Time is weird now. There’s far too much of it and yet also somehow not enough? The hard edge between work and rest has softened. My home is where I work which is where I live which is where I work which is where I live which is…difficult. I commit to doing a task for an hour and can’t focus for five minutes. Or I blink and my day was swallowed by a whale. Clocks are no good. I set schedules and then ignore them. I make to-do lists and leave each line uncrossed.
Today, I tried a more forgiving approach. A few weeks ago, when we could still go to Places and do Things, I bought incense at a Japanese grocery store. Fifty thin sticks of lavender promised to conjure, according to the box, “a mood of tranquility and peace of mind.” Sure! This morning, I lit a stick. Each one burns for the length it takes to brew and drink two brimming cups of coffee, so about 20 minutes. As the incense smoldered, I typed a draft of a story I’ve been working on for weeks. The words came easier today. Who knows why? By the end of the morning, my room smelled like flower petals, rain, and smoke. My anxiety, unexpectedly, dropped. I know this is what lavender is supposed to do, but it still surprises me when things work out like they should.
I started googling facts about lavender. Apparently its been shown to calm mice brains, and humans and mammals have similar emotional circuitry to mice. I remembered that T.S. Eliot once wrote about lavender, maybe? I think? I searched and found a reference in his poem The Dry Salvages. I hadn’t read it before today. (I was misremembering The Burial of the Dead, which mentions “lilacs out of the dead land.”) But these lines struck me:
I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant—
Among other things—or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
The way up is the way down. The way forward is the way back. The future is a faded song. The speaker sounds as twisted up as I feel.
I remember from a college Modernism class that much of Eliot’s work was written during World War I and later during World War II. He wrote The Dry Salvages while the Germans bombed Great Britain. He doesn’t mention the wars much, but as you read, you can feel the crack of a society shifting and splintering, of everything getting looser, disordered, worse. Sometimes in his poems, it seems like there is something to blame, an enemy maneuvering off screen. But other times, it all feels topsy turvy and pointless. Like a war with unprecedented carnage. Like, say, a pandemic that could have been slowed or stopped, but wasn’t. I like these lines especially:
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
It’s not a hopeful picture. The speaker continues:
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
Reading Eliot in college, his words felt pretty but distant. Reading him today, it feels like we live in the same place, like we’re looking out the same window at the same empty city. I can’t pretend I know what he’s saying for sure, but being alive right now feels a lot like hurtling toward a future without destination.
But there are still moments. There is still wild thyme, winter lightning, a waterfall. There is still the smell of lavender in your bedroom. The wreckage of Eliot’s era, as awful as it was, didn’t last. Spring eventually poked through.
Wonderful, Emma. Keep 'em coming.