Leafing thru this list of peotry resources from poet Christian Wiman, I found a great article on T.S. Eliot by former archbishop Rowan Williams.

From Rowan Williams (Poetic stanzas Eliot’s):

Where, then, is healing? Here Eliot is at his most stark: there is no escape, except into fantasy. There is only a penetrating further into the blackness and destructiveness of the world. Face the truth; face the fact that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death, and loss, that no light of ecstasy can change this. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion, and living without illusion is the first step to salvation. “Only through time time is conquered.” And here the starkness gives way to gospel. If there is a God whose will is for the healing of men and women, he can heal only by acting in the worldliness of the world, in and through the vortex of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sickness, our damnation, so as to bring his life and his fullness into it.

        The wounded surgeon plies the steel

        That questions the distempered part;

        Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

        The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

        Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all that we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernable meaning or pattern, but into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organize the chaos of the world in systems and mythologies, and realize that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way in which love can begin. Only if we are honest about the world can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is only destruction and death, or there is destruction and death that we can take into ourselves to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man.

        The dripping blood our only drink,

        The bloody flesh our only food.

I stumbled on an Andy Anderson skate video on Chris Hannah’s blog. Andy lives the “dirtbag” lifestyle of a skater and makes a wonderful observation on what it means to rest (emphasis mine):

…There’s a skill to relaxing, finding peace…It’s funny how relaxing is so tied into being lazy because it doesn’t neccesarily mean you’re being lazy. Part of my work is relaxing. Becasue relaxing is taking control of yourself¹ and accepting that you’re not controlling anything else.

Hearing Anderson talk about the the work of relaxing, I couldn’t help but think of what it means to stop…that is “sabbath.” Then, when he went on to talk about control and “accepting that you’re not controlling anything else,” something occured to me. “Control and surrender” is a sabbatic balance.

Brian Eno, Austin Kleon, and Alan Jacobs²—all speak of the creative process flourishing via the slow growth of control and surrender. Here’s Eno:

Control and surrender have to be kept in balance. That’s what surfers do – take control of the situation, then be carried, then take control. In the last few thousand years, we’ve become incredibly adept technically. We’ve treasured the controlling part of ourselves and neglected the surrendering part. I want to rethink surrender as an active verb…It’s not just you being escapist; it’s an active choice. I’m not saying we’ve got to stop being such controlling beings. I’m not saying we’ve got to be back-to-the-earth hippies. I’m saying something more complex.

At another point, Eno pictures surrender as a dynamic ship flexible enough to move through rough waters without breaking. This dynamism of “surrender as an active verb” ripens what it means to stop and rest. Without control, surrender would acquiesce to abstraction stripped of it’s particularity. Without surrender, control would absolutize into tyranny.

Shabbat begets the weaving of shalom. Control and surrender is the sabbath balance. Let’s re-create and weave peace bringing love its due worth.

David Lynch (via Rob Walker and Austin Kleon) uses these three metaphors for a thought:

Fish: “I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along.”

Flash: “If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment…but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash…And in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes like it’s got electricity and light connected to it.”

The explosion is an agrarian one, like the moment germination errupts from inside the dark walls of a…

Seed: So, you get an idea and it is like a seed. And…it explodes…And it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea, in an instant [a flash]…Then, the thing is translating that to some medium.

Lynch talks of waiting for the ideas like fish and cathing the big ones that live deep takes the most time. The poet Ted Hughes talks about ideas like both foxes and fishes. Ideas are critters to be actively waited for and sniffed out. A practice that, Hughes says, requires surrender:

And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.

“Learning to Think”

There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.

There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.

And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.

-Ted Hughes, Poetry in The Making: An anthology