You've just got to love John Barnes! On Talksport he really took apart all the holier-than-thou, faceless and politically correct "journos" who have simply jumped on the bandwagon of the Luis Suarez affair. Barnes--a great player for Liverpool and someone who often had to deal with racist chants throughout his career--correctly made the point that legislation will never lead to a society free of racism. As he points out, there is legislation against theft, but there are still people who steal: that's not to say some legislation is not required, but the main emphasis has to be on education. Barnes states that he's not interested in punishment, but wants to change the mind set of people in society--and simply legislating will never do that.

It's pathetic really how politically correct the U.K. has become while being empty--at least as regards the press and bureaucracy--of any true respect and compassion for those who suffer.

http://www.talksport.co.uk/radio/press-pass/blog/2012-02-12/barnes-racism-within-football-not-being-dealt-properly

WORTHY, BUT DULL


It's clear that most reviews are written by enthusiasts: that's why most product reviews are so high. Naturally, there is also the odd reviewer who really hates a book or movie and is determined to have his opinion heard. However, the vast, silent majority are mostly indifferent to almost everything. In any case, the point of this rather abstract introduction is that I fall into none of these three categories: I'm a movie lover who was disappointed by this "classic" of the forties. I had seen it before, but many years ago when I was a kid.

I admit that for its time it was ground-breaking. Hollywood didn't usually treat of alcoholism in any serious way and here we get benders, DTs, alcoholic hospitals, moral degradation and a lot more. Yet somehow--and I suppose we should expect this--the movie never quite loses its Hollywood sheen. Ray Milland is good enough in the leading role, but given Hollywood's propensity for gifting the acting oscar to anyone who is given an overacting opportunity, the oscar award doesn't say a lot. Everyone does a competent job, but the real problem is in the screenplay. Milland is an alcoholic who has never had a job, but wants to become a writer. It is assumed from the beginning that somewhere deep inside Birnam there is a real and talented writer struggling to emerge: but what is the proof? A few student articles and an early piece in Reader's Digest. Other than that, there is zilch. Lots of people want to write--but unless you write you're not a writer. Perhaps it would have been unendurable at the time to admit that most alcoholics don't have any special skill waiting to emerge: they are simply alcoholics. The Hollywood schmaltz element is further highlighted when Jane Wyman, a worker on Time magazine and the possessor of a perfect Hollywood wardrobe, decides to fall in love with our alcoholic nobody who--for reasons of Hollywood etiquette--must have the makings of a 'somebody' inside him. This might actually have done harm to the real alcoholics' cause, as one of the worst aspects of the disease is that the sufferer becomes a social pariah: the idea of an unemployed alcoholic winning the love of a high class lady from Time magazine and keeping it through all his degradations is pure Hollywood hoo-ha. Even the end of the movie rings false with Milland giving up drink and beginning on his infamous novel, "The Bottle", once again. This is supposed to be a happy ending--but the odds are that its just one more false dawn before the drinking starts again.

I'm sorry to be so negative, but this movie after deciding to deal with an important issue of this kind refuses to face the real horrors head on and, instead, is determined to wrap them up in several layers of Hollywood hokum.

Well, I've been watching a lot of Orson Welles' films lately. Citizen Kane might be an acquired taste and The Magnificent Ambersons something of a kitchen sink drama, but the old man definitely had something about him. Chimes At Midnight, A Touch of Evil and the Third Man (which he never directed) are undoubtedly touched with genius. All those strange camera angles are initially disconcerting but, eventually, fascinating and futuristic in style. The Lady From Shanghai is merely a B movie based on a pulp novel--yet the finale in the hall of mirrors makes for some amazing cinematography.

Journey into Fear is a run-of-the-mill movie with Dolores Del Rio's leopard woman as perhaps its most memorable feature. I was amazed to discover that Del Rio was already 36 at the time of this film. She really does have one of the most beautiful faces that I've ever seen (it seems that she and the old man had a 3 year affair--lucky old Orson!)

Dear Paul...


Hi Paul,

I just wanted to tell you that I thought your last article, "We're All Right, We're All Wrong", made for rather sour reading. As you know, I respect your writings on Liverpool deeply, but this piece seemed like 50% justification of your earlier criticisms of Hodgson and 50% grudging praise for a job well done against Chelsea. Now I am just as guilty as you when it comes to prior criticism of Hodgson--but I don't make a career out of writing on LFC. The truth is that you are right: there are still question marks against RH. However, in the last few games he's done a lot to lift the gloom, and we should consider the possibility that the manager's position at LFC was the job he was waiting for in order to show his true worth. After all, sometimes unlikely things like that do happen. Who would have ever dreamed what lay in the future when Bill Shankly took over an underperforming second division club in 1959? At this juncture the kind thing to do would be not to write about Hodgson at all until perhaps half the season has gone. It certainly looks like he's beginning to communicate his ideas in an effective way to the players. Is it possible that a style of coaching which always managed to punch above its weight at smaller clubs might be becoming more imaginative and expansive at a big club like Liverpool? It's at least possible (if not, perhaps, very likely). Shouldn't you begin to consider the possibility that Hodgson might actually achieve success with LFC, and last far beyond the present season? Fourth position and a cup win would be considered a major success, and perhaps this is not beyond Hodgson and his team. I don't say he will achieve this, but while he's winning games against top opposition we should at least consider it as a possibility and give undiluted praise when praise is due. In the end--and for whatever reasons--RB has gone and it's fairly pointless to keep looking back. If Hodgson, in the long run, proves himself unable to match Liverpool's ambitions, then I'm sure the new owners will move him on. However, we should not see this as an inevitable, foregone conclusion: a subtext that most of your recent articles seem to promote.

Regards, John Wallen

THE DEGENERATION OF BHARAT


PART ONE: Meet Hari Chand


Hari Chand—investigative journalist
Determined to illuminate
The terminal decline of Bharat;
With a special roving commission
From Anil Patil,
Concerned kshatriya of Maharashtra
Province: late professor of dermatology
At Jizan Health College,
Saudi Arabia,
Now expatriated to New Zealand;
Living along the outreaches
Of the Western world,
In Tauranga,
Dispensing
Ayurvedic remedies
To dissipated Europeans

O where did it all go wrong?

When Patanjali’s sutras
Explained the Vedic scheme
Siddharta’s wheel of Dharma
Already ruled supreme.
While Krishna and Arjuna
Discussed the pith of life
The chariots of ignorance
Disseminated strife.
At Vulture’s Peak, the Buddha
Revealed the Tantric path;
But my dear friend, Anil Patil,
Only makes me laugh!

The Mughals came
The Mughals built;
Shah Jihan to his cost
Spent all his wealth on Mumtaza
Until his realm was lost.
In latter days he viewed “the Taj”
Through iron prison bars
Incarcerated by a son
Who’d kicked him in the arse.

Caste, Caste, Caste, Caste;
Caste deflated India…
If I can’t touch you,
And you can’t touch me,
How happy can we ever be?

Brahmin priests and all their rituals,
Friends to the worldy ones,
Undid India.

Brahma. Vishnu. Shiva.
Did you ever really need them?
Brahma created without their incantations.
Vishnu, Krishna, Buddha,
Sustained and enlightened, indifferent to their technical mumbo-jumbo:
Shiva’s dance of death destroys, regardless of Brahminical threads and pride

Pride destroyed India.
And yet,
Avalokiteshvara’s infinite compassion still abounds;
His thousand arms waiting To rescue all sentient beings from the chains of their own ignorance, Into the Sambhogakaya: The Buddhafield.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

**************

I watched a snake charmer’s cheap trickeries
Outside Rajghat.
He wanted money.
Is it possible that one who is able to control
The dancing snake head
Can be in need of a few coppers from me?

O dissolute nation
Who had everything the world systems can provide,
But threw it all away--
What price must you pay
For your own unvirtue?

Hari Chand’s a secret guy;
You’ll find him in the bar,
Listening to private talk
(Not near, nor yet too far).
Whenever India’s discussed,
He’s got it on his mind
That something just might be picked up
Explaining her decline.
And as we know, he works for one
Inextricably bound
To the travails of Bharat and
The Ganges’ rushing sound.
It’s good to know that even when
Anil is in his dreams
Hari Chand is on the case
And life’s not what it seems.



PART TWO: Delhi Musings

I spent some time in Delhi’s maze
Of beggars, rickshaws, bikes and shit.
And everywhere I felt the gaze
Of those who would abandon it

A mother with her bundled child,
Tapped upon the moving glass.
Her eyes roamed, desperate and wild,
And wouldn’t let me pass.

I offered up some gift of notes
And suddenly there came
A hundred more in tattered coats
And each one had no name.

I looked upon their greedy eyes,
Then waved the driver on;
And inwardly, without surprise,
I found compassion gone.
***********

The poor and desolate are our friends,
They teach us generosity;
Let’s love our enemies better than our relatives
(As those who hate us give an opportunity for the practice of patience).

Perhaps one day I can become wild and homeless myself,
Though without the unmindfulness of a Delhi street beggar;
No, no, but with the green tinge of an enlightened Milarepa
Seeing beyond the limitations of
Nirmanakaya.

**********

Ashkhardan is beautiful
And, in just five years,
Volunteers built its stone temple
In the old way, fashioned from the imagination and love,
Without steel and iron.
Krishna consciousness pervades the essence.
Om Hari Krishna
Om Hari Krishna
Om Om Om

Hari Chand is on the case. He sees all, but says little. Everything is placed in the balance.

Dr. Anil will have his answer.



PART THREE: Dr. Anil in Motion and Still Life


Dr. Anil gave up all his glamour
When he travelled to Jizan.
Nevertheless,
He tried to show the Jizanis,
Through an innate pride in his nation,
The glory of the Vedas:
What they are, had been, and ever would be.
Even when they scoffed,
And asked him if the sacred cow had been his mother,
He persevered,
Watching old movies about Gods and Avatars
In his pleasing home,
Surrounded by a loving family:
His wife, Priyanka,
And blessed daughter Vishakha
Who, as the reincarnation of Anil’s maternal grandmother,
Was (somehow) close to Shiva
Lord of the dance.

Dr. Anil, disciple of Shankacharya,
Why did you come to Jizan?
Get away as quick as you can!
Talking’s just a barrier
To the enlightenment of man.

Leave it all to Hari… Hari Chand.
Hari’s built for sniffing out the meaning of life,
And the reasons for strife.
He’s a smooth operator
And sooner or later
He’ll find out all you want to know
Of virtue, knowledge, death and View:
He’ll show you what to do,
Explain the transcendental light
Of wisdom, just for you.

Om Hari Hari Chand.

Take refuge in the Hari.


PART FOUR: Vulture’s Peak


Rajgir was the setting for
The Dharma’s second spin:
The prajnaparamita core
Of emptiness within.
Thus have I heard: at Vulture’s Peak
The Thusly-Gone one taught
All aspirants who truly seek
To find a secret thought.
“Nam m’yoho renge kyo”:
The blessings showered down;
The diamond and the lotus show
The heart within the crown.
Assembled Boddhisattvas watched
Shunyata’s face arise
From Union with Emptiness
(And in the Buddha’s eyes).
Oh India you were not fit
To learn the Tantric truth
From Uddiyana’s great pandit
(Nor Krishna’s guiless youth).
Ganges, Yamuna, Saraswat:
Sweet Gangetic plains!
Holy rivers of Bharat,
Filled by monsoon rains!
Why did the flowing Dharma cease?
Why was the Tantra dumb?
Why did that mighty soul decrease?
Why didn’t Moksha come?
Why did the Buddha at Rajgir
Decide to hide the truth,
From India and all the world,
In Nagar serpent tooth?
Oh why is Ramakrishna’s faith,
Nandranath’s noble jewels,
Diluted by some Pretan wraith
Into a billion fools?

PART FIVE: Hari Reports Back to Anil

Slowly,
Anil rebuilds his life in Tauranga;
And even Vishakha,
And his dear departed grandmother
(Who now holds a New Zealand passport),
Is/are content.

Life is good.

Furthermore,
Hari Chand’s report
Has just arrived (from Delhi) giving meaty food for thought.
According to Hari
Life is a bitch
And we just have to try and get over it.

Anil (on the whole) finds himself in concurrence with these noble sentiments.

Om Tat Sat!

An Essay On T.S. Eliot's Waste Land.


ESSAY ON ELIOT’S WASTE LAND
By
John Wallen

INTRODUCTION

I first studied The Waste Land many years ago as a new post-graduate student. At that time I—naturally enough—bought into many of the usual platitudes on this piece: “It’s all about the hopelessness of the post-first-world-war situation”; “It’s about the decadence of Western civilization which, after the First World War, had touched rock bottom”; “Its contrasting the rich cultural heritage of the past with today’s moral and cultural turpitude”. In fact, the Waste Land is about none of these things. It is the intimate record of a poet’s bleak depression due to his inability to cope with the sexual and sensual life he longed for. All the cultural references and copious notes should be seen as ways of disguising this mundane truth—and even as a means of heroically attemping to magnify the poet’s plight into something more meaningful than a shy young man’s uneasiness about sex and close relationships.

THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

In this first section we are introduced to the sterile mind of the poet: paradoxically, this is a fecund sterility which produces profoundly meaningful language. The coming of Spring is seen as an unbearable intrusion on misery and loss.

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

Eliot now uses a technique that will be utilized extensively in this long poem: he misdirects us after making a personal statement. Suddenly we are in the world of a rich Hapsburg aristocrat of the type who had been ruined by the events of WW1. She reflects on her childhood and the world which has disappeared forever. Marie (for that apparently is her name)“reads much of the night and goes south in the winter”. After a bleak statement of his own despair, Eliot here refers to an older world of aristocratic manners and customs which, in his imagination, he feels a greater affinity with than the democratic sameness of the London he had adopted, but which he now feels has let him down.

After the famous passage about “fear in a handful of dust” we are given a brief interlude in the company of a rather aesthetic flower girl who seems to express Eliot’s asexual worship of a certain pure and virginal kind of nineteenth century girl. These virginal figures will occur frequently enough in Eliot’s subsequent work (and often in contrast with more worldly courtesan types). This first section finishes with the much written about figure of Madame Sosostris reading a pack of tarot cards. Clearly, Madame Sosostris is on the Madame Blavatsky model and is presented to us as a representative charlatan type figure—though she is also utilized as a means of adding inner coherence to the poem when she warns the sitter to “fear death by water” (a reference to the later death of Phlebas by drowning) and perhaps puts the author in mind of “Steson”: a rather fantastic character (subsequently introduced) who, we are told, fought with the writer in “the ships at Mylae”. This is a reference to the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage and its inclusion together with the grimly ironic talk of corpses in gardens “sprouting” and “blooming”, mostly has the effect of profoundly deepening the sense of discontinuity and despair.

Essentially, this first section can be seen as a means of establishing the bleakest of moods for the poem and pointing out what the author sees as the impossibility of enjoying a pure relationship in the grim and emotionally impoverished modern world. More specific admissions of sexual failure are to come later.

A GAME OF CHESS

The scene now changes to the poet’s inner sanctum: for surely the famous passage beginning “The chair, she sat in like a burnished throne” and its subsequent development along lines of deceit (a deceit pointed out clearly enough by the “laquers”, “strange synthetic perfumes” and “unguents”) refers to nothing other than the boudoir of Eliot’s first wife Vivian (whose later insanity was perhaps, at least in part, due to Eliot’s emotional callousness). This lady, surrounded by her sophisticated arts of deceit, is a world away from the simple and pure flower girl evoked by the writer in the first part of the poem. The next transition is made clearly enough:

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.


Eliot, the husband, is here reluctantly coming up the stairs in order to speak with his wife: though any attempt at real communication between the comparatively uneducated Vivian and the super refined sensibility of the young poet, is doomed to failure from the outset. The lady (or Vivian) makes her frustration at this state of affairs very clear in the subsequent lines:

“My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
“Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”

The poet’s unspoken reply is both arrogant and full of despair at the same time:

I think we are in rats’ alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

Neither person can understand the other. Both are lost in their own self-made fantasies: a psychological hypochondria in Vivian’s case and an intellectually inspired, hermetic egotism in Eliot’s. Next Vivian (for we shall call this neurotic lady Vivian) and Eliot (for we shall call this unresponsive and egotistical husband Eliot)clash over Vivian’s highly strung nerves. She asks her husband if he can hear anything strange and in response to his (presumably) monosyllabic answer in the negative, Vivian demands of her taciturn husband whether he can hear anything at all other than the intellectual fabrications of his own mind:

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?
But
O O O O that Shakespeherean Rag—
It’s so elegant
So intelligent

Immediately Vivian’s anger dissipates into despair and Eliot’s psyche retreats into the meaningless recital of the day’s events that will provide him with some kind of warped protection from his wife’s “vulgarity”:

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?’
“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
“What shall we ever do?”
The hot water at ten
And if it rains, a closed car at four.
And we shall play a game of chess,
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

The next section that takes place in a pub, is probably the least successful in the poem. Eliot decides to contrast the sexual and emotional desert of his own intimate life with Vivian with the lusty and unthinking sexuality of the common populace of London. Here, working class people speak of their love-making and their children. If an over refined sensibility prevents Eliot from fully engaging in the sexual act ( and this is a reality we come back to again and again in this poem) then his plight is mocked at by the sheer fertility and sexual lustiness of the poor. One feels there is not really much sympathy here for ordinary folk (who were very much off Eliot’s radar in any case) in spite of the apparently tender ending. Rather, Eliot rather ghoulishly and in a spirit of self flagellation, contrasts his own super refined sensibility with the hearty lustfulness of the poor: and the unspoken conclusion seems to be the same as that of his mentor, Ezra Pound, in his poem, "The Garden":

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.


THE FIRE SERMON

The third section of the poem, “The Fire Sermon” revisits and reemphasizes some ideas and themes we have already noted, while also introducing some new ones. In particular there is the barren hopelessness of contemporary London, where only isolation seems to offer any antidote to the depressing nihilism around. Doggerel returns as a way of emphasizing the bestial sexuality enjoyed by everyday folk, unencumbered by the high values of “Western Civilization”. At this point we are introduced to “Apeneck” Sweeney and Mrs Porter as representative characters of this type. They may not be able to understand the whole nexus of cultural and civilizational values that should go along with human procreation, but they can, at any rate, keep the race sexually alive (unlike the too refined aesthetic sensibility of the poet).

O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water

As before, the dominant tone is one of deep contempt for the vulgarity of those who engage easily in the activity of sex without understanding its deeper significance (for Eliot, intellectually, this would mean a connection to the values of a long flourishing civilization that would give a more profound meaning to the union of man and woman). An alternative form of intimacy is introduced with the character of Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant.

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant
Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants
C.i.f. London: documents at sight,
Asked me in demotic French
To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel
Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

This is a candid reference to the possibility of gay sex between men of a certain culture and sensitivity who find the mindless coupling of Sweeney and Mrs. Porter’s daughter demeaning and vulgar. Of course, the portrayal is ironic and, between these two men, it is only the poet who truly possesses a high culture. Mr. Eugenides may be Greek, but his “demotic” French and brazen overtures typify him as a hardened seeker after gay sex. Consequently, he is considered to be just as vulgar by the poet as the everyday folk, earlier and later referenced, who enjoy thoughtless heterosexual sex together. Homosexuality, then, offers the poet no satisfactory way out of his isolated predicament: he can only impotently express his own sexual fastidiousness in relation to those other less particular inhabitants of the metropolis. In this frame of mind, the poet takes on the identity of the all-knowing Tiresias, a mythical hermaphrodite, and watches (with deep contempt and impotent frustration) the meaningless coupling of two “lower class” inhabitants of London: a secretary and a house agent’s clerk.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

Eliot here leaves us in no doubt of his opinion of the young man, puffed up with his own importance. He is one of “the low” and his assurance is that of the bumptious made good. The secretary ‘s dominating emotion is indifference in the face of her lover’s amorous advances:

The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.

Just months before his marriage to Vivian, Eliot had written to a friend complaining about the fact that he still remained a virgin at the age of 26. Is it too fantastic to suppose that the highly educated, but emotionally inexperienced Eliot, was unable to deal with Vivian’s sexual and emotional needs and it was this that led to her later profound emotional and mental instability? If so, then it might be reasonable to also suggest that it was Eliot’s overwhelming sense of shame and guilt associated with this situation that led directly to the writing of The Waste Land.
Being unable to accept or to participate either in the ordinary sexuality of everyday people or the arch gayness of the refined homosexual community, Eliot is emotionally thrown back upon his own hyper-aestheticism which, like the flower girl, is able to give him no human solace. In these circumstances, the poet is forced to consider if his sterile aestheticism can be in some way transformed (almost by using tantric means) into something sustaining, and permanent. In the church of Saint Magnus the Martyr, we have the first stirrings of a religiosity which can be conflated or combined with Eliot’s profound aestheticism.

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.

Following this new trend of thought, Eliot sees himself as being purged of his negative emotions by the purifying fires of a new religious ecstasy:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning


DEATH BY WATER

Thematically, the drowning of Phlebas refers back to Madame Sosostris (“Fear death by water”) and also to Mr. Eugenides with his “pocketful of currants” (now transformed to “current”). This rather mysterious character might be seen as the transformed figure of the poet, now able (thanks to a growing religious belief) to die into life and, so, become human once again.

Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Clearly, any suggested hope is very muted here. However, it is something to be able to die as other people often do, with faith in their hearts: and without the overwheming fear of sexual union which has previously obsessed the poet. We should also not forget the purifacatory aspects of the water as it “Picked his bones in whispers”. The mood remains bleak and depressing, but there are also, perhaps, the glimmerings of a new hope.

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID

In “What the Thunder Said”, the idea of purification through water is continued and expanded. The poet who was lost in his own isolation has now found a new means of escaping himself and his finally sterile ultra-aestheticism. His old self may be dying and a new more stable self emerging sustained and sublimated by the age-old veracities of religious life.

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 325
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying

The reference to the “agony in stony places” is clearly intended to remind us of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and provides, once again, a clue to the new direction in which Eliot’s thoughts are turning. Now, the most important thing is that a purificatory ceremony should take place that will literally transform the poet into a new man, free of his old obsessions.

Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain

The purificatory rights now take place in the context of India and the Eastern religions Eliot had been recently studying.


Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
D A
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed

Eliot now, at least in his own view, has surrendered to a higher truth: that of spiritual renewal through religion. Finally, he has given himself to something, an experience, that is greater than himself and his own solipsistic mind. It is only through this inner surrender that the poet can really come to believe that his own existence has been in any way meaningful. Finally, he has given up his earlier prudence and embraced a new life-giving (for him) experience. His earlier mistake was to believe that he could find the meaning of his existence in another human being and through sexual union. Now, the pure virginity of the flower girl can be safely recalled without any accompaniment of a confused animal passion.
It is worth noting at this point that subsequent to the publishing of this poem, Eliot left Vivian, eventually divorcing her, and lived for many years in the company of a close friend. It was only in his latter years that he was able to find a new love with his secretary at Faber, whom he eventually married. However, whether this late marriage included ejaculatory sex is a matter for speculation. The probability is that Eliot’s second union was mostly based on the needs of companionship and included little (or perhaps no) sex.


The poem finishes with a host of fragmentary elements that suggest an old world falling apart, but also the possibility of a new more stable one, taking its place. The ending, written in Sanskrit , would seem to suggest new hope: “Shantih” is usually translated as “the peace that passes all understanding”.

CONCLUSION.

In conclusion, I should emphasize that there is nothing I have written here that can take anything away from the fact that The Waste Land is a great—perhaps the greatest--poetic masterpiece of the 20th century. Eliot made it dense with meaning and, in its allusions, it became almost inexhaustible. I have hardly touched on the amazing images from the poem that have, by this time, engrained themselves unforgettably on the psyche of modern man. Nevertheless, I feel the poem is often portrayed—wrongly--as a great narrative conveying ONLY the degenerate nature and nihilism of Western culture at a pivotal moment between two catastrophic world wars. It is undoubtedly all of this—but it more as well. The Waste Land is, in its most basic and truest form, the record of the writer’s depressed and agonized state of mind at a particular juncture in his life. This depression, or agony, was due to many factors: but most of all it referenced a deeply unhappy marriage between two very ill-matched people.

Written by: John Wallen

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