The presenters for Little Gidding did an excellent job presenting their portion of the poem, with its terrible darkness, allusions to the war, Dante and the Bible for imagery of destruction and purification. The drawings of the old man and time and the dying and living rose were great, I thought, and I'm still marveling that it was an actual picture of an actual snake that Gossamer von Goss presented--metaphor and allegory can be viscerally real, it seems.

Which leads in uncomfortably with the thing which I feel I must talk about, the dark dove with the flickering tongue which alighted on my shoulder during the presentation, specifically when Derek tied the poem in with Schindler's List. The element of Little Gidding is fire, and the recurring trope is fire which destroys and devastates so that redemption can come; there can be no salvation or purification without destruction, the forest has to burn so that the trees can grow again.

The literal Greek meaning of holocaust is "purification by fire". So, might there be arguments that the Holocaust was cosmically essential for the flourishing of life? That the Third Reich served a part in the ultimately good functioning of God's cycle? That the incalculable suffering of this was and is justifiable? It has been argued by many figures in different veins throughout history(even somebody like Leibnitz could espouse something like this, since it goes into all these hoary issues of theodicy and the paradox of how God allows us to suffer because of love and all the rest of it). I don't think I can accept this. Perhaps I am also feeding into this reading by the un-erasable biographical knowledge that TS Eliot was a virulent anti-Semite(as to an even greater extant was his mentor Ezra Pound, one of the three heads on the ghost),and in all likelihood didn't view the Nazi genocide as a bad thing, if anything the reverse. Can I not let this color Little Gidding? I want very much for it not to, but at the same time I do not think it can be ignored.

I admit I wasn't expecting to experience a dark epiphany this morning, yet I have. I'm still reeling from the implications of what the dark dove with the flickering tongue brought to me.