Shantih Shantih Shantih

When I first read The Waste Land, the last line, “Shantih Shantih Shantih,” aroused within me a feeling of transcendence, which reminded me of what I studied for my MA thesis. I studied theatrical techniques exploited in Wilder’s plays that expand time-space of the stage to transcend the particularity. One of his strategies is to remove all sceneries and props on a stage to recreate Elizabethan theatre where there was nothing on stage except actors and actresses who, only through their lines, conjured up the necessary images in the audience’s mind. According to Robert Speaight, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is constructed by “a mutual imaginative effort” of both actors and audience, which transforms the stage into “a map of anywhere” (78).

I think that The Waste Land’s last line also functions similarly implying a similar meaning. After describing all these deconstructive images that represent the current collapse of Western culture, he suggests a will to reestablish the order, reconstruct the land with fertility through the Fisher King’s line: “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (425). Then, he calms down disorderliness suggested in lines from 426 to 431 concluding them with the language of thunder and Shantihs, both of which are incomprehensible and thus transcends the temporal and spatial limitation. I interpreted it as emptying the stage to open up a possibility of transforming it into “a map of anywhere” in which they can rebuild a renewed order and culture embracing what they have ignored so far.

It was very interesting to me to read LeCarner’s “T. S. Eliot, Dharma Bum: Buddhist Lessons in The Waste Land” because, although he relies on Buddhist morals to explain Eliot’s way of transcending time-space, the base of his argument echoes what I made for my MA thesis to explain Wilder’s plays. The ending of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts also resonates in a similar way as it ends with “The curtain rose. And they spoke” as if to start a new play on a new stage. It’s very interesting to see how modernists unconsciously head toward a similar way in their works.

A little expansion on our in-class discussion

I’d like to expand a little more on what we discussed during the class on Monday while rereading the poem. 

In the last three stanzas of “The Burial of the Dead,” the failure of using eyes and mouth to properly foresee and foretell stands out. The Hyacinth girl says, “I could not/Speak, and my eyes failed” (38-39); Madame Sosostris with established clairvoyance “had a bad cold” (44) and has a distorted voice; one of the cards she explicates has “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” (47) whose eyes were opaque pearls that lost vision, and another card has “one-eyed merchant” (52) whose vision is imbalanced; then she says, “I am forbidden to see” (54) which exemplifies the loss of clear vision and of foreseeing ability that can be applied to the European culture as she is considered to be “the wisest woman in Europe” (45). In the last stanza, even the ordinary people prove to be shortsighted as “each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (65), and all they let out from their mouth are “Sighs, short and infrequent” (64) that have no meaning. Through these images, Eliot seems to point out the loss or distortion of faculty of vision and voice in European culture.

On the other hand, in “What the Thunder Said,” the sound and the faculty of hearing are emphasized. “After the frosty silence in the gardens” (323) which reminds us of Stetson’s garden in chapter one, there are “The shouting and the crying” (325); Also there are “dry grass singing” (354) and birds singing “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” (357). Even though we cannot find a trace of water, the last chapter is filled with diverse sounds from all parts of nature, which traditionally Europeans did not strive to listen to. By incorporating all these sounds in the last chapter, Eliot implies that there will be water restored to fertilize their culture if they take heed of these sounds as a prophetic voice.

Just Another Reason

When I read LeCarner’s text on Buddhism in the Waste Land I noticed something quite fascinating if I keep in mind Weston’s theories of religions all across the world linked by similar rutuals. Not only does LeCarner repeaedly refer to the water imagery that is by Weston linked both to Arian beliefs (the freeing of the waters, noticably by death of a god, that is then reborn), as well as Christian beliefs, who represent their water imagery in the fish-symbol.

And speaking of fishes, I cannot let the grail rest. And should not, for even though the reincarnation concept is entirely foreign to it, the general abherence of cravings, bruning desires and lust is a concept that is not only inherent to Buddhism, but also to Christianity. And it is indeed the guiding principle for characters like Perceval or Gawain, the Grail knights, who have to overcome these follies to reach a state that makes them worthy of the grail. This is underlined by Malory’s version of the Grail quest, where Lancelot, Gawain and Perceval are constantly juxtaposed to Gallahad, showcasing how only young Gallahad has sworn off all his earthly cravings and desire. Heis entirely devoted to the Grail quest and embodies the selfless ideals necessary for it. Seeing it with LeCarner’s descriptions in mind, I see just another reason for Eliot to turn to the Grail stories.

Let’s just note here: The Grail quest is not a wild goose chase in context with Eliot.

A Response to LeCarner

I’m ultimately a bit skeptical about LeCarner’s claim that Eliot sought to depict that “the world of desolation and despair that so many Westerners imagined was in fact an illusion, that through the veiled reality of a fallen world, peace might very well be right in front of us” (413). Part of this skepticism is ethical — the picture of Eliot as the wise Western poet clarifying “the common misconceptions about Buddhism” doesn’t sit right with me (412); I think it risks giving him too much credit. But, the main part of my skepticism lies in the essay’s rather morbid approach to a concepts like saṃsāra and śūnyatā which LeCarner, inexplicably to me, tries to spin as optimistic: “It is the quest motif that unifies the poem; it gives us hope, however subtle, that in death there will always be the possibility of Shantih—not of nothingness, not of emptiness, but of a ‘peace which passeth all understanding'” (414, emphasis mine).

I don’t know much about Buddhist thought, so my issue here might be unfounded. Yet, I’m skeptical about adopting LeCarner’s interpretation as the, ahem, gospel truth because I think it’s rather problematic to look at death as the only possible escape from “the Wheel.” Indeed, I think there is a paradox of sorts in that way of thinking. Take, for instance, LeCarner’s claim that the Cumaean Sibyl presents us with a glimpse “of the possibility of life through death, a suggestion that in our dying we might find peace, or to use the Buddhist lexicon, in our escape from saṃsāra.” He writes

Sibyl is the embodiment of human desire; she wants (“desires” or “thirsts”) to live forever. She is so blinded by that desire that she fails to foresee the possible consequences of such a request; she forgets to ask for perennial youth, thus, her craving for everlasting life having been granted, she is left only to beg for death: “I want to die.” For Sybil, as for us all, desire was the direct cause of her suffering. It is only through death, that is to say, through her escape from the incessant rotation of the wheel of life, that she will ever find enlightenment. (413)

Yet, what LeCarner fails to acknowledge here is that the Sybil has not lost her desire; she has, rather, redirected it, in this case toward death. She tells us, “I want to die.” How can this desire for self-destruction be a solace?

Reading this made me think, yet again, of Louis Owen’s The Sharpest Sight. Two characters in the novel, Luther and Onatima, act as seers of sorts, presiding over the events of the narrative, commenting on it, trying to direct the outcome to the least destructive end possible. At several points in the novel, the two discuss cultural narratives. In the course of one of these conversations, Onatima tells Luther,

That white writer thought change only meant death. And you could tell he loved death better than life. That’s what they’ve all been writing about for a long time. Even that boy in the novel I gave you, the one about the boy and the slave. Remember how the boy kept making up stories and they were always about death? They have a romance going with death, they love it, and they want Indians to die for them. (Owens 216)

This is why I think LeCarner’s formulation of these Buddhists concepts is rather dangerous. It romanticizes death. And, as often happens in the feverish blaze of self-destruction, the fire spreads, engulfing cultures, histories, and others. One forgets that, as LeCarner writes, “without one, the other could not exist” (409).

The Fisher King in Modern Context

The Fisher King portrays the modern version of restoring the maimed individuals and thus enabling them to start a love relationship, potentially leading into the procreation and fertilizing the land again, in the background of 1990s New York. In this movie, Jack takes a position of the knight in the grail quest who restores the maimed king and his land with a grail while Parry is depicted as the fisher king who suffers psychologically and physically, constantly chased by the hallucination of Red Knight. The relationship of two male protagonists is, however, not as obvious as in the original legend to call one the grail knight and the other the maimed king because Jack, who finally brings the holy grail for Parry, is also in need of recuperation as well. He used to be a successful yet condescending and misogynistic radio DJ who unintentionally stimulated one audience to murder several people, one of whom included Parry’s wife, which resulted in collapsing Parry’s life as well as Jack’s own. So, Jack identifies the journey of helping and restoring Parry’s life with that of his own; Jack is not only the grail knight, but also the maimed king himself who desperately needed to be cured and healed.

What I found interesting in this movie, especially in contrast to Eliot’s The Waste Land, is the importance placed on the female characters, Anne and Lydia. As we have discussed in class about the connection between red color and fertility ritual, Anne who is wearing a red manicure all the time and dressing herself with red items symbolizes the fertility. She also manicures Lydia’s nails with red nail polish, which emphasizes the possibility of Lydia’s role in her relationship with Parry. Without them, both Jack and Parry wouldn’t be able to be fully cured even though Jack eventually succeeded in delivering the grail to Parry, through which Parry recovers his physical condition.

At the end, the movie seems to imply that the cultural order of the society can be restored only when each couple reestablishes the order together. This is displayed by destroying the existing order represented by well-arranged VHS tapes collapsing in Anne’s video store when Jack finally comes back to Anne and when Lydia and Parry have first conversation in the store. This echoes the final section of The Waste Land which writes, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” In the poem, the subject of this question is “I” suggesting that it depends on the fisher king; however, the movie attaches the significance on the relationship between woman and man, not on one person, that can restore the maimed individuals as well as the proper order for the land.

Eliot, Dadaism, and Futurism; some thoughts

Dadaism as a movement applied to Eliot’s work may capture Eliot’s disillusion. In reading a further explanation on Dadaism, which Shelley Esaak defines as “a philosophical and artistic movement of the early 20^th century, practiced by a group of European writers, artists, and intellectuals in protest against what they saw as a senseless war—World War I,” I can see how Eliot’s poem might fit in. According to Middleton in the Wikipedia article, “dadaist artists expressed their discontent with violence, war, and nationalism, and maintained political affinities with the radical far-left” (Middleton 408-30). Eliot—as we have well established by now—is capturing the horrific traumas endured during WWI and he is not a supporter of the war. The Waste Land tells, “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,/Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!” (74-75). This line wants to keep war buried, not to be experienced again. Yet, war is tied to the fertility ritual (contradictory or not, could be argued); “the corpse” (recently buried), “has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” (71-72). The re-occurrence of war, the imminent threat of it, the imploring to keep it buried suggests that Eliot was not an apologist of war. Therefore, I have trouble applying some tenants of Futurism to him (though, I imagine we’ll discuss that in class; futurists were proponents of war, from what I gather). The poem also leaves readers a significant lack of closure, indicative of the absurdity inherent in Dadaism. According to Esaak, “in the end, everything is absurd. Everything is paradoxical; everything opposes harmony” (“What is Dada”; https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-dada-182380). Eliot’s work is far from harmonious and scholars have raged over its contradictions and ambiguities. Tzara in his Manifesto says: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles. I write this manifesto to show that people can perform contrary actions together while taking one fresh gulp of air; I am against action: for continuous contradiction, for affirmation too, I am neither for nor against and I do not explain because I hate common sense. Like everything else, Dada is useless” (Tzara). Eliot’s poem contains many, many contradictions; modern life, like in the Futurist Manifesto, has destroyed the ideal (yet some may argue that The Waste Land reasserts the ancient and mystic as a call backward, a restoration of a society gone too far). The Futurist Manifesto reads: “Come, my friends” I said. ‘Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness” (Marinetti). This new birth—unlike dada which is useless—suggests a revolt. Eliot, I assert, does not go so far as promising revolt but he highlights the potential for it through his portrayal of empty modern images, of the enslaved race of a London public, too busy to look up and consider where their life is going; his ambuigity and his portrayals suggest possibly a sleep that will turn into “the man at the wheel, the ideal axis which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit” (Marinetti); the wheel– a Tarot image where men are responsible for their own life and destiny–may well align with Futurism (see Michelle Tea for more information on the modern Tarot).

The Waste Land and Louis Owens’ The Sharpest Sight

If the ubiquity of The Waste Land had not already been impressed upon me through this course alone, it sure as hell has now, as I am finding that the poem is showing up in some of my other classes. Over the break, I’ve been reading Louis Owens’ brilliant novel The Sharpest Sight, which, like Eliot’s poem, focuses on the aftermath of large scale tragedy. Some of the main characters of the novel, like Owens himself, are part Choctaw, navigating a Vietnam-era America that has forced mostly men of color and men of lower socioeconomic status to die in a war that increasingly seems, like WWI, to be never-ending and pointless. But, the tragedy we are faced with in Owens’ novel is, like with The Waste Land, on the home front.

At the beginning of the novel, a Choctaw veteran named Attis is dead and being carried down a river. I’m going to quote at length the scene at length:

Attis McCurtain spun the river, riding the black flood, aware of the branches that trailed over his face and touched his body, spinning in the current of the night toward something he could feel coming closer, rising up to meet him. He knew he was dead, and in death an ancient memory had awakened, a stirring in his stilled blood, moving with him and around him on the flood. Above him the streaking rain that was the last thing he remembered from life had disappeared, and now the river swept him beneath a ceiling of heavy trees, and odors of decay began to fill the thickening air…And then he began to turn, slowly, swinging in a wide circle, around and around in a great whirlpool, the dead trees etched now against a black vault of sky. “Chahta yakni.” The words echoed as if he had spoken them. “Chahta isht ia,” a voice answered back. (Owens 8-9)

Sound familiar? This reads almost exactly like “Death by Water.” And, of course, the name Attis brings us yet again to The Golden Bough. I wasn’t the first one to make this connection—after finishing the novel and starting to delve into the criticism, I found an article by Carolyn Holbert titled “‘Stranded in the Wasteland:’ Literary Allusion in The Sharpest Sight,” which I would absolutely recommend checking out. Not only does it provide some interesting revelations about The Sharpest Sight—even though I do not fully agree with Holbert’s thesis—but it also suggests some enlightening approaches to The Waste Land. Here’s one interesting nugget regarding the warning at the end of “Burial of the Dead” in which Holbert borrows, in part, from F.B. Pinion:

With these lines, Eliot, changing only one word, is using a quote from “Cornelia’s song in Webster’s The White Devil (v.iv): ‘But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to man, For with his nails he’ll dig them up again'” (Pinion 124). Since “Dog” is capitalized, it likely refers to “the Dog Star or Sirius, which, according to .. . Frazer in ‘Osiris’, appeared above the horizon when the Nile valley was inundated (Pinion 124)… A further connection can be made with the dogs of Isis who dig up the dismembered corpse of Osiris, conflating the traditions of dogs who dig up corpses with the Dog Star flood that washes away and dismembers bodies. (Holbert 5)

Ultimately, reading The Sharpest Sight made me rethink my conception of rebirth. After all, rebirth doesn’t necessarily have to mean rebirth in the sense that we are returned to exactly the same state as we were in life—this, I would say, is the Christian sense of rebirth, as Jesus is returned to life three days after his death more or less the same; I’m also thinking about how some Christian ideologies I have encountered are skeptical about cremation, as, in the end times, the bodies of true believers are supposed to rise from their graves and be restored through Christ, so cremation seems a type of sacrilege. In Owens’ novel, the dead can still walk among the living, guiding us, reminding us of who we are and from where we come. I wonder if Phlebas, through his death, might not only act as a symbol for the fertility god but also serve as a type of guide as well. So much of The Waste Land, it can seem, is about burying the dead. But, what would happen if we started listening to them?

What is the Hanged Man? Investigating the Tarot Cards (make-up 10/28)

In Michelle Tea’s The Modern Tarot, she interprets the meanings behind each Tarot card. To briefly contextualize, there are 78 cards in the Tarot; each card has two potential positionings and usually three potential associations with each position, meaning that each reading has a potential of 156 outcomes and each outcome has 468 total possibilities. The Tarot is a divination tool that predicts or foresees the future; it was traditionally associated with other occult techniques such as seances in order to channel the outworld and discover hidden knowledge. As we discover in Tom Gibson’s “Tarot Identified,” despite the “presum[ed]” disclaimer that Eliot “had never seen a Tarot pack,” Eliot held great familiarity with the cards, especially the major arcana (which are considered to be the most powerful in the deck.

In the scene with Madame Sosostris who is often lauded as a false prophet, we see allusions to thirteen different Tarot cards, notably “the Tower, the High Priestess, the Moon, the Lovers, the Hermit, and the Star. In addition, one of the most notable cards that Eliot references is the “Hanged Man” (564). Gibbons points out that “the Hanged Man is not a man hanged by the neck until dead, but a living man suspended by one leg from a cross” and that “the Hanged Man . . . may well have led Eliot to a central motif of The Waste Land: the fusion of Christ and certain pagan vegetation-deities into one sacrificial figure” (563-564). Michelle Tea in her work elaborates upon Waite’s description: “A person in a tunic hangs by the ankle from a leafy tree—and looks pretty chill about it. Is this some sort of ancient yoga move, or perhaps a sadomasochistic ritual of yore? Um, in a way, sort of” (87). She continues, “The Hanged Man represents all situations in which you’ve put yourself somewhere on a spectrum between slight discomfort and deep pain, and you’ve done it consciously because you know at the end of your bondage a new and improved reality awaits you” (87). The Hanged Man is a seer within the Tarot, a seeker of enlightenment through new knowledge; taken in this context, I see the Tarot angling toward Eliot’s depiction of the fissures in modern humanity.

Interestingly, Tea elaborates in her history that this card also “rules meditation,” a common spiritual practice of the East (which we know Eliot points toward by the end of the poem); additionally, the appearance of the Hanged Man “recommends retreat” (88). An encounter with the Hanged Man means that one must give up in order to reach where they must go, to retreat from the common understandings of rationale and strategy, to “surrender” and “let go” (89). It ultimately—like Gibbons established—still signifies a sacrifice, but what Gibbons fails to mention and that Tea picks up is that the card also promises reward.

A Game; Seduction, the Illusion (make-up 10/21)

In Middleton’s Women Beware Women, marriage and courtship are central concerns. Livia intervenes in a relationship between the Duke and Bianca; wealth and material possession are primary concerns in the play as Leantio in particular consistently frets and fuses over his insecure position with Bianca; Bianca originally in scene 1 considers herself immune to material wealth because she is in love. The manipulations of relationship in the play mimic the manipulations occurring in Part II: A Game of Chess.

In Act II, Livia and Leantio’s mother play chess on the balcony; the game—a series of strategies—mirrors the seduction of Bianca by the duke that is occurring unbeknownst to the women. The game of strategy is eerily similar to the game of seduction and mirrors the strategy for Lil to acquire/keep Albert in the pub. I am uncertain whether or not the female adviser in the pub is playing for Lil to keep Albert or drive Albert into his own hand, but both potentialities, I think are open. In Eliot’s The Wasteland, the pub scene shows two women talking; one is advising the other that she needs to get her teeth fixed in order to please her husband and keep him satisfied. Lil’s value, like Bianca who impresses the Duke with her beauty and wit, is based on appearance and performance; like Livia who plots her next move, Lil must also determine her next move in the game that is her marriage. Failure to do so will result in “others” pleasing Albert.

The advice that the female adviser in the pub offers is sound. She argues, “Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart . . . get yourself some teeth . . . and get a nice set” (II). For Lil, her value as a wife to Albert is based on appearance and under the guise of friendly advice—much like Livia does with Isabella—the advice offered appears kind on the surface but actually has a more sinister purpose as evidenced by the fact that Lil is described as “so antique” and later, the adviser is invited to dinner “to get the beauty of it hot,” suggesting that Lil has failed in her quest to seduce her husband and that the very adviser warning her of her marriage’s demise might just be the adviser that steps in and acts the mistress.

The manipulation of seduction reminds me of Helene Moglen’s The Trauma of Gender where she argues that women do not hold true power in the seduction narrative because it is a story of male quest as the man accepts whether or not a woman will be transferred from one patronymic sphere (that of her father’s or in Bianca’s case, her former husband’s) to another, the suitor’s, the future husband’s (6-7). In this transfer, the power belongs to the woman only so far as her choice is concerned (she can agree, sometimes and limitedly, to the seduction, or she can refuse the match, occasionally). Where a woman holds power in a conquest narrative is in warding away the competition or winning the hand of a man over another women; we see this repeatedly in Middleton and in Eliot where women play to their strengths through artifice (perfumes) and strategy (pub scene). Whether or not those efforts actually succeed does not depend on the woman performing them but on the man accepting them.

The Myth and the Lie: It is Right to Die for One’s Country (make-up for 9/30)

            I am struck by the hellish portrayal of war within Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”; Eliot also suggests the large loss of life in war. Owen’s poem transports its reader to the front where they experience the war as a soldier “bent double . . . coughing like hags, . . . curs[ing] through sludge” (1-2). The war is an endless onslaught of bodies: “men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots . . . all went lame; all blind” (5-6). Eliot’s poem also points to this onslaught: “a crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Signs, short and infrequent were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet” (Part I). Like Owen, Eliot references the war and the soldier’s plight, spurring the reader to experience the onslaught of bodies; “many” being repeated in both poems. Owen’s poem also references the idea of drowning in “a green sea” of gas; Eliot’s poem also contains references to drowning, “fear[ing] death by water.” Death for Owen references the gas in trench warfare, but Eliot’s reference is vaguer, tying death not only to drowning that occurs in myth but also possible to the sea of gas infiltrating the trenches.

            Owen’s poem ultimately reveals “the old lie: dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori,” which translates to it is sweet and right to die for one’s country. Warfare in myth and nationalist propaganda is always portrayed as noble and righteous, dating back to well before the Crusades; it is often romanticized and seen as a sacrifice meant to be appreciated and honored. However, warfare is actually awful, grotesque, and even physically and mentally altering; it causes trauma that no human should ever have to bear. Eliot points to this trauma in The Wasteland, showing in one scene a possible war vet: “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me. “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? I never know what you are thinking. Think.” This piece of the poem is immediately followed by: “I think we are in rats’ alley/Where the dead men lost their bones” where the speaker is immediately transported out of civilian life and back into the scene of war where trauma abounds, where the many lost their lives.

            This raises questions of collective trauma for me. The war vet in The Wasteland is not the only one experiencing the trauma of the war; the other participant in the conversation (who I read as a woman) also is experiencing the trauma alongside him. The other speaker implores the vet to speak: “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.” But trauma, especially that of war and violence, is hard to articulate; scenes flash, bodies immediately go onto high alert. Back in Pennsylvania, I lived with an EMT who experienced a gas leak. Several people lost their lives; the man I lived with sustained chemical burns in his lungs. He would never breathe right again. When he came home, he couldn’t (wouldn’t?) speak about it; only to say I’m not okay and rock back and forth over and over again. He turned to any other mechanism to cope and I soon became frustrated; I became the woman with the vet in the poem, trying to understand, to eek out his trauma. I knew he was hurting. I just didn’t know. My brother was also a war vet; he came home from Iraq and committed suicide my last year of undergraduate study. The particulars of it, my parents hid from me, but from the little I know from his wife, he couldn’t handle the memories of the war nor could he adjust to civilian life. These issues remain culturally relevant.