-Tell me a story of truth.
-Stories of adventure are better. Listen:
I set off from the house with new sandals upon my feet, the soundtrack to Ghost in the Shell playing in my ears, and my staff in my hand. It is an ancient artifact, hewn from some long forgotten tree, carved with sigils of great power and mystery.
A rabbit hops nervously past as I stride down the grassy slope by my house, feet keeping rhythm with the pumping beats of the music. The forest, thriving under careful ministrations from my ancestors, now climbs clear up from its basin to the stone wall holding up the slope's soil. Stately young trees stand at attention as I reach the top edge of the woods. Beyond, shadows gently rest their heads upon all the leaves and ferns, feeling the weight of the drowsy summer sun. Dapple-skinned dryads dance about beyond my view, telling their presence only from an occasional flicker of red bark, windswayed shadows and light interplayed on dark cracked skin.
The lower edge of the forest gapes, an aching wound with a scab continually ripped off. The great tractors and land crushers sit, slothful, lazy in the heat like the beetles that now swarm glistening over most plants. The white ground feels hard through my sandals, a baked mud drum, cracked and rent by fissures.
I grin at the cars that drive by and continue on past a ramshackle series of houses. Once, humans lived there, then hobgoblins. Now they are deserted, except for a few twisted spirits of ruination as often appear in such locals. They shiver despite the heat, staring out as I walk past. They grip the broken windowpanes [smashed through by thrown tree limbs], and blood as dark as a Lovecraftian tomb trickles down their bony fingers.
The trees hang over the dusty trail as I walk along. Everything is lit by a red-orange glow, fiery and tense. It shimmers against the green of the trees, and seethes with fury at the blue of the shadows. In the distance, a white tower ascends heavenward. It used to be a cement tower, but a magician of some great esteem refurbished it, and now it seems ready to cast itself into the sky. Even on the brightest of summer days, the moon [or some dire reflection of it] hangs in the air above it.
Near the tower, a stream runs past the trail. I passed over it once on this journey, across a soft wooden bridge, and now I stop again to pay my respects. Some manner of aquatic creature stares up at me as I watch, blinking its eyes with aquatic intellect. Red graffiti mars the stone on which I stand, reading "NO SNOBS," clearly a reference to the lofty magician and the bridge that used to span this stream to his tower. Oh well.
The trail meets the road again, and I decide to take a chance on adventure. I turn onto the road and walk in a somewhat homeward direction. I pass by a famous house of the area. It looks nice enough, but the little shack near it lures me with greater mystery. A troll used to live here, but he got a job up in Maine, where the cold and damp suited him better. Now the stone shack sinks into the ground, covered in ivy.
Further up the road, I come to an offshoot to my own development, but discover to my consternation that it simply leads to another cul-de-sac. I speculate to myself that suburbs must begin with cul-de-sacs and spread outward. The cul-de-sacs are circular simply because the malignant spores that suburbs cast out are shaped like great slimy orbs.
-Are you lost?
-No, an explorer is never lost, just off the maps.
To my further distress, I realize that I am being eyed up by a group of guard-jackalopes, which hop about with a macho air. They decide that I am not a threat, however, and bound away. They are young, with horns still small, but even a young jackalope could pack a nasty punch when angered. They seem to know they are endangered, and react accordingly with an intense bad attitude.
I pass on towards a more major road. As I walk along it, cars and the occasional domesticated wurm roar by. The wurms are more akin to dragons than to worms, having a spelling derived from the wyrms of olde. Their riders know that owning one makes them a hotshot. They don't have to worry about oil prices rising. Wurms eat goats, sheep, and cattle. [Of course, these animals are still more costly than oil, but that doesn't bother the hotshot riders.] Partway down the road sits a house owned by a gorgon. Many petrified deer, rabbits, jackalopes, dogs, one cat, a small dragon, and an unlucky imp all squat or stand frozen upon her lawn. I walk past hurriedly, casting my eyes down to my bare ankles.
At long last, I reach my development. I pass by the white houses flanking either side. Little plastic gargoyles sit in front of several, holding a solitary vigil in case of burglars or youthful ne'er do wells. They look manic, bored out of their skulls, with blind unblinking white bulbs for eyes. In the distance, a woman is walking her pet manticore. Doesn't she know those things belong in the wild?
I approach home and set my staff by the door. It rests there faithfully, disguised as a simple walking stick. I open the door and then close it softly behind me, calling out my elated return to whoever else currently can hear me. The air conditioning caresses my skin, and the red light of sunset streams through the window.
-That isn't true at all! You made most of that up!
That part of me, the External Reception Apprehension, pipes up in its whiny, bitter tones. I shake my head, jostling him about most rudely.
-Something not real in a literal sense can still be real. These are centuries of dreams and desires, marching forward to greet me in the new millennium. It might be a weak philosophy, but these ageless dreams linger so well in our minds and hearts that they must generate some substance for themselves. The detractors reduce fantasy to escapism, while even the supporters dissolve the beauty of all these cavorting Fay and fiends to simple Freudian designs, or Jungian archetypes, or symbols of the industrial revolution, but there is more.
I type up these claims while sipping upon my succulent pomegranate juice. It is a lush red, and the setting sun casts prismatic rays through it as I hold it aloft. I propose a toast, friends, to the strange mysteries of the world! I propose a toast to the monsters and mystics that hide in plain sight. My feet and fingers both feel sore, but my mind still casts strange creatures onto the walls. I take another swig and hit Post Entry.
Comment On This ArticleGo To The Forum
Spring hovers ominously, the cruelest month approaches, and the world awakens from its long sleep. This week seemed like the right time to talk about fertility rites, and their dark twin.
In particular, I'm going to talk about the poem this site borrows its name and imagery from: "The Waste Land."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Bed in the Wastes
Eliot begins his poem with "April is the cruelest month," setting the whole mood of the poem. He makes his feelings on springtime fairly clear with that first line. At that point, the poem goes into a series of long descriptions about reawakening and longing for the sleep of winter. Winter is a happy time, and spring is a time where the sleepers are wrenched from their sleep towards the hideous waking light.
Eliot then starts to work such illustrious figures as Osiris, the Fisher King, and a few of their good buddies into the poem's allusions. All of these characters were symbols of fertility, symbols of the reawakening in the earth and ancient rites of spring. The Nile flooded and brought the great black earth up into the fields of Egypt. The land, saturated with mineral wealth not of precious metals but of base elements used to grow crops, overflowed with abundance as Osiris was restored to life. The Fisher King, sterile like his land, was restored by a Knight of the Round Table who had the courage to ask the questions that would reawaken the sleeping earth. Attis and Adonis were sacrificed to bring about the power of the land. The Hanged Man, sometimes representative of Odin, dies and rises again, returning with the great knowledge of the underworld, through which mankind prospers. Of course, there is also a young man from Jerusalem who died for the sins of the earth, who Eliot repeatedly makes mention of.
Something is wrong, however: the promises of these figures sound hollow when played back. They seem to promise a re-growth that no one cares to initiate. Through the cycles of death and rebirth in the poem, the protagonist--an amalgam of voices-- comes to realize...
What?
That the world can be restored through Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata? That the land can be reborn and made fertile again? Hardly. In the end, the speaker seeks only to "at least set [his] lands in order" before he dies. London Bridge is falling down, and there is not a damn thing to be done.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Poppy Poem
"The Waste Land" may be the world’s greatest antifertility rite. It is the perverse inverse of the fertility rites of old. Eliot reverses every aspect of rebirth and renewal in his poem, letting each one in turn become a symbol of emptiness and failure. He turns each of his gaggle of voices, brought together in the form of Tiresius, into a speaker for his own vision of desolation and spiritual bankruptcy. The words of these forlorn speakers, repeated over and over through decades, begin to warp the world. They call upon the land to stay asleep, they relish the fall and winter, when death and sleeping are on the mind, because only in this time can there be rest. Under the ministrations of this sort of curse, the world transforms into a blighted desert.
This is a bit of a dramatization, but the symbolism is right there in the poem. Not only that, Eliot also sometimes uses the rhythmic structure of his work to create an almost hypnotic chanting effect.
Take this long passage, for instance:
Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked housesIf there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water
By the end of the whole section, the repetitions are absolutely maddening, and take on the quality of a spell. It is the chanting of words of power, designed not to cause a happening, but to prevent a happening. It is a spell with the ultimate lack of effect. If it gets stuck in a reader's head, that reader quickly discovers just how many different parts of the poem turn into a litany that revolves perpetually like a stuck record.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why Then Ile Fit You!
So. Eliot wrote an antifertility rite back in 1922, and now Sam won't stop babbling about it. So what? Who cares?
Well, as it turns out, the poem might be rather relevant after all. Consider it like this:
Eliot stands not alone with his creation. He simply speaks what his audience anticipates. The poem gains great universality in this way. After all, how many people in this modern age believe the rituals of old have any power to save the world? Who among them believes that the world can be restored? Pessimism seems rampant, the problems insurmountable, the end inevitable. Better to sleep and let the world go dormant.
The themes that Eliot dwells upon are even more relevant now then they were back in his day. They had the horrors of a great war; we have the horror of constant threats from all directions. They had a widening gap between rich and poor, ditto for us. They had technology; we have super science. The age in which modern man has been set is simply an amplification of Eliot's own time. Really, this was practically foretold by the poem itself, in the way Eliot constantly juxtaposes ancient war with modern war, ancient experience with modern experience.
We even have a few more reasons to stay in bed: the ecology is falling apart, and the new generations have been saddled with the burden of restoring the earth. Besides that, human connections are branching out and complexifying as the Internet reduces all privacy to a minimum. The world is a cold horror, and spring seems like a cruel tearing away of the comforter.
Against the Ruins
This isn't a theme that Eliot covers alone. Fight Club is another book that really sinks its teeth into the topic. Tyler Durden's philosophy is that the world needs to fall apart. The answer is not self-improvement but self-destruction. It is not, however, the view of those who call for a return to nature: they hold more in common with the ancient fertility rites than this destruction path.
The world seems glutted with the pain of existence, and it simply makes sense to go to sleep and forget it all. Collapse society into ruin; destroy everything so badly that it will never re-emerge.
That is the antifertility rite.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Something of interest for this essay may be the section of The Invisibles that discusses the idea that Robert J. Oppenheimer was an initiate of Nyarlathotep, and his pronouncement of "I am become death, shatterer of worlds" was a spell designed to trap God in his own creation. Fun stuff, really.
Join me next week when I might have some idea of what I'll be writing about that week.
*The analysis is going to ignore the problem of Ezra Pound's justified meddling, and just focus on the poem as if it was intended from the start to be this way. There is enough backing the views here to make that statement, and it doesn't really matter what Eliot's first draft was in this case, or whether the final product was more Eliot's madness or Pound's method. What matters in this case is the final content.
If there's one overall strategy that I used during the last cycle of articles, it was analyzing the world. I dredged through topics ranging from graffiti to the school system, analyzing everything in my path without mercy.
Except for the last couple of articles, I didn't do any creating of my own.
It seemed like this week would be a good time to try something new. This time around, I'm taking The Criterion in a different direction: taking what I've observed and rearranging these fractured images into an original form.
Dante had Virgil to guide him through his creation, so I should probably get a guide for my own. I have decided that this will be a journey through dreams, so it seems like a sleep god would be an excellent choice of guides.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I. Somnambulant
The Deity of sleep is a stoneWreathed in one thousand wingsOf silkworm' ancient filmSeldom waking, warm in darkness
This is whom I choose for my guide and guardian. He stands before me, round, solid, and carven--almost fetal--but rising greater than my own stature, propelled on his myriad wings. He summons me to his side, and we wander through dark passageways beneath the earth, where the bones of giants have long lain waiting to be dug up and used as axel rods and building supports.
This god of sleep has no name, but is a household god for me; a being that watches over my slumber and in return asks only that I dream great stories for his perusal. One of the perks of my servitude is the ability to make a journey such as this.
We arrive at our destination, emerging from the sewers, to stand in the streets of the city.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
II. Ixat, Wreathed in Ashes
My eyes are drawn to a glowering in the distance. Headlight eyes approach with a howling of motors. Out from the veil of fog, a Titan emerges! It is Ixat, the god of motorcars and spinning wheels, the great engine beast, dragging chains forged in Arabia and Russia, dragging the enthralled public in its wake.
Ixat bears a crown of twisted metal, tipped rakishly to one side. His mouth bears one thousand tentacles of twisted wire, shooting sparks into the night, and his thousand eyes trap mine in his blind gaze. I stare as he approaches, breaking free of the stupor just in time to dive towards the sidewalk as he rockets by. The broken pavement, shattered by his passing, solemnly reconstructs itself so as to keep his existence unnoticed by the masses (who take him for granted).
He is a strong god, but dangerous, and has no knowledge of good or evil, only knowledge of momentum and the inexorable forward drive.
Shuddering, I follow my guide into a store.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
III. Spark Sprites and Mad Muses
The storeowner glances up as we enter, and shrugs. He is a creature of the night, and strange visions are no shock anymore. Such creatures as my companion are common as rats for sorcerers such as he.
From the electric lights come scampering sprites. Their bodies are intangible, burning brightly, but they wear skulls and bones of small animals, and hear and there a transistor sword hangs on a wire belt. They dart about me playfully, occasionally jabbing a bit maliciously at my fingertips. Like Ixat, they are neutral, simply existing for the purpose of existing.
As I wander among the aisles of CDs and band shirts, I notice a girl waltzing beside me. Her hair is spiked and dyed, and her manor is energetic. She skips over to me, and whispers in my ear, telling me that she is the patron muse of the store. Scantily clad, she gyrates to throbbing guitars from the stereo. Her eyes glow in the dimness, and faint wisps of lost loves, passions half grasped, and never-ending parties (staggering drunkenly towards the dawn but never quite making it) whirl out like film reels, like cassette tapes, like the rainbows cast off of CDs in the sun. She'll kick your teeth in as soon as look at you, but she is a magnificent lover.
She vanishes in a burst of bad teenaged poetry, and my guide grabs me, pulling me towards our final goal.
IV. Weedling
As we leave the store, a faint rustling fills the air. A few yards away the figure of a girl in muddy, old cloths stands, waiting. Her hair flows long, twined with honeysuckle. She smiles and begins to walk towards a dark alley, a hole that goes unnoticed by the normal passers by. We follow warily.
Between the houses in the city lurk hidden gardens. The girl leads us to one, luxuriant in it's hidden splendor, shining in the moonlight. She lies down in the long grass and breaths the night air deeply. I follow suit, and my lungs are filled with wind purer than any found on the busy streets. She twines a dandelion in her hair. She stands again, and walks on, through the network of hidden spaces. These are secrets not shown to normal metropolitan mobs, and this beauty is made more precious by it.
After a long journey, we reach a stream. The bottles and wrappers of departed nymphs float lazily in the waters, casually and carelessly poisoning the fishes. The girl stretches her arms moonward, bows her head, and transforms before our eyes into a slender willow. Her roots roil the muddy bank, digging into the earth, grasping it and caressing it. Her branches bow over the water, gently kissing it's surface seductively. I stand in awe.
There is a tug on my psyche. My guide desires my return to the land of the living, the land where strange wonders are deeper hidden. Regretfully, I turn to go, pausing only to twine a dandelion in my hair.
Well, that was different.
Depending on the feedback on this, I may do some more like it in the future. Or, I can return to boring academia, if that's what the public wants. Either way, join me next week when I carry out an anti-fertility rite.
