"the lotos rose" (Burnt Norton 36)
I suppose this is entirely Joycean to do, and I fully realize that Eliot uses the word 'rose' as in the verb, but I also see rose as a flower rose because of the numerous references to roses throughout the Quartets.
They are all so strange but wonderful. Below are six rose references:
"the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars" (East Coker 166).
"The salt is on the briar rose" (The Dry Salvages 25).
"Late roses filled with early snow?" (East Coker 57).
"But to what purpose / Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves / I do not know" (Burnt Norton 15-17).
"for the roses / Had the look of flowers that are looked at" (Burnt Norton 28-9).
AND of course at the very END, "And the fire and the rose are one" (Little Gidding 259).
So why the rose? To be honest, I don't even really like roses all that much. They prick you when you hold them. Nonetheless, they are steeped with meaning.
My mom was Rose Queen in 1975. I don't know much about it because she sort of brushes it off when I ask her, but she has an actual sceptre that was given to her. It is SO heavy and truly does resemble something I imagine a queen to have held in Elizabethan times. The STRANGEST thing about all of this is the night of my mom's coronation (told to me by my Granny.) Apparently all of the princesses appeared in front of the attendees one by one and had to pull a rose from a vase. Each rose stem carried on it a prompt for an impromptu speech. I don't know the exact prompt or speech (I will ask my mom,) but my mom gave her speech on words and the ocean. And at the very end of the Four Quartets (recognized by Brianne's blog name,) Eliot writes, "Not known, because not looked for / But heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea" (249-51). But this is all Tradition and Tralatition.
In The Dry Salvages, Eliot writes:
"I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened." (124-8)
I interpret this as 'the future has already been written'; it's a faded song pressed in a book, already typeset. From the moment something begins, matters of how it will be played out are already settled. I read the Bhagavad Gita several years ago for the class with Professor Jarow that I mentioned on my Emergent Lit blog. The Eleventh Teaching was always impressive to me simply because of how visual it was. This website helped remind me of the 11th teaching. Now I realize that it struck me so powerfully because it is epiphanic; it is seen, overwhelming, whole, and radiant. I went back through it and realized as well that the 11th teaching is even subtitled "The Vision of Krishna's Totality. Vid, veda. I also realized aside from being epiphanic (seen rather than heard in Arjuna's words to be exact) that the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna touches as well on the concept of the future already having been written. Arjuna says to Krishna:
"I heard from you in detail
how creatures come to be and die,
Krishna, and about the self
in its immutable greatness.
Just as you have described
yourself, I wish to see your form
in all its majesty,
Krishna, Supreme among Men."
In return Krishna speaks:
"I am time grown old,
creating world destruction,
set in motion
to annihilate the worlds;
even without you,
all these warriors
arrayed in hostile ranks
will cease to exist. . .
They are already
killed by me."
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At this point I am most intrigued by the first of the Four Quartets. Burnt Norton. Why burnt? A name? A garden?
Like others, I too was very much taken by the idea of the box circle and discovered on this website that the box circle is what traditionally marks the very center of formal gardens. "It is set so that the person looking from the upper story of a house overlooking the garden will see at it's exact center a circle inscribed in a square, usually with four entrances in the center of the side of the square."
Here is a rose garden in Portland.
It actually looks very much like a mandala.
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Other moments that struck me:
"Only through time time is conquered" (Burnt Norton 89).
"Home is where one starts from" (East Coker 190).
I can only think of Anna Livia. "Home!"
p.s. I do not understand what Eliot means by "fare foreward."
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