The Journey Of The Magi (Eliot) with some commentary.
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
[Thomas Howard in Chance or the Dance discusses the contrast between the understanding of imagination in the past, as a means of grasping reality, and it’s understanding in the modern world view. In doing so he cites “The Journey of the Magi” and the two ways of seeing. In other words what did they really find there, and what does the journey truly mean?]
“…when a modern man acts as though there is a correspondence running among all things (whenever he uses a metaphor or simile, or any image, that is), he is saying, in effect, “Our inclinations fool us. But we won’t be fooled. We know from scientific research that it is only imagination that leads us to project one thing onto another. To be sure, this is very often useful. It helps us communicate ideas. And it helps us cope with life. But it is just that—imagination—and nothing more. Things look as though they answer one to another, so we may speak of them in that way so long as we do not suppose that we are saying anything true thereby.”
In other words, the faculty in us that establishes these correspondences among things, and hence allows us to see one thing as an image of another, is imagination, and the modern mind (the new myth) understands this to be a flight away from actuality. In this view, when primitive man spoke of the god of the wood, he was peopling an inanimate thing with projections of his own inclination to see things personalistically. Similarly, when the Bible speaks of the fear of the Lord as the beginning of wisdom, this was a helpful, albeit fanciful, way of personalizing reality, so that an accurate modern rephrasing would be “A sense of modesty and awe when confronted by the phenomena of experience is appropriate.” When Dante fancies hell and purgatory and heaven as real states of being, he is, of course, projecting the human experience of alienation and discipline and bliss into a cosmic geography. When T. S. Eliot speaks of the journey of the Magi as a paradigm of human experience, we must remember that what the Magi found at Bethlehem was only an imaginary (that is, fanciful) thing and that there is no scientific (that is, serious) connection between this and anything real.
Imagination, which is this faculty by which we suppose correspondences among all things and hence see them as images of one another (it is the imagination—the image-making faculty), is understood in opposite ways by the old myth and the new: by the new it is seen as a flight into fancy; by the old it was seen precisely as a flight toward actuality.”
[I highly recommend Howard’s book as a way of seeing the differences between the modern perception of reality [chance] and the older, medieval/Renaissance perception [the dance]. I find that one of the views is exciting and much more likely to lead to a real understanding of the meaning of the cosmos and our presence within it than the other.
Let me provide a brief example. Shakespeare’s imagination at work in King Lear allows us to see the consequences of Lear’s failure to understand the realities of right reason, imagination and especially love. Those consequences unfold brilliantly although tragically in the following action of the play. Lear and his somewhat passive counterpart Gloucester come to see and understand the meaning of those realities by the end of the play though they (especially the King) have given away their power and are helpless to correct the situation. The situation does of course get corrected though not without a series of tragic losses.
Once the world view has shifted from that of Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and others to the new world view of Descartes and the Enlightenment, Jonathan Swift’s brilliant imagination has revealed to us exactly that which has been lost in the journeys of Lemuel Gulliver. Gulliver, as an embodiment of an aspect of the new world view, what Eliot would come to call the “dissociated sensibility,” has essentially lost the meaning of right reason and the human capacity to love, though his understanding of reason is now that of the truncated reason of the Houyhnhnms in the fourth book of the Travels. As a satiric character rather than a tragic one Gulliver never achieves an insight into what he has lost or failed to understand. By the end of the “novel” his real blindness to the earlier understanding of human nature that we see in Shakespeare still exists. He is out in the stable sleeping with his horses rather than inside his home sleeping with his wife. In a very clear way Gulliver is now one of C. S. Lewis’s “men without chests,” which Lewis explains in The Abolition of Man. Swift, I think, clearly grasped what had been lost in the understanding of human nature. As a clear example of that, contrast the perspective of Gulliver with that of the compassionate Portuguese sea captain who rescues him at the end. The sea captain has a perspective on human beings similar to that of Cordelia in King Lear.
For a slightly different perspective on that understanding of human nature and the cosmos that existed before the Enlightenment see Lewis’s The Discarded Image.]
