“You are the music/While the music lasts” T.S. Eliot

It is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts

from “Dry Salvages” by T.S. Eliot

“What is pushed to the back of the mind makes its way forward somehow. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows… ” Flannery O’Connor

Careful, a night set on edge
the European tradition of virtuoso
and the raw desire to articulate.
I pushed them both backward on the bed in the end
and each played on, one first
try and then another.
Soft then on succession thought.

from “One First Try and then Another” by Brian Blanchfield

I’ve been thinking of how we belong to each other. All of us. And no matter our driving desire to be original, to emerge as unique, we are who we come from, not just those from whom we spring genetically. All of them. We are made up of –belong to–the dead.

The understanding we try so desperately as writers to share belongs not to us, but to the past in a way that shapes everything we write, and everything that has already been written. Not an original thought, this. But the holidays take me there, to Eliot’s “historical sense,” to the idea that, as writers, as artists, what we say isn’t new, but the attuned raw re-articulation of those aspects that make us call a thing art. We are then not originals, but more importantly, keepers of the archive, our own record of an experience of language and power, the ongoing utterance and re-utterance of a subject and its dispersion through time and manifestations. And all the while, we think it belongs to us. Is writing at its best when it’s ours? Perhaps we need it to be so. But is that what makes for the best work?

This self-consciousness about an involuntary relationship to the past of cultural utterance might be born of fear, or perhaps laziness. As Eliot said, there is “great labor” required to acquire this historical sense, this ever greater awareness needed by writers of our role in the inevitable retransmission of the archive. But perhaps what frightens us even more is the idea that the past, the archive, is similarly helpless not to change as it absorbs us, our contributions to itself, our arrangement and rearrangements of its previous conventions.

Eliot said, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead….if we approach a poet…we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”

Rather than diminishing our efforts in any way, to me, this participation in the procession, this ungluing of the traditional notions of time and constant reconfiguring of what can be articulated elevates what we’re trying to do, the retelling of the human story, the assimilation, a sort of re-enculturation each time we set to the words. As if, rather than creating, we’re listening, privy to the symphony of voices swirling about us not only in present time, but those of fierce and instructive ghosts–no apparition those–but the very music, the very souls that composed (and are composed of) all language. For all time.

What better company could there be.