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\begin{document}
%\frontmatter
\title{A discussion of\\
\emph{The Waste Land}\\
of T.S. Eliot}
\author{St John's College alumni\\
 unofficial email list}
\date{December 5, 2003--January 27, 2004%2003.12.5---2004.1.27
}

\uppertitleback{\centering
A discussion of\\
\emph{The Waste Land}\\
of T.S. Eliot\\
\mbox{}\\
St John's College alumni\\
 unofficial email list\\
\mbox{}\\
December 5, 2003--January 27, 2004}

\lowertitleback{\centering
Transcribed into \LaTeX\ and edited by David Pierce\\
This version compiled \today}

\maketitle

\chapter*{Preface}

The email discussion presented here was originally translated into
\LaTeX\ by me while it was still going on.  Now, many years later, I
have returned to the editing.  I have tried to make the discussion as
readable as possible, in part through normalization of capital
letters, italics, quotation marks, and so forth.  I have corrected
misspellings noticed by me or one of the other participants.  

At first it was difficult to know what to do with a particular participant's
emails.  These emails could have extremely long sentences, whose
grammatical structure was unclear.  At first I simply adjusted the
punctuation, added words (in [square brackets]), or suggested removing
words (in <angle brackets>). 
But then I discovered a deeper problem.  If a passage in this
participant's emails \emph{was} well written, it often turned out to
have been taken
from an external source.  Yet 
the passage was not identified as a quotation.  The participant was
careful to identify quotations of other discussants, by using strings
of symbols > before, and < after (see page~\pageref 6).  
If the participant quoted \emph{himself,} he used the usual quotation marks.
But if he quoted from some website, he used no typographical means to indicate this.
The only clue might be that the quotation began with a capital letter, but was preceded by a comma. (See page~\pageref{18}.)

I have felt compelled to figure out which parts of these emails have
been taken from other sources.  All quotations that I have been able
to identify are displayed as such, with footnotes giving
the sources.  All footnotes are by me.

I have all of the original emails on file.

\begin{flushright}
  David Pierce\\
  Ankara, April 5, 2011\\
Istanbul, \today
\end{flushright}

%\mainmatter
\mbox{}
%\thispagestyle{empty}
\vspace{0.2\textheight}

\chapter*{The discussion}

  \begin{email}[Mr Gorham]\index{Gorham}
Ms Gillis\index{Gillis} wrote:
\begin{quote}
 Hello list folks, I miss you.
 I have caught up with the list to\dots Septem\-ber 21! What a strange
 epistolary novel it is. I can't wait to
find out what happens.
\end{quote}
Ms Gillis, I have to ask (and will patiently wait for your reply in
Spring of 2004): why not just delete or skip a bunch of messages and
begin reading from, say, last week? 

This reminds me of something I read this week about a man who reads the
\emph{New York Times} every day, except that he is behind by some number of
years. But still, he reads the whole thing and is trying desperately to
catch up. He said he listens to news on the radio, \emph{\&c.,} but if a story
comes up that may ruin the news he is reading in the \emph{Times,} he turns it
off. So for example, he won't listen to the news about the sniper
trials because he hasn't gotten to the point yet where the snipers were
sniping and doesn't want the story to be ruined for him. I have to say,
I found this very odd but also can't help but be amazed and thrilled by
such determination.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Pierce]\index{Pierce}
    See Maugham's story called `The Outstation'.  (It's not the same.  The man
gets his mail every few weeks, including the newspapers; he reads one a
day, from six weeks ago, at breakfast.)
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]\index{Lewis}
Mr Pierce, I dusted off my complete short stories of Maugham last night and
read the tale and saw immediately why it would stick in your mind, as this is
a dark story of obsession and territoriality. I wonder if Evelyn Waugh had
seen it when he wrote \emph{A Handful of Dust;} the similarities are
striking. I like
the idea that social codes become the routine by which we live, obsessively
squeezing out contemporary morality and signaling the death of spiritual
values. (How \emph{\`a propos} that the token of his obsession is the
newspaper.) 
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]\index{Tourtelott}
    Maybe this particular theme has a start in that clerk in
    \emph{Heart of Darkness} 
who insists on dressing for dinner in the middle of the Congo.  I wonder if 
I can find that passage, as it seems to speak to this.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Pierce]
`The Outstation' was the Maugham story we read in ninth-grade English.
Having read all of Maugham's stories since then several times, I think
that `The Fall of Edward Barnard' might have been good for the
high-pressure school where I was.  (Edward Barnard gives up a life in
Chicago's capitalist class in order to relax in Tahiti; Maugham seems to
approve of the choice; the title is ironic.)

What interested me as I re-read `The Oustation' on Saturday was how the
snob was not a racist, and the democrat was.  I don't have enough
knowledge of the British Empire to say whether Maugham's story represents
a real change in imperial attitudes.  In Maugham's story, the older guy
dearly loves a lord, but has real human sympathy and affection for the
natives.  (It's not \emph{that} simple; why does he refuse to take a native
`wife'?)  The younger guy has no use for the British class system; he also
just wants to make the `niggers' work; for him, raw power is all they
understand.  Shades of current attitudes towards Iraq, as discussed on the
list.

Since you brought up Waugh's \emph{Handful of Dust,} Mr Lewis, I wonder if you
have opinions about the meaning of the title, especially as used in
Waugh's source, namely Eliot's \emph{Waste Land.}  Should I be getting
something in particular from the phrase `fear in a handful of dust'?
  \end{email}

  \begin{figure}\label{6}
\centering
\begin{turn}{-90}
\begin{minipage}{14.1cm}
\begin{verbatim}
Mr. Pierce Wrote:

>>>>>>>>>>>>Since you brought up Waugh's _Handful of Dust_, Mr Lewis, I
wonder if you have opinions about the meaning of the title, especially as
used in Waugh's source, namely Eliot's _Waste Land_.  Should I be getting
something in particular from the phrase "fear in a handful of
dust"?<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Let me begin by saying the whole quote is  "... 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", taken from The Wasteland.  I don't say that to be pretentious, but
rather there is something key here in how I want to answer your question.
Namely that there is something in how one moves, how one walks through life
that is being drawn into question here. We walk through life and we set our
eyes on the shadow, or as I see it, the things of this world. It is a nice
analogy of the cave metaphor, that we think we are seeing the truth and
instead what we are getting is the illusion, and that life is not being
understood, and that Elliot feels he must show you something else, he must
draw your attention away from the shadow in order to get you to see his
point. And so I turn back to Brenda and Tony and their friends and I think
about how they walk through life, how they are part of the upper class, and
how their lives revolve around the traditions of "polite", well-bred
society. There is something rather callous in these people, though, Tony and
Brenda, something satirical that Waugh wants me to see; that this
\end{verbatim}
\end{minipage}
\end{turn}
\vfill
%\caption*{
The original of email number 6
%}
  \end{figure}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]\label{6-edited}
Let me begin\footnote{In fact Mr Lewis began by quoting the last email
  of Mr Pierce (the editor of this document), as on page~\pageref{6}.} by saying the whole quote from
\emph{The Waste Land} is:
\settowidth{\versewidth}{And I will show you something different from either}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
  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.
\end{myverse}
  I don't say that to be
pretentious, but 
rather there is something key here in how I want to answer your question.
Namely that there is something in how one moves, how one walks through life
that is being drawn into question here. We walk through life and we set our
eyes on the shadow, or as I see it, the things of this world. It is a nice
analogy of the cave metaphor, that we think we are seeing the truth and
instead what we are getting is the illusion, and that life is not being
understood, and that Eliot feels he must show you something else, he must
draw your attention away from the shadow in order to get you to see his
point. 

And so I turn back to Brenda and Tony and their friends and I think
about how they walk through life, how they are part of the upper class, and
how their lives revolve around the traditions of `polite', well-bred
society. There is something rather callous in these people, though, Tony and
Brenda, something satirical that Waugh wants me to see: that this
wonderfully congenial group live by yet another set of rules, not just the
taking of tea and cakes or dressing for dinner, but a subset of social
standards; that according to their rules any sin is acceptable provided it
is carried out in good taste (to paraphrase Waugh himself). 

So I begin to
think about the evolution of standards, how the privilege of upper-class
society gives birth to unique rituals whose main purpose is to set them
apart, to keep them separate from those who don't have the same privileges.
And that there isn't really anything else about the rules of the caste
system that has any substance, they don't make the upper class better
spiritually, only physically, temporally. Now I want to believe that
eventually these rules become so important that they drive out other types
of rules, rules of morality, but of course appearance is so important, so
they remain moral only in so far as appearances demand. And this is why
Waugh's story is so harrowing. Because when it's over, when Tony is stranded
in the jungle, separated from all he lives for and believes in, when he is
separated from custom and tradition, he has nothing to fall back on except
what his mind already knows, namely the pretentious set of `rules' that he
can invent provided they are acceptable, and there is no substance here,
nothing concrete upon which he can live, and so the sentence in the jungle
is a death sentence, but it is the most terrible death sentence because he
is morally (and spiritually) bankrupt. He is given his `fear' that is the
fear in a handful of dust.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Gorham]
    I'd say it's worth quoting the whole stanza. I think the beginning
lines add a theological tone that is missing if you take the second half
by itself.
\settowidth{\versewidth}{And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{19}{20}
  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow \\
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  \\
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only \\
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, \\
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,\\ 
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only \\
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.\\!
\end{myverse}
    Mr Lewis, you wrote: 
\begin{quote}
It is a nice analogy of the cave metaphor, that we think we
are seeing the truth and instead what we are getting is the illusion,
and that life is not being understood, and that Eliot feels he must show
you something else, he must draw your attention away from the shadow in
order to get you to see his point.
\end{quote}
I think this idea of yours fits nicely with the first half of the
stanza as well. The shadow of the red rock, for instance, and the
parenthetical invitation to come under the shadow. 
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Pierce]
Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
And this is why Waugh's story [\emph{A Handful of Dust}] is so
harrowing. Because when it's over, when Tony is stranded in the jungle,
separated from all he lives for and believes in, when he is separated from
custom and tradition, he has nothing to fall back on except what his mind
already knows, namely the pretentious set of `rules' that he can invent
provided they are acceptable, and there is no substance here, nothing
concrete upon which he can live, and so the sentence in the jungle is a
death sentence, but it is the most terrible death sentence because he is
morally (and spiritually) bankrupt. He is given his `fear' that is the
fear in a handful of dust.
\end{quote}

What I remember mainly from Waugh's novel is the hell of having to read
Dickens over and over to an illiterate man for the rest of one's life.  I
haven't an idea about whether this fate is particularly appropriate for
Tony.  Mr Lewis, is Tony a fearful man?  He did decide to leave home and
go on this Amazon trip in the first place.

Anyway, what is the significance of \emph{dust} for Eliot, and so for Waugh?
Somebody has done a lot of work to put together a website on \emph{The Waste
Land}:
\begin{center}
\url{http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html}
\end{quote}
But the compiler seems to have no specific comment on this line 30 that we
are talking about; he just notes the themes of danger, dryness, fear,
hands, and `the drawing of the reader into the poem'.

In \emph{The Principles of Art,} Collingwood says (p.~335) that \emph{The Waste
Land} 
\begin{quote}
depicts a world where the wholesome flowing water of emotion, which
alone fertilizes all human activity, has dried up\dots The only emotion left
us is fear: fear of emotion itself, fear of death by drowning in it, fear
in a handful of dust.
\end{quote}
  In his last phrase, Collingwood is merely quoting
Eliot, without---it seems to me---explaining him.

Why connect fear with a handful of anything, and why dust in particular?

Should I even be asking this question?  I was intrigued by William Blake
after reading \emph{The Marriage of Heaven and Hell} in high-school; but I
didn't really appreciate the intensity of Blake's visions until I read the
poem with an artificially altered consciousness.  Is Eliot's work also
something to be read while high?  It seems like something one should stay
sharp for, although I understand that, according to somebody, reading \emph{The
Waste Land} is like listening to a radio in Europe while constantly
turning the dial.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
I would say that Eliot is absolutely not a poet to read while high, that 
while one is constantly tuning the dial, each station comes in with great 
clarity and you need all your wits about you to figure out how the bits 
relate.

Also, though it may be questionable given that Eliot was not a Christian at 
the time he wrote \emph{The Waste Land,} I have always read the passage in question 
in terms of quite orthodox Christian symbolism.  The desert landscape is the 
world of dryness and desiccation from which the living water of Spirit has 
withdrawn, and the handful of dust is simply the reminder of the earth from 
which we are created and to which (absent the promise of eternal life) we 
will inevitably return.  In that sense the `shelter under this red rock' is 
the shelter of the rock or Petros of the church.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Gorham]
This too is how I have always read the
passage. I took `a handful of dust' to represent what the human body
will ultimately become. I don't know about the biology but I always
liked to think that an average human body, when re-dusted, would end up
as a handful. And by `liked to think' I mean `hate to think', in other
words, he showed me the fear in a handful of dust.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Pierce wrote:
\begin{quote}
What I remember mainly from Waugh's novel is the hell of having to read
Dickens over and over to an illiterate man for the rest of one's life.
\end{quote}
It's like being buried alive, trapped in the jungle, he finds an inscription
in the book of Dickens that indicates the old man never let the previous
reader go, and in fact, probably killed him when he tried to escape. That is
why I say it is a death sentence, Tony is never going home, and he is living
with a madman, and his days are numbered.
\begin{quote}
I haven't an idea about whether this fate is particularly appropriate
for Tony.
\end{quote}
I can't say who deserves what particular end, but in the novel these are
vain, opportunistic and callous people, and I don't doubt he probably got
what he deserved (see next two comments).
\begin{quote}
Mr Lewis, is Tony a fearful man?
\end{quote}
I think Eliot is saying we are none of us fearful enough, I think that is
certainly the truth in Tony, that he finds his fear in the end, that he is
stuck there reading Dickens to the end of his days, that he has a sort of
`death sentence' imposed upon him, and who wouldn't be afraid of that, Tony
may have been trying to escape his old way of life, he may have been open to
the possibility of change, that would be Waugh's vehicle for Tony to be able
to experience the fear of his almighty end. (See next.)
\begin{quote}
He did decide to leave home and go on this Amazon trip in the first
place.
\end{quote}
Actually this is the one point in the book I was kinda hoping you wouldn't
ask me about\dots because it does complicate my previous analysis, though not
much.  Basically Tony leaves because he is fed up, his wife is cheating on
him, and he is pretty sure she is going to leave him, take the family home
\emph{\&c.,} so he travels to get away.  As I recall he had gone to the jungle once
before or knew someone who did, but the details of the first trip elude me.
I think Tony is on a quest of self-improvement here, I just think he gets
stuck in the jungle before he can muddle his way out of his meaningless and
shallow life. That is why I describe the end as harrowing,  too
terrible for words: knowing you want to better yourself, knowing you want to
get away from yourself and make a new start, and finding you can't, and in
all probability <that>\footnote{I use angle brackets here around a word in the original email that would be better removed.} you are looking a death sentence in the eye.
\begin{quote}
Anyway, what is the significance of \emph{dust} for Eliot, and so for
Waugh?
\end{quote}
I tend to agree with Mr Tourtelott that
\begin{quote}
the handful of dust is simply the
reminder of the earth from
which we are created and to which (absent the promise of eternal life) we
will inevitably return.
\end{quote}
It is important to remember that Eliot was a
perennial snob and that he loved to pull in images from every where to show
you haw big his brain is so even though he may not have been a Christian, he
would have loved nothing more than to show you how much he knows about it.
\begin{quote}
Why connect fear with a handful of anything, and why dust in
particular?
\end{quote}
As I said before, Eliot is showing you mortality, that this life is an
illusion made up of shadow \emph{\`a la} Allegory of the Cave, Eliot
is trying to
say that fear is the beginnings of a spiritual awakening, the first step
away from the shadow and into the realm of spiritual enlightenment, but that
you will never get there if you, like Waugh's depiction of elite English
society, <if you> are focused too much on the things of this world.
\begin{quote}
Should I even be asking this question?
\end{quote}
Absolutely!
  \end{email}



  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    As I said in my previous email, I tend to agree with Mr Tourtelott
    and Mr Gorham, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, what is being alluded to
    here are the 
funerary rites of man. (It is possible that the handful of dust may even
refer to the handful of dust that Antigone sprinkles on her brother's
corpse.)  I only resend because I want to emphasize, as I said before,
that
\begin{quote}
Eliot is showing you mortality, that this life is an illusion made up of
shadow \emph{\`a la} Allegory of the Cave, Eliot suggests that fear is the
beginnings of a spiritual awakening, the first step away from the shadow and
into the realm of spiritual enlightenment, but that you will never get there
if you, like Waugh's depiction of elite English society, are focused too
much on the things of this world.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Unlike Mr Lewis in his original email, I display his
  quotation of himself \emph{as} a quotation, although there are
  slight differences from the corresponding passage of his previous
  email.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
It is a stark contrast with the Platonic
vision though, because I believe Plato says desire leads you to reason, <that> [which]
leads you to contemplate the pure forms; that fear is invoked is definitely
Eliot tipping his hat to the Christian tradition.
\begin{quote}
It is important to
remember that Eliot was a perennial snob (and an Anglophile) and that he
loved to pull in images from everywhere to show you how big his brain is
so
\end{quote}
(many subsequent authors will later bash Eliot for his continued
snobbery and his cold disdainful attitude towards his wife) 
\begin{quote}
even though he
may not have been a Christian, he would have loved nothing more than to show
you how much he knows about it.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{See the previous note.  Observe the reversal of order of the
  two quotations from Mr Lewis's previous email.}
\end{quote}
Eliot in his later years, in good English
style, endorses the Anglican Church.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    As I said in my previous email, 
\begin{quote}
what is being alluded to here are the
funerary rites of man. (It is possible that the handful of dust may even
refer to the handful of dust that Antigone sprinkles on her brother's corpse.)
\end{quote}
Allow me to elaborate:
There is possibly one if not two other references here to the story of
Oedipus and his children: 
\settowidth{\versewidth}{And I will show you something different from either}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
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.
\end{myverse}
 This could be a subtle reference to Oedipus and the
Riddle of the Sphinx: `What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the
afternoon and three at night?' Both the riddle and the Eliot quote give
this sense of, as I called it, mortality, or the stretch of life that a
person is given to walk. All of which tends to make me think that the
handful of dust could be something from \emph{Antigone,} where Eliot would be
summoning the contrast between the laws of man and the laws of God.  Again,
the handful of dust (or the fear associated with it) becomes the dividing
line between walking the path of shadow (yea though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death) and walking the path of light. Something
which apparently Eliot thinks the Church has failed in its efforts to
illuminate. This is after all, from a passage from \emph{The Waste
  Land} that says 
\begin{compactitem}
  \item
`And the dead tree gives no shelter'
\emph{i.e.}~the cross, or 
\item
`A heap of broken images'
\emph{i.e.}~the golden calf, 
\item
`the cricket no relief'
 \emph{i.e.}~the plague on the
Egyptians, 
\item
`the dry stone no sound of water'
 \emph{i.e.}~Moses striking the rock
for water. 
\end{compactitem}
Eliot seems to be damning the church for its obsession with the
temporal, 
\settowidth{\versewidth}{What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow\\
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, \\
You cannot say, or guess\dots
\end{myverse}
 Eliot asks us a
question, what are the roots that clutch, \emph{i.e.}~the roots of the
church? If
you believe, as I do, that Eliot is being critical, then he is asking, What
is at the foundation of faith, what are its roots? Literally, in any old
cathedral you look to its roots and you see crypts, the graves, or our very
bones holding down the foundation of the church. And why bury these people
here? Because they believe their bodies will be reborn, literally remade in
the flesh at the end of time: the Church's promise of a bodily reincarnation
instead of a reincarnation of the spirit. This idea of the bodily rebirth of
man was not part of the early church; it was put forth as a mandate of faith
at the council of Nicea in 326.\footnote{The date is usually given as 325.} Constantine's armies only later enforced it
as a means of converting heretics who shared in the bodily reincarnation of
the Dionysian rites, thus won over to the early church transplanting Jesus
as Dionysus. Eliot seems to be criticizing the church for the tenets of
its faith, saying that they are not of the path to true spiritual
enlightenment. It might be said that fear then is caused by the realization
that what you believe, what you hold dear, the foundation of your faith and
a belief in the afterlife may be called into question: the fear of death,
realized and re-realized in the ever-advancing search for enlightenment.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]\index{Murray}
    Is anyone going to keep talking about this?  I've just caught up a
    bit, and am wondering about how the two themes of dryness of the
    Waste Land and the death by drowning work together.  
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
I will try but I don't want to end up the only one talking here, Eliot is
[a] gen[i]us who hides references\label{references} within references, it only took me
four tries to
figure out that he was referencing Oedipus and Antigone in the last thread,
and you Ms Murray sound like you see more of what is going on here than I.
Be that as it may, I will give your query a stab in the dark.

The image of death by drowning begins with a visit to the Tarot reader
\begin{quote}
\centering
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
\end{quote}
who speaks of the Tarot cards and
the 
\begin{quote}
\centering
Drowned Phoenician sailor
\end{quote}
---probably a reference to \emph{The Tempest} act 1
scene 2 (note: Penguin edition)---as well as 
\begin{quote}
\centering
  Belladonna, the Lady of the
Rocks.
\end{quote}
 Belladonna is a siren, a creature who calls men to their deaths by
singing, and a man with three staves which I believe is a reference to a
sailor of some kind.  Sosostris advises the person she is reading, presumably
the narrator, a little girl, that while she does not see the Hanged Man, the
death of the wicked, <the> she should still 
\begin{quote}
\centering
  Fear death by water
\end{quote}
---the
accidental death, or the death of the innocent. However, the psychic's words
are deceptive. Although water implies death in both cases, the theme of the
section is that death must precede transformation and rebirth, the spiritual
voyage (see previous comments on a handful of dust). Death in this case is
tied to religion; in many religions, gods are burned or drowned in effigy so
that they may be reborn. In fact, this rebirth, the rebirth of the fertility
god \emph{\`a la} Joseph Campbell, is referred to at the end of the
section, with the 
body of the fertility god being planted and then dug up: 
\settowidth{\versewidth}{  That corpse you planted last year in your garden,}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
  That corpse you planted last year in your garden,\\
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
\end{myverse}
  The death in this instance refers to the physical (or cultural)
death of mankind, and the rebirth is the anticipated spiritual reawakening.
I don't think it was mentioned before, so I will add as a final note that all
of this takes place in the first section titled `The Burial of the Dead',
which is why I keep coming back to that as the underlying theme.

That is all the ideas I have on water after my cursory reading this morning.
I will take a look at your tie in to dryness later unless you have some
thoughts here (or if anyone else would like to take a stab?).
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Billington]\index{Billington}
 Collingwood regards \emph{The Waste Land} as exemplifying his
 theories of
 \begin{inparaenum}[1)]
 \item
 art, 
 \item 
the corrupt consciousness, and 
\item
 the remedy.
\end{inparaenum}
\begin{asparaenum}
\item
The poem has no instrumental purpose.  There are no exhortations to do
something, no calls for virtue, no target of satire, nothing to blame, not a
thing that amuses or entertains.  The poem is not a general report about the
failings of others.  Eliot is talking first about himself.  He began with vague
stirrings
 and converted them to conscious thoughts by feeling his way toward exactly
the right words.  His only purpose was to discover what his emotions were,
exactly.
\item
 `No community altogether knows its own heart; and by failing in this
knowledge a community deceives itself' (p.~336, the last page of the book).
Collingwood does say that his countrymen are altogether too much devoted to
amusement.  It is not clear why.  Certainly, because it is so much easier to
seek amusement rather than self-knowledge.  Perhaps also because of a
widely-held false theory of art, namely, that art should amuse or exhort.  If
so, then Collingwood is telling the artistic and literary critics to get their
conceptual framework right.  I'll bet that the genesis of this book was because
some critics were misinterpreting Eliot and his social function.

Collingwood's 1938 political views are not discussed, barely hinted.
\begin{quote}This poem\dots describes\dots a disease which has so eaten into
civilization that political remedies are about as useful as poulticing
a cancer (p.~334).
\end{quote}
Maybe 
Collingwood didn't intend a link to politics or anti-fascism at all, especially
since \emph{The Waste Land} was published in 1922.
\item
The remedy for the corrupt consciousness that Collingwood sees is `the poem
itself'.  The remedy is self-knowledge.  Eliot's stories, images, and allusions
give voice to what we all knew all along, but weren't able or willing to say.
The poet is the prophet of the community `at the risk of their displeasure'.  If
 the readers don't shirk the hard work of understanding the poem, they will
recognize and possess their previously unexpressed truth.   That is what
artists, critics, and readers should be focusing on.
\end{asparaenum}
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]\index{Breslin}
 Thanks for this summary Mr Billington.

I just had an argument yesterday with a screenwriter friend of mine, whose 
point of view it is that the role of the artist in American culture is to 
provide amusement and escape.   I was advocating for art that reunites
people with 
their reality, providing a sense of a returning ground beneath their feet, as 
well as a sense that life is worth living because we are worthwhile and worthy. 
  He remained adamant that such `ponderous' stuff was pretense and simply 
fooled people with rhetoric.   That the best thing an artist can do is make the 
world pleasant, and help people forget how horrible it is to be alive.

It was sort of like Hollywood arguing with\dots what?   New York?   Funny, I 
can't think of another distinct cultural/artistic center in the US
other than the movie/ tv/music biz as promulgated in LA.
  \end{email}

\begin{figure}\label{18}
\centering
\begin{turn}{90}
  \begin{minipage}{14.1cm}
\begin{verbatim}
So I am sitting here trying to tie dryness to drowning and am not getting
very far, The absence of water and the thirst for it enter in line 24, "the
dry stone gives no sound of water"; in line 42 (24 flipped around), "Oed and
leer dos Meer" ("Wide and empty the sea"), water is both a symbol of death
and a symbol of life: The fear of death by water is first made explicit by
Madame Sosostris. As I said before it is linked to" the rebirth of the
fertility god a'la Joseph Campbell, and +is referred to at the end of the
section, with the body of the fertility god being planted and then dug up"
Caused me to dig out my Frazer's "Golden Bough" And in the section titled,
"The killing of the Divine King," it reminds me of Osirus who was thrown
into the waters of the Nile and later "fished out" (resurrected),
symbolizing the rebirth of the life principle in the spring. This tie in to
the seasons reminds me of yet another set of myths, the Grail legends are
also derived from those vegetative rites, and it is the Fisher King on whom
the health and fertility of the land and people are dependent in these
legends. The Fisher King is wounded and, because he is sick, his lands are
waste and barren. Again, this reminds me of yet another Oedipus connection;
just as in "Oedipus Rex" the plague upon Thebes was due to the crimes of
Oedipus against the procreative cycles. Only when the Fisher King is healed
through the appearing of a pure soul (Eliot's little girl?) who asks the
proper questions can the land again become fertile, hence the connection to
dryness. (references within references)
\end{verbatim}
  \end{minipage}
\end{turn}

%\caption{
Original text of email number 18
%}
\end{figure}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]\label{first}
    So I am sitting here trying to tie dryness to drowning and am not getting
very far,%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\label{Symbols}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{\label{wayback1}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
The comma (followed by a capitalized word) is Mr Lewis's only
indication so far that the following text is a quotation from Philip
R. Headings, 
`Symbols in T.S. Eliot's \emph{The Waste Land}', which is an excerpt from the book
\emph{T.S. Eliot} (Twayne Pub., 1964).  
In his next email
(p.~\pageref{links}), Mr Lewis will give a link for this excerpt:
\url{http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/rsrcs/eng/eli/elihea1.htm}.
The link does not work today (April 3, 2011), but the text is
accessible through \url{http://waybackmachine.org/}.  The original
email is on page~\pageref{18}.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
The absence of water and the thirst for it enter in line 24, 
`And the dry stone [gives]%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{This word is correctly bracketed in the source, as not being part of Eliot's poem; but it is not bracketed in the email.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
no sound of water';  
in line 42 (24 flipped around),%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The parenthetical numerological observation
  seems to be Mr Lewis's own.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
`\emph{Oed' und leer das Meer}'%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The email has the same
  misspelling, \texttt{Oed and leer dos Meer}, that is found in the
  source (where the line is not italicized).  Mr Thomas points out to me
  that `wide' for `oede' (or rather \emph{\"ode}) is probably a
  mistranslation.  Indeed, the small \emph{Collins German Dictionary}
  (Toronto, 1982) translates the adjective as `waste, barren', and the
  noun \emph{\"Ode} as `desert, waste(land)'.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
 (`Wide and empty the sea'), 
\end{quote}
 water is both a symbol of death
and a symbol of life:%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{This interpolation is perhaps a
  rephrasing of first part of the continuation of the quoted text,
  which is, `water is both a negative and a positive symbol: it may
  carry Isolde and her healing arts to the dying Tristan, but as yet
  it is waste and barren.'   
The source continues, as in Mr Lewis's email, with the mention of
Madame Sosostris.}  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
The fear of death by water is first made explicit by
Madame Sosostris. 
\end{quote}
As I said before it is linked to 
\begin{quote}
the rebirth of the
fertility god \emph{\`a la} Joseph Campbell, and is referred to at the
end of the 
section, with the body of the fertility god being planted and then dug
up.\footnote{Mr Lewis's quotation of his own earlier email \emph{is}
  bracketed by quotation marks in his original email (p~\pageref{18}).}
\end{quote}
Caused me to dig out my Frazer's \emph{Golden Bough.}  And in the
section titled,
`The Killing of the Divine King', it reminds me of Osiris%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Mr Lewis spells it `Osirus', here and elsewhere.  A search
  of the named section---really Chapter 24---of Frazer's work at
  \url{http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/gb02401.htm} (April 2,
  2011) finds but one instance of the name of Osiris.  This instance
  is in \S1 of the chapter, in an account of the mummification of
  Osiris and other gods.}  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
who%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The three passages that will now be displayed as
  quotations are also not distinguished as such in Mr Lewis's original
  email.   I shall no longer bother to make such announcements: they would apply to \emph{all} quotations from external sources that Mr Lewis makes.
The next three quotations are again from Headings, `Symbols in T.S. Eliot's \emph{The
  Waste Land}'.  The first quoted passage is preceded in the source by
the following: 
`One valuable function of the notes, nevertheless, has
been to indicate some of the works that most importantly influenced
the writing of the poem---among others (as we mentioned) Frazer's
\emph{The Golden Bough} and Weston's \emph{From Ritual to Romance,}
books relevant to much of the basic symbolism used. \P\ 
In the vegetative rites discussed in both, the figure of the Year-god \emph{was thrown\dots}'.}  
\begin{quote}
was thrown
into the waters of the Nile and later `fished out' (resurrected),
symbolizing the rebirth of the life principle in the spring.\footnote{In the source, this passage is followed by,
`This ritual also came to be associated with the religious initiation patterns to which primitive people seem to give much more open recognition than do modern civilized societies.'  Then comes Mr Lewis's next quotation.}
\end{quote}
This tie-in to
the seasons reminds me of yet another set of myths:%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{\label{wound}The two passages in square brackets in the following quotation represent ellipses unnoted by Mr Lewis, but supplied by me.  Actually, in place of the second bracketed passage, Mr Lewis has `wounded'.  Mr Lewis seems to allude to this passage in his next email.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
The Grail legends [according to Miss Weston] are
also derived from those vegetative rites, and it is the Fisher King on whom
the health and fertility of the land and people are dependent in these
legends. The Fisher King is 
[sick, having been maimed (usually a sexual\linebreak wound);]
and, because he is sick, his lands are
waste and barren,\footnote{Mr Lewis's final quotation below immediately follows this in the source.}
\end{quote}
Again, this reminds me of yet another Oedipus connection;
\begin{quote}
just as in \emph{Oedipus Rex} the plague upon Thebes was due to the crimes of
Oedipus against the procreative cycles. Only when the Fisher King is healed
through the appearing of a pure soul\footnote{The source has `pure fool', without mention of `Eliot's little girl'.} (Eliot's little girl?)~who asks the
proper questions can the land again become fertile.
\end{quote}
Hence the connection to
dryness. (references within references)%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{I can only
  speculate whether this parenthesis is meant to acknowledge Mr
  Lewis's debt to other sources, or is merely an allusion to Mr
  Lewis's remark on page~\pageref{references} about Eliot's work.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
  \end{email}



  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
    Hi Mr Lewis, I Googled around and found some helpful notes to the
    poem here:\label{extended-notes} 
    \begin{quote}\centering
\url{www.colby.edu/~isadoff/map/Wasteland_Notes.rtf}
    \end{quote}
These are a little bit more extended than Eliot's own notes, but not
overpowering.  It was lines 8--18 that got me started.  So here's what
    I found out: 

Marie is Marie Larisch, who was cousin to most of the nobility of Europe:
\begin{compactitem}
\item
Archduke Ferdinand, whose asassination started WWI; 
\item
Ludwig II, mad king of Bavaria;
\item
Rudolph, who was found murdered with his young mistress at a hunting lodge
called Mayerling.  
\end{compactitem}
This was the Mayerling scandal which led to Marie's rejection
from society, as she had been acting as go-between between the archduke and
the mistress.  Marie then went to live in the mountains of Bavaria, where she
felt free.  She wrote an autobiography, with which Eliot was familiar; Eliot
also met her and it is thought that some of lines 8--18 are derived from the
conversation they had.  Finally, Marie was big on astrology and suchlike
clairvoyance, and was herself asassinated.

So what does this have to do with the poem?  Marie told an anecdote about
walking about at Starnbergersee, being caught in a rainshower, and taking refuge
in the hut of a gaga old woman who said that her son was a fisherman and would
soon be back.  Further inquiry revealed that he had drowned in the
Starnbergersee seven years earlier.  Ludwig of Bavaria also drowned in Starnbergersee.  So
these are the first deaths by water---fisher and king lying at the bottom of
the lake, but coming back soon.   These deaths seem to point to other bits of
the poem:

Of course, the two fellows drowned in Starnbergersee point ahead to the
drowned Phoenician sailor \& sea-change.

Ludwig II was crazy about Wagner, thus the bits from \emph{Tristan and
  Isolde.}  The
love-death of Tristan and Isolde echoes the death of Rudolph \&  his mistress.

Fisher \&  king drowned in Starnbergersee point forward to the man with three
staves---Eliot says that he associates this Tarot card quite arbitrarily with
the Fisher King from \emph{The Golden Bough.}  I haven't yet had a
chance to look into \emph{The Golden Bough} to find out what the
Fisher King's story is. 

The wet-dry polarity feeds the image of resurrection also through the
references to bulbs, tubers and corpses planted in the garden.  They are lying dead
under the ground, but the sweet showers of April (or the shower of rain that
surprised Marie) bring them back to life.   The bulbs bring me to the hyacinths.
 Strange lines.  Maybe the reason the hair was wet in the Hyacinth garden was
that whoever the wet-haired-person is has just come up from the bottom of the
lake.  No wonder then that the hyacinth girl could not speak and her eyes
failed.

Finally there's the crowd of dead coming over London Bridge.  Somehow I
imagine these as the dead of the Great War.  Thus this part of the poem vibrates
against the Marie-references to the nobility of Europe and all the politics that
led to that war.

This is as much as I've come up with so far.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
I read the crowd flowing over London Bridge---
\settowidth{\versewidth}{I had not thought Death had undone so many}
\settowidth{\vgap}{A crowd flowed over London Bridge,}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin So many,\\
I had not thought Death had undone so many
\end{myverse}
---as an ordinary crowd flowing over London Bridge, 
all of them trapped in the nightmare Death-in-Life.  The poem teems with 
figures, it seems to me, who are neither properly alive nor dead, whose feelings are 
anesthetized and routinized.  The central figure in that regard---and she is 
in fact the central figure in the poem---is the typist who, after her 
meaningless tryst with the young man carbuncular, has the half-formed 
thought `Now that's done, and I'm glad it's over.'  (Remember that it is of 
this scene that Eliot says in the notes that `What Tiresias
\emph{sees}\dots is the substance of the poem.')
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]\label{links}
    Ms Murray! Good stuff! A few observations before I dash out the door:
\begin{quote}
Ludwig II was crazy about Wagner, thus the bits from \emph{Tristan and
  Isolde.}  The
love-death of Tristan and Isolde echoes the death of Rudolph \&  his
mistress.
\end{quote}
This makes sense.  If I remember correctly, isn't there something in
\emph{Tristan and Isolde,} where she comes to heal him and all is dry
and barren?  
\begin{quote}
Fisher \&  king drowned in Starnbergersee point forward to the man with
three
staves---Eliot says that he associates this Tarot card quite arbitrarily
with
the Fisher King from \emph{The Golden Bough.}  I haven't yet had a
chance to look into
\emph{The Golden Bough} to find out what the Fisher King's story is.
\end{quote}
There is something key to these cards; they are not part of the standard
deck; Eliot has changed them to suit his purposes, which lead[s] me to believe
that he has reversed the meanings as well.  The siren lures us to our death,
but is it a physical death or a spiritual one[?] I tend to believe that this
section is still very much concerned with the death awakening motif
described earlier.
\begin{quote}
The wet-dry polarity feeds the image of resurrection also through the
references to bulbs, tubers and corpses planted in the garden.  They are
lying dead
under the ground, but the sweet showers of April (or the shower of rain that
surprised Marie) bring them back to life.   The bulbs bring me to the
hyacinths.
 Strange lines.  Maybe the reason the hair was wet in the Hyacinth garden
was
that whoever the wet-haired-person is has just come up from the bottom of the
lake.  No wonder then that the hyacinth girl could not speak and her eyes
failed.
\end{quote}

`The hyacinth girl', who may or not be the narrator herself,%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{\label{wayback2}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Though I do not typeset it as a quotation, this block of text
is evidently adapted from Anya Pavlov-Shapiro, `The Water
Motif---Both Positive and Negative---in Eliot's \emph{The Waste
  Land}' (For International Baccalaureate English 
1998).  A link is given below:
\url{http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/rsrcs/eng/eli/waspav.htm}.
Again, this is not directly accessible today (April 3, 2011), but can
be reached through \url{http://waybackmachine.org/}.  The
relevant passage reads, `Next, the narrator
describes ``The hyacinth girl'' (36) (who may or not be the narrator
himself): ``Your arms full, and your hair wet'' (38). It is implied in
this scene that the girl has either just been raped, or has had at
least a negative sexual experience. Each of these references to water
corresponds to the waste land; the usually pure symbolism of water is
twisted to become negative, and in each scene there is some perversion
such as rape.' 
Among other things, Lewis has changed Pavlov-Shapiro's `himself' to `herself'.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
appears,
`Your arms full, and your hair wet'---[which]
implies in this scene that the girl has
either just come from a sexual encounter, or that she has just been raped---a
possible connection with the Fisher King's wound, which is generally a
sexual one.\footnote{In Mr Lewis's previous email, see note~\ref{wound} and the quotation following.} 
Each of these references to water corresponds to the usually
pure symbolism of water, which is then twisted, and in each scene there is
some perversion such as rape.
\begin{quote}
Finally there's the crowd of dead coming over London Bridge.  Somehow I
imagine these as the dead of the Great War.  Thus this part of the poem
vibrates
against the Marie-references to the nobility of Europe and all the politics
that
led to that war.
\end{quote}
I have a bit more to add and will try to get it all out later tonight, keep
on Googling, there is a ton of stuff out there that can help us.  I have
found (and borrowed) bits from
\begin{quote}\centering
\makebox[0pt][c]{\url{http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/rsrcs/eng/eli/waspav.htm}}\\
\makebox[0pt][c]{\url{http://cityhonors.buffalo.k12.ny.us/city/rsrcs/eng/eli/elihea1.htm}}
\end{quote}
(so don't hold me to any plag[i]aristic intent).\footnote{See
  notes~\ref{wayback1} and~\ref{wayback2} above.  I do not know about
  Mr Lewis's intent; but his quotation of the words of others, without
  clearly indicating \emph{that} he is quoting, is plagiarism.} 
I have also seen links between Eliot and <his  relationship between> his
friend Jean Verdenal. 
\begin{quote}
In 1910 T.S. Eliot went to Paris to study for a year
at the Sorbonne. He roomed at a \emph{pension} where he met and befriended another
young man, Jean Verdenal. Verdenal was killed in 1915 in a World War I
battle.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Text found at \url{http://world.std.com/~raparker/pub/jean.html} (April 5, 2011).}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
Apparently this death highly influenced Eliot's writing of \emph{The
Waste Land.}
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]\index{Thomas}
    Ms Murray and Mr Lewis discuss the Wagner quotations in Eliot's poem.
As I recall there are three direct quotes,%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{At lines 31, 42, and 266.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
 two from \emph{Tristan} and one from
the \emph{Ring.} 

Eliot quotes the ditty sung by an unseen sailor at the beginning and also
quotes the description of a blank and bare sea at the beginning of Act III.

From the \emph{Ring,} Eliot quotes the nonsense syllables sung by the
Rheinmaidens in the first and last operas of the cycle.  These, like the
sailor's ditty from \emph{Tristan,} are the first things sung.

Mr Lewis seems to be mixing up \emph{Tristan} and \emph{Parsifal,}
Wagner's opera about 
the Grail legend---obviously relevant to the Jessie Weston book that
Eliot mentions in his notes as being important to his poem (and which I
read once upon a time).  While he doesn't quote any from Wagner's text of
\emph{Parsifal,} he does quote a line from a Verlaine poem entitled `Parsifal'%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{At line 202.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
(which I haven't read, so I don't know what relation, if any, it has to the
Wagner opera).
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
Thanks for setting me straight on that.
I knew it was somewhere in the 
recesses of my mind; I just haven't thought about these things in a while
and it gets to be a jumble.  Honestly, at some points I seem to be hitting the
limitation of my insight into \emph{The Waste Land,} while in other
places it seems
clear as a bell.  I imagine that has something to do with the great pains the
author took to wrap every nuance into each line (not to mention my own
forgetfulness).
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
    I haven't got a copy handy, and I can't claim to have the whole poem in my 
head, so can somebody tell me if, as I seem to remember. the London Bridge  
passage comes just after the `unreal city' passage, in which a number of 
metropolises of both the ancient and modern world are proclaimed unreal?  I 
think that goes along with my reading of the crowd as walking dead, but of 
course that particular association falls apart if the passages are at 
opposite ends of the poem.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    OK, let's see, \emph{The Waste Land} can be found at
    \begin{quote}\centering
\makebox[0pt][c]{\url{http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html}}
    \end{quote}
  so don't 
rush our and buy a copy if you don't have one.
`Unreal city' is <at> line 60 and [London] Bridge comes right after at 62.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Ms Murray wrote:
 \begin{quote}
 Finally there's the crowd of dead coming over London Bridge.  Somehow I
  imagine these as the dead of the Great War.  Thus this part of the poem
  vibrates
  against the Marie-references to the nobility of Europe and all the politics
  that
  led to that war.
\end{quote}
Mr Tourtelott wrote:
  \begin{quote}
  I read the crowd flowing over London Bridge---`So many, I had not thought
  Death had undone so many'---as an ordinary crowd flowing over London Bridge,
  all of them trapped in the nightmare Death-in-Life.  The poem teems with
  figures, it seems to me, who are neither properly alive nor dead,
  whose feelings are
  anesthetized and routinized.  The central figure in that regard---and she is
  in fact the central figure in the poem---is the typist who, after her
  meaningless tryst with the young man carbuncular, has the half-formed
  thought `Now that's done, and I'm glad it's over.'  (Remember that it is of
  this scene that Eliot says in the notes that `What Tiresias
  \emph{sees}\dots is the substance of the poem.')
\end{quote}
The city is real enough and clearly identified as London \emph{vis-\`a-vis} the
Church at Saint Mary Woolnoth, and the bridge as London Bridge, though I
think it is not incorrect to assume that it is also the City of the Dead.
The conversation with Stetson is an enactment of lines from Baudelaire <which
opens>: `ghosts converse with passers-by in broad daylight', and ends with
another line from the same poet, <that> which I translated in my time at
 SJC: `\emph{Hypocrite lecteur}'\footnote{The email has `Lecture'.}
 ---my brother!---bringing the reader into the
 poem with the 
other personages. We are none of us exempt from Eliot's damning good graces.
This is a very good place draw the line because it takes us back to
 Ms Murray's question about dryness and water.  There is a sort of sense of
 being
in two places at once, of being in time and out of time that is being
portrayed here: one the water, a metaphor for the flowing of time; the other
the dryness, the Waste Land itself, where there is death and dying and
damnation, the cessation of time.  \emph{The Waste Land} seems to move in and out of
human time, evoking the relativity of Einstein or the theory of Bergson that
there is relative mathematical time and perceived human time. The poem moves
back and forth juxtaposing the myths and symbolism of the ancient past with
the memories [of] the recent war, stories of London and the present.
Consecutively the poem imposes the cycle of spiritual birth, maturity, death
and rebirth, as the cyclical core of human spiritual comprehension. To see
this he gives us the Oracle, a Sibyl, the blind seer Tiresias and the Tarot
attributed to Thoth, councilor to Osiris, whose own fertility ritual took
place in the spring, in April.

Ms Murray writes:
\begin{quote}
The wet-dry polarity feeds the image of resurrection also through
the
references to bulbs, tubers and corpses planted in the garden.  They are
lying dead
under the ground, but the sweet showers of April (or the shower of rain that
surprised Marie) bring them back to life.   The bulbs bring me to the
hyacinths.
 Strange lines.  Maybe the reason the hair was wet in the Hyacinth garden
was
that whoever the wet-haired-person is has just come up from the bottom of the
lake.  No wonder then that the hyacinth girl could not speak and her eyes
failed.
\end{quote}
Hyacinth is a name alluding to the old myth,
\begin{quote}
Hyacinthus was a charming and
handsome Spartan youth, loved by both Apollo and Zephyrus. Hyacinthus
preferred the Sun-God to the God of the West, who sought to be revenged. One
day, when Apollo was playing quoits with the youth, a quoit that he threw
was blown by Zephyrus out of its proper course and it struck and killed
Hyacinthus. Apollo,\label{Apollo} stricken with grief, raised from his blood a purple
flower on which the letters `ai, ai', were traced, so that the cry of woe
might for evermore have existence on the earth.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Mrs M. Grieve, \emph{A Modern Herbal,} available at
\url{http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/h/hyawil43.html} (April 2, 2011) and other places.}
\end{quote}
Again there is a sense of
being in two places at once, of being in time, in the flower, the temporal,
and out of time, the sorrow of the god, that is being portrayed here\dots
I agree with Ms Murray that we should move on to the second section, it
just gets juicier.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
OK, I've read about the Fisher King---how he's wounded and so infertile and in 
pain, and his wound causes his country to become a Waste Land.  It will stay a 
Waste Land until the Fisher King is cured, which may or may not be by someone 
asking the right question.  
Other ingredients:  
\begin{compactitem}
\item 
The Grail, which may be a chalice or a cauldron or a fish platter.  
\item
The Fisher King's castle, which looks a lot like Neuschwanstein.  
\item
Parsifal---Wagner again.
\item
Isn't there also a lake, as in Lady of the Lake?  
\end{compactitem}
The website where I did this reading had a list of modern Grail literature, 
and this list included David Lodge's \emph{Small World.}   I slap my
forehead---what
an ignoramus I am.  I just read \emph{Small World} fairly recently and
thought it
was just a very amusing academic novel.  There's a character named Kingfisher 
who is cured of impotence when the young hero (Persse, for Percifal, naturally) 
asks the right question (at an academic conference).

I am going to dip into the second section now.  This is fun.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
    Oh that is good, I like it.  The only hyacinth I dredged up was Saint 
Hyacinth.  He did walk on water, left footprints too.

Mr Tourtelott, I think your imagining the many dead as Londoners going
about their daily lives makes perfectly good sense.  My idea about the
war dead comes from the
pervasive feeling of that period that \emph{so many} had died.  The actual 
reference is to the processions of the dead in the \emph{Inferno.}
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    I too remember seeing a reference to Dante for this line, oh wait, I found
it, \emph{Inferno} III, 55--7.\footnote{This is Eliot's note to line 63.} 
  \end{email}



  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
The `unreal city motif' appears three times in the poem.  The first, which we 
have discussed, is just before the London Bridge crowd.  The second is in 
conjunction with the appearance of `Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant' who 
invites the narrator to a (presumably dirty) weekend at the Metropole.  A 
Greek Smyrna merchant is, in the 1920s, a man from an unreal city, the 
Greeks having been pushed out by Kemal and the city burned.  There is no 
Smyrna anymore at this point, only Izmir.  The third repetition of the 
motif, which I had indeed, as I suspected, confused with the London Bridge 
section, comes in the final section, with a passage that I think even more 
explicitly refers to the Great War, its destruction of human life, and its 
large-scale destruction of civilization as symbolized by the final list of 
unreal cities:
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{369}{370}
  What are those hooded hordes swarming\\
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth\\
Ringed by the flat horizon only\\
What is the city over the mountains\\
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air\\
Falling towers\\
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria\\
Vienna London\\
Unreal
\end{myverse}
It is I think especially significant that the list of unreal cities ends 
with the narrator's own.  London, unlike Vienna, may be a capital of the 
victors, but the war has left it no more real than Vienna, all of whose 
power and empire have disappeared.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Fant]\index{Fant}
    Did this come up earlier?
`I'm not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, a true German.'
Translation of line 12 of \emph{The Waste Land.}
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Section II, `A Game of Chess', opens with at least five
    references to famous
women and queens of antiquity.  The opening passage itself is from \emph{Antony
and Cleopatra} (See Eliot's notes to \emph{The Waste Land}), Act 2,
Scene~2,\footnote{Eliot's note refers more precisely to line 190; this and the next read,  `The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, / Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold'.}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{77}{80}
  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)\\
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra\\
Reflecting light upon the table as\\
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,\\
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;\\!
\end{myverse}
but he has subtly changed the passage from Cleopatra's barge to a Chair.
Another famous queen in a chair is Cassiopeia. 
\begin{quote}
Perseus had recently slain
Medusa, the Gorgon, and had put its head in a bed of coral. He retrieved the
head and waved it in midst of the warring wedding party, instantly turning
them all to stone. In the group were both Cepheus and Cassiopeia. A contrite
Poseidon put both father and mother in the heavens. But because of
Cassiopeia's vanity, he placed her in a chair, which revolves around the
Pole Star, so half the time she's obliged to sit upside
down.\footnote{The text is on various
  webpages, such as
  \url{http://www.crystalinks.com/cassiopeia.html} (April 2, 2011).} 
\end{quote}
The Cupidon is
a naked infantile figure looking like the Roman god of love; and the sevenbranched candelabra, a possible reference to the Pleiades. In line 92 the
laquearia is from the \emph{Aeneid.} (See Eliot's notes to \emph{The Waste
  Land.}) This is from 
Virgil's description of a banquet given by Dido, Queen of Carthage, for
Aeneas, with whom the gods made her fall in love. Just as Queen Cleopatra
commits suicide due to her involvement with Anthony, Dido's passion for
Aeneas also leads to her suicide. We have seen the narrator, a little
girl, consulting a Tarot reader.  The images of these women invoke youth and
beauty and age and wisdom (second sight?). Does Eliot suggest that the
lives of women are as pieces on a chessboard? Have these women been
manipulated? And what about the enigmatic last line? 
\begin{quote}
\centering
  Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.
\end{quote}
 Taken from the mouth of
Ophelia? Is this reference in \emph{The Waste Land} as Ophelia died by drowning
while holding flowers just as the flower holding hyacinth girl in
Section I?  Why are these women, as pieces in a chess game, out of time? 
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock
  upon the door.} 
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{137}{137}
 And we shall play a game of chess,\\
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
\end{myverse}
Eliot means [to] compare the women of \emph{The Waste Land} to the action in Thomas
Middleton's play \emph{Women Beware Women} where in act II, scene ii, a woman,
Bianca, is seduced by the Duke of Florence in one room (in the play, the
upper stage) while in another room a game of chess between Livia and
Bianca's mother-in-law has moves paralleling the steps in the seduction.
There are as many references to women as sexual objects, both as prostitute:
%\poemlines2
\setlength{\vrightskip}{-1cm}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{`With my hair down, so.  What shall we do tomorrow?} 
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{131}{131}
`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?'
\end{myverse}
and in sexual servitude in marriage:
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a
  hot gammon,}  
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{163}{165}
  Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said\\
What you get married for if you don't want children?\\
\textsc{Hurry up please its time}\\
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,\\
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot---\\
\textsc{Hurry up please its time}\\
\textsc{Hurry up please its time}
\end{myverse}
Coming from section one where Eliot so strongly invokes rites of passage,
spiritual death and rebirth, time and timelessness, it seems here that Eliot
is again critical that women seem to have been left out of the equation,
that they have been objectified as sexual objects and not afforded the same
opportunities. (Reminds me of the arguments about no women on the SJC
reading list.) This smacks in the knowledge that Eliot was supposedly not
kind to women (or his wife) in real life.

That's all for now!
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]\index{Goree}
    Ms Murray writes:
\begin{quote}
My idea
 about the war dead comes from the 
 pervasive feeling of that period that \emph{so many} had
 died.  
\end{quote}
To whatever extent Eliot was talking about physical
death I personally connect it to the flu epidemic that
had recently killed more people than the Great War (I
think 25 million dead in only 6 months). I'm still
torn over exactly what `death' means at that point in
the poem, though.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Fant wrote: `Did this come up earlier?'
I think so, Ms Murray pointed out:
\begin{quote}
Marie is Marie Larisch\dots  Ludwig of Bavaria also drowned in
Starnbergersee.  So
these are the first deaths by water---fisher and king lying at the bottom of
the lake
\end{quote}
---which seemed pretty comprehensive to me.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Goree writes:
\begin{quote}
I'm still torn over exactly what `death' means at that point in the
poem, though.
\end{quote}
What are your choices? By that I mean what are you torn over? As I have said
before, my own sense of what death means here comes from the way in which
death and rebirth play cyclical roles in the open passages of
\emph{The Waste Land.} 
There is a sense here and hereafter, in time and out of time, being in
London, but also, at the same time, being in the city of the dead, torn by
war and disease. Again, Eliot uses death as a motif of the vegetal rites of
birth, death, and rebirth, the core of the human spiritual experience, whether
it is linked to the seasons and agriculture, or in [the] Christian rite of
Eucharist. I don't think that the one necessarily excludes the other.  There
is a sense of this has come before, and here we are, in the after, looking
back, trying to make sense of this thing that has happened, are we alive and
reborn, or are we a corpse? Has our society crumbled and decayed around us
or has it been renewed? I don't think that Eliot wants to answer these
question as much as pose them. But his links to the rites and myths of the
past are Jungian in that they seems to indicate this is something at the
core of humanity, something that we see and will see and then will see
again.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Fant]
    Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
I think so, Ms Murray pointed out\dots---which seemed pretty
comprehensive to me. 
\end{quote}
I meant something far more trivial; there was a recent thread about
Lithuanians and their relationship to Germans and anti-Semitism. Realizing
the poem predates the Holocaust, I merely want to point out that Eliot
appears to have had an opinion about Lithuanians that was expressed in the
poem.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]\mbox{}
[\emph{The Waste Land,} line 12:]
    \begin{quote}
\centering
      Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
    \end{quote}
`I'm not Russian at all, I come from Lithuania, a true German.'
I see\dots A few more observations.  The gender of the German noun Russin
indicates that the speaker is a woman. Note that this line is not in italics
as other lines in other non-English languages are. 
\begin{quote}
As this historical Marie
was born into the Wittelsbach royal house of Bavaria, far from Lithuania,\footnote{Text found at \url{http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/exmarie.html} (April 2, 2011).}
\end{quote}
Marie was close to her aunt and became her confidante. In 1877, at the age
of 19, a marriage was arranged for her and she became Countess Marie Laris[c]h.
\begin{quote}
By her own accounts the Countess had been serving as a go-between for the
Archduke Rudolph and Mary---\footnote{The three blocks of text quoted here are found in the order 2, 1, 3 at the page last cited.}

The body of the archduke, the heir to the
Austrian Empire, was found with the body of Marie (Mary) Vetsera, a baroness
who was his mistress.

---although, in her books, she wrote that she was at times
duped and at other times her good-nature was taken advantage of. 
Despite
this, when the affair came to its bloody end she suffered the wrath of the
imperial family and became the disgrace of Europe.
\end{quote}
Eliot's widow comments in
\emph{The Facsimile} (pp.~126-127) that the remarks that Eliot
included in \emph{The Waste Land} were taken verbatim from a
conversation that Eliot had with the Countess.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]\index{Eckstrom}
    If you are working your way through \emph{The Waste Land,} you may want to
    glance at the new biography of the first Mrs Eliot---Vivian
    Eliot.  The biography is full of florid prose and you will need to
    supply your own sophistication as to how a poet's life and his
    poetry overlap (because the biographer is far too simplistic).
    That said, the biographer burned her bridges with Eliot's estate
    and wrote about many topics that scholars who wish to be on good
    terms with Eliot's estate speak about in hushed terms to their
    graduate students---and never in print. 

I found my reading of \emph{The Waste Land} changed after reading it.  I
finally `got' what my old professors from graduate school kept hinting
about Eliot's male friendships and first marriage (1915) and how these
experiences made their way into \emph{The Waste Land} (1922). 

A Johnny may find the gossip in the book unseemly, but \emph{The Waste Land}
takes on a great deal of force as an elegiac poem after reading the
book. 
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
Mr Lewis, I'm puzzled---I don't think the narrator is meant to be a little 
girl.  The bit at the beginning about going on the sled at the Archduke's is 
said by Marie as a little girl, but it's just a snip from her
conversation.   I  
thought that the narrator was supposed to be Eliot/Tiresias?  I
haven't gotten 
very far in the chess game yet---will try to have something to say about it 
tomorrow.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
Ah yes I was wondering that myself, but since we hadn't crossed that bridge
I thought it best to leave it ambiguous at best. 
I think the best case for
her narration is the tense shift after the quote: it reverts back to a past
tense introduced in 8--16, that invokes the girl's commentary.  However, the
last two lines of the English passage introduce the second thematic strain,
the concept of time suspended into infinity, the speaker neither living nor
dead, looking into `the heart of light'.  The next passage changes tense
once again into past present, introducing the clairvoyant Madame Sosostris, and
working out this fortune seems to constitute the plot structure for the
remainder of the poem.  Since multiple shifts exist in this section of the
poem, it is difficult to tell who is the narrator. My best guess is the
girl, but the suggestion of past present and second sight lend weight to the
argument for Tiresias. Time shifts here are important. The future is told by
employing a vehicle, the cards, that belongs to the past (Greek or Egyptian).
The key is the final passage, a point you introduced Ms Murray, the `Fear
death by water'---the death of the innocent but also the chronological
movement of the poem, closely resembling the stream of consciousness, the
movement of speech that follows thought, like the conversation between Marie
and Eliot, that finally cements for me (although controversially)  that it
must be the little girl.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]
I apologize for the thesis statement in my subject line
(`\emph{The Waste Land} = \textsc{crap,} \emph{Four Quartets,} a worthy
farewell'), while adhering to it.

\emph{The Waste Land} is Eliot's way of self-indulging in the
privileged powers of an educated upper middle class   American expatriate.

\emph{Four Quartets} blossoms all of a sudden into a kind of widening humility
that speaks without the insufferable whining and self-pity and throttleable
self-con\-sciousness of the much more artificial and inexcusable
\emph{Waste Land.}

\emph{The Waste Land} is High Modernism at its absolute
worst---echoing in a tedious and pedantic voice the
oh-so-oh-I-am-so-lost-in-between-the-wars-so-I'll-quote-Dante woo woo
woo bullshit masturbatory public self-flagellation that weakens
its own argument and ought to have remained courageous, sick and silent.

There is no wisdom in it.   Pride goeth before a fall.

The wisdom only reaches Eliot, a soul twisted like a trained vine on the
\emph{zeitgeist,} in \emph{Four Quartets,} and he proves he read his Wilde, whose voice laughs
`art is knowing when to stop', as Old T.S. knew exactly when to stop when
\emph{Four Quartets} finished him.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Ms Eckstrom writes:
\begin{quote}
That said, the biographer burned her bridges with Eliot's estate and wrote
about many topics that scholars who wish to be on good terms with Eliot's
estate speak about in hushed terms to their graduate students---and never
in print.
\end{quote}
No news here, try reading Hemingway's \emph{The Garden of Eden} or look at the
way males and females switch roles in \emph{A Farewell to Arms.} 
Guess what,
writers are bisexuals, some writers hate women, Eliot was not an exception,
other writers even criticized him (Eliot) in their works, look for
references to Eliot's marriage in Hemingway's `Cat in the Rain' or
Fitzgerald's `Mr \&  Mrs Eliot'.  They say everything from that he is a bad
lover to he is an obnoxious misanthrope and one should feel sorry for Mrs
Eliot.  I agree completely, but should this imply he is a bad poet, is \emph{The
Waste Land} less of a poem because of it?
I am not sure.
Is there no wisdom in
it as Mr Breslin points out?---
\begin{quote}
\emph{The Waste Land} is Eliot's way of
self-indulging in the privileged powers of an educated upper middle class
American expatriate.
\end{quote}
Guess what, so is your St John's education. Get
used to it. Eliot is a perennial snob. He doesn't like people, he likes
literature, and he knows literature. He also knows language and the arts. To
say there is no wisdom is to cut yourself off from the heritage that is
Western civilization. To say Eliot is a horrid person is correct, to say
that makes him a bad poet, is not. He is dry, urban[e], and without passion,
but without wisdom? That seems simplistic, at best, a passionate argument
meant to inflame, but without insight, point or place.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]
    I like \emph{Four Quartets} and `Prufrock'.

I just think self-serious high modernism is bad art.   It's a matter of
taste.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Pierce]
    I wrote most of the following yesterday.

I'm glad people are interested in talking about Eliot's poem.  As
Mr Billington has also indicated, Collingwood took \emph{The Waste Land} as an 
outstanding example of good art.  This is a reason why I want to make
sense of the poem: I enjoy \emph{Collingwood}'s writing.  Otherwise I know
little of 20th-century poetry.

Eliot's Waste Land is two words, not one.  Eliot's name has no doubled
consonants.  (This corrects the errors in some emails.)

A web-source for the text is 
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html}  
\end{quote}
I took
this text and marked it up as a \TeX{} file, from which I created
\texttt{dvi, ps,} and 
\texttt{pdf} files for printing: they are all in the directory:\footnote{The
  address does not exist anymore.}
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://www.math.metu.edu.tr/~dpierce/poetry/Eliot/wasteland/}
\end{quote}
However, I haven't figured out the best way to indent lines with \TeX.
Can anybody propose any \emph{significance} to the various sorts of
indentations used in printed versions of Eliot's work?

I'm also reading (Turkish poet) N\^az\i m Hikmet's `epic novel in verse',
\emph{Human Landscapes from my Country;} Like Eliot, Nazim uses indentations of
various lengths, and Ay\c se tells me that N\^az\i m learned this style from
Mayakovsky.
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://mayakovsky.com/}
\end{quote}
(All I know about \emph{him,}
I think, is 
that a poem of his about worker-poets forms a part of a wall-sized collage
about the Russian Revolution in the Hirshhorn Museum;  the Hirshhorn
re-displayed this piece when the USSR fell.)

Oh, I compared the text of \emph{The Waste Land} on Bartleby (which is from an
early publication) with the text in the book of collected poems of Eliot
that I have.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{\label{text}T.S. Eliot, \emph{The Complete
    Poems and Plays 1909-1950,} San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
  1971.}  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
I found minor variations, mostly in these indentations. 
The later version doesn't use an apostrophe in
`\textsc{Hurry up please it's time}'.
Also a 3-letter non-English word in the
last stanza is different in the two versions.

In my \TeX{} file, I haven't (yet) edited Eliot's notes (to italicise
titles, for example).

About the poem itself: Ms Murray and Mr Lewis, you seem to be approaching
it now as a puzzle.  That's okay, and I will do the same below.

However, following Collingwood (as I understand him), I would say that our
appreciation of the poem \emph{as art} does not require us to understand the
allusions.  Of course, maybe we can't understand the poem as art unless we
are as hyper-educated as the poet himself.  In that case, if we don't come
to the poem as hyper-educated people ourselves, then maybe we should pass
it by.

Now, one allusion I do seem to recognize:
\settowidth{\vgap}{Which I am forbidden to see.}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{\vin I do not find}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{54}{55}
\vin I do not find\\
The Hanged Man.  Fear death by water.\\!
\end{myverse}

I think Mr Lewis mentioned \emph{The Tempest.}  In the first scene, Gonzalo
finds the boatswain to be destined to hang from the gallows; therefore
the boatswain will not drown; therefore nobody else from the ship is likely to
drown.

But if the boatswain were not doomed to hang, then Gonzalo \emph{would} fear
death by water.

Back to line 2; I read somewhere that it alludes to Whitman's `When Lilacs
Last in the Dooryard Bloomed'
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://www.netpoets.com/classic/poems/070015.htm}
\end{quote}
Would Eliot's poem bear line-by-line scrutiny?  Probably Mr Breslin has
just said `No.'

How profound is it to say that April is not only cruel, but cruelest of
all months?  And what does it mean to mix memory and desire?  I can give
some answers, but perhaps only as if I were writing a high-school essay.

April is cruel because it follows winter; but the voice of the first
stanza changes over into the voice of one who avoids a harsh winter by
going south.  Is this important, or is is perhaps inattentiveness on
Eliot's part---or on Ezra Pound's part, since he cut a lot out of Eliot's
original work?
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Breslin writes
    \begin{quote}
I just think self-serious high modernism is bad art.   It's a matter
of
taste.
    \end{quote}
Mr Breslin, I apologize to you and Ms Eckstrom, It was late last night and
something you said must have touched a nerve and I did not mean to come off
so high-handed, and [I] certainly should never be allowed near a keyboard in such
a state of mind.
However, your comments about \emph{The Waste Land,}
that it is `High
Modernism at its absolute worst' and that `there is no wisdom in it',
intrigue me at second glance, and I invite you, if you are so inclined, to
join our conversation, since you seem to have so much insight into the poem,
and show us, through your poetic analysis of said poem, how your
observations hold up in light of your poetic interpretations. Again we are
the `privileged powers of an educated American upper middle class', and in
my view \emph{The Waste Land} is just the kind of poem that our
weighty classical
education prepares us for. I have no love of Eliot, the man, \emph{per
  se,} however 
I do like a good riddle, and cracking the \emph{Waste Land} code
intrigues me, Why 
so many quotes and references, why so many allusions?  Eliot showing
off? Mr Breslin, Eliot is arguably a genius, \emph{The Waste Land} is
arguably a literary 
giant of the 20th century, and while he is no Joyce, \emph{The Waste Land} no
\emph{Ulysses,} surely his motivation (Eliot) is worthy of our consideration.
Incidentally, Does anyone know of the \emph{Ulysses--Waste Land}
connection? I read
somewhere that Eliot was inspired by Joyce's novel when he sat down to write
his poem, but I don't enough Joyce to ferret out the references.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    Mr Lewis writes (I've quoted only a fragment of a sentence, but don't
think the quotation is misleading for all that):
\begin{quote}
Eliot is arguably a genius, \emph{The Waste Land} is arguably a
literary giant of 
the 20th century.
\end{quote}
This seems true, of course, but what Mr Breslin said (and I agree) is that
the arguments for at least the latter proposition are not strong ones.  I
myself would argue that Eliot is a minor poet with a strong sense of
diction, which carries some of his poems over his lack of originality.  I
loved Eliot in high school (in the 60s, when modernism was still a secular
religion) but became increasingly dissatisfied with him.  I reread \emph{The
Waste Land} after college, and found it much worse when I knew more about
where he was stealing things from.  The end of my appreciation of Eliot
came when I read through the \emph{Penguin Book of Italian Poetry} (or something
like that) and discovered that the first line of `Ash Wednesday' was lifted
wholesale from a famous early Italian sonnet.\footnote{\emph{Perch'i' no spero di tornar giammai} (`Because I do not hope to turn again') \url{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Cavalcanti} (April 5, 2011).}

One can, of course, treat \emph{The Waste Land} as a puzzle, but treating a poem
that way seems to me to diminish its aesthetic point.

(Give me Frost any old day of the week---now there's a poet!)
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Thomas writes
    \begin{quote}
  One can, of course, treat \emph{The Waste Land} as a puzzle, but treating a
poem that way seems to me to diminish its aesthetic point.
\end{quote}
You say `seems' like you are not sure. What is a poem, a fancy bunch of
words to lift and inspire? Only god can make a tree? Or does it provoke us
to think, to look at the world in a new way? Isn't that what Eliot is doing?
He borrows pieces from the past, jumbles them up, reshuffles the deck if you
will, and then puts it back out in a way that is new and challenging. On the
shoulders of giants as it were. Kandinsky writes in his \emph{Concerning the
Spiritual in Art} that to reproduce the art of a bygone age is to produce
something stillborn, something lifeless; but is that all that Eliot is
doing?
\begin{quote}
Many critics have written of the antitheses, the antinomies, and the
contrasts in \emph{The Waste Land.} These exist in abundance and are not just
accidents of inclusion; they comprise a basic and indispensable aspect of
the poem's technique, progression, and meaning. Many such polarities could
be identified in the poem: universal-personal,\label{up} male-female,
conscious-unconscious, hope-fear, and others. But the technique of
contradiction goes deeper than this in the poem's structure. 
[Many of its symbols are involved in what I should like to call
  `parallelodoxes'.]
Many of its
symbols [, that is,] simultaneously develop in antithetical directions.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Headings, `Symbols in T.S. Eliot's \emph{The Waste Land}'
  (note~\ref{wayback1}).
The bracketed phrases are supplied by me from the source.} 
  %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
That is what I
meant by a puzzle. And this seems entirely new. A bit dry perhaps, but that,
for me, adds to the overall tone of the poem.
\begin{quote}
(Give me Frost any old day of the week---now there's a poet!)
\end{quote}
I am really more of an e.e.~cummings man myself.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    I've been looking back over the second section trying to figure out what is
going on here, but it is proving elusive, I couldn't help but notice that
Ms Murray's water allusions have changed, is there a new meaning here:
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock
  upon the door}   
\settowidth{\vgap}{What shall we ever do?}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{135}{135}
\vin 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.
\end{myverse}
Lidless eyes that recall the Phoenician sailor, the pearls for eyes, taking
us back to the previous water allusion, but here the water is avoided, the
modernity of the car is used as an escape. Do the trappings of the modern
world distract us from our spirituality? Are the old gods of death and
rebirth, gone forever? The symbol of water is ambiguous, and is definitely
different from line nine of the first section:%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Part of the following quotation appeared on
  page~\pageref{Symbols}; see note~\ref{wayback1}.  The passage quoted
  here is preceded in the source by `The symbol of water, for
  instance, is already present ambiguously in line nine of the first
  section:'} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
The shower of rain that comes
over the Starnbergersee both heralds the summer and makes the speaker run
for shelter.\footnote{Mr Lewis inserted a paragraph break here, which
  is not in the source.} 
The absence of water and the thirst for it enter in line 24, `the dry stone
[gives] no sound of water'; in line 42, `\emph{Oed' und leer das
  Meer}'\label{Meer}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Again, Mr Lewis and the source both have `Oed and
  leer dos Meer'.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
(`Wide and empty the sea'), 
\end{quote}
water carries both positive and negative connotations.%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Mr Lewis's interpolation replaces `water is both a negative
  and a positive symbol: it may carry Isolde and her healing arts to
  the dying Tristan, but as yet it is waste and barren. The fear of
  death by water is first made explicit by Madame Sosostris.'  This is
  followed in the source by a paragraph break.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
Both
sides of this ambiguous symbol are inconspicuously present in the game of
chess: `The hot water at ten./And if it rains, a closed car at four'; and
again the negative side is seen through the allusion to Ophelia, who drowned
herself: `Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good
night.'
\end{quote}
 (Philip R. Headings)\footnote{\label{finally}Finally Mr Lewis names his source, albeit without having indicated exactly what he has taken from there.}
\begin{quote}
Whereas water is usually seen as desirable and purifying; here it is merely
for a regular bath, or something to get away from. This is characteristic of
the deadening of the people to nature and beauty, as part of their spiritual
death. The pair's boredom with life ties into the section's theme that sex
without love in the modern world has become a battle within and between the
sexes. This is yet another aspect of the waste land, and parallels the
negative symbolism of the water; whereas the couple should be happy and
loving, they are bored and disinterested, almost at war. 
\end{quote}
(Pavlov-Shapiro)\label{PS}\footnote{See notes~\ref{wayback2} and~\ref{finally}.}
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    Mr Lewis writes:
\begin{quote}
You say `seems' like you are not sure.
\end{quote}
Not at all.  I am absolutely sure about how it appears to me.  I am not
insisting that it must appear to you that way, partly as a matter of
courtesy and partly as a matter of principle.  The principle is that one
can be blinded to actual qualities in works of art for personal reasons,
and that others may see such qualities.  This principle, on the other hand,
when applied to my dislike of Milton, led people to claim that I was simply
wrong.  (People blinded to actual positive qualities in works of art may
also see actual qualities that those who appreciate the work are in turn
blinded from appreciating.  Wagner is the prime example, for me, of this
paradoxical attribute of works of art:  one may be blinded by appreciation
from seeing the deleterious inherent in the work.  Thus, those who hate and
those who love a work of art may be both responding to something real in
the work.)

There are writers who one must puzzle out to get.  But once one has puzzled
out what they are getting at, one has to make the further assessment of
whether the work of puzzle-decoding was worth it.  The rationale that such
puzzle-making is a manner of `making things new' was offered by Gertrude
Stein in defense of her odd writings.  But other than being fractured,
there is often not enough point in Stein to make the effort worthwhile.

James Joyce is also a puzzle-making author.  I find his work through
\emph{Ulysses} worth it (although some of \emph{Ulysses} is pretty extreme in that
regard).  After I graduated from law school I thought I would make an
effort to get through \emph{Finnegans Wake,} but gave up after about
30 pages.  It
was clear that, with the help of the various commentaries I had available,
I could have made my way through it, but it also seemed that the puzzle
making had swamped any real aesthetic impulse and I didn't think that the
effort was worth it.  (This was the first time, by the way, that I had not
completed a book I had started.  I even made it all the way through the two
volumes of John Gower's \emph{Confessio Amatis,} the Middle English poetic
equivalent of disco.)

James Merrill is a puzzle-making poet who I do like, although for me the
narrative thread of \emph{The Changing Light at Sandover} was
necessary to get me through the puzzle aspects.

And Robert Frost is perhaps the most difficult poet to read well, because
he doesn't provide any of the cubist bumps of puzzle-making modernists.
That many people find him `easy' is due, no doubt, to the fact that some of
his poems are regularly read in junior high schools.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Thomas wrote:]
    \begin{quote}
There are writers who one must puzzle out to get.  But once one has puzzled
out what they are getting at, one has to make the further assessment of
whether the work of puzzle-decoding was worth it.
\end{quote}
Perhaps it is safe to say (if safe has any meaning here) that beauty is in
the eye of the beholder.
You write, and rather eloquently I might add, of an impressive array of
books for which you have had varying degrees of success in decoding, but
first and foremost you must like what you do, or you will never find the
pleasure in it. When I sit down and take a bite out of a poem, as I often
do, I enjoy it. The better the poet, the more fun I have, as I said before,
Eliot is interesting because `the antinomies and the contrasts in \emph{The
Waste Land} exist in abundance and are not just accidents of inclusion; they
comprise a basic and indispensable aspect of the poem's technique,
progression, and meaning.'

I tend to agree with your observation that 
\begin{quote}
the rationale that such
puzzle-making is a manner of `making things new' was offered by
Gertrude Stein in
defense of her odd writings.  But other than being fractured, there is often
not enough point in Stein to make the effort worthwhile.
\end{quote}
And while I have
no love of Stein, I would only add: What is new? It seems to me that almost
everything comes from the reworkings of the past, which makes understanding
the past, and how it weaves itself into something like \emph{The Waste Land,} that
much more important.  (Isn't it at the core of our common education?)

Mr Breslin writes of wisdom, I don't know from wisdom, but I don't usually
spend my day thinking about things like `universal-personal, male-female,
conscious-unconscious, hope-fear'\footnote{See page~\pageref{up}.} and so, when I find these things in a poem
that causes me to think about those things and how they appear in my own
life, I tend to believe a poem has done its job, regardless of much (or how
little) the poem made me work to get there.

I don't really want to argue, it seems to me a waste of energy, and because
in reading your last response I get the sense that we are not so different.
I am just not so ready to dismiss Eliot as some. The poem is interesting.
Many of its symbols simultaneously develop in antithetical directions. I
like being asked to hold two different and antithetical ideas in my head at
the same time, and, after reading some of their posts, I would think that
would also appeal to a great many `listers'.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
    Just bouncing onto a new topic here:

My introduction to Eliot (outside of seeing \emph{Cats} in
high school) was in my senior language class at SJC.
We read \emph{Murder in the Cathedral,} \emph{The Waste Land} and
\emph{Four Quartets.} 

At that point in my life I wanted to be a professional
composer, was completely immersing myself in Schenker,
did my preceptorial on Beethoven's string quartets,
and I had for my senior language tutor Ms Blettner,
who had also been my sophomore music tutor.

So, I ended up reading Eliot looking to see how he
addressed the questions of structuring a work of art
over an extended period of time, like composers do
(after `Burnt Norton' I saw there was nothing at all
novel about my approach, except to me).

My analysis of \emph{The Waste Land} was hopeless, because I
didn't `get' sonata form at that point. But I turned a
corner (after and thanks largely to the Beethoven
precept) with `Burnt Norton'.  It hit me that if
\emph{The Waste Land} or any of the \emph{Quartets} were pieces of
music, you would of course repeat section III after
playing section IV; it usually doesn't even need to be
marked. `Fire Sermon' is a scherzo and `Death by
Water' is its trio. It was the same problem of `3, 4,
and 5 in 1' that composers always face and that lead[s]
to the `sonata form' in the first place. For me, at
least, hearing `Fire Sermon' as a \emph{frame} for `Death
by Water' rather than as just a predecessor finally
made the whole poem `work'.

The downside of looking at the poems this way was that
I almost never bothered to figure out what the words
`meant'; I only thought about their rhythm, their
sound, and sometimes the images they brought to my
mind (I still don't know what the Sanskrit at the end
means; I just know it sounds like thunder to me). 

Does anybody else read Eliot that way? Or, does
anybody feel that it does violence to his work to
barely care about what the words mean?
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Goree writes:
\begin{quote}
The downside of looking at the poems this way was that
I almost never bothered to figure out what the words
`meant'; I only thought about their rhythm, their
sound, and sometimes the images they brought to my
mind (I still don't know what the Sanskrit at the end
means; I just know it sounds like thunder to me).
\end{quote}
[From Eliot's note on line 402:%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{This is the line number of the printed text cited in note~\ref{text}; but the site \url{http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/} (April 3, 2011) numbers it as 401.}]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
 `Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize, control). The fable of the
meaning of the Thunder is found in the
\emph{Brihadaranyaka--Upanishad,} 5, 1.  A 
translation is found in Deussen's \emph{Sechzig Upanishads des Veda,} p.~489.
\end{quote}
[From a supplement to that note:%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The following can be found for example at the site just cited, or at the link provided by Ms Murray (p.~\pageref{extended-notes}).}]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
The Hindu fable referred to is that of gods, men, and demons each in turn
asking of their father Prajapati, `Speak to us, O Lord.' To each he replied
with the one syllable `DA', and each group interpreted it in a different
way: `Datta',\label{Datta2} to give alms; `Dayadhvam', to have compassion; `Damyata', to
practice self-control. The fable concludes, `This is what the divine voice,
the Thunder, repeats when he says: DA, DA, DA: ``Control yourselves; give
alms; be compassionate.'' Therefore one should practice these three things:
self-control, alms-giving, and compassion.'  
\end{quote}
Also [from Eliot's note to the last line of the poem]:
\begin{quote}
 Shantih. Repeated as here,
is a formal ending to an Upanishad. `The Peace which passeth understanding'
is a feeble translation of the conduct of this word.\footnote{The text cited in note~\ref{text} has `\thinspace``The peace which passseth understanding'' is our equivalent to this word.'}
\end{quote}
[Mr Goree again:]
\begin{quote}
Does anybody else read Eliot that way? Or, does
anybody feel that it does violence to his work to
barely care about what the words mean?
\end{quote}
I often read poetry trying to decipher the meter first, the words second.
There are allusions to music in the section you speak of, and I don't think
it accidental that you should compare it to a sonnet.  Line 192 references
\emph{The Tempest,} Act I, Scene ii:
\poemlines0
\setlength{\vgap}{-1cm}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin[\textsc{Ferdinand:}]\\
Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?\\
It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon\\
Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,\\
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,\\
This music crept by me upon the waters,\\
Allaying both their fury and my passion\\
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,\\
Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.\\
No, it begins again.

\vin\textsc{Ariel} \emph{sings:}\\
Full fathom five thy father lies;\\
Of his bones are coral made;\\
Those are pearls that were his eyes:\\
Nothing of him that doth fade\\
But doth suffer a sea-change\\
Into something rich and strange.\\
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell\\
\end{myverse}
Incorporating music and yet another `death by water'. I have to admit the
musical aspect of it never occurred to me. Why does the nightingale sing in
the desert? What is the Shakespearean rag?\footnote{Eliot has `Shakespeherian', but this is never noted in the discussion.}
 Music and \emph{The Waste Land,} very
interesting Mr Goree.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]    
Mr Lewis writes:
\begin{quote}  
  What are your choices? By that I mean what are you
  torn over? As I have said
  before, my own sense of what death means here comes
  from the way in which
  death and rebirth play cyclical roles in the open
 passages of \emph{The Waste Land.}
\end{quote}
But I see two deaths in \emph{The Waste Land.} There's the
Fisher King / Robert Graves / Death That Leads to
Rebirth / That's Why April is Cruel `death', the death
that life comes back from, and there's the Soul
Sucking / Dysthymic / Dystopian `death', the death that
doesn't seem to lead to regeneration.

Compare Marie in `Burial of the Dead' with the woman
Tiresias sees in `Fire Sermon' (who I guess I see as
an older Marie after the aristocratic way of life
disappeared). There was something\dots maybe not erotic,
but something like erotic, in the sled and hyacinth
scenes. But the actual sex scene in `Fire Sermon' is
about the least erotic description of sex I've ever
read:
\poemlines5
\settowidth{\versewidth}{The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{236}{240}
  The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,\\
Endeavours to engage her in caresses\\
Which are still 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.
\end{myverse}
Something has died between the sled ride and then.

I don't know. Maybe Eliot's point was that having your
soul die also leads to a rebirth. That's not how I
feel about the poem, though: I feel like some kinds of
death do just send you underground to wait until
spring, but other kinds `mummify' you and I don't see
Eliot offering a way out. To myself I called the
`good' kind `wet' deaths and the `bad' kind `dry'
deaths (hence my mummification image).

If I knew that the rain ends up saving the dry red
people I would probably say that Eliot is saying all
kinds of death lead to rebirth. I don't see that (I
don't see the ending as `hopeful' in any sense), and
so I don't think Eliot considers all kinds of death to
be equal.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    Mr Goree writes:
    \begin{quote}
The downside of looking at the poems this way was that I almost never
bothered to figure out what the words `meant'; I only thought about their
rhythm, their sound, and sometimes the images they brought to my mind (I
still don't know what the Sanskrit at the end means; I just know it sounds
like thunder to me).

Does anybody else read Eliot that way? Or, does anybody feel that it does
violence to his work to barely care about what the words mean?
    \end{quote}
As I said, I was mostly interested in Eliot in high school.  (In
speech tournaments I had some success with recitals of part 2 of
\emph{The Waste Land.}) 
I mostly didn't pay attention to what the words meant, but I did love the
`music' of it.  I think that my decline in appreciation may have been
occasioned upon my increasing comprehension of the allusions he made.

Whether this way of reading Eliot does violence or not is a matter of
opinion.  In many respects, I would argue that the multiplicity of
allusions and actual theft of words may have been somewhat necessary to
Eliot as a compositional matter, but may not be the respect in which the
poems really come across well.  Just as Berg, for example, used strict
dodecaphonic procedures and musical acronyms (if that's the word I want) in
composing his violin concerto:  one doesn't really have to know how this
all works to respond to the beauty of that piece.  Thus, ignoring the
technical mechanics of creation doesn't constitute `doing violence to' a
work of art.  What seems odd is to class the linguistic meaning of words as
mere technical mechanics of creation in a poem, since this is true for few
other poets.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    Mr Lewis writes (again I quote only a fragment of his sentence):
\begin{quote}
I don't think it accidental that you [Mr Goree] should compare it to a
sonnet.
\end{quote}
Actually, I don't think Mr Goree compared \emph{The Waste Land} to a sonnet.  He
used the term `sonata form', which refers not to the form of a sonnet, but
to a form usual in Classical and Romantic music.  (I'm using the term
`Classical' not in its wider application, but in its narrower use to refer,
basically, to Hadyn, Mozart and Beethoven.)  If he had compared the big
poem to a sonnet, the correct term would have been `sonnet form'.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Thanks, I apologize for being so sloppy, and I will endeavor to try harder
for you in the future Mr Thomas.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
    Mr Lewis [quotes:] 
    \begin{quote}
    `Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize,
 control).
 \end{quote}
Ah, thanks. I actually think I remember `datta' from
my \emph{Teach Yourself Sanskrit} book that I keep starting
(mostly I just remember the declension of \emph{ashva}
[horse] and page after endless page of sandhi tables).
\begin{quote}
  and I don't think
  it accidental that you should compare it to a
  sonnet.  Line 192 references
 the Tempest Act I\dots
\end{quote}
Oops\dots did I say sonnet? I meant sonata.
\emph{The Waste Land} reminded me of the musical sonata form
because both use nested structures in groups of 3, 4,
and 5 to present contrasting themes as a whole over a
period of time.
\begin{quote}
Incorporating music and yet another `death by
water'. I have to admit the
musical aspect of it never occurred to me. Why does
the nightingale sing in
 the desert? What is the Shakespearean rag? 
\end{quote}
We listened to a record of \emph{The Waste Land} read by Alec
Guinness once\dots his Shakespearean rag was a little
disappointing.

Where I saw music in \emph{The Waste Land} was in its larger
structure; it's like a `classical' (\emph{i.e.}~Haydn, Mozart
or Beethoven) symphony, with 5 sections:
\begin{compactenum}[I.]
\item 
Two contrasting themes are exposed and developed.
\item
Two contrasting themes are exposed but not developed.
\item
A single theme is varied.
\item
A contrasting theme is exposed very delicately (in the symphony III is
repeated here).
\item
A single theme is contrasted with alternatives.
\end{compactenum}
I was just surprised at how well \emph{The Waste Land} matched
that pattern, though after reading `Burnt Norton'
later I realized this was probably quite deliberate on
Eliot's part.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    I am still working on a response to your Hyacinth post but allow me to
quip\dots
\begin{quote}
Oops\dots did I say sonnet? I meant sonata.
\emph{The Waste Land} reminded me of the musical sonata form
because both use nested structures in groups of 3, 4,
and 5 to present contrasting themes as a whole over a
period of time.
\end{quote}
No you got it right, it was I who was sloppy\dots
\begin{quote}
We listened to a record of \emph{The Waste Land} read by Alec
Guinness once\dots his Shakespearean rag was a little
disappointing.
\end{quote}
That's too funny\dots
\begin{quote}
I was just surprised at how well \emph{The Waste Land} matched
that pattern, though after reading `Burnt Norton'
later I realized this was probably quite deliberate on
Eliot's part.
\end{quote}
Again I would just like to compliment you on this bit of insight, I have
never seen or read anything on this, it strikes me as wholly original. Well
done!
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
    Mr Thomas writes:
\begin{quote}
In many respects, I would argue that the
multiplicity of
allusions and actual theft of words may have been
somewhat necessary to
Eliot as a compositional matter, but may not be the
respect in which the
poems really come across well.  
\end{quote}
Kind of like Ives's music (who takes it to the extent
of ripping himself off in his later works). Maybe it's
part of modernism. 
\begin{quote}
Just as Berg, for
example, used strict
dodecaphonic procedures and musical acronyms (if
that's the word I want) in
composing his violin concerto:  one doesn't really
have to know how this
 all works to respond to the beauty of that piece. 
\end{quote}
I'll confess first that I love and have always loved
dodecaphonic music. But I don't get any particular joy
out of the `connect the dots and find the tone rows'
analysis that I see everywhere. I see dodecaphony (and
atonalism in general) as tools a composer can use to
emphasize the non-tonal aspects of the music and their
role in creating structure; as with any tools they may
or may not be interesting but ultimately they are not
really the point of the piece.

I wonder if that's how I'm treating Eliot: the
allusions and borrowings in \emph{The Waste Land} (props to
whoever pointed out that it's two words---my bad) are
ways to divorce the poetry from literal narrative or
description. Berg gives us tones (calling it `atonal'
is incredibly deceptive in my opinion) that we are
finally free to consider and enjoy independently and
without expectation, and which each contribute
uniquely to the structure of the piece rather than
hinting at a preordained problem and solution. I don't
think Eliot took his poetry that far (or even that
poetry as I know can go `that far' or would want to),
but I see similarities---certainly I wouldn't say
that \emph{The Waste Land} had a `plot' or even a `subject' in
the most basic sense, any more than Berg's concerto is
in a `key'. But both pieces have remarkably deep and
fascinating (to me, at least) structures, which are
revealed in ways not traditional to the medium. 

I wonder if Eliot's allusions and thefts are similar
to Berg's allusions and theft[s] (the chorale in movement
4 of the Concerto comes to mind). In both cases I hear
something intellectually familiar but I experience it
as something new; I have to confront it in a way that
is not as comfortable as before. I get that feeling
more strongly with Berg than with Eliot but that may
just be because I know a lot more about music than I
know about poetry.
\begin{quote}
What seems odd is to class the
linguistic meaning of words as
mere technical mechanics of creation in a poem,
since this is true for few
 other poets.
\end{quote}
That's what seems odd to me about it as well, and
makes me question whether I'm right to do so.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Goree wrote:]
    \begin{quote}
I feel like some kinds of death do just send you underground to wait until
spring, but other kinds `mummify' you and I don't see Eliot offering a way
out. To myself I called the `good' kind `wet' deaths and the `bad' kind
`dry' deaths (hence my mummification image).
\end{quote}
I agree that these ideas of death play out in antithetical roles, that they
are of being in time and out of time.
One:
\begin{compactitem}
\item 
The water, a metaphor for the flowing of time.
\item
A stream of consciousness.
\item
The here and now of this mortal coil.
\item
The physical death that Eliot is confronting (possibly the death of his
friend, Jean Verdenal, possibly the soldiers of WWI or the victims of the
flu pandemic).
\end{compactitem}
The other:
\begin{compactitem}
\item
The dryness.
\item
The Waste Land itself, where there is death and dying and damnation.
\item
The cessation of time.
\item
The mummified corpse frozen for all eternity.
\end{compactitem}
\begin{quote}
If I knew that the rain ends up saving the dry red
people I would probably say that Eliot is saying all
kinds of death lead to rebirth. I don't see that (I
don't see the ending as `hopeful' in any sense), and
so I don't think Eliot considers all kinds of death to
be equal.
\end{quote}
I question whether or not the water can save anybody: I tend to think of the
drowning, the reference to Ophelia. I agree in that I don't think `hopeful'
is what Eliot is after; I think he is trying just as hard to sort out these
questions as we are, placing us in the poem along side of him
\emph{\`a la}
Baudelaire. As I remarked in the section on the handful of dust: There seems
to be a contrast between the bodies in the crypts waiting to be reborn, and
the parishioners in the pews looking for salvation. I keep coming back to the
water, baptism or drowning. I agree when you [say] that all kinds of deaths are
not equal, the Hanged Man, the death of the wicked, death by water, the
accidental death, the death of the innocent. I think back to how the little
hyacinth girl resembles the drown[ed] Ophelia, for me it all comes down to the
myth of Hyacinth:
\begin{quote}
Apollo, stricken with grief, raised from his blood a purple
flower on which the letters `ai, ai', were traced, so that the cry of woe
might for evermore have existence on the earth.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{See page~\pageref{Apollo}.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
There are some deaths so terrible that God writes the name of the deceased
in eternity, and there are some that never look away from the shadow, the
things of this world, who dash into the car to get out of the rain, but
ultimately die sad little deaths that are empty and meaningless.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    Mr Goree writes:
\begin{quote}
I'll confess first that I love and have always loved dodecaphonic music.
\end{quote}
I wonder how many people can make that claim.  As for me, my early musical
loves were always of twentieth century music, and it took me a fair amount
of effort to `get' baroque, classical and romantic music.  I still recall
the first time I heard `Ionization'---I was probably in the 4th or 5th
grade, and it spoke to me immediately.  I also recall seeing a PBS
(actually---it would have been a `NET' [National Educational Television
network]) broadcast of \emph{Moses und Aron} (an opera that I will be attending
at the Met tonight, in fact) in the mid-60s.  I got the impression that the
opera was by Stravinsky (it's actually by Schoenberg), and searched in vain
for a recording of it for years.  (Record store clerks all assured me,
correctly, that Stravinsky had written no such opera, but failed to note
that a guy named Schoenberg had.)

The first opera I ever saw, when I was 10, was Honneger's \emph{Joan of Arc}
(written as an oratorio, actually), presented by the Santa Fe Opera, with
Vera Zorina in the lead role.  (Joan is a speaking part, and spends the
entire opera strapped to the stake which will eventually burn her; in Santa
Fe the stake was composed of red neon light tubes, which made a startling
effect when they came on at the end.)

In high school, I actually wore out LPs of music by Varese
(\emph{Am\'eriques}) and Stravinsky (\emph{Rite of Spring} and
\emph{Les Noches}).

One of the advantages of living in New York right now is that there are
musicians of very high caliber who play a lot of the music of the Second
Vienna School:  I'm talking in particular of the Met Opera Orchestra and
James Levine.  They don't just play the operas---they also perform in a
series of concerts at Carnegie Hall, both the orchestra as a whole and the
chamber ensemble.  In March the chamber ensemble will be performing a set
of works by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and in May the complete orchestra
will perform Schoenberg's \emph{Pelleas} and Berg's violin concerto (with
Christian Tetzlaff as the soloist).  And one of the most magnificent
concerts I've seen was their performance of Schoenberg's \emph{Guerre Lieder}
(which is not a 12-tone work, but is rather the apotheosis of Wagnerian
chromaticism).

The music of the Second Vienna School depends so intensely upon precision
and the precise timbre of the instruments playing it, that superlative
performances can make the music sing in a way that inferior performances do
not.  I recall, for example, seeing \emph{Wozzeck} (which is actually not
dodecophonic, although one couldn't really tell just from the way it
sounds) at the Met a few years back.  The orchestral playing was so
precise, that I for the first time understood why it was that Benjamin
Britten had hoped to study with Berg.  The orchestration of \emph{Peter Grimes}
was virtually copied from the orchestration of \emph{Wozzeck,} although the
thematic material is radically different; I don't think I could have heard
that without an almost supernatural precision from the orchestra.  (And, of
course, both operas concern protagonists who are outsiders in their own
society.)
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    I wrote:
\begin{quote}
The music of the Second Vienna School depends so intensely upon precision
and the precise timbre of the instruments playing it, that superlative
performances can make the music sing in a way that inferior performances do
not.
\end{quote}
This I probably stated a little opaquely.  It is a truism that superlative
performances are better than inferior ones, but I was aiming at a different
point.  The easiest way I know to state it is to compare the mature operas
of Verdi and Wagner.  Both are better heard in good performances than in
bad ones, but the main point of a Verdi opera will be hearable even in a
truly lousy performance, whereas at some point in the spectrum from good to
bad, a mature Wagner opera just stops making any sense at all.  It becomes
a random assortment of notes played and sung, to no apparent purpose.  And
some of this is due to the fact that Verdi was a practical man of the
theater, whereas Wagner was something of a lunatic.  Wagner wrote music
that no one could play, when he wrote it, and that people had to learn how
to play.  (The first time the prelude to Tristan was played in Paris, for
example, the critical reviews were mostly just baffled, and many people
could not conceive of this as being music at all.)

The music of the Second Vienna School is more like that of Wagner, in this
respect, than Wagner's itself.  Indeed, Schoenberg at some point remarked
that coming generations would come to appreciate his works only when
musicians learned to play them well, which he thought would take a
generation.  The Met's productions of the two Berg operas and of
Schoenberg's \emph{Moses und Aron} are all relative successes at the box office
as well as in the opinion of the cognoscenti.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms McLaughlin]\index{McLaughlin}
    Mr Lewis apparently [quoted] (I seem to have missed a digest):
\begin{quote}
`Datta, dayadhvam, damyata' (Give, sympathize, control)
\end{quote}
That's a nice demonstration of the \emph{Indo-} in Indo-European.
\begin{compactitem}
\item 
\emph{datta = dare} (Latin),
\item
\emph{damyata} = tame, dominate, domicile.
\end{compactitem}
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]
    I think that some novels and poems (and religious
texts) are best read in a group---I think that
the more `puzzling' poets are like that.

I think it is an interesting aesthetic  category.
As a side note---the Eliot book I mentioned isn't
an expos\'e on Eliot's homosexual forays.  It is more
a long catalogue of an almost pathological lack of
generosity (and betrayals) and plenty of grinding
financial struggle[s] that result in incredible
unhappiness for all those around him.

On that happy note\dots
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]
    I am trying to reconstruct this from memory, but if
you are interested, I think that the link is Ezra
Pound and the little magazines and at least two
women---Dora Marsden and Sylvia Beach---who were
interested in modernism and supported modernist
writing in various ways.

\emph{The Waste Land} is dedicated to Pound and if you live
around NYC, I \emph{think} that the New York Public
Library at 42nd street has the original \emph{Waste Land}
with Pound's corrections and suggestions in its Rare
Book Collection.  If I remember, there is a copy
with blue pencil and red and one was Eliot's
corrections and the other was Pound's.  But I think
anyone with some time might find the magazines.  I
haven't worked on this stuff for a long, long time.
 I bet everything is on line these days.

The little magazines [\emph{The Dial, The Egoist, The
Vortex} (?)] are fun to see.  I like to see what
advertisements/articles ran next to the serial
publication of \emph{Dubliners} or \emph{The Waste Land.}  [I'd
love to see an anthology of poetry that published
poems that way!]  Eliot and Pound were both editors
at \emph{The Egoist} and Eliot was editor at \emph{The Dial.}  I
cannot remember if \emph{Ulysses} was published serially
before it came out as a book.

If I remember, Eliot reviewed \emph{Ulysses}---before \emph{The
Wasteland} was published but only just  (I'm not
checking these facts---they are from a muddled
memory).  Virginia Woolf read it as well (while
attempting to write her own great modernist novel)
and had scathing things to say about it but kept her
remarks to her diary (I think).  But I think you can
see \emph{Ulysses}'s influence on her own experimentation
as a novelist.

Finally, Pound was a great friend to both Eliot and
Joyce (he introduced Eliot to his first wife and
tried to help Joyce as much as he could with \$\$\$ and
encouragement).

Finally, I think that April is the cruelest month
because it is easier to remain dormant---it is a
little like waking from anesthesia.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]
    Mr Thomas---

I enjoyed reading \emph{Finnegans Wake} for the entertainment of it.   Burgess
helped me with that.   But it is also tedious and ridiculous by turns.

Frost is damnably difficult to read well, perhaps the single most difficult
poet in English.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]
    Hi again Mr Lewis---

First of all no apology necessary whatsoever.

Mainly, you don't seem to be understanding what I'm saying.   Or maybe you
are and I'm not noticing.   I'm saying I \emph{love} \emph{Four
  Quartets} and I'm very 
fond of `Prufrock', but I think \emph{The Waste Land} is a kind
of pretentious half-joke played on scholars, critics, and the
intellectual elite of Eliot's day.   I do not find the imagery, music,
or resonance of \emph{The Waste Land} to be particularly memorable or
impressive. 

\emph{Four Quartets,} in fact, is far and away one of my desert island
books, and
I read it several times a year.   It is absolutely astonishing out loud, and
so well done that it takes my breath away.

And it contains as much despair and bleak existential whining as \emph{The
Waste Land} but adds a certain pathos, humility and reflective depth.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]
    Mr Goree writes:
\begin{quote}
Does anybody else read Eliot that way? Or, does
anybody feel that it does violence to his work to
barely care about what the words mean?
\end{quote}
Hi---I often read \emph{Four Quartets} for the music and just let the meanings
blur off in the background, sometimes decoded and sometimes not.   Poetry in
general is not about `meaning' anyway.   I think if you can get at what a poem
means in some sort of obvious or final way, it's pretty flimsy stuff.   This is
precisely what frustrates my current lit students about \emph{King Lear.}   They
want a script that explains itself somehow, and Shakespeare just plum refuses to
let that happen in any way that one can nail down   or hold still.

In fact I think a greater violence is done to poetry through over-analysis and
a disregard for the sounds.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Billington]
    Ms Murray quoted Helen Vendler:\footnote{Apparently in an email
      that I did not save.}
\begin{quote}
understood style as personality, style as the actual material body of inner
being. Before I could make out, in any paraphrasable way, Stevens' poems, I
knew, as by telepathy, what they meant emotionally:
\end{quote}
Collingwood would recognize this.  He says paraphrase and description belong to
categorization, to `things of a certain kind'.
  That is a kind of clarification,
of course.  But he contrasts that kind of clarification with expression (in his
sense, which of course is art), which is unique, particular, and inseparable
from its means of expression.  Expression in this sense presents `a certain
thing', and no other will do.

Collingwood insists on the difference, maybe because it obviously helps in his
craft vs.~art argument.  He doesn't apply it, even in the \emph{Waste Land}
discussion.  I get the sense that he doesn't know what else to make of it, maybe
because he isn't a literary critic.  Or maybe he gets Eliot directly, as Vendler
gets Stevens.   I suppose most people have to puzzle out the major allusions in
\emph{The Waste Land.}  After we can paraphrase and describe its
action and themes,
the next step is to connect Eliot's imagination and feelings to his stylistic
originality, to the direct power of his words.  As Vendler says:
\begin{quote}
I was overcome by a desire to know how that perfusion, which
somehow bypassed intellectual translation, was accomplished. All my later work
has stemmed from the compulsion to explain the direct power of idiosyncratic
style in conveying the import of poetry.
\end{quote}
That would be nice to know.  I think I'll look up some Vendler.  Thanks.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Billington]
    Mr Breslin wrote:
\begin{quote}
  I was advocating for art that reunites people
with their reality, providing a sense of a returning ground beneath their feet,
as
well as a sense that life is worth living because we are worthwhile and worthy.
\end{quote}
By `their reality', I suppose you mean an inner emotion or state.  You once
remarked how your high school girls noticed that high school boys act like
Homeric heroes, which is quite a leap across time and culture.

Humanity's preoccupation with complex inner emotions has been remarkably stable,
beginning with the Gilgamesh epic.  Has your screenwriter friend written scripts
that did not touch in some way upon love, the death of a friend, the defeat of
the villains, deliverance, or the fight against all odds?   It was all chase
scenes and explosions?
\begin{quote}
He remained adamant that such `ponderous' stuff was pretense and simply
fooled people with rhetoric.
\end{quote}
That's possible.  Would it make a difference if the stories were noble lies?
The Christmas season gives me lots of opportunities to ponder whether I'm being
fooled with amusement, escapism, and rhetoric.   The same goes for the patriotic
speeches on the 4th of July.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Breslin]
Mr Goree writes:
\begin{quote}
Berg gives us tones (calling it `atonal'
is incredibly deceptive in my opinion) that we are
finally free to consider and enjoy independently and
without expectation, and which each contribute
uniquely to the structure of the piece rather than
hinting at a preordained problem and solution. I don't
think Eliot took his poetry that far (or even that
poetry as I know can go `that far' or would want to),
but I see similarities---
\end{quote}
Mr Goree---I'm not sure how poetry could accomplish an effect like that of
12-tone music, since we automatically attach meaning to words or at least start
to look for it. It would be difficult to use language in a way where every
word had equal weight with every other word.   (Eliot hints toward this perhaps
in part V of `Little Gidding'). I wonder if the libretti of certain postmodern
operas like \emph{Einstein on the Beach} come close, or perhaps the
sound-lyrics of
Meredith Monk.   Or the mystical revelry in sound of that sound-poet whose
name escapes me at the moment.   Hugo Ball!  Damn, glad I remembered his name.
 Would have bugged me all night.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]
    From a Google search:
\begin{quote}
As Joyce began writing \emph{Ulysses} in Trieste, he was
approached by expatriate American writer Ezra Pound,
who worked as foreign editor of an American
magazine, \emph{The Little Review.} Pound sought material
for serialization in the magazine, and Joyce agreed
to submit installments of \emph{Ulysses} with Pound as an
intermediary. Serial rights were purchased by \emph{Little
Review} financial backer John Quinn, a New York
attorney. From the first installment in 1918,
censorship issues dogged \emph{Ulysses,} eventually forcing
a halt to its serialization in 1920.\footnote{This text was not distinguished as a quotation in the email, but it is found on the web at a number of sites, including \url{http://www4.uwm.edu/libraries/special/exhibits/clastext/clspg158.cfm} (April 5, 2011), which another site, \url{http://forum.quoteland.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/2911947895/m/901104691}, names as the source.}
\end{quote}
(Sylvia Beach
published it by subscription in Paris in the end.)

So---although the two works share the same formal
publication date (1922), it is clear that at least
some sections of \emph{Ulysses} were public while Eliot was
writing \emph{The Waste Land.}
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Nease]\index{Nease}
    I happen to posssess a copy of Victor Purcell's \emph{The Sweeniad}---a 
parody/criticism of Eliot's work, originally published under the 
pseudonym `Myra Buttle'. Given the current discussion---(Purcell's 
inside-the-Sweeniad parody is referred to as `The Vacant Mind'):
\poemlines0
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Your brain-box stopped an arrow, you old cadaver.}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
  Sunday is the dullest day, treating\\
Laughter as a profane sound, mixing\\
Worship and despair, killing\\
New thoughts with dead forms.\\
Weekdays give us hope, tempering\\
Work with reviving play, promising\\
A future life within this one.\\
Thirst overtook us, conjured up by Budweisserbrau\\
On a neon sign; we counted our dollar bills.\\
Then out into the night air, into Maloney's bar,\\
And drank whiskey, and yarned by the hour.\\
\asterism\\
 Earthly Limbo,\\
Chilled by the raw mist of a January day,\\
A crowd flowed down King's Parade, so ghostly.\\
Mowed down by the centuries, so ghostly.\\
You barely heard the gibbering and the squeaks\\
As each man gazed in front with staring eyes,\\
Flowed past Caius insurance Offices\\
To where the clock in Trinity Great Cort\\
Marked off the hours with male and female voice.\\
There I saw one I knew, and hailed him shouting,\\
 Muravieff-Amursky!\\
You who were with me up at Jesus,\\
And fought in my battalion at Thermopylae!\\
Your brain-box stopped an arrow, you old cadaver.\\
Are you Hippolytus, killed by your horses' hoofs, (6)\\
Revivified by Aesculapius?\\
`I sometimes think there never blows so red\\
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled.'(7)\\
`If winter comes can spring be far behind?'(8)\\
\asterism
\end{myverse}
\begin{quote}
Notes

6. \dots  Originally a vegetation myth, but here, for the sake of poeric 
consistency, Aesculapius administers arsenic instead of elixir to 
Hippolytus.

7. FitzGerald, Omar Khayaam. `The Rose' = Pernicious Anemia.

8. Shelly, Ode to the West Wind. For Winter read Spring, and Vice Versa.

11. `The Sage follows nature in establishing social order, and does not 
invent principles out of his own head.' Since this is a rational 
statement in authentic chinese it is thought to have slipped in by 
mistake for a quotation from Mr Pound.

12.  From an ancient Egyptian inscription. Literally, `Thy breath of 
life is sweet in my nostril.' `Life' here is an occult symbol for death.

16. Reproduced by permission of the Westminster City Council.
\end{quote}
`The Vacant Mind' contains allusions and adaptations from thirty-five 
different writers in twenty languages, including Pali, Sanskrit, 
Aramaic, Tagalog, Swahili and Beche-de-mer.

(I myself am not fond of \emph{The Waste Land.})
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Thomas]
    Mr Breslin writes:
\begin{quote}
Mr Goree---I'm not sure how poetry could accomplish an effect like that
of 12-tone music, since we automatically attach meaning to words or at
least start to look for it. It would be difficult to use language in a way
where every word had equal weight with every other word.
\end{quote}
I don't think that every note is supposed to have `equal weight' with every
other in 12-tone music, whatever that would mean.  Obviously different
notes have different imports throughout a piece.  Were it not so, one would
have not a piece of music, but a mere aggregation of notes.   Bad serialist
music is just that, by the way:  a random aggregation of notes.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Jacobs]\index{Jacobs}
    Mr Breslin writes:
\begin{quote}
I think \emph{The Waste Land} is a kind of pretentious half-joke played on
scholars, critics, and the intellectual elite of Eliot's day.
\end{quote}
I generally agree with this statement, \emph{however\dots}
\begin{asparaenum}
\item 
There really in no other way to put this: The poem sounds good. For some
reason that slips my mind, I had reason to sit-in in an undergraduate lit
class a few years ago. In that particular class, the teacher played a
recording of a Shakespearian actor, probably Olivier, reading
\emph{The Waste Land.} 
It was a remarkable experience in that I did not see a single yawn or
eye-roll. The students were transfixed by the `sound' of the poem. Any poem
of that length that can claim, and then maintain, the interest of a group of
college freshmen deserves study.
\item
I think it would be hard to argue that \emph{The Waste Land} was not the most
influential poem of its day. In fact, one could make a sound argument that
the poem affected the society as a whole during the inter-war period. How
many poems have had such influence beyond the poetry-reading milieu? I can't
think of any.
\end{asparaenum}
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
    Mr Breslin wrote:
\begin{quote}
Mr Goree---I'm not sure how poetry could accomplish
an effect like that of
12-tone music, since we automatically attach meaning
to words or at least start
to look for it. It would be difficult to use
language in a way where every
 word had equal weight with every other word.  
\end{quote}
I think that (`equal weight' for all tones in a piece
of music) was Schoenberg's goal. I don't think it's
the only goal of dodecaphonic music or atonal music in
general. And I see a big difference, anyways, in
seeking equal weight for all tones (whatever that may
mean to the composer and listener) and equal weight to
all \emph{notes.} Schoenberg, and certainly Berg, did not
write music where all notes were of equal importance
or musical significance, even if they worked to free
the audience from our tonal expectations about those
notes.

You have a point: musical notes rarely have
significance external to the work itself (the only
ways a note can point to something outside of the
piece of music are onomatopoeia and borrowing from
other works---and serialist composers do both of
those extensively), while words in a poem nearly
always do. So of course any comparison between the two
forms is going to miss something important.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
    Mr Jacobs wrote:
\begin{quote}
Any poem
of that length that can claim, and then maintain,
the interest of a group of
 college freshmen deserves study.
\end{quote}
Somebody mentioned earlier that Frost gets bad
criticism because he's read in high schools. As
different as they are, I think Eliot and Frost have
the same problem: they both wrote poems that
17-year-olds enjoy reading. It can be hard to look
back at how stupid I was at 17 and still respect the
poetry I liked then; though it helps to remember that
when I'm 37 I'll no doubt think I'm just as stupid
now. But, I have to say Frost speaks to me more now
than Eliot does. Not to keep dragging composers into
this, but it's like Copland. We all played or heard
\emph{Appalachian Spring} in middle school; after that it's
very easy to overlook the subtlety and brilliance of
Copland's music. At any rate, I think the similarities
between Frost and Copland are much more striking than
the similarities between Eliot and any of his
contemporary composers.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Thanks Mr Breslin, I have to admit I missed a lot yesterday, Down with the
chills and a terrible stomach cramp, which is why I was near the PC all day,
though I am much better today, and not that it would matter as  I am off to
\emph{LOTR ROTK}!!!

PAL (who also Loves `Prufrock' as it was the first major poem I ever
read and made me fall in love with poetry\dots)
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
    I think I'm getting a feel for the chess game section now---life
    and death together in childbirth and the consequent mutilation and
    isolation of women. 

To backtrack for a second, the bit in Part I, `I\dots go south in the
winter.'  Ha!  This is Persephone!  The dolphin in line 96 led me to
Persephone's mom, Demeter, who is portrayed with a dove in one hand, a
dolphin in the other.  The dolphin in the chthonic tradition is
apparently a womb symbol---there was some fertility ritual in which
you eat a fish which is reincarnated as the baby.  There is
cannibalism in the Philomel story too\dots Before I leave Demeter and
her fish, we should probably also notice that her story parallels that
of the Fisher King---\emph{i.e.}~she withholds crops during the winter, but
later restores the land's fertility.  Oh, and one more thing, Demeter,
like Medusa, has snaky hair---`spread out in fiery points'. 

On to the chess game: the dressing table scene I think of as the
 classical section.  We have allusions to Dido and Cleopatra, who died
 for love, of flame and poison respectively; and Philomel.  I think
 Mr Lewis already did the story of Philomel, but let me repeat anyway:  a
 king rapes his sister-in-law Philomel and cuts out her tongue.  In
 revenge, the wife kills the king's son and serves him for supper.
 Compare at the end, Lil's sister (call her Phil) sitting in the pub
 talking about Lil and Albert.  Poor Lil with two kids and bad teeth
 because of the pregnancies, and Albert wants to mutilate her by
 having all her teeth pulled.  Meantime, Lil's poisoned herself with
 the stuff she took to induce a miscarriage, and now her own sister
 Phil is messing around with Albert.  But this Phil has her tongue cut
 out too---\emph{i.e.}~her story is cut short by last-call just as she's
 getting to the good part.  Gammon---what a great word!  Phil went to
 her Lil's for a bit of hot gammon, ham,  for supper.  Gammon also
 means backgammon or to win at backgammon, and clearly Phil and Lil
 are playing some sort of game that Phil thinks she's winning, and
 maybe this connects with a chess game, recalling that the title of
 the section refers to a play in which a chess game and a seduction
 are happening in parallel on stage.  Finally, gammon can be a verb,
 to deceive. 

Then at the end the reference to Ophelia, another who died for love,
and a death by water. 

But back to the dressing table.  Even though the scene is opulent,
what with mirrors and candles and jewels, it's kind of tawdry.
Synthetic perfumes---yuck, the kind you buy at the drugstore by the
quart.  Vials are `coloured glass', not alabaster; the mantle is
`coloured stone', some kind of dyed something.  Mention of base-metal
copper in this context surprised me, as I expect only silver and gold
in such a scene.   

The `sylvan scene' line:  Eliot points to Milton as the source of the
phrase, with Satan sneaking around peeping into Eden through a thicket
(like the cupid peeping through the fruited vines), but I rather like
this bit from Dryden's \emph{All for Love} (a remake of \emph{Antony and
Cleopatra,} I too love the web): 
\setlength{\vgap}{-1cm}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Stretched at my length beneath some blasted oak,}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin\textsc{Antony:}\\
 I'm now turned wild, a commoner of nature;\\
Of all forsaken, and forsaking all;\\
Live in a shady forest's sylvan scene,\\
Stretched at my length beneath some blasted oak,\\
I lean my head upon the mossy bark,\\
And look just of a piece as I grew from it;\\
My uncombed locks, matted like mistletoe,\\
Hang o'er my hoary face; a murm'ring brook\\
Runs at my foot.
\end{myverse}
Well.  If that doesn't sound like a corpse sprouting in the garden, I
don't know what would. 

That's all I've got right now, guess I'd better do some work.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
    We often hear `use the delete key', and truly when I think the
    conversation is going off, I try to encourage and participate in
    the more promising threads.  But it's not that simple.  Those of
    us for whom the digest is the best option, we have to scroll
    through page after page after page of
    ((\dots((drivel))\dots)).  First, it's
    depressing.  Second, bad drives out good.  It's like being hit
    with a goddam firehose.   

Joanne\\
Disappointed but not surprised that we only managed to talk about 2
sections of \emph{The Waste Land.}
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Are we done? That's sad. I thought Mr Goree had done an excellent job of
introducing Part III in his Eliot and Music post and I admit I am a bit
slow to respond because he had given me more to think about than time
allows, as I am quite busy getting ready for my show on the 9th of January and
we are going out of town for the last two weeks in December so I don't have much
time, anyway I hope to have a little something on `The Fire Sermon' by this
weekend, but let me know if I shouldn't bother.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
    Ms Murray wrote:
    \begin{quote}
Disappointed but not surprised that we only managed
to talk about 2 sections of \emph{The Waste Land.}
\end{quote}
\emph{Sniff} I talked about III and IV as a scherzo and
trio, and about the utter un-erotic-ness of the sex
scene in III\dots

`Fire Sermon' and `Death by Water' are the `crux' of
the poem, to me at least.

I'd be happy to finish a thought I had but edited from
my `Eliot and music' post (I led up to this but didn't
make it clear):

Because of how familiar I am with the large musical
forms that I feel Eliot is imitating in \emph{The Waste Land,} I
hear `Death by Water' as coming in the middle of `Fire
Sermon' rather than after it. That is, I see it sort
of as a vision that is above and simultaneous with the
dust and dreariness of `Fire Sermon'. I don't finish
`Fire Sermon' and then turn some corner and come to
the stillness of `Death by Water'; I hear them as both
happening at once, with `Fire Sermon' all around
`Death by Water' on every side (sorry for the confused
time and space metaphors there).

I don't have any argument to persuade anyone else to
hear it that way other than my belief that Eliot was
basing the form of his poem on the Classical symphony,
and in a symphony that's how III and IV would work. 

How do you see the transition between `Fire Sermon'
and `Death by Water'?
  \end{email}



  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
Oh---we're \emph{not} done!  I just thought we'd been swamped out!  carry on!
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
    Oh, I apologize to Mssrs Lewis and Goree both.  I just assumed the
    topic had been swept away.  I will go home now and read `The Fire
    Sermon'. 

By the way, what does this mean:  `I think we are in rats' alley, where
the dead men lost their bones'?  How do dead men lose their bones?   
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
      I've always assumed that, if you're in rats' alley, and dead
      (thus a corpse,  
or more likely skeleton), you lose your bones by having the rats drag them 
away to gnaw on.

I don't suppose I can sign that `cheers', can I?
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
      But, see, Mr Tourtelott, it seems more usual for a corpse to lose
      everything \emph{but} the 
bones, til nothing is left but a sun-bleach skeleton.  And in any case, is 
this something to say to your wife when she's already acting a bit skittish?

Of course you can say cheers.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
[Ms Murray wrote:]
    \begin{quote}
  And in any case, is
this something to say to your wife when she's already acting a bit 
skittish?
\end{quote}
 No, but given that Viv was always feeling skittish, or as people in Texas 
say `nervous', and that Tom was something of a prig (and a prick), I think 
of that line as delivered wearily, as a way of saying, `We're dead and just 
gnawing on each other.'  Now admittedly, if you say that, then the answer to 
the old women's magazine question `Can this Marriage be Saved?' is `No.'  
(Does anybody remember which that column was in?  I can remember the column, 
but given that Mother subscribed to both \emph{McCall's} and
\emph{Redbook,} I don't know which it was .)

Cheers.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Goree]
      I took that to mean that the spiritually `dead' lost
their\dots \emph{ahem} \dots potency.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Baumgarten]\index{Baumgarten}
    I'm pretty sure `Can This Marriage Be Saved?' is a \emph{Ladies Home
    Journal} feature.  
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
      Thank you, Ms Baumgarten.  I think that's right and, believe it or not,
      that is the  
kind of question that causes me to lose sleep at night, so you've done a 
good deed for a shut-in.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Collins]\index{Collins}
    It is indeed a \emph{Ladies Home Journal} feature.  One joy of the
    internet   
may be never losing sleep over questions that Google can answer  
instantly.  The trade-off is you can stay up much too late reading  
stupid back articles of said feature at
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://www.lhj.com}
\end{quote}
On the other hand, it could make one grateful to be single.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Baumgarten]
    They even have a website now! I have many fond memories of Betsy
    McCall paper dolls. I even had a paper doll set for my
    paper doll. \emph{McCall's,} alas, turned into \emph{Rosie,} which
    is no more.  
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Murray]
    Potency, ah. Thank you, Mr Goree.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]
    In Shakespeare's \emph{Tempest,} the dead do lose their bones:
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Those are pearls that were his eyes:}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
Full fathom five thy father lies;\\
Of his bones are coral made;\\
Those are pearls that were his eyes:\\
Nothing of him that doth fade\\
But doth suffer a sea-change\\
Into something rich and strange (Act i.\ Sc.\ 2).
\end{myverse}
As for Mrs Eliot's nerves, I always understood that poor Mrs Eliot
had a problem like that of the woman in the Gospels who touched the
hem of Jesus' robe:  In the words of one of my old Southern
professors, she `hemorrhaged'.  These days she would have been
given something aking to Hormone Replacement Therapy.  You see it in
Eliot's poetry with references to `blood on the sheets' which
otherwise don't make sense. 
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
      The meaning of this line seems to change for me every time I look at it,
this may refer to the rat-infested battle trenches of World War I. In which
case it refers back to the city of the dead, rat-infested, or like a
graveyard, the home of men's bones, being picked clean by rats as in my
reference to graves in my handful of dust critic, or this may also have the
sexual connotation of a penile erection. It allows one to consider reading
`bones' as `vitality'. In contrast to the vitality of the contemporary
women, like queens on a chess board, or sitting on burnishe[d] thrones, the
contemporary games are empty and end in stalemate, in contrast to the depth
and suffering of Philomelas (which reminds me of Mr Goree's observations
about sex in the second section). Again as I look at these lines I see it
recall the Invitation to the Reader in the Baudelaire reference, drawing the
reader into the poem with the we reference.  Then, even as this line casts
back into the past of the poem I also look forward: Eliot suggests in his
notes that he means [to] compare Part II, line 115:
\poemlines{1}
\setlength{\vrightskip}{-1cm}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Where the dead men lost their bones.}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{115}{115}
I think we are in rats' alley\\
Where the dead men lost their bones.\\!
\end{myverse}
to Part III, line 195:
\settowidth{\versewidth}{White bodies naked on the low damp ground}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{193}{193}
White bodies naked on the low damp ground\\
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,\\
Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year.\\!
\end{myverse}
That's all I have so far.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    I was at the DMA last night with my 5-year-old daughter taking advantage of
the `free Thursday night' policy and we wandered through their `Celebrating
100 Years' exhibit.  When we came to the end we passed through a large dark
room with a 20-foot screen standing in the middle.  On both sides a
projection was being shown, that was essentially the same: a man in a blue
oxford shirt, khakis and tennis shoes would approach the screen in sloooow
motion, approaching from great distance, would come to a stop inches from
the camera in full view,  and then, on side A, a trickle of water would
begin to fall that would become a deluge that would consume the man until he
completely vanished, the water would gradually come to a stop and then from
the distance the man would begin his approach again, on side B the same,
only at the base a small flicker of flame that would grow to consume him,
die out and begin again. As I stood watching side B I suddenly slapped my
forehead and said, `Oh my god!---It's the Fire Sermon!' Fire as the thing
that consumes us, the eternal, but also the passions of man, hatred, grief
and despair. Also sorrow, lamentation, birth, death, misery, and
infatuation. Fire is also the traditional part of the midsummer festivals of
early Western civilizations. The juxtaposition of the display's fire/water
smacks in the face of \emph{The Waste Land}'s death by water/death by
dryness motifs. 
What is striking for me is the contrast that seems to begin in earlier
sections (chiefly II for me) that the vulgarity and shallowness of the
modern is contrasted with the beauty, simplicity and depth of the past. The
Thames, `sweet Thames', is swollen with the leavings of promiscuity and
modern life, What was once ritualistic and meaningful is now empty and
dirty, though I would not go so far as to say that Eliot is merely invoking
the `good old days' of the past in preference of modernity.

It may also be worth noting that the exact middle of the poem, which is 422
lines long,%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{It is 434 lines in the text cited in
  note~\ref{text}.} 
falls within this section, and that thematically,
it could be
argued that the climax of the poem falls within this central passage,
between 217 and 247 (the exact middle of section III).  That makes me think of
Mr Goree's insights into the sonata form of this poem and the `framing' of
this poem. (Sorry Mr Goree, that's all I could come up with on that.)
Again the sexual attitude[s] of men and women are called into question, but is
it the fire of lust, or the indifference to chastity that is being
illustrated?  I remember a section described in \emph{The Power of
  Myth} by Joseph
Campbell where a young couple would go into a hut and would be `coupled',
the supports of the hut would be torn away and the couple would perish in
the collapse of the dwelling, the wood would then be set to flame and the
subsequent bonfire would be the center of a ritualistic feast and dancing.
Tiresias is witnessed this, at the center of the poem, the timeless quality
of an action affected by time-wrought changes, suggesting perhaps that the
only salvation is death, because out of death is rebirth, but that we have
corrupted this, so what can come of the future?  As a seer, he can tell us,
does he tell us here, can we again be reborn? There is again an echo of
Dante's \emph{Purgatory} in this passage, but this purgatory is without purpose.
Everything here is meaningless, and unrelated, the gramophone stops with a
reiterated `la la' at the end of the song, all of this pointless seduction
has been foretold by Tiresias, the fire is put out by the complete
indifference to the body and the spirit. (That neither gets exemplar[y]
treatment I think to be key). Both Buddha and Christ taught of moral virtue
as the road to timeless salvation of the soul.  The Fire Sermon
\emph{qu\^a} Sermon on the Mount: whether it is blissful eternity
(Christ) or annihilation (Buddha)
both conceived of fire as the symbol for the destructive elements in life.
The broken prayer of St Augustine (that he may be a fire brand plucked
from the burning) reminds me of Dido's suicide swallowing a burning coal, but
also, as it is in the end of the section, leads to a possible suggestion of
purification in the next section. (By water? Baptism? Rebirth?)
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Goldsmith]\index{Goldsmith}
    To the discussants of \emph{The Waste Land:}  You guys make me
    feel like some
kind of mouth-breathing cretin with your giant memory tanks and your
transcontinental attention spans.  Thanks.  No, really.  Your discussion
moved me to read the poem for the (kicks dirt and looks sheepish) first
time.  Keep talking, I'll just listen.
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]
    I just remembered a St John's connection to T.S. Eliot.  When I
    read Eliot's controversial lectures `After Strange Gods' (given at
    UVa in 1933) I noticed that he thanked his host, Scott Buchanan (I
    think it was Buchanan and not Barr, but it was one of the two).
    The controversial nature of the lectures (which the Eliot estate
    did not allow to be reprinted) was that Eliot seemed to be having
    Nazi sympathies: 
    \begin{quote}
 The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures
 exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely
 self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more
 important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and
 religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews
 undesirable.
\end{quote}
I wrote Winfree Smith (a tutor at St John's) and asked him if he
    had gone to the lectures (since he had been at UVa at the time and
    was a prot\'eg\'e of Buchanan's) and what the audience's response was.
    He wrote me back a wonderful letter and said that no, he hadn't
    gone, it was spring and he was in love\dots  (A nice way to think of
    Winfree for those of us who knew him in his later years.) 
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
    Ms Eckstrom's mention of `After Strange Gods' reminds me of another (and 
extremely unpleasant) possible significance for the appearance of rats in 
various sections of \emph{The Waste Land}---namely, the pervasive use in popular 
anti-Semitic literature of the interwar period of the association of Jews 
with rats.  This imagery is all over the place in the 20s and 30s, 
culminating in Goebbels's famous propaganda film \emph{Der Ewige
  Jude,} and it seems 
to me explicitly used in one of Eliot's other poems---is it `Gerontion'?---in 
the lines
\poemlines0
\settowidth{\versewidth}{And the jew squats on the windowsill, the owner,}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
And the jew squats on the windowsill, the owner,\\
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp.  
\end{myverse}
The association with the rats in \emph{The Waste Land} may 
be, in W-speak, subliminable, but it seems to me that it is there.

(On a brighter note, it's always seemed to me that Winfree was as good an 
advertisement for Anglicans as Eliot was a bad one.)
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Billington]
    Ms Eckstrom wrote:
\begin{quote}
I think there is something to the idea of poetry as music.
\end{quote}
Mr Breslin quoted Mr Goree:
\begin{quote}
Does anybody else read Eliot that way? Or, does
anybody feel that it does violence to his work to
barely care about what the words mean?
\end{quote}
and responded
\begin{quote}
Hi---I often read \emph{Four Quartets} for the music and just let the meanings
blur off in the background, sometimes decoded and sometimes not.   Poetry in
general is not about `meaning' anyway.
\end{quote}
Okay then, which lines of \emph{The Waste Land} should we treat as
music and just let the meanings blur off?

The only thing that struck me was `the young man carbuncular'.

Eliot can be heard reading \emph{The Waste Land} at
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/011894_harp_ITH.html}
\end{quote}
  \end{email}


  \begin{email}[Mr Tourtelott]
Actually, `the young man carbuncular' seems to me a quite meaningful phrase. 
  That particular detail---that he's nastily pimpled---sets up the the tone of 
utter abhorrence with which the assignation is presented.  He's `one of the 
low' and an arriviste, or at least a striver---that's why his self-assurance 
is compared to `a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire', as who should say a 
silk hat covering a sow's ears. `Carbuncular' may have a kind of music, but 
it's the Bronx-cheer note of a kazoo, if it does.
  \end{email}

  \begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
    Mr Jones\index{Jones} wrote:\footnote{In another email that I did
      not save.}  
    \begin{quote}
And, I now have 2 weeks off!  Don't tell me the fiery discussions are
going to die down now that I do have some time and energy to
participate!
\end{quote}
Never fear Mr Jones---there are still two sections of \emph{The Waste
  Land} to be
discussed, and it sounds like quite a few listers like Frost.
I was wandering about Half Price books in Dallas yesterday looking for a bit
of good reading for the holidays and found myself wondering what others were
going to sink their teeth into. I finally landed on a Sufi poet named Hafiz,
not a bad bit of poetry, reminiscent of Rumi  or Rilke, anyway does anyone
else have a good line of some holiday reading?
  \end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Jones]
  I am hoping to finish \emph{Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy}
which I started back in August but had to put down to prepare Geometry
and Applied Math lessons.  (And apparently my first foray into teaching
geometry went well---my students' scores on the ridiculous but highly
valued state test were equivalent to those of the 25 year veteran
teaching the other sections.  So, whether I really did well or not, I
got some nice pats on the back.)

But now I guess I'll go downstairs and find my wife's copy of
\emph{The Waste Land.}
I could use some literature exposure right now.  And I did read
Maugham's `The Outstation' the other night after it was mentioned on the
list.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Tourtelott wrote:
\begin{quote}
Actually, `the young man carbuncular' seems to me a quite meaningful phrase.
\end{quote}
Yes, I know.  Carbuncles, the round cut of certain jewels, glow with the inner
fire of life.  Jewels feature in the city in Revelations.  Maybe the young man
has a jewel in his cravat-pin.  Or the tip of his circumcised penis looks like a
carbuncle.  Carbuncles, the pimples, would be contracted from whores
in the anti-city of Babylon.    So Eliot has chosen a word with Mr Lewis's
contrary meanings again.

However, I still want to stick with the music or form of it.  Form is the
content-as-arrangement.  So I'll try to keep the content, but change the form:
\begin{compactitem}
  \item
`the carbuncular young man':  this is prose.  The stricter rhythm is important.
\item
`the carbuncled young man':  no rhythmic flow, no music.
\item
`the young man be-pimpled':  something wrong with the short i.
\item
`the spotty young man':  in a British accent, that's not too bad, but it is
surface description only, and of course no double meaning.
\item
`the youth carbuncular':  nope.
\item
`the spotty youth':  that's okay for a high school boy, but doesn't connect
with the self-importance of a Bradford millionaire.
\end{compactitem}
\begin{quote}\centering
And makes a welcome of indifference.
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}\centering
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn.
\end{quote}
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  Since this thread is titled Eliot and Music and not \emph{The Waste Land} and
music\dots
It seems to me the opening of `Prufrock' is more rhythmic, well, perhaps lyrical
than musical, still I find the phrase `Let us go then you and I\dots' and
essentially the following 8 or twelve lines to be quite flowing and
beautiful and wondered what you would say about those line[s] Mr Billington?
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  OK, to recap: 
\begin{quote}  
  Death by water, which in Section I was to be feared, has become
by Section IV ambiguous---suggesting both the dissolution of physical death
and the promise of resurrection in the Year-god ceremonies, Christian
baptism, the Easter pageant, and the other chief symbolic patterns
used.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Headings (note~\ref{wayback1}).} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
So I ended my discussion of [the] Fire Sermon \emph{qu\^a} Sermon on the
Mount email with 
\begin{quote}
the broken prayer of St Augustine reminds us of the burning coal used to
purify Isaiah, also a fire brand plucked from the burning reminds me of
Dido's suicide swallowing a burning coal, is used in the end of the section
as a possible suggestion of purification in the next section. (By water?
Baptism? Rebirth?)
\end{quote}
and so I began looking at `Death by Water', Section IV,
and found the link between death and baptism in line 319 that refers to
Paul's letter to the Romans VI 2--4:
\begin{quote}
How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not that
so many of us [as] were baptised into J.C. were baptised into his death?
Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ
was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so should we
walk in newness of life.
\end{quote}
Actually the more I look at this the more I wonder what in the heck Paul is
talking about\dots but that is another story.

The wheel is the wheel of the drown[ed] Phoenician's ship, the wheel
of fate that 
found the sailor drown, the fulfillment of the prophecy that we have seen.
Fear death by water, now we are in the section `Death by Water', the poem has
come around, are we reborn? The wheel is the wheel [of] Budd[h]ist reincarnation,
is the road to resurrection and rebirth prepared here? The whirlpool
(another wheel) threatens to destroy us even as we are promised new life.
however, in light of Mr Goree's observations about the lack of rebirth,
Phlebas's drowning as a death by water, seems to bring no resurrection,
although there is a strange sense of peace in the death. Again there is a
passage that seems to draw us into the poem, the ambiguous `You who turn
the wheel'---the sailor? or the reader?
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Ms Eckstrom]
  I think this part of \emph{The Waste Land} is so icky---not bad, but
  just icky. 

Since the first line of the poem ends with `breeding' we might expect
something passionate, painful, or tragic, but instead we get two
modern lovers: 
\poemlines5
\setlength{\vrightskip}{-1cm}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare.}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{231}{235}
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.\\
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,\\
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,]\footnote{These three lines
  were an ellipsis in the original email.}\\
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.	\\
(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.)	\\
Bestows one final patronising kiss,	\\
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit\dots	\\!

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.
\end{myverse}
Tiresias who is there to judge who gets more pleasure out of
sex---women or men---must have a hard time choosing.  They are both
indifferent.  He seems to think it is his due (for no particular
reason since he is not heroic---he isn't even a house agent, he is a
\emph{small} house agent's clerk!) and she is indifferent.  They eat canned
food and listen to canned music, even her hand is `automatic'.  I
think the carbuncles are part of the revulsion of it all.  Think of
the contrast to the Wagner!  That is not to say that they don't have
the other references. 
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
  So I ended my discussion of [the] Fire Sermon \emph{qu\^a} Sermon on
  the Mount email with
  `the broken prayer of St Augustine reminds us of the burning coal used to
  purify Isaiah, also a fire brand plucked from the burning reminds me of
  Dido's suicide swallowing a burning coal, is used in the end of the section
  as a possible suggestion of purification in the next section. (By water?
  Baptism? Rebirth?)' and so I began looking at `Death by Water', Section IV,
  and found the link between death and baptism in line 319 that refers to
  Paul's letter to the Romans VI 2--4:
\end{quote}
My line 319 in its entirety is `Gentile or Jew'.  How do you get a link to
Romans 6:2--4?
\begin{quote}
  The wheel is the wheel of the drown[ed] Phoenician's Ship, the wheel
  of fate that 
  found the sailor drown, the fulfillment of the prophacy that we have seen.
  Fear death by water, now we are in the section `Death by Water', the poem has
  come around, are we reborn? The wheel is the wheel [of] Buddhist
  reincarnation, is the road to resurrection and rebirth prepared here?
\end{quote}
I see the water imagery (rain to river to sea to rain) as the cycle of
experience, the natural cycle, the wheel of earthly life.  Fear death by water
because you don't escape from the whirlpool.  Fear the handful of dust because
it really is death.  Eliot looks for an escape from the cycle by the
apocalyptic
fire, thunder, wind, and bird images, but each is thwarted. 

So it seems to me that Eliot considers Buddhist escape or Jewish deliverance.
Paul's rebirth-by-baptism language doesn't fit the pattern.
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
  It seems to me the opening of `Prufrock' is more rhythmic, well,
  perhaps lyrical 
  than musical, still I find the phrase `Let us go then you and I\dots' and
  essentially the following 8 or twelve lines to be quite flowing and
  beautiful and wondered what you would say about those lines Mr Billington?
\end{quote}
That `Prufrock' is lyrical, metrical, and flowing because Eliot is
writing a poem
of exile, a lament about a world to which he doesn't belong (`I should
have been
a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas').  By
choosing to write under the discipline of rhyme and meter, he evokes the world
that is a continuous whole, but then says that it is closed to him.

In contrast, \emph{The Waste Land} is discontinuous, associational, like the
switching of the radio dial as Mr Pierce said.   The broken syntax, the
changing tenses, the uncertainty as to who is speaking, and the puns, mimic the
voice of an oracle. Or the other way around, that because Eliot chose to write
in free verse, we get the sense that the poem is discontinuous, \emph{\&c.}
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  Sorry about the lateness of my reply, I have been with my in-laws for 2-1/2
weeks\dots
Mr Billington wrote:
\begin{quote}
My line 319 in its entirety is `Gentile or Jew'.  How do you get a link to
Romans 6:2--4?\dots So it seems to me that Eliot considers Buddhist
escape or Jewish deliverance.
Paul's rebirth-by-baptism language doesn't fit the pattern.
\end{quote}
O.K when I left off we were at:
\poemlines{5}
\setlength{\vrightskip}{-1cm}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and
  tall as you.} 
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\setverselinenums{312}{315}
  Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,\\
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell\\
And the profit and loss.\\
A current under sea\\
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell\\
He passed the stages of his age and youth\\
Entering the whirlpool.\\
Gentile or Jew\\
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,\\
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.\\! %(312-321)
\end{myverse}
\begin{quote}
Here, the narrator is holding up Phlebas as an example of one who died for a
good reason: Phoenician sailors were responsible for developing, and
(through trade) spreading both religion and what has become our modern
alphabet. This is a parallel with the idea that drowning is positive, and
essential to rebirth.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Pavlov-Shapiro (note~\ref{wayback2}).} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
The rising and falling again seem to me to be a
similar to the shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at
evening rising to meet you, the cyclical motion of life but also the
disintegration of the flesh, the old life, and the mystery, half heard, of
the new life, `Entering the whirlpool' in one terrifying moment of surrender
results in peace `free of attachment' (Fire Sermon)---free of `the cry of
gulls, and the deep sea swell'. It is no longer necessary to measure life in
terms of age or youth because he is free of chronological time. (The risen
Christ?) I remembered the Pauline saying `I am neither Gentile or Jew' and
did a quick sweep in my Biblical concordance to find the reference that
contained a water and a burial motif in Paul, and remarkably it contained
the same birth and rebirth imagery as in our \emph{Waste Land} passage
(coincidence?), that we are dead to our old lives and reborn in Christ, the
parallels were too remarkable not to mention. The wheel is a multiple
reference, the wheel of fortune, of Buddhist doctrine, and the wheel of
resurrection. The death by water foretold in Section I and fore-suffered in II
and III [is] realized in IV, the fortune fulfilled, the prophecy realized. So
as in Paul, the road to resurrection and rebirth has been prepared. So it
seems to me that as you say Paul's rebirth-by-baptism language does fit the
pattern.
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  
M. Billington Wrote:
\begin{quote}
So it seems to me that Eliot considers Buddhist escape or Jewish
deliverance.
Paul's rebirth-by-baptism language doesn't fit the pattern.
\end{quote}
So looking ahead I also notice that the beginning of Section Five introduces
three themes, the first of which is derived from Luke XXIV 13--31, the
section that recounts the resurrection. The opening lines of the section are
an echo of lines 19--24 in Section I, again a reference to the
crucifixion/resurrection. A Pauline reading of the end of Section IV links the
starting point of Section V, linking the Christian myth (the mysterion of life
and death) to the vegetation myths. `He who was loving is now dead.' Who is
he? Phlebas? Yes. But also Christ, Adonis, The Fisher King, the Phoenician
\emph{\&c.} And `We who were living are now dying' in the sense of
St~Paul. This
is the most interesting point in the poem, to me because is suggest that we
whose lives were once enriched by figures of faith, heroes, demigods, and
gods, no longer respond to them. `Here is no water.' Recons to the rock
imagery in the beginning of the poem, the cry of the Israelites in the
desert before Moses strikes the rock, Belladonna, the lady of the rocks,
comes to a culmination here. The passage of Lines 346--358 indicates an agony
for water, and possibly an agony for baptism and salvation of the symbolic
level. Eliot explains 359 in his notes, but does not do so completely. Her[e]
is the Fisher King, the man of the Tarot with 3 staves, Frazer's Hanged Man
and Christ all come together, the hooded figure the resurrected Christ of
Luke XXIV 15--16.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  I thought I would finish the section in my own mind at least, I hope there
are no objections.
So I have been thinking about what I wrote last, namely:
\begin{quote}
`He who was loving is now dead.' Who is
he? Phlebas? Yes. But also Christ, Adonis, The Fisher King, the Phoenician
\emph{\&c.} And `We who were living are now dying' in the sense of St~Paul. This
is the most interesting point in the poem, to me because is suggest that we
whose lives were once enriched by figures of faith, heroes, demigods, and
gods, no longer respond to them.
\end{quote}
And I think I like it because it reminds me of [what] one of my favorite authors
Jung proposes.  Now understand that the opening of Sect.~V introduces at
least three themes, the first I have covered, the second, according to
Eliot, a sizeable reference to Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend,
where she maintains that these legends are accounts of initiation employing
a mystery ritual and claim knowledge of a future life, divided into two
parts, a higher and a lower life (divine and physical).  Now I know little of
Miss Weston's book but I do know it discusses the `tradition of the Perilous
Chapel' and is reminiscent of the test for the lower initiation. Eliot's
`Decayed hole among the mountains' is a reference to the return to the
Chapel Perilous, the horrors preceding the vision are the horrors one
witnesses on approach to the Chapel Perilous, which is in a cemetery, the
Cemetery Perilous, of course, that is also full of horrors, such as Eliot's
`dry bones'.  Now I realize this is a bit of a stretch so have your way with
me, but these dry bones are the parallel to the figures I spoke of before
are represented here, the dry bones can do us no harm. So in terms of Jung
and his Archetypes, there is always a danger that the soul or psyche may
not return from a voyage through such horrors, that one might perish in the
desert, or permanently pass into unknown realms, the Chapel Perilous set to
accommodate those that do not pass this quest. Eliot says that this decay,
is the decay of Eastern Europe, but then as cultural decay it is also the
loss of values, the Jungian Archetypes that no longer hold sway, have lost
their meaning to us, their myths and ultimately our own, \emph{i.e.}~the mist of
the dying and rising Christ have no meaning any longer.
\begin{quote}
`Datta', to give alms; `Dayadhvam', to have compassion; `Damyata', to
practice self-control. The fable concludes, `This is what the divine voice,
the Thunder, repeats when he says: DA, DA, DA: ``Control yourselves; give
alms; be compassionate.'' Therefore one should practice these three things:
self-control, alms-giving, and compassion.'\footnote{See page~\pageref{Datta2}.}
\end{quote}
What is given? The self entering the whirlpool? What is the response to
compassion? The reference to Dante---Eliot points [out]\footnote{Mr Lewis's email reads: \texttt{The reference to Dante- Eliot points in his note is the prison}\dots} in his note---is the prison
of self in which each man is locked. What is controlled? Literally in the
poem the boat, the boat the heart, the heart surrenders its blood, the sky
the rain,
\begin{quote}
This insistence\footnote{The reference in the source text is to the
  `idea of aridity'.} is followed later by relief: `\dots Then a
damp\label{damp}
gust/ Bringing rain' (393--4). Finally, rain has come to the waste land,
bringing with it the rebirth and cleansing that it has traditionally
symbolized. This is a double symbolism in that the symbolism of the water
has reverted from a perversion back to its normal meaning, symbolizing the
approaching end of the waste land. The rain falling on the parched earth is a
metaphor for the reawakening of the people shell-shocked from the world war,
ready to begin their lives again.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Pavlov-Shapiro (note~\ref{wayback2}).}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
The three together comprise the theme of this section. In this passage,
control refers to regaining control of your life, in particular to the
Fisher King legend, in which a king's land falls to waste when he himself is
diseased. This is paired with lines [424--6]:
\settowidth{\vgap}{Fishing, with the arid plain b}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{\vin  I sat upon the shore}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin  I sat upon the shore\\
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me\\
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
\end{myverse}
This means that the Waste Land is coming to an end---that the king is at last
returning to health and returning to control.

That's all I have. Goodnight.
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
evening rising to meet you, the cyclical motion of life but also the
disintegration of the flesh, the old life, and the mystery, half heard, of
the new life, `Entering the ehirlpool' in one terrifying moment of surrender
results in peace `free of attachment' (Fire Sermon)
\end{quote}
I don't see either terror or surrender here.  Maybe peace, but more likely
simple cessation. `As he rose and fell / He passes the stages of his age and
youth / Entering the whirlpool.'  I suppose it depends on what `passes' means.
 He could be passing by the stages, or passing through them again, or
 passing to the other side, \emph{i.e.}~outside the cycles.
\begin{quote}
contained a water and a burial motif in Paul, and remarkably it contained
the same birth and rebirth imagery as in our \emph{Waste Land} passage
(coincidence?), that we are dead to our old lives and reborn in Christ, the
parallels were too remarkable not to mention.
\end{quote}
Rebirth is explicit in Paul, but I don't see rebirth in this poem.  Stillbirth
is more like it.
\begin{quote}
The wheel is a multiple
reference, the wheel of fortune, of Buddhist doctrine, and the wheel of
resurrection.
\end{quote}
Wheels, swells, tide, time and space, cycles, and Buddhist rebirth all symbolize
the same thing.  In contrast, resurrection/Christian rebirth is a leap above
the plane of the wheel.   \textsc{Imho,} the `wheel of resurrection' is an oxymoron.
\begin{quote}
The death by water foretold in Sect.~I and fore-suffered in II
and III [is] realized in IV, the fortune fulfilled, the prophecy realized. So
as in Paul, the road to resurrection and rebirth has been prepared.
\end{quote}
It's clearly death by water, but I don't see resurrection.  Maybe
rebirth to the stages again.  Do you really see Section IV as hopeful,
a fortune fulfilled?  If so, why does Madame Sosostris tell us to
`Fear death by water'? 

`Consider Phlebas' could be a warning instead.
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Ms Murray]
I've gone ahead to the thunder section---now I am curious what I will decide 
about whether there is resurrection in this poem, I'm only still stuck at the 
beginning of the section.

I am struck by the pure feeling of the horror of approaching death.  I ask 
myself how the poem works to do this, and I start to have a theory when I look 
at the sequence of nouns in the second stanza---
\begin{quote}\centering
  water rock\\
rock water \\
road road\\
mountains mountains\\
rock water\\
water rock\\
(sweat feet sand)\\
water rock
\end{quote}
 \dots  you get the idea.  it's \emph{really} dry.

I wonder about the red faces in line 322 and repeated in line 344---maybe 
they are the beginning of the hallucinations.  I think that the `sound high in 
the air' and the `hooded hordes' are hallucination, and the word
`unreal' is the  moment of death.

Then comes the bit starting with the woman fiddling whisper music on her long 
black hair.  This part makes no sense to me at all.  bats, towers, voices 
singing.  How does this fit in?
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Billington wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
I don't see either terror or surrender here.  Maybe peace, but
  more likely simple cessation. `As he rose and fell / He passes the
  stages of his age 
and youth / Entering the whirlpool.'  I suppose it depends on what `passes'
means.
He could be passing by the stages, or passing through them again, or
passing to
the other side, \emph{i.e.}~outside the cycles.
\end{quote}
You jump into a whirlpool and you are not terrified? OK, that aside,
According to Frazer, the dead god (usually in effigy) is tossed into the sea
and then welcomed back when [he] is reborn at the end of his journey (returned
via the current). Thus the rising and falling on this level symbolize the
relinquishing of the `natural man' to the `current of the sea'. The surrender
is the surrender of self, the rising and falling then committing oneself to
the water; in the Christian cult, the rising and falling is likened to
dipping oneself in the baptismal font. (Death and baptism linked in Paul.) I
am not going to push this Paul thing too much more but the links to section
V, that opens with Luke version of the resurrection, the reference to
Gentile and Jew that is from Paul, and the insinuation of baptism all seem
to suggest that a reading of Paul is one of the many meanings that is given
here.
\begin{quote}
Rebirth is explicit in Paul, but I don't see rebirth in this poem.
Stillbirth
is more like it.
\end{quote}
Is it possible that you don't see rebirth because as I pointed out in my
Eliot commentary on Sect.~V, the myths and heroes of old are dead, And `We
who were living are now dying' in the sense of St~Paul. Because it suggest[s]
that we whose lives were once enriched by figures of faith, heroes,
demigods, and gods, no longer respond to them. You can't feel the rebirth of
the Fisher King because you are in the Waste Land. In my bit on Sect.~V it
seems linked to the return of the Fisher King and I quote myself here, `the
Fisher King legend, in which a king's land falls to waste when he himself is
diseased. This is paired with lines [424--6]:
\settowidth{\vgap}{Fishing, with the arid plain b}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{\vin  I sat upon the shore}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin  I sat upon the shore\\
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me\\
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
\end{myverse}
This means that the Waste Land is coming to an end that the king is at last
returning to health and returning to control.'
\begin{quote}
\textsc{Imho,} the `wheel of resurrection' is an oxymoron.
\end{quote}
Oops!, my bad.
\begin{quote}
It's clearly death by water, but I don't see resurrection.  Maybe rebirth
to the
stages again.  Do you really see Section IV as hopeful, a fortune
fulfilled?  If
so, why does Madame Sosostris tell us to `Fear death by water'?
\end{quote}
Not resurrection, baptism, resurrection of the king occurs in Sect.~V.
\begin{quote}
`Consider Phlebas' could be a warning instead.
\end{quote}
I like that\dots 
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Ms Murray wrote:]
\begin{quote}
\begin{quote}\centering
    water rock
\\ rock water
\\ road road
\\ mountains mountains
\\ rock water
\\ water rock
\\ (sweat feet sand)
\\ water rock\dots
  \end{quote}
\end{quote}
I found myself staring at this for half an hour trying to find symphonic
structure\dots 
\begin{quote}
I wonder about the red faces in line 322 and repeated in line 344---maybe
they are the beginning of the hallucinations.  I think that the `sound high
in
the air' and the `hooded hordes' are hallucination, and the word `unreal'
is the
moment of death.
\end{quote}
Lines 322--330 of \emph{The Waste Land} are traditionally read as an allusion to the
events suffered by Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.
\begin{quote}
Then comes the bit starting with the woman fiddling whisper music on her
long
black hair.  This part makes no sense to me at all.  Bats, towers, voices
singing.  How does this fit in?
\end{quote}
Eliot explains in his notes that these lines, basically 366--76, are visions of
chaos in Eastern Europe.  The visions borrow horror and fear from the Chapel
Perilous, the horrors preceding the vision are the horrors one witnesses on
approach to the Chapel Perilous, which is in a cemetery (the Cemetery
Perilous, of course), that is also full of horrors. There are many echoes
here of previous lines in the poem for hair: see lines 38, 108, 133, and 255.
For  music there are a million, 31--34, 42, 101--3, 128, 176, 183, 199--206,
253, 256, 277, you get the idea (there are more).  Violet air recalls violet
hours in Sect.~III, whispered music reminiscent of whispers in Sect.~IV
tolling bells to line 67, it just keeps going on like this, basically as you
walk to the Chapel Perilous, your journey takes you back through the poem.
Keep in mind that these horrors are now only shadows of their former selves,
the[y] cannot hurt you. Mrs. Murray said `I am struck by the pure feeling of
the horror of approaching death.' To which I respond from an earlier note on
Sect.~V: `The dry bones can do us no harm. So in terms of Jung and his
Archetypes, there is always a danger that the soul or psyche may not return
from a voyage through such horrors, that one might perish in the desert, or
permanently pass into unknown realms, the Chapel Perilous set to accommodate
those that do not pass this quest. Eliot says that this decay, is the decay
of Eastern Europe, but then as cultural decay it is also the loss of values,
the Jungian Archetypes that no longer hold sway, have lost their meaning to
us, their myths and ultimately our own, \emph{i.e.}~the mist of the dying an[d] rising
Christ have no meaning any longer.'
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Ms Murray]
When I revealed that Lodge's \emph{Small World} is a Grail novel, I
think Mr Fant
mentioned having recently read it.  probably others here are David Lodge fans 
also (if not, y'all should be).  Anyway.  I was Googling around about `Chapel 
Perilous' trying to really understand Mr Lewis's posts about T.S. Eliot, and 
I happened across this interview:
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/lodge.htm}
\end{quote}
Whoa!  Now I really \emph{am} going to reread \emph{Small World.}  I
recommend both book and interview.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
Finally, rain has come to the Waste Land,
bringing with it the rebirth and cleansing that it has traditionally
symbolized.
\end{quote}
If that is so, then why is April the cruelest month?  It seems to me the cycle is coming
round again.
\begin{quote}
 This is a double symbolism in that the symbolism of the water
 has reverted from a perversion back to its normal meaning, symbolizing the
 approaching end of the Waste Land.
\end{quote}
The sea is death, unless Phlebas `passes' the stages, which is a new life.
(Baptism is death by water, but also rebirth in the spirit.)  Rain is life is
cruel, unless it brings a flood, which is death.  Rivers flow and rise
and fall,
an endless cycle.  Similarly, the Fisher King takes part in the cycle of the
seasons.
\begin{quote}
\settowidth{\vgap}{Fishing, with the arid plain b}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{\vin  I sat upon the shore}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin I sat upon the shore\\
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me\\
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
\end{myverse}
This means that \emph{The Waste Land} is coming to an end that the king is at last
returning to health and returning to control.
\end{quote}
Returning to health, but not by the old myths, I take it?  By a Hindu myth, it
appears. Yet Eliot uses fishing, shore, and land, all of them part of the old
myths, to symbolize the new state of mind.  So is he telling us anew an old
myth, or making a new one?  What does `fishing' mean?

`These fragments' I assume refers to the poem itself.  So the poem is the
salvation, as Collingwood said, if it can create a new state of mind.  To do
that, the poem spends most of its lines discussing the failure of the old myths.
Maybe Eliot hasn't figured out what the new myth is.  Maybe he is just clearing
the ground.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  I should probably read this [\emph{Small World}], as I am just as
  confused about what I have
written as anyone. Obviously, I don't really have an in depth knowledge of
the Chapel Perilous, or \emph{The Waste Land} for that matter, though I have enjoyed
what I have learned, most of what I posted I gleaned from reading Eliot's
notes, and similar commentary, and then trying to sort it out in my own
language to the best of my ability, adding a little St John's Shine to keep
it interesting.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Billington wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
If that is so, then why is April the cruelest month?  It seems to me the cycle is
coming
round again.
\end{quote}
April is the Easter month, evoking concepts associated with the death and
resurrection of the Christ. It is a vehicle to immediately introduce
fertility rites into this poem. The major thematic strain is initiated in
the title of the first section and its juxtaposition with the first line.
\begin{quote}
Returning to health, but not by the old myths, I take it?  By a Hindu myth,
it
appears. Yet Eliot uses fishing, shore, and land, all of them part of the
old
myths, to symbolize the new state of mind.  So is he telling us anew an old
myth, or making a new one?  What does `fishing', mean?
\end{quote}
Fishing is the idleness of sitting around while your kingdom falls to ruin.
(More see below.)
\begin{quote}
`These fragments' I assume refers to the poem itself.  So the poem is the
salvation, as Collingwood said, if it can create a new state of mind.  To
do
that, the poem spends most of its lines discussing the failure of the old
myths.
Maybe Eliot hasn't figured out what the new myth is.  Maybe he is just
clearing
the ground.
\end{quote}
The last ten lines of the poem are almost all allusions. They are the broken
fragments (of truth?) left standing in the Waste Land. There are references
to the Fisher King (fishing). The king must do something more than sit and
fish while the ruins of his kingdom collapse around him (London Bridge is
falling down). There are fragments from tragedies akin to \emph{Hamlet,} fragments
of Dante, who meets the poet suffering for his lustful life on earth,
fragment[s] from a song about spring and fulfillment, and finally fragments
from a sonnet, of a lost poet trying to rebuild his lost heritage. And it is
there that I begin to see the light. If you will allow me to digress a bit,
it took me back to my days in Grad.~School when I was studying the first few
hundred years of Christianity and I was sitting in a class that was
predominantly Methodist and Presbyterian ministers when it was asked how
they had each individually gone about justifying to their respective
ordination committees whether or not they believe that Jesus was the divine
Son of God \emph{\`a la} the Nicene Creed---`God from God, Light from light'---, and the
simple majority admitted that no, in fact they did not hold this opinion.
The reasons differed, as did the justifications, but it had a profound
effect on me, I scooped my jaw up off of the table and said something like
`What the Hell are you all talking about?'

In retrospect, I realize, I was witnessing first hand the decay of the myth
that is modern Christianity. And what is the culture doing about it? They
look around, to Gnosticism, to the cult of Mithras, to the Cathars of 11th-century France. Eastern mysticism, Buddhism, Gnosticism, Bahaism, classical
mythology and more are woven into a catch-all creating a story that taps
into the deep wells of emotions that we bring to religion in a world
suddenly gripped by competing religious visions, and faiths that have lapsed
with time. But if you think about it, it begins to make sense, you can say
what a new myth is, new myths aren't just going to be taken out of the air,
you take the meaning[s] that have always been there and see how they have
changed, reshuffling the deck as it were, and isn't this what Eliot gives
us, fragments that are the new deck, `the truth that passes all
understanding'.
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Lewis himself wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
But if you think about it, it begins to make sense, you can say
what a new myth is, new myths aren't just going to be taken out of the air,
you take the meaning[s] that have always been there and see how they have
changed, reshuffling the deck as it were, and isn't this what Eliot gives
us, fragments that are the new deck, `the truth that passes all
understanding'.
\end{quote}
There are a few typos in this last sentence, and I wanted to be clear. New
myths aren't taken out of thin air. You can't say today I will make a new
ritual and that ritual will be X\@. The new myths are born out of a process
that we see in our own culture, and one that Eliot evidentially saw in his.
That there is a passing away with values, and that new beliefs are formed,
only slowly, out of what has come before, this is important, because it is
the reforming ou[t] of the past that makes these new myths palatable. Because
they are already part of our ongoing tradition; except that our traditions,
like the rituals in a church, have become diluted over 2000 years, and we
begin the arduous task of casting about to make sense of what it is we are
doing and why, the old explanations only hold up so long before the[y] too
become tired and empty, and what are we left with, look what the matrix did,
an amalgamation of Philosophy, Theosophy and religion, trying to make sense
of a world that doesn't seem real, and if this world isn't real, what are
the other possibilities? Heaven? The Waste Land? And eternity in the Chapel
Perilous? Yuck.

Anyway a good example of this transmogrification is the birth of the ritual
surrounding the Last Supper, taking the meal of Passover and having it
become a new ritual of Eucharist.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Ms Murray]
OK, I'm caught up and now know that `Chapel Perilous' is the same as the 
Grail chapel, and it's where the knight must ask a question (any
question?  only
the right question?) to revive the Fisher King and his kingdom.
Asking and answering questions and knowing the magic word, I guess,
are pretty standard elements of all manner of myths, legends and fairy
tales.  Does anyone find this element in Eliot?  

(By the way, Mr Lewis, I don't think that reading David Lodge's novel would 
be particularly helpful for deciphering Eliot, but I expect that all the 
things we've learned about Eliot and the Grail legend would make Lodge
vastly more entertaining than he already is.)

I've always thought that `April is the cruelest month' meant that the 
reawakening of nature was like your foot going to sleep and then
waking up---desirable but painful while it's happening.  It also makes
me think of the reading we are doing for the Pittsburgh seminar:
Yi-Fu Tuan's The Good Life.  Tuan points out that in the lushest, most
fecund environments, like farms or jungles, one is always in the
presence of death.  Most of the cute little baby rabbits born in April
have been eaten by hawks \& cats by May; the deer eat half of what you
plant in the garden.  Winter and the desert are pure and still. 
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Ms Murray wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
 Tuan points out that in the lushest, most fecund environments, like farms
or jungles, one is always in the presence of death.  Most of the cute little
baby rabbits born in April have been eaten by hawks \& cats by May; the deer
eat half of what you plant in the garden.
\end{quote}
We seem to have come full circle as Eliot intended (?). In his notes he says,
he is indebted to \emph{The Golden Bough:} `I have used especially the two volumes
\emph{Adonis, Attis, Osiris.}  Anyone who is acquainted with these works will
immediately recognize in the poem certain references to the vegetation
Ceremonies.'  The title, `The Burial of the Dead', recalls Osiris, whose rituals
took place in spring. Usually a time of Blooms, birth and celebration.
Instead we have death, mutilation, and suffering. April, by these standards,
would seem to be cruel.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
April is the Easter month, evoking concepts associated with the death and
 resurrection of the Christ. It is a vehicle to immediately introduce
 fertility rites into this poem.
\end{quote}
I'll say again that the two myths above have quite different shapes.  A
death-and-resurrection myth is U-shaped.  A fertility myth is circular, or if
you stretch out the time element, a sine wave.
\begin{quote}
 But if you think about it, it begins to make sense, you can say
 what a new myth is, new myths aren't just going to be taken out of the air,
 you take the meaning[s] that have always been there and see how they have
 changed, reshuffling the deck as it were, and isn't this what Eliot gives
 us, fragments that are the new deck, `the truth that passes all
 understanding'.
\end{quote}
I like that part about the reshuffling of the deck.  The `new' myth assigns new
meaning to the old symbols.  The old symbols wear out, I suppose, because the
felt needs have changed.  The `new' myth addresses the new felt needs.
Naturally,
that leads to the question, what are Eliot's new felt needs?

Maybe more answerable, since it may actually be in the poem, is, which shape do
you think is Eliot's new myth, U-shaped or sine wave, or since April is the
cruelest
month, something else?
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Ms Murray wrote:
\begin{quote}
 Asking and
 answering questions and knowing the magic word, I guess, are pretty standard
 elements of all manner of myths, legends and fairy tales.  Does anyone find
 this element in Eliot?
\end{quote}
If there is a magic word, it would be `DA', coming from an inanimate entity.  It
is spoken three times, and each time the listeners hear a different word.  It
sounds to me like the message either isn't really there, or will always be
misinterpreted.  Whatever we hear will be wrong, including this poem.
\begin{quote}
 I've always thought that `April is the cruelest month' meant that the
 reawakening of nature was like your foot going to sleep and then
 waking up---desirable but painful while it's happening\dots 
Winter and the desert are pure and still.
\end{quote}
So in which category, or neither, is Eliot at the end of the poem:
\settowidth{\vgap}{Fishing, with the arid plain b}
\settowidth{\versewidth}{\vin  I sat upon the shore}
\begin{myverse}[\versewidth]
\vin  I sat upon the shore\\
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me\\
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
\end{myverse}
Ms Murray, you found the shift key!%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{My normalization of capitalization obscures the meaning of
  this comment.} 
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Billington wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
I'll say again that the two myths above have quite different shapes.  A
death-and-resurrection myth is U-shaped.  A fertility myth is circular, or
if
you stretch out the time element, a sine wave.
\end{quote}
I guess I have a hard time accepting that birth/resurrection isn't circular
(yes I see that once Christ is risen it is done) but then again, we
celebrate it every Easter. Christ has died/Christ has Risen/Christ will Come
again (perhaps to die?)~seems circular to me. Eliot links the Easter
celebration to the recurring vegetation rites, in much the same way.
That leads to the question, what are Eliot's new felt needs?
My first intuition, usually not my best, is that he is pointing to a time of
healing in the aftermath of WWI. The war still on everyone's mind, the loss
of children, fathers, friends, must have had a terrible psychological impact
on society and left a hole in their spirituality, what is this for? Where
are our fathers, our role models now? How can a Christian myth answer these
questions, when will they return, when will Johnny come marching home?
Never.
\begin{quote}
Maybe more answerable, since it may actually be in the poem, is, which
shape do
you think is Eliot's new myth, U-shaped or sine wave, or since April is the
cruelest month, something else?
\end{quote}
\emph{The Waste Land} has been linked to symphonic structure, composed in five
movements that are linked by contrapuntal interweaving of a series of
recurrent themes which interlace the structure and are derived from time-honored patterns, something Eliot would have consciously [striven] to achieve.
Eliot's use of quotation, allusion and adaptation serve to illustrate a
sense of the past, involving perception not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence. The verse patterns of the poem seem to follow the
same style, however the verse does vary from section to section providing
different rhythms for different functions (some more successful than others
perhaps). Eliot writes in his \emph{Use of Poetry} that `Rhythm\dots works through
meanings\dots and fuses the old and trite, the current, and the new and
surprising, the most ancient and the most civilized mentality.' Perhaps \emph{The
Four Quartets} achieved an even far greater control of this verse form than
was possible for Eliot in \emph{The Waste Land.} At any point I suggest that perhaps
looking at Eliot's use of time may give us some indication of the flow
and/or shape of this poem.

The time structure of the poem is intricate and complex, achieved by use of
citation, allusion, reference, and adaptation, bringing each outside thing
into play in a whole spectrum of associations, connecting to thing[s] referred
to the reader in various `states' of time, real or chronological,
mathematical, emotional, and historical, and depend[ing] largely on the reader's
involvement with the poem. Eliot dissolves time much the same way Dali
dissolves space. Still Eliot seems to be concerned with how the past and
present coexist in the now. Much as new myths are made of the broken form of
myths pasts and our current emotion, interpretation and philosophy. Every
reader will bring a slightly different set of responses, because the poem is
not a concrete set of concrete denotative statements, rather it is written
to help us achieve our own set of goals while appealing to our logical
intelligence. Look at the beginning of the poem, before the `April is the
cruelest month' you find: [trans]
\begin{quote}
With my own eyes I saw the Sybil of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the
boys said to her: `[Sybil, what do you want?]' she replied, `[I want to
die.]'
\end{quote}
The reader is free to move about the past present interrelationships as he
chooses, Eliot's present, readers present, Petronius's present, Eliots past,
Sibyl's present, \emph{\&c.} The Sibyl was granted perpetual life but not perpetual
youth, in short as the Sibyl goes older she ages, just as with our myths,
they age and change, the epigraph contains all these suggestions of time
level as well as the substance of the poem.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis, you wrote:
\begin{quote}
I guess I have a hard time accepting that birth/resurrection isn't circular
 (yes I see that once Christ is risen it is done) but then again, we
 celebrate it every Easter. Christ has died/Christ has Risen/Christ will Come
 again (perhaps to die?) seems circular to me. Eliot links the Easter
 celebration to the recurring vegetation rites, in much the same way.
\end{quote}
I thought you said that resurrection was a leap out of time and space.  Hold on
to that image.  Yes, people need regular reminders of the myth that they live
by.  Yes, historic Christianity was content to take over the equinox and
solstice festivals.  (Historic Islam was not content with that.)  Yes, Easter
today is accompanied by bunnies and eggs.  We even see,  as early as
the New Testament, the vegetative dying God images accumulating around
Jesus, a radical departure from the image of the resolutely male, uncreated
god of the Hebrews.  But since you are conversant with archetypes and
symbolic thinking, I hope you can see the practical difference in a life
based on a U-shaped story and one based on a sine-wave story.
\begin{quote}
 How can a Christian myth answer these
 questions, when will they return, when will Johnny come marching home?
 Never.
\end{quote}
All the usual answers are dry, is that right?  It's a Waste Land, but Eliot
doesn't despair, he hopes for a way out, through poetry.  Or through fishing.
\begin{quote}
 mathematical, emotional, and historical, and depend largely on the reader's
 involvement with the poem. Eliot dissolves time much the same way Dali
 dissolves space.
\end{quote}
OK, I can see that.  A U-shape is a fight through time to eternity.  A
sine-wave shape makes its peace with time.  How does the dissolution of time
lead to shantih?  (Sorry if I've gone too far from what you wrote).

Normally, I'd say the dissolution of time is like waking up to reality.  But it
is unclear in this poem what Eliot is waking up to.  Also, waking up is a
Buddhist myth, which doesn't fit with the Sanskrit references.
\begin{quote}
 Every
 reader will bring a slightly different set of responses, because the poem is
 not a concrete set of concrete denotative statements, rather it is written
 to help us achieve our own set of goals while appealing to our logical
 intelligence.
\end{quote}
You're saying Eliot has no proclamation about the way out.  How do you
interpret
`DA'?  Are you saying the way out is to bring our own set of goals to the DA?
\end{email}




\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Billington wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
I thought you said that resurrection was a leap out of time and space.
Hold on
to that image.
\end{quote}
I have this theory that you don't like to see the waters of Christianity
sullied, Mr Billington.
\begin{quote}
OK, I can see that.  A U-shape is a fight through time to eternity.  A
sine-wave shape makes its peace with time.  How does the dissolution of
time
lead to shantih?  (Sorry if I've gone too far from what you wrote).
\end{quote}
No, No, not too far at all, in fact, the idea to follow the dissolution of
time came to me as a last grab, I'm glad you find it interesting. Lets see,
shantih? Shantih? Oh yes, Eliot's note to line 433 defines Shantih as 'The
Peace which passeth understanding.' The Book of Philippians, Chapter 4,
verse 7 reads: `And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall
keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.'

More Paul I am afraid, but also the Upanishads, the Upanishads are poetic
dialogues on ancient Hindu scriptures, and in part commenting on them. The
fact that the benediction is in a language so foreign to Western tradition
may indicate that the solution is willed, not achieved. This is where I
originally got the idea that the poem was written in this manner to appeal
to the unique set of responses from each reader, which follows to your
comments, namely:
\begin{quote}
You're saying Eliot has no proclamation about the way out.  How do you
interpret
`DA'?  Are you saying the way out is to bring our own set of goals to the
DA?
\end{quote}
This is the thunder speaking. In the \emph{Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad} the three
offspring of Prajapati---gods, men, and devils---ask him in turn for sacred
knowledge. He speaks as thunder and answers Da to each and each interprets
the answer differently. They hear damyata, datta and dayadhvam. (Gods
restrain yourselves, men give, demons sympathize.) In \emph{The Waste Land} Eliot
uses the different order of datta, dayadhvam, damyata and gives translations
of give, sympathize, control, changing the meaning of damyata from
self-restraint to control.
\begin{quote}
Normally, I'd say the dissolution of time is like waking up to reality.
But it
is unclear in this poem what Eliot is waking up to.  Also, waking up is a
Buddhist myth, which doesn't fit with the Sanskrit references.
\end{quote}
Honestly, I am not sure what you wake up to, I've read some early Christian
Gnostic texts that refer to waking up as well, it is a reference there to
waking up to the secret knowledge or gnosis of god, or to the knowledge of
the true nature of Christ. I suppose this taints my view a bit. But with the
ritualistic chant at the end, it is almost as if the whole poem is a
ceremony, like a ritual of some kind, except the ceremony, like the
Waste Land, seems to be broken, and so awakening from this leaves on a broken
sense of self, not the Buddist Nirvana, not the face of the true Jesus, just
a picture of a down trodden king, fishing beside the banks of the ruins of a
bygone kingdom. I suppose if we are to make a new myth of this we cannot
know what it is exactly---what it is we have made until we are done. For
Eliot, there is a sharper, keener perception of what endures and should
endure, and incessant demand that all traditions of literature, music,
painting, architecture and philosophy be put to their proper psychic or
religious use. In that sense, Eliot's message is the message of the Gita
(\emph{i.e.}~the tolerance preached by the Gita is echoed in Eliot's use of imagery
drawn from several religions), of the essential utility of all activity: a
message for all time, though it is harder to understand because it must be
united from the materials, tone and perspective of his poems.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
 I have this theory that you don't like to see the waters of Christianity
 sullied, Mr Billington.
\end{quote}
I don't pay much attention to purity of doctrine, but purity of images, that's
another matter.
\begin{quote}
 This is the thunder speaking.
\end{quote}
Yes, but how do you interpret the `DA'?  Should we take it straight up, as some
sort of new myth?  Or does Eliot consider and reject it?  Or is it ironic in
some way?
\begin{quote}
 But with the
 ritualistic chant at the end, it is almost as if the whole poem is a
 ceremony, like a ritual of some kind---
\end{quote}
It's true that poems and ceremonies are both stylized.  But a ceremony is a
public, communal event, while this poem seems much more private and individual.
It's not a Maya Angelou event.  Also, rituals remind us what we already know,
but this poem is a puzzle poem.   If it is a chant or a benediction, what mental
state are the congregants supposed to be in at the end?  I guess I'm asking
about the content of that shantih.
\begin{quote}
---except the ceremony, like the
 Waste Land, seems to be broken, and so awakening from this leaves on a broken
 sense of self, not the Buddist Nirvana, not the face of the true Jesus---
\end{quote}
The dissolution of time, and your mention of the Upanishads, and the
Sibyl, made me think that Eliot's answer is simply the dissolution of
the self, like a flame burning out. Not waking up, but the drop of
water returning to the sea.  But it's 
hard to actually see this in the poem.  `These fragments I have shored against
my ruins' would have to be something like the consolation of poetry, before
life's smoke wafts away.  That is a kind of shantih.  I guess it was comfort
enough for centuries of Brahmanists.
\begin{quote}
---a picture of a down trodden king, fishing beside the banks of the ruins of a
 bygone kingdom.
\end{quote}
I'm not sure the fisherman is the king.  In fact, I was wondering if the `I sat
upon the shore\dots' meant that he, Eliot, was no longer caught in the
Fisher King's cycle.  He is no longer on the arid plain, either.  `Fishing'
might be more like Voltaire's advice to tend one's garden.  But then, the
images of decay keep right on coming.  But then it ends with DA and
Shantih.  In general, Section V isn't coming together for me.
\begin{quote}
 In that sense, Eliot's message is the message of the Gita
 (\emph{i.e.}~the tolerance preached by the Gita is echoed in Eliot's use of imagery
 drawn from several religions), of the essential utility of all activity: a
 message for all time, though it is harder to understand because it must be
 united from the materials, tone and perspective of his poems.
\end{quote}
Do you see references to the Gita in this poem?   The devotionalism of the
Gita is quite a bit different from the Brahmanism of the Upanishads.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Ms Murray]
  I am also having trouble pulling things together at the end of this poem.  
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  Well Ms Murray, Mr Billington, the end may not be far now\dots 

Mr Billington:
\begin{quote}
In general, Section V isn't coming together for me.
\end{quote}
I sense that, so let's recap and see where the problem lies\dots 
But I want to say upfront that Eliot was very familiar with the Gita as well
as the Upanishads by the time he wrote \emph{The Waste Land,} his
message of, as I said, 
\begin{quote}
The tolerance preached by the Gita is echoed in Eliot's use of
imagery drawn from several religions [\dots], of the essential utility of all
activity: a message for all time,%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Mr Lewis does put this passage between quotation marks, but
  did not say or quote this earlier (unless I lost an email).  It is apparently by Swami
  B.G.\ Narasingha and can be found at
  \url{http://gosai.com/writings/east-meets-west} (April 4, 2011) and
  other places.  The ellipsis noted by me includes, `Eliot's message
  is the message of the Gita'; Mr Lewis's words preceding the quote
  echo this.}  
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
is very vivid in \emph{The Waste Land.} 
\begin{quote}
The
Upanishads and The Bhagavad-Gita and concluded with a Sanskrit incantation:
Shantih, Shantih, Shantih.\footnote{This fragment, presented as a
  complete sentence by Mr Lewis, is the end of a sentence that begins,
  `It is significant that two of the ten works that Oppenheimer
  claimed as most influential were Indian (The Bhagavad Gita and
  Bhartrihari's \emph{Satakatrayam}) and a third, \emph{The Waste
    Land} by T.S.~Eliot, alluded to the Hindu Scriptures'.  One source
is \url{http://www.hinduwisdom.info/quotes21_40.htm} (April 4, 2011).} 
\end{quote}
I think I agree with you, Mr Billington, if you mean that Sect.~V doesn't
seem to come together as well as some of the other sections. It open[s] with
references to the Upanishads and the Gospel of Luke, but also the Grail
legends, the Chapel Perilous and a citation from Herman Hesse (Eliot's note)
that seems to indicate the current status of the turmoil of Eastern Europe.
This fragmentary procession continues all the way to the end of the section
growing more fragmentary and more obtuse as it goes. We begin with Eastern
and Western religions, ancient myths and the present (Eliot's idea that the
past and the present are continuously culminating in the now), and end in a
now that seems completely foreign and disconcerting. Am I getting this
right? I am just trying to summarize a few of our major themes we have
discussed, and basically it was thrown out that the fragmentation was
purposeful in the coming together of a new myth or myths that stood as a
test of what, humanity perhaps, but that there is also a question about the
dissolution of time. I think Mr Billington said it best, 
\begin{quote}
the dissolution
of time, and your mention of the Upanishads, and the Sibyl, made me think
that Eliot's answer is simply the dissolution of the self, like a flame
burning out. Not waking up, but the drop of water returning to the sea.  But
it's hard to actually see this in the poem.
\end{quote}
Amen to that. And so we are
left with the central question, which is, I think, about the content of that
shantih.

Mr Billington teases us with: 
\begin{quote}
`These fragments I have shored against my
ruins' would have to be something like the consolation of poetry, before
life's smoke wafts away.  That is a kind of shantih.  I guess it was comfort
enough for centuries of Brahmanists.
\end{quote}
To which I might add, if I may,
\begin{quote}
Mircea Eliade referred to \emph{illo tempore,} a
sacred revelation from the long ago, which in enactment, puts one in contact
with the ancient power: As it was once, is now and ever shall be, world
without end\dots Amen!%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The passage can be found at
  \url{http://www.thesoulsjourney.com/foreword.html} (April 3, 2011)
  where it is attributed to Stephen Larsen.}   
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
This reminds me of Ms Murray's sacred word in the
Chapel Perilous, but also the idea that this poem might be spoken as a chant
or a benediction.
\begin{quote}
We moderns will madly venerate any sacred revelation from
the past---Koran, Bible, Bhagavad Gita---which somehow becomes more sacred the
more ancient it is regarded to be. But what Martin Buber regarded as a
`spiritual exile' from the Holy Land, that afflicts the modern world,
and T.S. Eliot called `The Waste Land', can be moistened, and
sweetened with nectar of living experience.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{This quotation is a
  continuation of the preceding.} 
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
`\dots Then a damp gust/Bringing rain' (393--4). Finally,
rain has come to the Waste Land, bringing with it the rebirth and cleansing
that it has traditionally symbolized. This is a double symbolism in that the
symbolism of the water has reverted from a perversion back to its normal
meaning, symbolizing the approaching end of the Waste Land. The rain falling
on the parched earth is a metaphor for the reawakening of the people
shell-shocked from the world war, ready to begin their lives
again.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{This quotation is almost the same as on
  page~\pageref{damp}.} 
\end{quote}
\begin{quote}
Thus
this account,
with its honest self-revelation, agonies as well as ecstasies,
tell us the same thing said by the Gnostic Jesus: The Kingdom of God is
spread upon the Earth and men do not see it! (One of Joseph Campbell's
favorite quotes.) [\dots]%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{This quotation continues the next-to-last.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
Think of the wisdom of the Upanishad,%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The following quotation is from the same source as the previous, and is preceded by, `Here
  [Lawrence Edwards] is evoking the metaphysical wisdom of the
  \emph{Mandukya Upanishad.}} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
which says that 
there is a special%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The source has `an especial'.} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
quality of
consciousness, in which it may learn to 
penetrate all of its own potential states: Waking, Dream, Deep Sleep and
\emph{Turiya.} It is just beyond deep sleep that our knowledge of Cosmic
Consciousness exists.
\end{quote}
I thought this would appeal to Mr Billington who
said:
 `I thought you said that resurrection was a leap out of time and space.
Hold onto that image.'%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The last quoted passage now continues.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
 It's here all the time (Cosmic Consciousness), only we are unconscious of
it.
\end{quote}
Who is? Anyone left fishing idly on the bank of the river, the king,
Eliot and even the Reader.
\begin{quote}
Eliot was well aware that literature has often
had an impact on religion, and vice-versa. In most of his work he explored
how society encouraged or prohibited religion and literature. He was also
preoccupied with the ways in which writers before him had approached
questions of faith, such as Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare and Baudelaire.
Eliot also believed that a lot of the most remarkable achievements of
culture had arisen out of discord and disunity. He thought that society in
his own age had broken down to a large extent, as expressed in \emph{The Waste
Land.} Writing after the Great War, he felt that modern life was rife with
futility and anarchy. It was his interest in the institutions of society
that led him to see the importance of communal worship, and the significance
of religious practice for entire nations, as well as for individual
souls.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% 
\footnote{From
  \url{http://mag.christis.org.uk/issues/67/ts_eliot.html} (April 3,
  2011).} 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
What are those practices? For Eliot they are, `Damyata' (restraint), `Datta'
(charity) and `Dayadhvam' (compassion) followed by the blessing `Shantih
shantih shantih' rewritten (reorganized) to take on more Christian, or
perhaps more universal, meanings.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
For you \emph{Waste Land} junkies---

I was googling about this evening and I found a \texttt{pdf} that is a paper on
Eliot that talks on the Sect.~V material that we have been discussing, it
has some of the same ideas I presented in my last email, only it is much
better written (no surprise) and has better citations (also no
surprise).\footnote{This might be interpreted as an admission that Mr
  Lewis cannot be bothered to cite his own sources.}  The
[meat] of the information on Shantih lies between pp.~3--6. (Paying close
attention to the author's use of quotation.)
\begin{quote}\centering
The Intellectual and Religious Development of T.S. Eliot\\
Reflected in Selected Readings of His Poetry\\
with Emphasis on `Ash Wednesday'\\
\url{http://www.dbu.edu/naugle/pdf/ts_eliot.pdf}
\end{quote}
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
[Section V] opens with
  references to the Upanishads and the Gospel of Luke, but also the Grail
  legends, the Chapel Perilous and a citation from Herman Hesse (Eliot's note)
  that seems to indicate the current status of the turmoil of Eastern Europe.
  This fragmentary procession continues all the way to the end of the section
 growing more fragmentary and more obtuse as it goes.
\end{quote}
I think the DA sections are straightforward.  Eliot doesn't seem to be playing
around.  It's not a dream sequence, nor in overlapping voices, nor with
ambivalent images.  There are only a couple of allusions, to a spider, a
solicitor, and Coriolanus.  Naugle treated them straight up, as if Eliot
meant them as some sort of answer. Here's what the DA says. `The awful
daring of a moment's surrender'.  A key and a prison and `aethereal
rumours' of revival.   A boat and your heart `beating obedient to controlling
hands'.   One interpretation, encouraged by Naugle, is that Eliot is
longing for 
 the kind of organized religion which he later comes to in `Ash Wednesday'.
The last 11 lines are saying that he doesn't know how to get there.
`Hieronymo's mad againe.'
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:
\begin{quote}
---and end in a now that seems completely foreign and disconcerting. Am I
getting this right?
\end{quote}
Yes, how the DA leads to fishing, or if it does, is a surprise and a jump.  In
my printed version, there's a blank line between 423 and 424.  Lots is
supposed to go on in that blank line, I guess.

My problem now is that there is so little textual evidence for our
interpretations of fishing and/or shantih.  Mr Lewis has suggested
\begin{enumerate}[1)]
\item
that
the king is at last returning to health and returning to control,
\item
that
fishing
is the idleness of sitting around while your kingdom falls to ruin, 
\item
the
essential utility of all activity, or 
\item
 a Cosmic Consciousness which is here
all the time only we are unconscious of it.   
\end{enumerate}
I have suggested that fishing
means
\begin{enumerate}[1)]
\item
writing poetry,
\item
tending your garden,
\item
a simple cessation, or
\item
an unrealized longing for organized religion.
\end{enumerate}
I'm all in favor of multiple interpretations which teeter deliciously between
high and low.   Mr Lewis has suggested that the openness here is positive,
that Eliot was attempting to dissolve time and received myths to encourage
the reader to bring his/her own meaning to the poem.  That's possible, but
the indecision in this case doesn't strike me as positive.
\end{email}



\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Billington wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
I'm all in favor of multiple interpretations which teeter deliciously
between
high and low.   Mr Lewis has suggested that the openness here is positive,
that Eliot was attempting to dissolve time and received myths to encourage
the reader to bring his/her own meaning to the poem.  That's possible, but
the indecision in this case doesn't strike me as positive.
\end{quote}
I love your use of the word `deliciously' as I think you summed up exactly
my sentiments about this ending, and have come to agree that while my first
instinct tells me the end is positive, the reality is far more complex.
Thank you for your wonderful comments Mr Billington.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
Today I read the essay on Eliot in \emph{Coming of Age as a Poet} by Helen Vendler.
We have concentrated on the theme or message, but Vendler has always emphasized
the style or discourse.  
\begin{quote}
Both we as readers, and poets as writers, participate
in the necessary belief that it is the urgent theme that drives the writer.  So
it does---but it is the writing that gives the theme life.  How it does so\dots 
is the matter of the chapters that follow.
\end{quote}
I don't think I have the equipment to get into the hows in \emph{The Waste Land.}
However, in \emph{The Waste Land} I can see several of her observations about Eliot
and his poetic voice.
The young Eliot's
\begin{quote}
Protestant ethical seriousness had to find a way to share its
own idiom with his satiric irony, his sexual revulsion, his love of
philosophical language, his desire for a musical line, and his exacting sense of
structural form.
\end{quote}
Eventually Eliot discovered what his poetry was meant to do:  an 
\begin{quote}
EEG, an
image-coded of graph of the twitches of the nerves as they respond to life's
disorders', vibrating `sometimes towards anesthesia, sometimes towards energy;
now towards disgust, now toward ennui; now towards cosmic fear, now towards
social agony; now towards romantic longing, now towards a suicidal siren-song.
\end{quote}
Finally, 
\begin{quote}
the force driving `Prufrock' is Eliot's youthful desire to fuse, in
his poetry, his alienated erotic self, his transfixed social self, his
intellectual philosophic self, and his introspective artistic self\dots   This
discourse---Eliot's newly achieved personal style---is the foundation for \emph{The
Waste Land,} where he will complicate it by taking it out of the drawing-room
and placing it in larger geographical, historical, and literary contexts.  But
that is another story.
\end{quote}
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Ms Murray]
  I don't know what to add about the end of the poem, except that I do just 
like the image of a person fishing, without knowing what else to make of it.  I 
keep thinking about reminding everyone that it's not the job of the poet to 
make an unambiguous statement about how things really are, but y'all know that\dots .

Shall we read some more?  Maybe some essays about reading poetry?  There's `7 
types of ambiguity' or George Steiner's `On Difficulty'.  Or we could read 
some Frost or some Yeats.  I am not at all a poetry reader, and so have really 
very much enjoyed doing this poem here\dots .
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  I am very interested in Eliot and Pound's collaboration on \emph{The Waste Land.}
\begin{quote}
[Their relationship is particularly useful in a study of twentieth century collaboration because the nature of]
the collaboration between the two great poets is clearly documented in
Eliot's extant manu\-scripts with Pound's scrawled markings and marginalia. It
is also interesting as an example of an extensive collaboration that has
tested the limits of the idea of Romantic authorship for many critics\dots In
short, Pound reduced the poem from over 1000 lines to its current 434. In
the process, he focused and limited the poem's message and eliminated a
sarcastic tone. The critical view, with only the exception of a handful of
scholars, is that Pound's edited version is an undeniable improvement.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{James Miller \emph{et al.},
\emph{Collaborative Literary Creation and Control: A Socio-Historic, Technological and Legal Analysis} \url{http://mako.cc/academic/collablit/writing/BenjMakoHill-CollabLit_and_Control/book1.html}, Chapter 2: `A Meta-History of Collaborative Literature and Control'
\url{http://mako.cc/academic/collablit/writing/BenjMakoHill-CollabLit_and_Control/x426.html} (accessed April 2, 2011).}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\end{quote}
How?
\begin{quote} 
The poem would undoubtedly be `clearer' if every symbol had a single,
unequivocal meaning; but the poem would be thinner, and less honest. For the
poet has not been content to develop a didactic allegory in which the
symbols are two-dimensional items adding up directly to the sum of the
general scheme. They represent dramatized instances of the theme, embodying
in their own nature the fundamental paradox of the theme.
\end{quote} 
(To quote from \emph{Modern Poetry and the Tradition.}%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{\label{Brooks}Here the source was named, in the middle of the quotation.  The beginning and end of the quotation, and the ellipsis (supplied by the editor) following Mr Lewis's citation, are not clear in the email.  The text is at \url{http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/wasteland.htm} (accessed April 2, 2011), where the author is named as Cleanth Brooks.})
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
[We shall better understand why the form of the poem is right and inevitable if we]
compare Eliot's theme to Dante's and to Spenser's. Eliot's theme is not the
statement of a faith held and agreed upon (Dante's \emph{Divine Comedy}) nor is it
the projection of a `new' system of beliefs (Spenser's \emph{Faerie Queene}).
Eliot's theme is the rehabilitation of a system of beliefs, known but now
discredited. Dante did not have to `prove' his statement; he could assume it
and move within it about a poet's business. Eliot does not care, like
Spenser, to force the didacticism. He prefers to stick to the poet's
business. But, unlike Dante, he cannot assume acceptance of the statement. A
direct approach is calculated to elicit powerful `stock responses' which
will prevent the poem's being read at all. Consequently, the only method is
to work by indirection. The Christian material is at the center, but the
poet never deals with it directly. The theme of resurrection is made on the
surface in terms of the fertility rites; the words which the thunder speaks
are Sanskrit words\dots\footnote{The ellipsis, unnoted by Mr Lewis, is supplied at the end of the email.}

To put the matter in still other terms: the religious\footnote{The original text has `Christian' here.  It seems Mr Lewis silently changed this and inserted the following parenthetical list of religions.  In the original email, as elsewhere, he spelled \emph{etc.}\ as `ect.'} terminology
(Christian, Buddhist, Hindu \emph{\&c.})~is for the poet a mass of clich\'es.
However `true' he may feel the terms to be, they operate at a dangerously
superficial level as the clich\'e, and Eliot must begin a process of bringing
them to life again. This may account for the method Eliot used in
formulating the poem. For the renewing and vitalizing of symbols which have
aged poorly with our growing familiarity of them demands the type of
organization which we have already commented on in discussing particular
passages: the statement of surface similarities which are ironically
revealed to be dissimilarities, and the association of apparently obvious
dissimilarities which culminates in a later realization that the
dissimilarities are only superficial---that the chains of likeness are in
reality fundamental. In this way the statement of beliefs emerges through
confusion and cynicism---not in spite of them.\footnote{Here the quotation of Cleanth Brooks ends, and a new quotation begins.  Both are apparently from the same webpage.}
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
The textual discontinuity of \emph{The Waste Land} has usually been read as the
technical advance of a new aesthetic. The poetics of juxtaposition are often
taken as providing the enabling rationale for the accomplishment of new
aesthetic effects based on shock and surprise. And this view is easy enough
to adopt when the poem is read in the narrow context of a purely literary
history of mutated lyric forms. However, when the context is widened and the
poem read as a motivated operation on an already always existing structure
of significations, this technical advance is itself significant as a
critique of settled forms of coherence\dots
This construction, achieved
rhetorically, in fact is neither acceptable anthropology, nor sound
theology, nor incontestable history, but draws on all these areas in order
to make the necessary point in a particular affective climate. (\emph{T.S. Eliot
and the Politics of Voice: The Argument of `The Waste Land.'})\footnote{The quoted text is again at \url{http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/wasteland.htm} (accessed April 2, 2011), where the author is named as John Xiros Cooper.}
\end{quote}

\begin{quote}
We have been speaking as if the poet were a strategist trying to win
acceptance from a hostile audience. But of course this is true only in a
sense. The poet himself is audience as well as speaker; we state the problem
more exactly if we state it in terms of the poet's integrity rather than in
terms of his strategy. He is so much a man of his own age that he can
indicate his attitude toward the Christian tradition without falsity only in
terms of the difficulties of a rehabilitation; and he is so much a poet and
so little a propagandist that he can be sincere only as he presents his
theme concretely and dramatically.\footnote{This is again from Cleanth Brooks, as noted above.}
\end{quote}
The rest he leaves to the reader.\footnote{These words are apparently Mr Lewis's own.}
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  I seem to recall early on in the Eliot/Wasteland discussion someone saying
that they loved Frost and the Frost was an infinitely superior poet who
showed deeper meaning and clarity \emph{\&c.} Perhaps they could suggest a Frost
poem or two? (Or Yeats, I am a big fan of Yeats.)
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  Mr Breslin also suggested that he like[d] the \emph{Four Quartets} if you wanted
more Eliot fun in your life\dots Mr Breslin wrote: 
\begin{quote}
\emph{Four Quartets,} in fact, is far and away one of my
desert island books, and
I read it several times a year.   It is absolutely astonishing out loud, and
so well done that it takes my breath away.

And it contains as much despair and bleak existential whining as \emph{The
Waste Land} but adds a certain pathos, humility and reflective depth.
\end{quote}
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis, you deserve our thanks for doing the heavy lifting in this
conversation.  You always gave me something to think about, clearly stated and
well-written too.\footnote{But the quotation below is really from Cleanth Brooks!}  When I first read \emph{The Waste Land,} it was totally opaque and
I wasn't sure I wanted to puzzle it out.
\begin{quote}
  The poet himself is audience as well as speaker; we state the problem
  more exactly if we state it in terms of the poet's integrity rather than in
  terms of his strategy. He is so much a man of his own age that he can
  indicate his attitude toward the Christian tradition without falsity only in
terms of the difficulties of a rehabilitation.
\end{quote}
That's very helpful.  Eliot can't say `rebirth' because it would elicit stock
responses.  He can't even translate the Sanskrit into English.  But the words
take effect and leave him fishing.  Then he doubts and ironizes the whole
enterprise.  He says he is equipped, then that he is mad.  Then come the three
words and three shantihs.  You suggested that they be read as a public
benediction, not as an achieved state of mind.  That makes a lot of sense.

Give, sympathize, self-control:  are they the solution for Eliot's peace of
mind, the solution for what's wrong in Eliot's Britain?
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
[Mr Billington wrote:]
  \begin{quote}
Give, sympathize, self-control:  are they the solution for Eliot's peace of
mind, the solution for what's wrong in Eliot's Britain?
\end{quote}
You got me thinking again, Mr Billington, and we all know how dangerous
that can be\dots 

I think it is the solution for Eliot's Britain as you say, but it requires a
reinterpretation of the poem, where one the reads \emph{The Waste Land} not as a
tale of dissolution and despair but one of hope and rehabilitation. 
\begin{quote}
The
quotation from `El Desdichado'
[as Edmund Wilson has pointed out]\footnote{Ellipsis supplied by me.}
 seems to indicate that the protagonist of
the poem has been disinherited, robbed of his tradition. The ruined tower is
perhaps also the Perilous Chapel, `only the wind's home', and it is also the
whole tradition in decay. The protagonist resolves to claim his tradition
and rehabilitate it.

The quotation from The Spanish Tragedy---`Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's
mad againe'---is perhaps the most puzzling of all these quotations. It means,
I believe, this: The protagonist's acceptance of what is in reality the
deepest truth will seem to the present world mere madness. (`And still she
cried \dots  'Jug jug' to dirty ears.') Hieronymo in the play, like Hamlet,
was `mad' for a purpose. The protagonist is conscious of the interpretation
which will be placed on the words which follow---words which will seem to
many apparently meaningless babble, but which contain the oldest and most
permanent truth of the race: Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. 
\end{quote}
(\emph{Modern Poetry and
the Tradition})%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Again Mr Lewis tersely cites his source, Cleanth Brooks (note~\ref{Brooks}), in the middle of the quotation, without having noted the beginning of the quotation.}
\begin{quote}
\dots Like Hieronymo, the protagonist in the poem has found his
theme; what he is about to perform is not `fruitless'.
\end{quote}
So I argue that%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{The quotation of Cleanth Brooks now continues.  Ellipses are supplied by me.}
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\begin{quote}
\emph{The Waste Land} has been almost consistently misinterpreted,
[since its first publication. Even a critic so acute as Edmund Wilson has seen the poem]
as essentially a statement of despair and disillusionment, and [his account] sums up the
stock interpretation of the poem 
\end{quote}
by many of its critics.
\begin{quote}
Such
misinterpretations involve also misconceptions of Elliot's technique.
Eliot's basic method may be said to have passed relatively unnoticed. The
popular view of the method used in \emph{The Waste Land} may be described as
follows: Eliot makes use of ironic contrasts between the glorious past and
the sordid present.
But this is to take the irony of the poem at the most
superficial level, and to neglect the other dimensions in which it operates.
And it is to neglect what are essentially more important aspects of his
method.%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
\footnote{Here the words have changed to a different author:
Michael H. Levenson,
\emph{A Genealogy of Modernism: A study of English literary doctrine 1908-1922,} from the same page as Cleanth Brooks and John Xiros Cooper.}

Eliot wrenched his poetry from the self-sufficiency of the single
image and the single narrating consciousness. The principle of order in \emph{The
Waste Land} depends on
\end{quote}
taking the poem from many points of view at the same
time,
\begin{quote}
a plurality of consciousnesses, 
\end{quote}
if you will, 
\begin{quote}
an ever-increasing series
of points of view, which struggle towards an emergent unity and then
continue to struggle past that unity. 
\end{quote}
Not unlike the process, one could
imagine, of rebuilding a war-torn Europe.
\end{email}

\begin{email}[Mr Billington]
  Mr Lewis wrote:\footnote{Not really!}
\begin{quote}
So I argue that \emph{The Waste Land} has been almost consistently misinterpreted,
as essentially a statement of despair and disillusionment, and sums up the
 stock interpretation of the poem by many of its critics.
\end{quote}
Certainly there are lots of images of prisons, falling towers, fogs, unreal
cities, rats, deserts, whirlpools, misery, pain, bondage, madness, quests that
aren't there.  The human figures are parodies of romantic roles.  Apparently,
Eliot sees something on the other side of the bottom of this hell, as when
Virgil leads Dante past Satan and going down is now going up.   If it exists,
that something is in the `DA', but the last eleven lines (for me) throw doubt
upon the possibility of a comedic ending.
\begin{quote}
  Eliot wrenched his poetry from the self-sufficiency of the single
  image and the single narrating consciousness.  The principle of order in \emph{The
  Waste Land} depends on, taking the poem from many points of view at the same
  time, a plurality of consciousnesses, if you will, an ever-increasing series
  of points of view, which struggle towards an emergent unity and then
  continue to struggle past that unity.
\end{quote}
I won't disagree with the `struggle' part.  Eliot has to escape from under the
ruins of his society, even going so far as to learn Sanskrit.  If he can, he
will start a new society, or maybe just write more poems, based on those three
Sanskrit words, whatever they mean.  I suppose this is his poetic life's quest.
It's an open question whether Eliot will succeed, but at least he's got large
vision, and a large ego.  The emergent unity, as I see it, is a unity of the
shape of this story, which is an old and traditional shape indeed.
\end{email}


\begin{email}[Mr Lewis]
  While still formulating my thoughts on the discussion of the \emph{Four Quartets,}
I found this while Googling around early this a.m.
Try typing in water, or time, or face and see what happens\dots 
Enjoy!
\begin{quote}\centering
\url{http://www.missouri.edu/~tselist/cgi/tsebase.cgi}
\end{quote}
\end{email}

\setindexpreamble{Here are listed all people whose emails appear in
this document, along with the page of first appearance.  Some people
appear only once, and incidentally.}

\printindex

\end{document}