The Murder in the Cathedral Chorus
The Chorus of Murder in the Cathedral at Samford University in 1979
This blog is the September 26 entry from my book, Theatre Is My Life! Day after tomorrow is T.S. Eliot’s birthday, and I do love Murder in the Cathedral. Reading back over this writing, I vividly remember how impressed I was with our chorus: young college students who could read, digest, memorize, and then spew with feeling lines that were very difficult, both in form and meaning.
“Seven years we have lived quietly,
Succeeded in avoiding notice,
Living and partly living.
There have been oppression and luxury,
There have been poverty and license,
There has been minor injustice.
Yet we have gone on living,
Living and partly living.”
Chorus in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
T. S. Eliot was born into a Unitarian family on this day, September 26, 1888, in St. Louis Missouri. After graduating from Harvard and studying in Paris, he married in 1915 and moved to London where he converted to the Anglican Church. Over the next few decades, he became an admired and well-read modernist poet. Eliot said poetry “may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”
In 1935, he was commissioned to write a play for Kent's annual Canterbury Festival. With few limitations on subject matter, he decided to dramatize the 1170 murder of Thomas Becket in a play he called Murder in the Cathedral.
In this chosen passage, the Chorus moans about a frozen, static, stationary life for the past seven years without their Archbishop, who had fled into exile to France to escape the disgruntled King Henry II. The women of Canterbury have dwelled in a “both-and” sort of existence: “oppression and luxury, poverty and license.” Their prolonged communal life of suffering has unfolded in a jillion shades of gray, which they have borne stoically.
When I wonder about this kind of “living and partly living,” what comes to mind is parents of a kidnapped child, children of a mother who has wandered into the wilderness, a man suddenly arrested for something another did, a woman given a diagnosis of breast cancer — all of us in the deepest woundings of our time on earth. For days, months, even years, we then go through “living and partly living.” Nothing is normal in our world, but the sun continues to shine, the rain to fall, the traffic to roll, the restaurant to serve food. We don’t want the sun or the rain, to drive or to eat. Yet, something about our life has to continue on.
I love this Greek-tragedy Chorus. While “living” these seven years, they have refined a radar-like ability to detect the emotional pulse of their city: Thomas is coming with applause, and yet doom. And while “partly living,” something inside them has matured an obstinacy and the ability to doubt, a wisdom and the capacity to surrender to life as it unfolds, while still commenting on it.
Unlike these sage elders, our Samford students who wailed and lamented this and other Eliot passages were full of the vigor and promise of youth. And yet, they memorized these passages. They devoured the text and spit out lines about “the small folk drawn into the pattern of fate,” “our hearts are torn from us, our brains unskinned like the layers of an onion, our selves are lost, lost,” and being “afraid in a fear which we cannot know, which we cannot face, which none understands.”
Confronted, in delivering the words of this play, with the perplexities of life, “a fear not of one but of many, a fear like birth and death,” these students grappled with — at a young age — the challenge of making sense of it all: the meaning of who we are, and the reason for our being on earth. Such experiences are why theatre is such a spiritual space where we can cross over a line into the Holy, and a realization that we can no longer continue the “constant evasion of ourselves.”