NOTES

Eliot completes The Waste Land with his own detailed end notes. They inform. I am not convinced they illuminate, nor were intended to do so.

He published The Waste Land in 1922. The ravages of the Great War must surely have informed the pessimism - perhaps fatalism is better - of the poem.

Five million died in Povolshye famine of 1921-1923. Did Eliot notice? The Holocaust, Dresden, Nanking, Hiroshima, the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria and much more were still to come.

Sigmund Freud wrote, also in 1922, "The facts that have led us to believe in the supremacy of the pleasure-principle in psychic life also find expression in the hypothesis that there is an attempt on the part of the psychic apparatus to keep the quantity of excitation present as low as possible..."  Perhaps the waste emerges from this tension.

There is waste and worse. We are a cruel race, especially rough with beauty which we typically break or bury alive.

And yet, I have mostly argued alternatives.

Beauty abides side by side our cruelty.  We love and murder with similar intensity.  A man conceived and constructed London Bridge and Magnus Martyr, even as other men displaced one and interred the other.

I am slightly embarrassed to admit, the single most powerful literary influence on my actual living is The Secret Garden (1911).  There is profound neglect, horrible loss, deep separation.  There is also beauty reclaimed, life restored, and wholehearted love known for the very first time.

Brokenness and healing are each real.  Choice is not the only source or cause.  Choosing the good, the true or the beautiful does not ensure our claim.  But without choosing, the default is decay.

“Might I," quavered Mary, "might I have a bit of earth?”

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

      Shantih     shantih     shantih

Μῦθος ὁ τῶν τεττίγων καὶ τῶν μυρμήκων προτρεπόμενος τοὺς νέους εἰς πόνους
Everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
Of these fragments I have made a foundation
What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?
Faith. Hope. Love.

     And the greatest of these is love

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

I sit upon the mountain
Writing, with the green meadow before me
Shall I at least give thanks?

Ring around the rosy,
A pocket full of posy.
Ashes, Ashes, we all fall down.

Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands

Agape: The stream flows
Unceasing, tumbling to the sea
Beyond azure coasts, the sea churns
Unceasing, lifting to the moon
Crashing to the shore

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA

Elpis:
My love seems mere lust
My love seems merely sensuous

My love seems mere sentiment
My love seems merely impetuous

My love seems mere neurosis
My love seems merely vivacious

My love seems mere complacense
My love seems merely spontaneous

My love seems mere dalliance
My love seems merely extemporaneous

When saying, "I love you,"
I mean that in you and through you
I find a ground of being
I know a wide angle of reality
I engage myself and non-self
With much less ambiguity
Than without you and only with you

Appearance is ambiguous
Experience is ambiguous
Life is ambiguous

But in you and through you
I touch a wholeness
Emerging and absorbing
Transforming and revealing
AH

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
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA

Pistis: What have we given?
Blood rushing, hormones gushing
Desire's fitful murmurs
Two bodies breathing, slowly dying
There's all that,
                       and
A shared meal
Honest hearing
Tender smiles
The knowing ahhh
Of two lives touching
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
But unfolds in this moment
Uninvited, unexpected, and whole
AH

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
DA

Leaves drop from the tree
As a mother weeps for her dead child
Another and another, heavy with death
No breeze to scatter
No dance across the grass
Drop, drop, drop
Carcass of shriveled springtime
Corpses of summer sun
Drop