, in Heidegger’s terms, [in the] virtue [of] a technocratic or industrial virtue of obtaining this — or movement, or action. And this is something that Eliot understands extremely well in the Four Quartets when he speaks about the still point of the turning world and descending into the darkness, which is not the twittering of the world.

When Eliot’s provocations and invocations [come] in “that open field, / if you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, / on a summer midnight, you can hear the music / of the weak pipe and the little drum / and see them dancing around the bonfire.” This is Eliot gesturing into and towards time within time, this timeless state of revelation or realization. “What is the late November doing / with the disturbance of the spring / and creatures of the summer heat, / […] snowdrops writhing under feet…” He is asking the question. And he is evoking the answer.

What is time doing? What is within time that is gleaming, in Hölderlin’s terms? What is being? And to reveal or revelate being is itself dwelling poetically in time, which is available at all times, particularly through the cultivation of experience as in dwelling poetically. And this is a practice, and this is why writing poetry is a practice.

And this is why Heidegger asks the critical question: what are poets for in the midst of the world’s midnight? Because the world’s midnight is eternal at the deepest level. [It] is an eternal midnight of a perceptual failure of being, that time itself is the perceived overgrowth of forms, and that these forms themselves appear impenetrable to the human nervous system and the human developmental stage. That poetry itself is the deploying of the perpetual relationship between the refinement of experience and the iteration of the symbolic method, to break into time and to experience the eternal through time. To thus incorporate time and incorporate the human experience into the wisdom. “[Not] only the knowledge of dead secrets…”

Humility and Ground

“…Knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, / for the pattern is new in every moment […] / We are only undeceived / of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm. / In the middle, not only in the middle of the way, / but all the way, in a dark wood…” — a blatant allusion to Dante. “[…] in a bramble, / on the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, / and menaced by monsters, fancy lights, / risking enchantment.”

And this enchantment aspect is critical. “The houses are all gone under the [sea]. / The dancers are all gone under [the hill].” What this is, what this is an enchantment of, is the vacancy in the void brought about by the ontological loss — the loss of the ground, which, again, Heidegger calls the Abgrund , or the void, the abyss. That is pulled out from beneath knowing. Evaluation of all we have been in every moment is new and shocking. This is a return to dwelling poetically.

Which for Eliot is deeply entwined with a relationship to God, or relationship to being. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.” This is the state of being of the poet, which is the dangerous proximity to disclosure, which is actual intimate relationship, or in-folding within relationship.

And there’s a fantastic illusion — I won’t even be able to place it now — but it’s a statue, or [I] believe it’s a statue of Christ, that has been reabsorbed into a tree. This is a deeply symbolic and signifying image for our project. Because the movement of Christ, which Eliot is describing, the relationship to being, is deeply sacramental. “The dripping blood our only drink, / the bloody flesh our only food: / in spite of which we like to think / that we are sound, substantial flesh and blood — / again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.”

That Eliot is with the human experience, right? This is not a disavowal of being in time. This is a deepening of being in time. Never does Eliot leave history. Never does Eliot leave the Statesman, the Stock Exchange Gazette, the sun and the moon. That this deepening of being in time is the incorporation of the appearance of the time, the appearance of the human experience, into the moment of revelation in the hedgerow or the rose garden.

“Where is the summer, the unimaginable / zero summer? […] If you came this way, / taking the route you would be likely to take / from the place you would be likely to come from…”

Every single moment in the Four Quartets is a path in, a path in, a path in. Every single historical moment, every single object relationship, is a path in to relationship to being. This is the gift. This is the treasure. This is the wealth of poetry which Heidegger identifies correctly — and absolutely correctly — at the moment of the world’s midnight, which is the industrial technological turn, which has only accelerated in the hundred years after he has decried and proclaimed this abyss as a historical condition, which is accelerating, which began before Heidegger and has continued after his project.

The Gold

That this way of being is the gold itself — to use an alchemical term, right? This is the gold, or this is the transformation of the human being into [being]. “[…] These dead men more than the dying. / Why should we celebrate / these dead men more than the dying? / […] / We cannot revive old factions, / we cannot restore old policies / or follow an antique drum. / […] Whatever we inherit from the fortunate / we have taken from the defeated / what they had to leave us — a symbol: / a symbol perfected in death.”

What Eliot is saying is that there is a possibility, right? There is a way into being through the cultivation of this poetic relationship, through the cultivation of perception — [which] is dwelling poetically, the practice of poetry, which is the restoration of the ground, the ontological ground, which appears split in history via false valuations, or attempts at identification which are impositions of false difference. Which are not descents into the still point, which are not descents into the darkness. The dancers have fled and the houses have fled into the abyss, or into the void, which are not these descents. Which are first and foremost spiritual descents of confrontation with the ontological ground of being itself. And that the pursuit of this descent — Eliot, like Shelley, and in many ways also like Trakl — the pursuit of this descent is a symbol perfected in death.

That Eliot, in the completion of the Four Quartets — the writing of the Four Quartets and the experience of them — leaves and gives the wealth of the transformational artifact, the transformational script. Which is itself why he quotes Heraclitus. Why Heraclitus is explicitly and implicitly referred to. To be redeemed from fire by fire. Consumed by either fire or fire. “What we call the beginning is often the end. […]” It is to step into this relationship via the sacrament itself of language and languaging.

The Aperture

And so when we’ve talked here — and I’ll swing this back around — we’ve talked here about authenticity and vulnerability as transparency of thought. This is Eliot’s thinking through languaging as living process, living procedure, which is the aperture, which is a process of relationship in time to being. This is laid down before the poem. This is why with Eliot, the Four Quartets is not a poem. It is an act of poetry. It is an act of the poetic mind cultivated at this level of profound — I won’t say mastery, I’ll say profound engagement — via the pursuit. That these arms are entirely laid down at this advanced languaging path, this advanced twenty years of failure has been laid down before the true soul-task, which is disclosure of being.

And that what Eliot gives us is the world. That Eliot gives us the whole world. The world that is unbroken — from the horseshoe crab, the whale’s backbone. Primrose, the Dry Salvages, the wounded surgeon. The Directory of Directors. Lavender spray. Mars. That the whole world is integrated and incorporated into the poem as itself this disclosure of fire, of being, of “now and in England.”

“If you came this way, / taking any route, starting from anywhere, / […] it would always be the same. / You would have to put off / sense and notion. You are not here to verify, / instruct yourself, or inform curiosity / or carry report. You are here to kneel / where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more / than an order of words, the conscious occupation / of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. / And what the dead had no speech for, when living, / they can tell you, being dead: the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. / Here, the intersection of the timeless moment / is England and nowhere. Never and always.”

This is one of the most profound philosophical statements that is possible — but it is made possible through the poetic act. And to understand this is crucial. Because this is a thinking through languaging whose only requirement is ontological communion with being. And this is why Heraclitus is our poet-philosopher of the first order. The only commandment is disclosure and communion. With the ontos.

The Saintly Path

And this is why Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets , reads as profoundly religious, profoundly spiritual. This is the preoccupation here with the saint or the saintly path. Is that the saintly path is not — to mistake it as moral or ethical or religious would be to confuse the function of poetry. That the poetry itself, and the writing of the poetry, is simultaneously a document of disclosure and the cultivation of the instrument of disclosure itself. That the actual body is the living and dwelling of being upon the earth — in form, in the nervous system, in the somatic register. This is why I say somatic attunement: the lived constraint of being in time, the body in presence, being broken open through the wandering of this way, which is the wilderness — to say [with] Dante.

That Eliot, in his time as Dante in his, comes upon this broken openness of history, of the body, of the existence, of the condition. And that the poetic path, as Heidegger correctly elucidates, is non-negotiable. It is the only question of this cultivation. Because it is the question of what is being, and therefore how is being in time even possible? How is a meaningful relationship to being even possible? Because if there is no meaningful relationship to being, there is not. And this is what Eliot laments, laments and laments, before he’s broken open in the Four Quartets , with The Waste Land and The Hollow Men.

And, for myself, The Waste Land and The Hollow Men are very, very barely read or encountered as much as the Four Quartets itself is a poetic achievement of the first order. Because Eliot descends. He lives on the battlefield, or the ground of the dead, or in the wake of the war, so to speak, in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. But Eliot embarks truly on the descent, and avails himself of the descent, which is the profound surrender into “the world of perpetual solitude, / […] destitution of all property, / desiccation of the world of sense, / evacuation of the world of fancy, / inoperancy of the world of spirit; / this is the one way…”

“Time and the bell have buried the day, / the black cloud carries the sun away.” Eliot avails himself to death in life. “Chill / fingers of yew be curled / down on us…”

Eliot and Trakl

This is the ineluctable, profound relationship between Eliot and Trakl. It’s that Trakl inhabits this death and life. And it suffices to say, in many ways, he remains there. Eliot moves through this turning point. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. / The houses are all gone under the sea. / The dancers are all gone under the hill.”

And the remainder of the I is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Four Quartets. Is that Eliot is thinking through languaging , whereas, very often, Trakl will disappear through languaging. This is an interesting question of the presence of the one who is thinking. [Between Eliot] and Trakl.

This is the fascinating part of Eliot, and I’ll just kind of add this on here at the end, because I think this is a separate conversation, but it is related. That Eliot himself is a very cerebral poet. That thinking through languaging for Eliot is, by and large, a process — process of his great intellect, which avails him a degree of cognitive distance even as he experiences the desecration, the desiccation. That Eliot himself thinks very much so like one who is deeply, deeply educated, because he is.

And with Trakl, what we have — and perhaps what is so profoundly dark and disturbing about Trakl’s poetry — is that it is nearly entirely embodied. That the population of the symbolic mode and the register is Trakl’s experience. Of the descent into destitution, desecration. That Trakl is not contemplating this process. Trakl is experiencing it, as in a total submergence. He is submerged in this descent into the abyss. So this descent.

And we understand that Trakl dies quite young, whereas Eliot’s poetic pursuit continues and commences for decades. And this to me is the primary difference: that what we get, and what we have lost — which is a profound loss — is the full fulmigation of Trakl’s poetic pursuit through maturity. Whereas the Four Quartets themselves would not have been possible without this steepening and deepening of twenty years of failed attempts of thinking through languaging. Toward which Eliot lays all to bare, lays his burden down, so to speak, in the Four Quartets. Laying the burden down as in a total surrender toward the ontological project, which is the loss of the poem.

That the poem itself is matterless or meaningless, but rather it is that which is stripped off. It is the clothes which remain as Eliot steps into the sparkling, gleaming river of being. [As] Plato[’s] platonic river of time — that time is the moving image of eternity. And this is what is pierced by Eliot. And this is why the Four Quartets themselves are an immortal document. Truly, an immortal document. Even if and as language dies and the symbolic order is totally rent down to the genome — that it is a document of what is possible in being human. Which is not only that disclosure itself can be transmitted via [an] advanced, highly articulate symbolic register which is cultivated over decades and decades, a lifetime. Which is the gift — a lifetime of the genius of Eliot, the Renaissance mind of Eliot, brought to bear in the Four Quartets , which is a transformation of the experience of being in time.

Not only that this document of disclosure is possible and attendable, and that it is attended, but that Eliot himself is that which is being communicated here. That he is the dwelling poetically which has been refined unto the breaking open, which is the true register, which is the laying down [of] the concerns of thinking [in] any which way, or languaging [in] any which way. And that languaging is at once, in this maturation, this profound spiritual and existential maturation — that this entire process of the ordinance and ordinancy of the symbolic register is laid to bare, absolutely, in this great master. And that it is itself [a] document of the richness of Eliot’s thinking through languaging, which is itself a document of the spirit, which is the way of being of Eliot in time, which is made possible by his pursuit. The allowance to be broken open toward the innocent project, [the] process of [poetry]. And to dwell authentically in being and time.

So thank you.

Appendix edition — Dwelling Poetically: The Vocation of the Poet (May 19, 2026 Lecture) (2026-05-19)

Substack lecture post https://davidbussellarchive.substack.com/p/dwelling-poetically-the-vocation; 66% of its passages appear in the compiled series text above.

Dwelling Poetically: The Vocation of the Poet (May 19, 2026 Lecture)

Dwelling Poetically: The Vocation of the Poet

So now we’re into the question of dwelling poetically. That Eliot’s Four Quartets is rather a document — poetry is a document of the act of dwelling poetically upon the earth, with Hölderlin and Heidegger’s inquiry. This is the fundamental question which unites poetry, philosophy, and the fundamental existential human condition: that to dwell poetically upon the earth is to be in union with being.

That the act of poetry is really just a forebearer, or a process, in this descent into the nightfall, to say [it] with Eliot. “The murmuring shell of time, [you are not] those who saw the harbor receding, or those who will disembark. / Here, between the hither and the farther shore / […] while time is withdrawn, consider the future / and the past with an equal mind.” Eliot is providing the structural beams, the architecture of this process. This poetic procedure of the descent into being, in this dangerous union — which is ultimately a dissolution of the poet, or the one who is being, or dwelling poetically.

This is what being a poet is. Being a poet is not necessarily the act of writing poetry, although the act of writing poetry can be — and often is — in relationship to dwelling poetically. Because writing poetry, again, is a languaging, [a] thinking through languaging, by which one comes into “the way.” As Dante says, he came upon this forest in his middle age, which becomes this transformational aperture into this descent with Virgil, his guide, into hell — to strip away, in an Inannic sense (goddess Inanna), to strip away the world and to come upon the raw stump, or the raw post, of being itself. Which is a somatic interlocution, being in time, the raw nerve with the timeless or the eternal — “the dripping blood our only drink, / the bloody flesh our only food.” Dwelling poetically.

The Way of Dispossession

The poem itself is oblivion. The poem itself is the way in which Eliot arrived. And this is critical. “You must go [by] the way […] in which you are not. […] What you do not know is the only thing you know, / and what you own is what you do not own, / and where you are is where you are not.” Eliot is blowing away the obliteration, the way of dispossession. That poetry itself is a caustic force, it is a caustic element against this worldliness of which Eliot wails throughout his poetic career — this worldliness of the twittering, the distraction within distraction within distraction, which is the way of avoiding this descent into the world of perpetual solitude. The way of avoiding this descent which Trakl is dragged into, which Eliot contemplates and surrenders [to]. This is the pursuit of the poet. It’s the pursuit of Shelley.

Why is this the pursuit of the poet? Because it is the failure of the world’s way, which is the way of virtue, as Heidegger says — which is the technologization, which is the standing inventory, which is the industrialization, the productization of being into extractable, commodifiable forms, which to the poet is unbearable, is not compatible with the neural architecture of the poet.

The poet, as I’ve suggested in the Renaissance Mind architectural essays and lectures, is a neural sensitivity. It is a literal architectural body which is sensitive to being, sensitive to existence, sensitive to the powers. And thus itself is incompatible with the worldly symbolic order — and yet uses the worldly symbolic order, whether that’s the English language for Eliot, or German for Trakl and for Hölderlin, to enter into the realm of the powers. Which is also the realm of the shades, which is also the transformative — that being itself is in and of and as the Transformer. That it is “neither flesh nor fleshless, / neither from nor towards […] there the dance is […] at the still point.” It is the transformation itself.

Heraclitus and the Epigram

And this is why Heraclitus is essential. “Although the logos is common to all, most people live as [if they] had a wisdom of their own.” [And:] “The way upward and the way downward are the same.” Heraclitus. These are the epigrams of the Four Quartets. Why? Because Eliot understands Heraclitus at the most fundamental level. Because Eliot and Heraclitus are one in the practice of poetry. Heraclitus, the philosopher-poet, himself. Eliot, philosopher-poet — especially in his relation to Hinduism and Christianity.

Why the epigram? The epigram is the architectural key to the work. And we ask this of Shelley as well, because the epigram is absolutely important to all of Shelley’s works. And he chooses these very deliberately, because they express his current iterative stance toward being.

“Although the logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own.” This is the twittering world. Distraction upon distraction upon distraction. This wisdom of their own is manufactured to avoid the descent. “The way upward and the way downward are the same.” Towards spirit and toward the soul, in medieval and ancestral terms. That the descent into hell is the descent upward, or the ascent upward to spirit, as is articulated again in Dante. That this descent, this Inannic movement, is essential.

“Descend lower […] into the world of perpetual solitude.” Abstention from movement, while the world moves in appetency on its metalled ways of time past and time future. Eliot is saying we are broken from the world, “desiccat[ed] [from] the world of sense, / evacuat[ed] [from] the world of fancy, / inoperancy of the world of spirit.” That the poet is broken from the world in this descent, and it is unavoidable to the poet. Unavoidable. It is itself the passion and the pursuit which is the being of the poet. It is ineluctable from the being of the poet. It is the architectural, neural, actual, existential condition of the poet. And that the poet is called by the being itself — that the being in time itself, the very being of the poet, is called to poetry as in the union with being, which it cannot accept. It is constitutionally unable to tolerate the world of fancies, the twittering world, the distraction upon distraction upon distraction.

The Vocation

And this descent is itself the vocation of the poet, the absolute vocation. “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / is the wisdom of humility […]” “The houses are all gone under the sea. / The dancers are all gone under the hill.” It cannot be accepted. “[…] dark, dark, dark, they all go into the dark, […] / […] captains, merchant bankers, […] / […] the vacant into the vacant, / […] the interstellar spaces, […] / patrons of art, statesmen and rulers […]”

Eliot is listing, like an ancient Hindu sage — in the Dasboh, for instance instance — listing all that comes into not-being. The poet comes the way of not-being, to discover what is. In the obliteration, the destitution, that Eliot moves through The Hollow Men and The Waste Land , and his time of the world wars. Historically and existentially, absolutely, into the destitution. “[…] the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated / of dead and living […]” “[…] as we grow older […]” This is what is required.

“We must be still and still moving / into another intensity / for a further union, a deeper communion / through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / of the petrel and the porpoise. […] / In my end is my beginning.” This is critical. Eliot is moving into being in time. This is not the being in time of linear historical movement. This is the being in time of actual embodied participation in being — rooted in the still point of the turning world, and yet still moving into another intensity for further union and deeper communion.

And this is the sensitivity of the poet, which is the penetration. It is the movement of the poet into the danger, to work with Hölderlin. Into the danger which is the union — and this union is necessarily also a dissolution. The poet is dying into life via transformation. That the poet no longer exists but in the poetic act, which is what is left behind in this dying into life. “A further union, [a] deeper communion. […] / In my end is my beginning.”

The Only Thing That Matters

So we ask again: dwelling poetically. This is the only thing that matters. All else, shades, distraction upon distraction upon distraction. Eliot strips this away. As does, explicitly, without even a decrying of it, Trakl’s embodiment of his time — his existential body, his architectural being in his historical time. Not even decried — it is not there, it is not present. Trakl is moving into communion, and the symbolic register in which he is articulating is a descent into that which is prior to the presumed. Into being — of that which is his being — and penetrating into this substructure which then opens up.

Again, the way upward and the way downward are the same. That it must be destroyed, desecrated. This is critical to Eliot, and Eliot explicitly states this over and over. The destruction and desecration which are articulated in the Four Quartets are an utter necessity. They are required. And the poetic vocation itself is a violence against the world. This is essential. It is a violence that is uncaring, an unattached devotion. “The failing / pride or resentment at failing powers, / the unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless, / […] a drifting boat with a slow leakage, / […] the clamour of the bell of the last annunciation. […] / There is no end of it, the […] withering of withered flowers, / […] to the movement of pain that is painless and motionless […]” The movement into “the prayer of the one Annunciation.” Absolute, absolute, the dwelling poetically.

The Danger

And this absolute vocation is the danger. It is the danger which both Eliot and Trakl face. It’s an existential danger, as well as a historical danger, which we understand with Dante. Because it refuses. It cannot accept.

Eliot carves through the charnel house — the detritus , so to speak, the charnel house of history — into the shining, the gleaming. This is what’s so beautiful and so maximal about Eliot’s Four Quartets in relation to perhaps some of Hölderlin’s shorter works or Trakl: is that Eliot is incorporating the ruins of all time. That through the ruins of all time we see.

“The moment in and out of time, / the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, / the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning, / or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / while the music lasts. […] These are only hints and guesses, / hints followed by guesses; and the rest / is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”

He is telling you explicitly: “Here the impossible union / of spheres of existence is actual. / Here the past and future / are conquered, and reconciled.” This is the poetic practice. The act of being in time, poetically dwelling — dwelling poetically — as a practice, as a discipline, as even a penitence. As a way. This is, again, the Annunciation, where he continually returns to the Annunciation, [the] spiritual act.

“And right action is freedom / from past and future also.” This is the relinquishing of the coils. “[…] We, content at the last / if our temporal reversion nourish / […] the life of significant soil.” “[…] we are only undefeated / because we have gone on trying […]”

The Life of Significant Soil

What does this mean — “the life of significant soil”? In the ancient Greek, in the Heraclitean, this would be Pluto, or Plouton. The riches, the wealth of the underworld. Deeply connected to Dante. Also the god of transformation, the god of change, the god of death. That we are moving into the essence, the groundswell of the fire, for instance, in the Heraclitean. That the transformation itself is the still point of being. It is that which is gleaming, yet unseen. “Neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor towards, at the still point, there the dance is.” But what is that being? And how do we come into relationship with it?

Hölderlin and Heidegger tell us: dwelling poetically is man upon the earth. Isn’t — man should dwell poetically. This is, man is dwelling poetically upon the earth. It already is. It is the first condition. It is the first condition upon which merit is transposed, or virtue is transposed. World of sense, world of fancy. Property.

In that the act of the poet is the descent through history. This is the Botticelli painting of the map of Dante’s hell. It’s extremely powerful because it’s sedimental. What’s being shown is that history itself is a body. It is a landedness. It is a geology and a geography which is traversed by the human being in time — genetically, architecturally, as a somatic neural system, [a] synaptic system, but also culturally, civilizationally as a symbolic code, an architecture and way of being in time.

Which is, exceedingly in Eliot’s time, as in Heidegger’s, in Hölderlin’s, in Shelley’s, in Trakl’s — a time of standing inventory of being. That being itself is utility. In that this is a profound, profound, profound spiritual death, that being in time poetically can only reconcile. That this is the only reconciliation. Because it is the truth, and it is not a reconciliation — it is a return to the foundations, the ontological root of being. That we do then experience the possibility of meaning in relation to being, in the face of a meaningless, destitute time, which has been utilized by a symbolic order of consequence. Profit. Use.

How Do We Experience the Possibility of Being?

How do we experience the possibility of being? Poetry does not matter. It is an entrance, as we understand in Dante, a gateway, a gate to hell. This is deeply connected to Eliot — utterly deeply connected to Eliot. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

Explicitly, what is articulated by Eliot in the descent into “the world of perpetual solitude, / […] destitution of all property, / […] internal darkness, deprivation […]” — that it is a movement toward the outgrown, the movement toward the void. And this is the danger, which we understand deeply in Trakl. It’s the danger of this descent from the twittering world, the world of distraction. Because all there is, is to come about face to and with being, toward disclosure. The possibility of meaningful life and meaningful relationship — but it is descent, and destitution, deprivation and desiccation. “[…] all property, / [the] world of sense, [the] world of fancy. […] / […] abstention from movement; while the world moves / in appetency on its metalled ways / of time past and time future.” [The] poet goes this way because there is no other.

Eliot the banker.

Why the Poet?

Why does the poet know this? Why does the poet see this? This is a much deeper question to me than “what are poets for?” The poet is for no use. Although Heidegger’s essay is essential for his time. One of, I think, the most important philosophical essays of the 20th century. Along with works of Simone Weil, and Camus’ lecture on the human crisis.

Why? Why the poet? The poet is the one open to disclosure. That disclosure penetrates. It’s a permeable membrane of being in time. This is an architectural, neural, somatic, embodied condition in which there cannot be tissue stuffed [in the gaps], in the poetic sense. That the eyes and the ears, the nose and the mouth, the body itself, has an aperture. [A] perception that is pierced by light, that is penetrated at all moments by being. And that it is being itself [which] cannot accept the destitute and destituting symbolic order of the world, which is distraction upon distraction upon distraction, twittering.

That it is itself descending and descended as in its very existence. That disclosure is something primary to the actual neural, synaptic, and somatic architecture and aperture of the being itself — which is dwelling poetically to such an extreme extent, to such a fundamental extent, that there is something of an irreconcilable difference, wherein the symbolic order of the world cannot be incorporated.

The Admixture

And so it is admixed. This is how we achieve poetry. That poetry is a destitution from the sense order of the world. That even as it uses the language of the communal, it cannot accept the absurd of the [world] — and evokes instead the strange and sublime and subliminal architecture of being out from under the denial code of world.

[Most] not hear the darkness in this twittering world. “World, not world, / but that which is not world; internal darkness, / deprivation and destitution of all property, / desiccation of the world of sense, / evacuation of the world of fancy […]” These are not [merely] semantic words. “While the world moves / in appetency on its metalled ways / of time past and time future” — it is a refusal, [it] is a denial, it is a movement downward. Not horizontally into virtue, which is being of and in the world, but downward into being itself. Abstention from movement.

[Poetry] is going down into oneself. The stillness. “As a Chinese jar still / moves perpetually in its stillness. […] / […] Words, after speech, reach / into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / can words or music reach / […] not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, / not that only, but the co-existence […]” Eliot is trying to say the unsayable. And it is a way of meditating upon. It is the circling of the still point until finally the language collapses into the still point itself.

This meditation is proximity into union, proximity into communion. And Eliot is describing that this is a practice. “We must be still and still moving / into another intensity / for a further union, a deeper communion / through the dark cold and the empty desolation […]” Twenty years trying to use words. “Old men ought to be explorers, / here or there does not matter […]” “Love is most nearly itself / when here and now cease to matter.”

Subtonic, Sub-tectonic

[This] is critical to understanding what Eliot is telling us about the vocation of poetry and the vocation of the poet. That the poet itself is something that is beneath the world. Is sub-tonic. Is sub-tectonic. It is itself the deeper, most essential existential relationship to being, which is using the symbolic code of the world — everything from the tree to the letter to the genome of the human being — to collapse this existential relationship at its structural foundation. To collapse symbolism, to collapse the symbolic code. Which, again, the symbolic iteration of the human being in the genome, the tree, all that appears to be, which is “melted away by the infernal method” of Blake. Again, these are structural elucidations of what poetry is.

Poetry is nothing but a being, [a] way of being, an aperture, a way of seeing, a life. This is what Blake is telling us. This is what Eliot is telling us. This is what Hölderlin is telling us. And this is what Heidegger is asking, because it is so necessary. And it is never more necessary than it is now, as it always has been.

Because if we do not have poetry, we do not have life. We have death in life. We have destitution, absolute absolution, which appears to be that which is worldly wealth or worldly constancy, but is in fact living death — which is worse itself than the descent into death, which Eliot shows us and tells us and avails us, which Dante shows and tells us and avails us.

The One Annunciation

The poet itself, the poetry itself, is a descent into destitution to come into communion with being. And this is understood theologically, as by figures as diverse as Meister Eckhart, to the Buddha, to Christ. This is a spiritual, theological movement towards the ontos , towards being itself, towards God, absolutely. The primordial unity, the absolute unity. “[Only] the hardly, barely, [prayable] prayer / of the one Annunciation.”

A-N-N-U-N-C-I-A-T-I-O-N.

This is the one movement of life that avails life itself — the possibility of life, the lived experience of life — dwelling poetically upon the earth. It is the destitution of virtue. It is the death of industry, the death of technology, the death of all unto the surrender of what always was: technology, poetry, the body, the genome, the bird, the song, into this utter collapse of total ontological presence and communion with being.

“No occupation either, but something given / and taken, in a lifetime’s death in love, / ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”

“For most of us, there is only the unattended / moment, the moment in and out of time, / the distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, / the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning, / or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply / that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / while the music lasts.”

Eliot is giving us the only possibility. The only life.