Holiness and Desire by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

The time that is to come is not;

How can it then be mine?

The present moment’s all my lot;

And that, as fast as it is got,

Phyllis, is only thine.

Then talk not of inconstancy,

False hearts, and broken vows;

If I, by miracle, can be

This live-long minute true to thee,

’Tis all that Heav’n allows.25

This is a marvellous, despairing poem exerting all its skill to say something untrue: that people live neither in the past nor in the future. Rochester makes ‘this live-long minute’ into the only real choice by relinquishing his hold on everything else: all he has ever been, all he might be. His first move is to cancel the ‘my’ of ‘my past life’ and announce his history to be possessed by time the robber, flying into unreachableness with the past in its grip. The speaker is left with nothing: he wakes like one mugged, with the rags of memory only the ‘images’ of ‘transitory dreams’. As for the future, the speaker denies it any reality at all, either as a form of imaginative potential or as a space for the expression of faith: ‘How can it then be mine?’

Rochester’s poem therefore forbids hope, which relies on imagining what might become. The living resonances of a personal history are also torn away, because he says memory is a ‘store’ of ‘images’ of what was once, and is no longer, real. The sense of memory as an activity that lives in and changes the present is nowhere. Its elegant structure makes the verse close, claustrophobic: ‘this live-long minute’. Though it promises to turn a minute into a lifetime, it actually reduces a lifetime to a minute.

And it hints that even a minute is becoming too long a time to retain, its integrity only intact by ‘miracle’. The prison walls of the poem press closer and closer together, threatening to crush our hero altogether, as in a Scooby-Doo cartoon, to the point where he loses his grip on even the smallest unit of time and can offer nothing to anybody at all. That point is coming, somewhere a little beyond the end of the poem’s last line. The outcome of existentialism is advanced dementia. No one can really live like this. Hedonists who don’t possess Rochester’s grim wit just haven’t paused to consider the logic of their position.

So is ecstasy a cheat? Not exactly. Rare glimpses of the joy beyond the rule of time matter very much indeed, and continue to do the work of meaning within both memory and longing. But ecstasy doesn’t subsist on its own, and it can’t be loved for its own sake. Worshipping sensation is not the same thing as meeting, or recognizing, or communicating, or loving, or caring. It doesn’t, in the end, involve any other being than the self. Whether the sensation you worship is defined as sexual or as spiritual, if it begins and ends in self then it is bound to disappoint. Eternity is in love with the productions of time,26 and we are made in order to practise our loves upon them, rather than to curve inward.

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