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Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Welcome to turning to the Mystics.

Greetings everyone. Greetings everyone and welcome to our time together turning for guidance to the

teachings found in T.S. Elliot's poem four quartets. We are now turning to the third of the

four poems which is titled Dreyse Salvages and an explanatory note in my edition explains that Elliot

his parents when they left England and settled in America. In the summers they

vacationed in New England. And in New England, off the

coast of Cape Anne, Massachusetts, there's a small cropping of rocks in the distance which are called the Savaages and it has a little beacon or a little lighthouse in it to warn the ships going by so they don't crash and sink on the rocks. And so he's going to use that as the place for the poem, on time and eternity. And really what the poem is about deeper down are the ways in which we in time, especially

in the time of technology and engineering and achieving things.

It's really about the ways that we interface with the primordial,

with the primitive.

There's a saying that nature is God's first scripture, it's the world.

And so there's a primordial world and then there's the effect of technology and engineering and science about being

exiled from the primordial and also the primordial depths of

ourselves that's really the point and how do we be healed from that exile so the poem begins

first stanza I don't know much about gods but I think the river is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed, intractable, patient to some

degree at first recognized as a frontier, useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce.

Then, only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the

Brown God has almost forgotten, by the dwellers and cities, ever however

implacable, keeping his seasons and rages destroyer reminder of what men choose to forget,

...