Thursday was ...

... the 42d aniversary of T.S. Eliot's death. Craig Raine considers Eliot's Private passions. (Hat tip, Vikram Johri, who comments as follows:
"I am forced to agree with Eliot's position. Passion is not all; one must have talent to create something -- to bear something. I wonder if this may be taken forward to mean that all art is creation of some sort, and conversely, denying this creation kills the beauty that art must provide. Could that mean that ideologies that profess destroying against creating, such as fundamentalism, atheism etc. are essentially not only anti-art, but also, anti-life? If this were so, then intellectualising arguments against God and religion would make little sense, since that would be akin to covering up for one's dislike for life, as it were. "

I think Vikram is on to something here - and in rather an original way. I am reminded of e.e.cummings's line, "a world of made is not a world of born." There is something fundamentally different between something that is created and something that is constructed. Ideology - whether it be fundamentalism or narrow rationalism (and the two have much in common) - do not simply see life as being only the sum of its parts. They see life as actually amounting to less than the sum of its parts. Whereas the mystery of life is that it is more than the sum of its parts. The best poems I have written - hell, the best anything I have written - has always seemed to me more like taking dictation - the revision involved making sure I had got it down right. And the latter is where the craft came in. As for the emotions attendant to the creative act, by the time the thing is done I am so far removed from those that the piece could have been written by someone else.)