Fancy Lights

From Eliot's Four Quartets, East Coker:

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived
Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.
In the middle, not only in the middle of the way
But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,
On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,
And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,
Risking enchantment.

For the longest time, I could not find the verb in the last sentence, until I

realized it is "lights," as in, lands. Duh. And I had to go all the way to the unabridged

OED to find "grimpen," which, it turns out, is probably a coinage of Sir Arthur Canon Doyle, 

from The Hound of the Baskervilles.

My sources tell me this is Echinofossulocactus ochoterenaus subsp. rosasianus

Anyway, obviously, Eliot packs a lot of punches into that sort passage,

and this humble post is only about one thing: risking enchantment.

From the Online Etymological Dictionary:  

enchantment (n.) 
c. 1300, "act of magic or witchcraft; use of magic; magic power," from Old French encantement "magical spell; song, concert, chorus," from enchanter"bewitch, charm," from Latin incantare "enchant, cast a (magic) spell upon," from in- "upon, into" (from PIE root *en "in") + cantare "to sing" (see chant(v.)). Figurative sense of "allurement" is from 1670s. Compare Old English galdor "song," also "spell, enchantment," from galan "to sing," which also is the source of the second element in nightingale.

Look at how musically tangled up this wild word is-- a song, concert or chorus metaphorically

transformed, like the Sirens' Song to Odysseus's men, into a magical spell. 

Tie me to the mast, mates. I want all of it. I'm not saying I can always "handle" it,

But that's what masts and rope and other such precautionary measures are

for. 

I have no patience this morning for the weird formatting demons here at Blogger,

so for the moment will close with what I will be meditating on today:

Why risk enchantment?