On Sept. 26, had he been alive, T.S. Eliot would have marked — and possibly celebrated — his 125th birthday. The Nobel Prize-winning poet is best known as the author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land” and the “Four Quartets,” and is recognized as one of the pillars of high modernism.
His work retains all its grace and power, and remains as relevant now as when it was written: relevant to biomedical engineers, the implications of social media, and the conflict in Syria — that is, relevant to real people. He and his work are worth commemoration — but how does one commemorate a dead poet who said “Why should we celebrate / These dead men more than the dying?”
Besides reading his work aloud by a fire with friends and merlot, one can commemorate Eliot by carrying forward his vision. Among those doing this is painter, writer, and artistic catalyst Makoto Fujimura, who has founded the Fujimura Institute, which seeks collaboration with groups of artists.
Its vision is the restoration of real harmony: “Defying fractured, fragmented modern perspectives, the Fujimura Institute encourages artists and thinkers to collaborate, cooperate and inspire their audiences to piece together a whole view of the world.” Currently their foremost exhibit is a collaboration of painting and music inspired by Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”
Commemorating a dead poet is hardly the sum of the institute’s goal. The aim is art that illustrates and expresses hope: “Not a sentimental hope,” says Fujimura, but “a hope that lies beneath the rubble.” Or as Eliot wrote in the “Four Quartets”:
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Sentimental hope is naïveté. It is hope without ground for hope. This is not the hope these artists hold fast to. Their hope is one that comprehends the brokenness with beauty, based on the ground of carefully placed faith.
Hope has been out of vogue in the arts for some time now, because many artists believe it is no more than a pleasant lie. After the 20th century, and after the first decade of the 21st, how could it be otherwise? But this despair stems from a view of the world as broken and meaningless. For Eliot, the artists at the Fujimura Institute, and a growing number of others, it is despair which is the real lie: for Christianity teaches that although the world is broken, it will be restored.
Truth is alive with hope. It is replete with hope, if Christianity is indeed true. It may be worth looking into. In the words of C.S. Lewis, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”
To commemorate Eliot, I plan to schedule a fire and a reading of the “Four Quartets,” to consider his truth, to seize his hope, and to return to my own work with a burning mind.