The Waste Land - Dookie's Blog

(This particular blog was written as a supplement to the entire text of "The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot, complete with summaries and analysis of each of the five sections. All of this was added to a print by Blookup of my further ramblings on various other subjects; first to lengthen a sparse text ["never mind the quality, feel the width"] and second as an attempt to add gravitas. Only this blog is assessible online, but it does "stand alone" -  if "stand" is the correct word!)

The Waste Land begins with a line that is very well known, that "April is the cruellest month". Normally April is associated with Spring, renewal; why should it be "cruel"? 

What is there to renew and what will effect any renewal? For T S Eliot and many of his own generation, the answer was in the balance. Old ways, old forms of all artistic expression were dated beyond redemption, expressing a world that was gone. Swept away in part by the Great War and its carnage, obliterating the thought and hope of a natural human progress toward "perfection". No longer was the earth at the centre (Copernicus), no longer was "man" a special creation (Darwin), each found themselves alone. They sought meaning beyond the poetry of rural scenes, the art of classical and biblical events, of "important" people pictured upon a horse or throne, above the crowd. 

The poem of W B Yeats, "The Second Coming" sets the scene and asks a few questions:-

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?  

A few "beasts" have  slouched towards Bethlehem since those words were written; but then again, what age has never had its beasts? Is ours any different? 

Well, moving on in the Waste Land I came across the word "shadow", repeated in a few lines, lines that end "I will show you fear in a handful of dust". Pretty dismal stuff, not the sort of thing to brighten a dull afternoon when looking for suitable diversions. In fact the word shadow set my mind off into a tangent, to the words of Layman Hsiang, from a "Zen Reader":-

Shadows arise from forms, echoes come from sounds. If we fiddle with shadows and ignore the forms, we do not recognize that the forms are the roots of the shadows. If we raise our voices to stop echoes, we are not cognizant of the fact that sounds are the roots of the echoes. To try to head for nirvana by getting rid of afflictions is like removing forms to look for shadows. To seek Buddhahood apart from living beings is like seeking echoes by silencing sounds.

So we know that illusion and enlightenment are one road. Ignorance and knowledge are not separate. We make names for what has no name. Because we go by the names, judgments of right and wrong arise. We make rationalizations for what has no reason. Because we rely on the rationalizations, argument and discussion arise. Illusion is not real: who is right, who is wrong? The unreal is not actual: what is empty, what exists? Thus I realize that attainment gains nothing, and loss loses nothing. 

I have no idea if such thoughts relate to anything that T. S. Eliot intended, but I certainly relate them to another section from the Zen Reader:- 

The graduations of the language of the teachings—haughty, relaxed, rising, descending—are not the same. What are called desire and aversion when one is not yet enlightened or liberated are called enlightened wisdom after enlightenment. That is why it is said, “One is not different from who one used to be; only one’s course of action is different from before.” (Pai-chang)

Some look for change, renewal. What exactly has to change? Or is true renewal simply "acceptance", pure acceptance of what is, paradoxically the only source of genuine transformation? Is there then, at such a time, a system, or are we then beyond all systems?

Well, onto the second section of The Waste Land, "A Game of Chess" where Eliot once again seeks to evoke the vacancy of much life as then lived  - and perhaps as it is often always lived. As one analyst has written:- "Modern city-dwellers who float along in a fog are neither dead nor living; their world is an echo of Dante’s Limbo. Chess belongs therefore to this lifeless life; it is the quintessential game of the wasteland, dependent on numbers and cold strategies, devoid of feeling or human contact. Interaction is reduced to a set of movements on a checkered board."

Eliot, drawing also upon many allusions and references mainly lost upon me, centres his summary of vacant drifting lives upon two ladies. One of high society, one of low. While she who is high would appear to be in some sort of boudoir, she who is low seems most definitely in a public house. Someone is constantly calling "time"! 

Whatever, both ladies would appear void of much that could be called authentic life, let alone the "peace that passes understanding." James Joyce takes such life and dialogue and finds humour, even finds in it that which is worthy of consideration, God being a "shout in the street." But here, in this "game of chess," each appears to inhabit their very own drifting emptiness. 

Now I think of the sheer multitude of bodhisattvas in the Flower Ornament Scripture, of their various ways and means of reaching each and every human heart. Where does myth and reality meet? How does it meet? However mundane our own lives maybe there is often the chance to be a "bodhisattva" when opportunity calls. Of coming forth from vacancy.

Next up is The Fire Sermon section. The Fire Sermon of the Buddha is well known. Known in the Pali Canon (Theravada) of Scripture as the Adittapariyaya Sutta, it is a long warning (for want of a better word) against being captive to our senses. Of how our eyes and ears and everything else is subject to an unending succession of impressions - and we are often just a plaything of them, with no inner direction.

Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, and despairs.

And so it goes on, with ever greater detail. The "ALL" is aflame! For Mahayana Buddhism, the "all" is both samsara and nirvana. Our world and birth and death and the Deathless. Thinking of what has been said before in this blog, do we seek to quench the flames, put them out or pass through them? Are the flames finally doused and extinguished - or transformed, transfigured, even renewed by Grace, Reality-as-is. Shinran, one of the "fathers" of Pure Land Buddhism, writes in one of his Hymns of the Pure Land":- 

We are quickly brought to realise that blind passions and enlightenment are not two in substance. 

Further:- 

Blind passions and enlightenment become one body and are not two.

And in verse 39 of the 34 hymns of Shinran dedicated to the writings of the Master T'an Luan:-

Through the benefit of the unhindered light,

We realise shinjin (faith) of vast, majestic virtues,

And the ice of our blind passions necessarily melts,

Immediately becoming water of enlightenment. 

In The Waste Land  the fourth section "Death by Water" follows and given the context and themes of the entire poem I can only think of baptism, the death of the "old man" (or woman!) and the coming to be of the new.

Finally, the last section, "What the Thunder Said". Reading the analysis of this on one or two websites, I would say that the words are ambiguous given the sheer variety of explanations. Maybe that was the intent of Eliot? Who knows.

There is a blend of "eastern" and "western" ways and forms, and the whole poem ends with the Hindu cry of shantih, of the peace that passes understanding. 

In the Upanishads the thunder speaks to humanity: it commands us to give (datta), sympathise (dayadhvam), and control (damyata). Can such things ever come to be as the result of  "commandments"?

Eliot draws upon various apocalyptic images, all quite threatening, but as is said in one analysis:-

Release comes not from any heroic act but from the random call of a farmyard bird. 

Which is apt. At least, I think so. Much like the still small voice that answers us from the whirlwind. 

.....but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind the earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice......(OT, Kings)

The Hidden Ground of Love is a whisper, even "empty", beyond comprehension, not a consequence of systems, logic or rational thought.

Ending this blog, I will mention the "underground bodhisattvas" who  "express the immanence of the liberative potential, or buddha nature, in the ground of the earth, as well as in the inner, psychological ground of being, ever ready to spring forth and benefit beings when called. The image represents the fertility of the earth itself and the wondrous, healing, natural power of creation, or the phenomenal world..........the liberative qualities of spatiality and temporality."

Related Quote:-

"Not knowing why, not knowing why - This is my support: not knowing why - This is the Namu-amida-butsu." 

(From Siachi's Journals)