A warning to blog readers:
Following the tradition of the philosophers, I impose no restrictions of length or subject-matter scope on what may be termed a note. This piece is long.
A note on the notes of the note: The windows copy fucntion does not recognize footnotes and blogger does not allow the attachment of documents, so I have had to replicate footnotes by hand as endnotes, stupendously inconvenient as they are. The marks to these notes appear as ordinary-sized numbers in parentheses.
All poetry is local. The art does not examine the generalities of the human condition qua generalities, even when the poem is on the subject of patterns, relationships, that must be repeated in every life, or in every family, or in every perception of every place. Even supposing that there are such patterns or relationships, or more weakly that they are at least possible, poetry subverts their universality. In its pure exposition of idea or sentiment or image, poetry itself does not care about anything but the writer and the reader, and in particular does not care what it would mean for their to be generalities in the human condition. Any applicable conclusions to be drawn from it are after the poem. What makes poetry poetry is a separation of interpretation, which is necessarily of a general character, from the original material it is drawn from, an interruption (1) of the mental process by which all sense perception becomes indistinguishable from its’ interpretation. Merely by the poem being on the page and its’ intention being in the mind of the author and its’ interpretation being in the mind of the reader, the separation or interruption is accomplished. The poem itself might seem to be separate from its’ reading in the same way that a chair is separate from its’ viewing, in other words only when considered as an artefact. But the poem is different by virtue of incorporating intellect into matter. The poem has an artistic intention, but is just what is on the page.
This definition so far does not separate poetry from any other art form. I have merely taken poetry as a model art. What makes poetry different from painting, cinema, novelism, etc., however, is the ability to subvert the general and give significance to the materialization of thinking intention. A novel is generally about individuals, and if these individuals represent generalities or are applicable to general situations, as the heroes of French existential novels explicitly were, generality is achieved in the mind of the reader by the logical mechanism of arbitrary example. If a novel should literally be about generalities, as none to my knowledge has ever been, it begins general and stays general. A painting can be either abstract or depictive, and if depictive, can be more or less allegorical, expressive or representative. A movie, even one without a narrative structure, must show things going on. Paintings and movies and novels generally cannot materialize the ideal, thereby interrupting the incessant flow of interpretation in life, because they lack the indeterminateness of poetry. Those examples of the other art forms that can achieve the results I speak of are usually described as poetic, and this is proof that there is a method of communicative transcendence that comes from poetry. There could not have been poetic paintings before actual poems had been composed, and this for more than linguistic-historical reasons, as I will attempt to show. The ages have struggled to define poetry because it’s very strength is being an undefinable something else to thought and consequently to other art forms insofar as they are species of thought. This second specie of difference is however quite secondary, almost superfluous, fit for belated critics trying to define things; the simple fact is that poetry, in not caring about anything but the writer and the reader, doesn’t care about other art forms either. At the table of the arts, there must be one and only one guest whose function, origin, and relationship to the others remains mysterious and undefined. To have none would reduce the human condition to that of objects, and to have more than one would be to expand it to banal chaos; “something else” is singular because an order can contain only one undefined element. No more than one can be defined negatively, in relation to the others. There is only one poetry.
Something else can only be achieved in art by cutting up the thing. There is no second room to the house of art, so Chinese walls must be used. Thus are cesurae and line breaks, to name the most explicit and formal mechanisms of the arsenal. Thus also are lines without verbs demanding to be read first on their own, nouns that subvert procedural linguistic logic by having no article, explicit or implicit, words whose part of speech is double or ambiguous, and at a higher but probably less important level, sensory confusion. However, these mechanisms, including the two that are considered definitive of the art by formalists, are all consequences rather than causes of the poetic medium, which is simply words upon a page which contain ideas, thoughts, expressions and images not meant to promote anything other than ideas, thoughts, expressions, and images, respectively, each for itself.
So much for poetry in general since I say it is never general. I wish to examine one of the premier genres of poetry in English in the 20th century, the world-poem, through its’ most famous and probably most successful exemplar, “The Wasteland.” What does it mean to write a world-poem, as the mass of critics and readers so far believe Eliot was clearly attempting, in light of the local nature of poetry of itself, by itself, and for itself? It means first to challenge the locality of poetry by extending it’s locale. And this is accomplished through a simple mechanism modernism invented by declaring it was allowed: the quote. Poetry is made of pre-established words, to which it can assign new meanings in the context it creates, possibly along with more everyday forms of language. These unpartible minimal units are called morphemes by linguists. A quote as what it is is a longer and artificial minimal unit. Take it apart, and it is no longer a quote, but words, just as words taken apart are no longer words but letters. The parallel but not identical minimality of a quote by someone else calls for a parallel linguistic expression, one ending in eme. I choose cultureme, partly because the expressions made up by others are part of the tradition that we use to interpret the world, and partly for a more subtle, related reason. Language, vocabulary and grammar together, are what are given to the poet, the archae (before) of the poem. Since words are its’ medium, the language or languages of its’ composition are in a sense its’ identifiable context. In another sense, though, the poet’s culture is the context of composition, and the reader’s culture the context of reading. Eliot used the most directly linguistic aspects of culture, quotes, and used them as extensions of language, via the cultureme; the quote is used as a word ordinarily would be. If a quote is going to be part of a poem, it must be so.
Some theorists have held that culture is an extension of language, a system of signs beyond the communicative one, and should be analyzed along linguistic lines. Clearly, though, the word’s many related sense do not coincide with such an elegant definition. But this doesn’t matter here. What matters is that Eliot is using culture as an extension of language, turning the poem’s linguistic context into its’ cultural context. As had the bible-writers before him, but not before thousands of years of cultural events not directly known to us, Eliot is writing a pure text by choosing a purely textual context. Like the bible-writers before him, Eliot is applying new meaning to quotes as one ordinarily applies new meaning to words: by context and without knowing it. But Eliot is writing what most of the Tenach and Gospels aren’t: poetry. A pure poetry, as that Mallarme suggested, achieved through what might appear to be intrusions into the poem. But they are no more intrusions than words are.
Poetry can only be grasped from the line or turn of phrase, the unit of linguistic comprehension, outward. It is linguistic in a sense additional to that in which novels and plays are linguistic too. Eliot challenged the necessary localness of poetry, in this sense, by extending the unit of linguistic comprehension, and in so doing challenged the necessary localness of poetry in the sense described above. But, because the unit of linguistic comprehension is what it is, this method of extending the meaningful unit of the poem from the level just above its’ archae, the phrase, to a poem of considerable length, comes at a cost: the internal logic of the quotes on which the poem’s ability to remain a single poetic object rather than a sequence (as Poe and I think Paradise Lost really is) rests is blackboxed. As the computer program classes from which the term comes, and the words ordinary poems are written in, only external or functional features of the cultureme can be used. Blackboxing is inherent in writing and thinking in general, but Eliot is blackboxing something different from previous poetry: tradition, instead of logic.
It will be noted by the apt reader that most of the shorter quotes in the poem seem to fail to adhere to the most literal version of this principle: their grammar is part of the grammar of Eliot’s sentences. For instance: in “Son of man, you cannot say or guess” the expression from Ecclesiastes could be used in such a sentence had Eliot made it up. But this is always true of blackboxing: the programmers blackbox, but the computer cannot push about a 0 as if it were a piece of hardware or a function as if it were a variable. The necessity of using correct grammar to write coherently is part of the archae of poetic language and as such is inalienable and inescapable. Blackboxing doesn’t change grammar, just as it doesn’t change 0s and 1s or first-order logic. But, in extending this archae, this locale, to include units beyond the morpheme, Eliot is performing a service for human language similar to that which the object-orienters performed for machine language: making it possible to deal instantaneously with a more complex process than was previously available to a moment in thought. The poem overall may be no more complex than, for instance, Paradise Lost. But it’s use of tradition certainly is so. The mind needs no help from Mr. Eliot’s tool for its’ logical blackboxing, or to transfer the whole range of these abilities into the field of verse. Wallace Stevens was doing that around the same time without using culturemes. Eliot found a way to use tradition in a way as complex as others use logic.
The purpose of all this is well known: to elevate said tradition above the level of a bit of silliness, and to make it understood. This project has been labeled reactionary by its’ detractors and an enquiry into the origins of liberal democracy’s necessarily archaic cherished objects by its’ defenders. I don’t think it is either, although the second camp fully understands the issues at stake. It is rather a technique for using culture. But ought culture to be used? Is it not a work of people unseparable from those people that can only be used exploitatively? Was not Eliot a man of reprehensible politics for a reason related to the way he wrote poetry? I leave these question to the reader. I do not wish to proclaim further value judgements concerning unsolvable dilemmas.
By extending the locale, can one write a world-poem? It is obviously not as simple as going from a place outward until one has encompassed everything. What exactly does Mr. Eliot wish to do by including as broad a range of quotes as possible to write a poem that is supposedly about the state of the world? The question cannot be answered with further technicalities. I will now look at certain passages of the poem selected for their fame or their appeal to me. The critic has no other guide.
The poem opens with
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
This opening is inspired but not directly culled from the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, and strikes me by its’ turning of a generic remark concerning a universal into a particular, individual one, its’ subversion of the general. What is perhaps most remarkable about it, though, is that knowledge of the source of the inspiration makes no difference whatsoever to its’ initial reading. Knowing that the remark is classical, part of the foundation of English literature, and knowing just from reading it that it is a concrete remark devoid of particulars, empty and formal, in a non-pejorative sense (2), amount to the same knowledge. It is only on a second level of reading that one can make something relevant out of this irrelevance. Eliot is already questioning and interacting with the origin of beloved established things by robbing Chaucer of the particularity with which he or any other classical author is considered, which can only be summed up by the expression “it’s Chaucer,” or an equivalent banal naming of another author. If it makes no difference whether the remark is powerful because it is devoid of cultural and literary context, rooting in the previous (the roots are stirred) giving it a specific materiality, or because it comes from Chaucer, it makes no difference that Chaucer was Chaucer, ala Kripke. Who was Chaucer? A man who lived before the rest of English literary history, a man whose archae entire is solely the archae shared by all English writers. To ask the very question is the opposite of saying “it’s Chaucer,” and to answer it as such is to make the point that those who came first are classical thanks to the absence in their writings of those who came later. Eliot knows he cannot forget literary history and replicate this emptiness. So he uses the version available to him.
The first three lines end in the gerunds breeding, mixing, and stirring. Of this series of processes considered as a pattern, one is first tempted to ask what the bred is mixed and stirred with, especially in light of the theme of corruption of the poem as a whole. How can human life be corrupted? What substance is foreign to it relative to an existential purity, and how can merely genetic breeding be juxtaposed to analogies for existential processes? The answer is in the grammar. The gerunds appear in a peculiar context, each preceded by a comma, a marker that can indicate either that the next word modifies or acts upon the previous phrase as a whole or on the contrary that the words encompassed between here and the next comma are only related to one previous word, or simply separates clauses. Commas, the written indicators of spoken pauses, are all-purpose markers for a relationship between the preceding and following words is not the most obvious grammatically, be it the only one that makes sense. In this case, the multiple commas allow a nested structure in which each heavy falling gerund modifies the entirety of the poem up to that point. Breeding is nested in mixing, nested in stirring. Rather than mixing following breeding and being followed by stirring, breeding is nested in the existential process, and mixing is nested in stirring. The motion of life is the ultimate context, the addition of elements the proximate context, and the biological reproduction of life the immediate action.
A little further we have another very classical, generic, passage:
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
This time the motivating image is from the Prophets of the Bible, as is some of the surrounding imagery I omit. So far in the poem there have been sentences. With the parentheses of the second line, explicitly an invitation, there is the first explicit interruption of the poem. An invitation is an interruption of whatever one is doing fending for oneself when it is received. First the positive fact of shadow under the red rock, or “this” red rock, that is the red rock whose particularity is in the present situation, which Eliot creates on paper, and creates with nothing more than “there is.” Again, he is establishing a seat of consciousness.
By signifying invitation by parentheses, the poet makes the invitation underhanded: it is a secret between the writer and each reader. What follows, though, is not sexuality but a spectacle, which however shares with sexuality a manifest, explicit nature. The invitee is presumed to grow tired of seeing nothing but his or her shadow, his or her effect upon the world, in its total but limited manifestation (3). The vision permitted to the individual is unidimensional: the shadow is behind or in front of one. In “striding behind you” and “rising to meet you” there is a suggestion of a relationship between individuals, a form of life, but it is muted; it is a shadow. In the Platonic tradition, in this world one sees only one’s shadow, but Eliot, unlike Plato, is writing poetry, so there is process and rhythm to this colorless shadow. In light of the suggestion that the cry for anything beyond the Platonic tradition yields an equally minimalist or elegant (artistic) symbol of death, whose relationship to actual death remains indeterminate, one must wonder whether the poetry enhances the human condition or whether it is rather there to show it is no escape from this condition. Any change of tone between the human condition and the inhuman condition of death or its’ fear, would be critical to the message. Analysis cannot here rely on feeling, so let it rely on cold linguistics.
The structure is parallel except for one important detail; the human condition has two attributes, the shadow at morning and the shadow at evening, while death has only one. Death or its’ fear is described in a line, life in three. The spectacle following “I will show you” is linguistically direct for death, despite the complete ambiguity of meaning, and indirect and differential, for life. These are the respective attributes of life and death that the ages have recognized. Since the facts as the ages have seen them speak for themselves, tone, let alone a change of tone, is both unnecessary and inappropriate. These remarks notwithstanding, there is in a sense nothing to say about these lines, some of this poem and even poetry’s most brilliant ones. And when nothing can be said concerning them, they are a minimal unit, the point beyond with or within which “explanations must come to an end” (4); the blackboxed unit which does not communicate its’ internal logic to the outside poem.
Is the black-boxing of this poeticized wisdom of the ages the same as the quote blackboxing, and perhaps more importantly, what do each or both do to the locale? Both are blackboxing of tradition where others before had used only innate linguistic blackboxing, and both make culture into an extension of language, as I have discussed in the abstract. And both extend the locale by extending the length of the unit above the morpheme one can have a primary sense of. I am thus motivated to conclude that there is no clear distinction between the use of quotes and that of looser culturemes in the poem. The big question remaining is whether extending the locale can ever make the poem no longer local, but global, a world poem. I proceed to the following passage:
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
Here is death, the word itself. And herein is the answer to the question of how this poem means to accomplish the impossible, and why it is regarded as in and of itself successful as being a world-poem, whereas none of the individual works of Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, or more recent poets such Elizabeth Bishop or John Ashberry are generally so considered. The technical baggage of quotes and traditional reconstructions is enough to extend the locale, but in trying to get to the world by a maximal extension of the locale, as if the world were actually that round thing that revolves around the sun, death came a’creeping in the poem. This last passage does not follow either logic or tradition as tightly as the previous one. But it cannot help but follow the following: only in death are all things united. In the mad rush of feet over London Bridge, Eliot saw death not because of the weather or the first World War, but due to his world-poetics. This is not intended wholly as a criticism: the fact that Eliot’s world-poetic ambitions made him the man to see death on the face of the earth in his time does not make his poetics meaningless, wrong or inapplicable. Saint Mary Woolnoth, whoever she is, keeps the hours with a dead sound for a locally sound reason: the hours, the things beyond us on which we rely, the locus of our other reliance , cannot be of our lives. Yet nothing that happens only in our lives, such as this psychic phenomena, cannot be of them at all, and as such must be associated with some element of our psyche. Death is the only place in the psyche for this “something else,” which Eliot believed his then-modern era exhibited to a frightening degree. This I wish to dispute as unfalsifiable and logically improbable. There is no way for anyone to compare the degree of other reliance of his era to that of another. The poet can only ascertain whether it existed and was believed to be increasing in the eras of previous poets, and cannot argue the contrary from absence of evidence. The attempt here at temporal extension through the usual daily mechanism of claiming a condition is new and thus ascribing a truth in the past by establishing the absence of a “modern” phenomenon fails here for the usual reason. The blackboxing of tradition may seem to be a method better suited for temporal than for spatial extension of the setting, but in fact the contrary is true. One can visit places but not times. The correct analogy for what Eliot does successfully is extending the locale, not extending the duration. Thus, I believe that while the above quoted passage is brilliantly successful locally, it does not extend through blackboxing successfully because it is attempting to do so along a temporal dimension.
I ignore the rest of the first section. Here is the notable opening of the second:
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Is the thematically final, rather than thematically opening, parenthetical passage an invitation? It is certainly a species of interruption calling for the notice of a reality hidden in plain sight. The angel hides his eyes, but his wing is visible, and his eyes deducible. Yet Eliot demands this second Cupidon to be noticed parenthetically. The bashful side of sexuality, with an angelic ring to it, is certainly an interruption and also an invitation of sorts: but this time, the invitation is clean because something usually unnoticed though part of ordinary life is involved. It will also be immediately noticed that the pickings have all of a sudden grown rather plush. No more barren Ecclesiastes imagery for us. Another route is being taken to that which the locale can be expanded to.
Further on:
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
'Jug Jug' to dirty ears.
The passage is almost unbearably beautiful. We know instinctively something evil has happened, but it is not so simple as rape. Philomel and the barbarous king are mythical even to the presumably ancient subject of the passage. But still, at some point in the past, she cried, and still, now, the world pursues...something. Something incomprehensible, beautiful, living, in a more than ordinary way. Wherever the mystery comes from, it is inviolable: we know of each word that it is necessary for the effect, and one of those words is one I have been discussing, “world.” The word, which appears only here in the poem, is a self-referential point in the bid to write a world-poem. We need look no farther than the lack of literal sense of the sentence to know that the world discussed is the poem-world of the world-poem. Derrida’s remark that there is nothing outside the text is definitely applicable to this poem which brings everything outside the text that inspired it unto the page, blurring the bounds between context and content. It is not simply that nothing occurs outside of context. Indeed, this by itself would refute Derrida’s famed line. It is that everything must occur in a context from which it does not emerge. In contemporary (post-Philosophical Investigations) philosophical parlance, there are no special experiences to mark an uncrossable boundary between context and content in this poem.
Thus to understand what “the world” here means, we must look at context. But should it be the poetically immediate context of the surrounding lines, or the whole poem or “world?” In accordance with my general method, I declare all poetry is still local, even if the locale has been extended. The world is a noun like the others in this passage. Excluding proper names and phrases containing them, we have “the antique mantel” in the first line, “a window” and “the sylvan scene” in the second, “the barbarous king” in the third, “the nightingale”in the fourth, then “the desert” in the fifth, and finally, in the sixth and penultimate line “the world.” Of all these common nouns, every one but one is particularized or made unique by the definite article. The exception comes in an “as though” clause. The general cannot be subverted in such an unreal clause. But the “world” definitely can be subverted. Again, I believe that nothing can be said about the “meaning” of these words in this passage. They are beyond meaning, and we are only guided by instinctive knowledge of their perfection, that is the knowledge that nothing can be improved by any additions or removals. It is as if the meaning is blackboxed to the reader, who feels only the effects. If it were not so, the passage would not be a high point in the world-poem. The word “world” is as it were the entry point into the function, at which the reader is asked to input her or his peculiar experiences. But the framework, or context, for interpreting these pre-poetic experiences is at this point the poem he or she has been reading. The totality has been subverted into the particularity of the work.
Continuing:
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
Clearly “savagely still” would not be possible without certain culturally prevalent opinions about what constituted “savage” behavior that are part of a view of the world as a unified process which anecdotal data must necessarily give evidence for (5). We can neither take this world view seriously today nor let its’ connection to fascism go unnoticed. But the poetry is therefore all the more powerful and disturbing, because the sensitive reader, in his (or her?) inevitable reaction to this passage, despite its nefariousness, realizes that he (or she?) is capable of being swayed at the deepest level by intellectually indefensible statements. It is a robbing of innocence. But, besides this, what does the passage mean? In the layering of symbolic contexts and the ultimate confusion of the subject with the context inherent in departing from literalism, Eliot attempts to give birth to a fleshly word. But the hair which becomes words is “spread in fiery points.” Why? The most obvious answer, that generality must be divided into parts for distinct words, cannot be the whole story because there is too much else going on. The points are fiery, under the firelight and the brush. While there is actual firelight in the created context, there is no brush. Here is a triplet of terms of which the middle must be symbolic, while the other two are ambiguous. Finally, there is no objective difference, that is to say no literal difference, between the glowing into words and the being savagely still, which things are abruptly contrasted without an explicit value judgement. It is notable that the fiery points do not glow into sentences, which alone give moving sense to words, and that glowing is a still thing. There seems to be here both a movement of abrupt dichotomous change, in which, as in the change of Philomel, temporal succession does not contrast opposites but establishes them: there is within a life no guide to what is opposed to anything else except temporal succession, and thus Eliot will have it in his poem. There is no in life no clear and inherent distinction between literal and symbolic events, but only things which must be symbols by their being culled from the set of human imagery precisely for their absence from current context: thus is the brush; its’ symbolic value comes from no more than its’ being the not-palace, and amounts to a throwing off course, a shaking up, which is quickly and symphonically ended by “her hair.” Because appearing in a line separate from its’ object, it is on the contrary hyper-literal. How doth the passage flow? From careful versifying attention to sound-qualities which mimic the rhythm the human mind covers unlike things with to convince itself of unity. Only this, and nothing more.
In the well-known conversational modern portion that follows, there occurs the passage:
'What it that noise?'
The wind under the door. 118
'What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again nothing.
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'
What are we to make of this in light of the posh pseudo-antique magnificence of what preceded it? Does the fact that there is no direct succession between the two passages, but only poetic succession, bring with it the burden of thematic link or are we to accept the collage on faith, that is from within? The palace passage blackboxes itself in the end. Not only is its’ internal sentencial grammar not relevant to what follows, as is usual between sentences, but its’ thematic grammar is also sealed off. We must not yet look for what seems to naturally follow a series of words, or “await the expected guest;” as in the next section, which opens with a river despite its’ promises of fire. Both title and beginning of the second of five sections are deliberately artificial. We are asked to foresake naturalism, and to forsake it because it is assumes what it is trying to prove. Just as there is no nature in modern mathematics, there is not to be any in this poem, yet. But there is something else which holds math together. What is the something else here? Blackboxing. You simply plug it in. God as machine, which the French paid homage to in calling computers “ordinateurs” from a Medieval theological term for God, seems to be at work here. What else could be meant by a religious man writing a “modern systems poem”?
I do confess, however, of being somewhat appalled by T.S. Eliot’s version of religion, as fully manifest in “Murder in the Cathedral.” So I will not further discuss this to avoid bias, and continue my technical discussion of blackboxing as a method of extending the locale. The phrase “nothing again nothing” begs to be interpreted as the center of the passage by its’ grammatical isolation, a center by virtue of exclusion. Looking at it again from a thematic point of view confirms the impression. ‘Nothing’ twice means that the empty term, which I have said in another connection can only occur once in a series, occurs twice. Eliot is saying that a system is cracked. For it to be cracked, a nothing is not enough; there must be two in a row. Thus “nothing again nothing.”
But what justification obtains for the claim? The local passage is not easy to interpret. There has always been wind under doors to make noise in otherwise silent places. Either the world has been always a big series of nothings upon nothings, or something has been lost. But the wind under the door is not a loss. It is a symbol of loss in context, and the thrust and greatness of the lines comes from the ever-present but not ever-noticed image signifying a loss that allows one to notice the background, as when a house is emptied of its’ furniture. Elsewhere occur the lines
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain.
The wind under the door foreshadows these lines in its’ general despair and its’ turning a loss, something negative, into an unpleasant positiveness. There is not a void to rely on surrounding the Wasteland. There is positive chaos.
Besides the wind under the door, there is a woman imploring someone in a tone of marital despair. The familial tone applied to the profoundly unfamilial or unhomely material shows us how ungraspable our most familial concepts are. The very idea of the familiar must be based on the ungraspable mystery of life; what we cannot possibly understand, we take for granted. Does the frequency with which a matter in question crudely occurs in life matter to its’ status as familiar or unfamiliar? Even knowing that would be a start. But the abstraction of the poem, in which there are symbols whose signified is not identified by nature but only by effect, does not allow that knowledge, whether for an intellectual or a poetic reason.
I will not attempt to say who the woman is addressing. That is mysterious. But then, whatever the nature of stony force addressed, what does it mean by quoting a de-contextualized line from “The Tempest”? It should be noted first that the force is quoted without quotes. It is neither an authorial voice, a radically fictional quote, nor a quote that is factual within the context of that radical fiction. It simply is, and what it says is what simply is. The relevance of “Those are pearls that were his eyes” is its’ putting human life in a context of objects. The pearls were his eyes. But that little bit of grammar is blackboxed, taken from the past to a radical presentism which, from its’ lack of sense of the past cannot know that the living are living and the dead dead; without tradition, no duality, and without duality, no life from death and death from life.
I have little to say about the “realistic” passage that follows. It seems to me an attempt to just show the sort of scene to which the heretofore symbolic poem applies. As such, the capitalized and repeated phrase “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” has an implication of a horribly perfunctory existence. I move to the opening of the third section:
The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.
The opening is a bang, a mixture of categories. The unsaturated phrase “The river’s tent” renders us incapable of dismissing what follows with ordinary language. Since a river and a tent cannot be compared for size or value in ordinary language, what is the river’s tent? All we know is that it is broken. Putting together unlike terms in an attempt to bring forth a unity in existence, a unified measure of the life that we encounter, and as such is not new. The point is simple. Suppose there is a man who goes through ten contexts in a day, reacting appropriately in each according to its’ nature. Nothing could be more normal. Now suppose that day is his entire life. Nothing could be more disturbing. The second section ends with a critique of perfunctoriness. The third attempts to abolish it by poetic means. But the thing is broke. The poem announces its’ own inability to make the world one.
Any attempt to unify the world will genericize it. But something more is going on here. The land is brown, a color which as a mixture of any three of the others, is a generic among generics. Since the world cannot be unified, the wind, movement of the universal, is unheard as it crosses the doubly generic land. The unification announces itself fully, for the first time in the poem, as its’ own failure. But the old Zen question is all: if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it exist? If a wind crossing the brown land is unheard, has there been a crossing? This is of course a riddle with no answer.
The answerless riddle is followed by a short sentence, to wit “the nymphs are departed.” Those of you who had hope for generic, but erotic, beings underlying all emptiness, those of you who had hopes for grace or just a cushion, abandon them here. This and what follows, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” appears first here and then again later, in
The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept ...
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
By repeating in a slightly altered context, Eliot succeeds now in doing to himself what he has done to others; reapply words with new meaning. This bizarre mechanism, though apparently bereft of an lyric ‘I’, is, I claim, Eliot’s entry into his own poem. The self is not allowed to appear, but only to be formed necessarily out of third-person material. Yes, there must be a self. But the reader is not permitted to revel in it. By adding friends of the nymphs and a Swiss lake between the nymphs and sweet Thames, which runs through London, the locale proper of the poem, two different things have been accomplished. First, it becomes clear that the nymphs must be modern figures if they are playing a role in our lives. But the impression of peripherality the image conjures is created by something. Furthermore, if we have an image of a peripheral being in our head, one who does not leave an address, we are inhabiting the peripheral ourselves. This comes, recall, right before what I claim is a hidden appearance of the lyric I. The fact that it is a lyric I without the word itself goes with the creepy impression of peripheral existence. We are attempting to lead eccentric lives, but cannot escape ourselves, for repetition of an object in consciousness creates the self after all. The nymphs, the beauty of the eccentric, have left. The Thames will clearly run after our songs are completed, but we know nothing of it. We have won nothing. Nothing again nothing.
Loudness in speech and life is poorly regarded, length only in speech. It is simplest to conclude that the mention of speech in a poetic speech is a reference to speech, and that the poet is promising the Thames not to be rude. But that is not the whole story. We are in a world-poem, a radical world of pure speech. I believe the brevity stands also for the brevity of life, the source of its’ necessary tragic beauty. In speech, there is only beauty and ugliness. Making something beautiful out of the ugly, as in the tragic brevity of life, is strictly speaking beyond the speech. For the existential statement to be effective, two conditions must obtain: first, there must be a perfect coherence of the speech as a pure speech, of speech, about speech, and for speech, and second, the reader must bring a knowledge of life’s tragedy to the poem. I believe these conditions are met, the first by the writer, the second by him and most of his readers.
I continue now to the dramatic center of the poem, the three appearances of Tiresias, in which recollection of the cultural past, which has been one theme of the poem, makes its’ appearance in the radical presentism the poem ultimately espouses as inescapable. Here are all three entries:
1) I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, 218
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
2) I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest -
I too awaited the expected guest.
3) (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
All three are ambiguous in their relation to reality and interrupt descriptions to comment on it.
But the third is a parenthetical radical interruption, an invitation. The first comes after the introduction of a scene but before its’ feminine character is identified by gender. Gender is precisely of its’ subjects. Tiresias’s inter-sexuality is necessary for his blind insight. The object he sees is feminine. Not knowing what exactly to make of this that wouldn’t be a totally arbitrary interpretation, I wish to instead venture a guess as to what it means to be “throbbing between two lives.” It would have been perfectly easy to simply be between two lives, and easier to be bodiless between them if one is going to change sexes. But no. Tiresias throbs. She/he is most physical between the lives and genders. It is easy to be reminded of a French avant-guarde remark that the body itself is genderless. But this is too easy and ultimately besides the point. What matters is that life is an intellectual continuance. What endures between lives is matter. Arthur Danto’s body/body problem, that of contrasting the body of internal sensation with the body as dumb object, simply has no place here. A being changing lives with a throbbing body to unite her/him is no different from a being dying before another is born. The body throbbing or the river running, it just doesn’t technically matter, but the body throbbing allows us to see the matter. The horrifying in-difference makes the poetry together with a fact that would seemingly contradict it, that Tiresias speaks. If the physicality between lives speaks in this poem, what doesn’t? Nothing doesn’t ultimately speak in “The Wasteland” and that bid to capture and leave nothing silent is part of what makes the world poem. The rest of passage (1) is a witnessing: Tiresias, though blind, can see, provided that the hour is to be a certain one, which strives homeward. In the brief fourth section, there will be a young man looking outward to see, in a passage to remind us that all is vain. But no one, let alone a blind man, sees anything in that passage: Phlebeas the Phoenician not only simply is but can be captured as simply being only by a moralization of sorts, which is clearly intended to be a Christian interpretation of a pre-Christian, or archaic, event, as is manifest in the message being addressed to “Gentile or Jew.” Tiresias, though, is neither Christian nor previous to Christianity in anything but the rigidly historical sense.
The common image of sailing and classical aesthetic invites comparisons, and a few questions therefrom. Why can the blind man with insight only see the return? Is it any insight at all to see the return, rather than the setting forth? And finally, is Tiresias’s insight tarnished by its’ reliance on known motivation, “striving,” from being absolute insight on the model of sight? Tiresias is a human tampered with by the Gods. His insight is not God-like. He may represent a sort of wisdom, but it is a wisdom within our condition; memory and not prophecy. Tiresias’s prophetic abilities in Sophocles come from his ability to remember together with a then perfectly common and conventional understanding of the operations of Gods and Fates. Thus it is here. The return is the future as predictable by the past. I leave the reader with a question: is this really the limits of human insight, or just the limits of the traditionalist method?
Now comes the expected guest. He turns out to be a vile seducer who is “low” in an unspecified way, and whose self-assurance is compared to a sign of wealth. To explain his expectedness, is it enough to say that the woman of the passage happened to expect him at that time? Some of the modern scenes are arguably there as examples, arbitrary facts that serve either as the necessary and necessarily material starting points of analysis or as dead ends in the mental process of associating scenes or ideas with other scenes or ideas. Which of these schemes fits the poem is a matter of interpretation. The second, less mathematical, schematic is heavily suggested by a simple fact: the grittily material scenes are modern, temporally successive to the symbolic scenes; ends, not beginnings. However, the scenes more material than symbolic must necessarily be drawn from contemporary material due to nature’s simple restrictions upon human witnessing, and must by the same token have been in reality the starting point of the analysis. Eliot, in writing a poem that employs tradition as its logic, affronts the paradox of traditionalism, which would ground our consciousness on a collective temporal succession. What comes first to the individual is what comes last to tradition; the individual is not happily seated.
It is and is not enough to say that the young man happened to be expected in the novelistic situation on the page. For a traditionalist writing literature, a semblance or imitation of materiality is never enough. However, there must be an empirical starting point, the very contrary of meaning. Tradition is not there to tell the radical lie that life has no material starting point, but to add something to that starting point. This holds for every instance of raw realism in the poem. The particularity of this seduction scene up to unspoken climax is that it is literally encompassed by the same symbolic figure. Tiresias’s announcement that, as an intersexual, he has “foresuffered all enacted on this same bed or divan” (emphasis mine) would serve as a proxy for climax except for its’ being in parethenses, an aside separate from the text. I leave it to the experience of the reader to prove that climax is not parenthetical, not an invitation, not an interruption. The effect of the parentheses is to announce “scene omitted.” The climax is reduced to its’ historical repetitiveness without any mention of its’ character. Tradition circles around a black hole.
Though the “expected guest” implies temporal succession, a going forward in which there can be no repetition, at the level of interpretation, there is return. It is not just that sexual climax is like poetry without regard for its’ peers but very repetitive when seen from the outside. The same is true of anything we anticipate and whose completion is thus psychologically inseparable from its’ expectation. The sex is ultimately there not to moralize about sex but to explain the human condition. I consider this give and take in any moment of time the locus of Eliot’s stance. Expectation is going forward; interpretation is return. This passage is the climax of the poem; the sexual climax announces the thematic one. But both are not quite there; more than sex is subtilized.
In a discussion of Samuel Beckett, whose writings are often compared to “The Wasteland”, the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou says the author “writes the generic” by reducing the human condition to the three activities of going, being, and saying. As previously indicated, I think that Eliot in his masterwork also tried to write the generic. But, as a poet, he subverts the general as well. In reference to Badiou’s schematic, it is notable that the only person who speaks in the passage is Tiresias, the figure of the return. Might not the subversion of the general within the generic, be achieved by returning, the complement of going unmentioned in Badiou’s prose commentary on prose? Return is the etymological meaning of the very word “verse.”
Tiresias witnesses. No matter how generic the scene presented to him, he has an inherently personal presence. Though within tradition, a necessarily generic and general entity, he is identified by name, not function. His name is irreducible to any function: it is taken on faith. Furthermore, he is now blind. What he is capable of witnessing lacks the particularity of present sight, and is therefore necessarily generic in a sense. But he says “I.” It can be argued that his “I” is the “lyric I”, the center of what is still, and possibly despite itself, a lyric poem. But even without arguing this disputable point, it seems clear to me that Tiresias’s very condition subverts the general within the writing of the generic by the mechanism of return. Nostalgia makes the most mass-manufactured item particular to one.
After Tiresias’s third and final entrance, the following lines occur:
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...
There is no light without Tiresias’s witnessing/recollection and only one kiss. Kisses are a kind of which there are many examples. Tiresias’s guarding of memory unifies kind. Without kind, there is only one of each kind of thing. In this case, one kiss. I do not care for the “patronizing” expect as rhythm, and do not comment on it.
But, for the woman, the scene continues. I think the key lines of the remainder of the third section are:
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold 264
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
Many of the splendors of “The Wasteland” are inexplicable, for all our attempts to render it otherwise. Here the poet gets away with something amazing: creating inexplicable splendor just by mentioning it. Lounging at noon is the ultimate in relying on others for one’s bread, other reliance in a very physical sense. This passage is explicitly situated in London, and explicitly involves a religious site, as the previous passage that I said mentions other reliance.There is a clear return to the theme of that passage. But this time, it has been materialized by both its’ specificity to fishmen and its’ mention of the peek hour of day. The poem needs to start general to be a world poem; stance comes at the beginning. But by later specifying, materalizing, one its’ chief claims, the poem gains depth, possibly by a subversion of the initial generality. Then comes the longest short-line passage of the poem, naturally composed mostly of disjointed nominal phrases. Since these are not part of propositions, it is impossible to tell exactly what is being said here. I propose that nothing is being said, in the usual sense of those words. The sense achieved in the preceding climactic section of the poem, classicism and modernity tied by a church built by a neoclassicist, what does there remain to be said within a stream of consciousness? A bunch of things simply are. And then, there is nothing with nothing, again. “That struts and frets its’ hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.” Damn beautiful, though.
In the brief and aforementioned fourth section, Phlebas the Phoenician forgets. He is not simply dead, but a fortnight dead. The bid for an empty term within the poetic set continues. It takes a fortnight before the newfound nothingness of Phlebas becomes nothing with, or again, nothing. It is as if Phlebas had a little metaphysical insurance policy that granted him some kind of survival beyond death, but then total oblivion after it expires. He forgets profit and loss. That is to forget life for a Phoenician, since all we know of them is their trade and somewhat brutal existential accountancy. But the locale matters. In fact it is primary. The Phoenicians may have turned the sea into a matter of accountancy long ere the East India Company ruled the waves and Lloyds of London kept the books thereof, but in either case, the physical surrounding came first. The word “and” does not imply temporal succession, but the context is nonetheless mentioned first. There is a hint, without it actually being said, that what comes first, is first forgotten. Phlebas’s last memory as a metaphysical being will be what he made out of the sea, not the sea as it was there before him. The rest of the fourth section is classical again classical and invites no commentary.
Here is the opening of the fifth, and ultimate, section:
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
The generic quality of the passage is obvious. Any mention of what or which torchlight red on sweaty faces, what or which frosty silence in what or which gardens, etc. is omitted. This is in keeping with the rest of the poem. It is the genericizing method laid totally bare. What follows is a dizzying conceptual pantoum about the theme of there being no water and not even silence (auditory void) in the mountains we inhabit.The effect mimics consciousness. To mimic the temporal succession in which a single term cannot be an understood object at the seat of consciousness, as first described by Kant (fundamental unity of apperception), Eliot repeats words in different contexts. It does not necessarily matter whether there need be a shared term between every moment of consciousness and the last in a series of the form xy et al., yz et al., zw et al., etc. for a stream of consciousness to operate. That question is philosophy. The poetry uses the mechanism to evoke consciousness; the fundamental unity of apperception is mimicked by this verbal device, and effectively.
From the mountains, we come to the plain. Most obviously, the grass is very nearly explicitly stated not to be green on the other side. Beyond this, there is a hoard on the plain. That imagery is traditional. But the most haunting moment of this trancelike, yet consciousness-mimicking section of “The Wasteland” is the following, inglorious on the plain:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together 360
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
According to Eliot’s own notes, it was inspired by a real phenomenon of delusions in extreme circumstances. As a real phenomenon, it cannot actually stand for anything, and yet we cannot help but wonder exactly what it stands for. Death, the empty term within life, mystery? In a way, it is a symbol for symbolism, ironically drawn from the strange but true.
The end is a dizzying swirl of quotes and references that seem less organized toward a purpose than all the rest. Life, we seem to be being told, ends as it began not in nihilo but in chaos. Within this passage, there is one good metaphor for life itself: “I have heard the key in the door turn once and turn once only.” I call this Dante quote a metaphor for life for a single reason: it happens once and once only. Dante’s purpose was religious. Eliot places a Sanskrit word from the Upanishads, a decidedly non-Christian religious text, ahead of the Christian metaphor for life, made Christian by the idea of a key turning in a door, rather than something else, and made a metaphor for life by the happening only once. I do not know what this collage attempt to say.
My incomprehension of how it all ends for this poem makes it somewhat difficult for me to judge whether a world poem has been written or only attempted. Or maybe the end is supposed to be as mysterious as the end of life. For all the mentions of death, we still don’t know how it ends, and we are not supposed to. Whatever the case be, poetry is an attempt, even more so than essays which bear the French name of an attempt. (Shakespeare extends Montaigne by means of poetry). As such, there is no claiming success or failure for it. In claiming that a world poem was here essayed, I say nothing original. In saying that Eliot tries to write the generic, as Beckett, I most likely say nothing original either. My claim is that there is an extension of the locale through blackboxing of tradition in this particular poem and a subversion of the general in poetry in general of which “The Wasteland” is a fine example. These claims are not ultimately provable, but I hope to have suggested reasons for believing them to the reader through logical and quasi-poetic means. Shanti, Shalom, Salam, pax, paix, peace.
(1)This idea is drawn from lectures of Maria Irene Ramalho Santos
(2) This interpretation is guided by the line of Zen prayer “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form.
(3) See Emmanuel Levinas Totality and Infinity
(4) The phrase is from the Philosophical Investigations
(5) See Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, both volumes, and also his theory of falsification as the basis of science.
