T.S. muthaf*ckin’ Eliot.
I wrote a paper on “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” a couple of years ago that talked about the isolation of modern man. The division and unknowability of self. Not a very original thesis, but for some reasons, it felt new. Could it be that fact that I was younger, coming into certain ideas, and the coming into becomes, is a becoming, and therefore feels new? Maybe. Maybe Eliot would disagree, and tell me, in all of his Western erudition, why I’ve only licked the top of the iceberg.
I don’t know. He’s dead, so that’s impossible.
But The Waste Land... what a poem. What a piece of art.
Eliot does this thing where seemingly oppositional ideas--the “parts equaling more than sum,” and “the sum equaling more than its parts”--converge and create something new. Taken as a whole, The Waste Land makes no sense, but investigation of its individual sections, individual verses, produces avenues for interpretation by which to link the thing together.
Time.Time and space. Time and space, plus the compact nature of poetry.
She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
How like our contemporary time, this stanza?
I’m particularly struck by the numbness or the sense in the shrugging, “half-formed thought” of “‘Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.’” The accumulation of material impairing the natural senses, to the point where a bit of clarity is not even a full thought, fully considered. What else is not considered? Could it be the consequence of loneliness left from the act committed with “her departed lover”? She seems to fall into a puddle of morass, “[pacing] about her room again, alone,” brought out of it by the playing of music.
I love, love, love the line-- “[s]he smoothes her hair with automatic hand.” It communicates numbness, but it also signals the loss of nature to the increasing dominance of industry and technology. Her hand moves robotically, does not require thought. Eliot suggests that perhaps the rest of her life, the modern life, operates in this way.
And is this not true? Our phones are like a sixth appendage or extremity. The way in which we pay attention to each other (and ourselves) has changed drastically within the span of my life (30-something years). Eliot signaled this alienation back in 1922.
I wonder sometimes if some writers are gifted with a type of future-sight, or their present sight is so nuanced that they can artfully delineate the threads of time, giving off the illusion of future-sight.
