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We are poised on the shore of a new continent

From Jessica Benjamin’s Beyond Doer and Done To loc 2,948:

So it is not merely the analyst’s subjectivity that is finally irreducible (Renik, 1993); it is the fact of mutuality, which must be embraced in all its complexity and vitality or avoided at peril of both partners losing their subjectivity. Knowing that once our subjectivity is freely acknowledged, we must face our own demons and assume responsibility for them, we are poised on the shore of a new continent, and now, together, must all pay close attention to what happens next.

This immediately made me think of one of my favourite sections of The Four Quartets:

So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.

I’ve rarely experienced such an immediate poetic association when reading theory. I think the reason my psyche threw it up is the sense in which “words I never thought to speak in streets I never thought I should revisit” carries a sense of novelty coupled with familiarity. It’s about revisiting, returning, renewing. In that moment of encounter which Benjamin describes there is a novelty which emerges within the familiar. A new way of relating to what has long been part of existence. It feels like Eliot is describing this movement from the individual’s perspective. A few lines earlier:

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

It’s clear that Benjamin’s image is mutual and prospective. Two people standing on the shore together. Whereas Eliot’s image is individual and retrospective, looking back on a change that has occurred in terms of an individual’s own individuality. But there’s still a deep resonance here I think in terms of the shore as a threshold through which change happens within the parameters of the familiar.

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