Sunday Literary-ism
As I start to feel a little bit of anticipatory nostalgia about California, law school, and the people I know here, I’ve been thinking about T.S. Eliot. Here are the first four lines of “The Waste-Land”:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Here are the last four of “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but awhimper Con Law Exam.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Here are the last four of “The Hollow Men”:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a
Labels: Exams
posted by Isaac Zaur at 9:29 PM
16 Comments:
Ah, nostalgia. And, anticipatory, at that. IZ, maybe its time for you to graduate, ha! Thank you for the "poetic justice" you posted here: it got me thinking . . .
For the zealous changemakers out there--the ones about to be set free into the communities and advocacy efforts and movements eagerly awaiting your arrival and your expertise, I offer the 'T.S. Eliot' that spoke so loudly to me when my own Boalt days drew to a close.
The closing is especially compelling, in light of recent catastrophic decisions like this. In spite or in light of what any graduation speaker advises you to do once you leave the halls of Boalt, I hope each of you takes a minute to comprehend the kind of power you will soon possess--because it is one that can change the world; or, destroy it.
Some lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
[. . .]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
Be bold, be brave, be consistent and stay committed. Disturb the universe. If there is one thing I have learned about what life and law have in common, it is that persistence will pay off, but only if you keep fighting. You may not see the change now but, rest assured, those who come after you will (and those who came before you will turn in their graves, if you don't).
Good grades don't hurt, either--so stop reading & start studying! :)
If you're going to quote the love song, you must include the opening lines, perhaps the most vivid of any poem:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table
If you're going to quote the beginning of Prufrock, you really ought to cite to Dark Star, by the immortal Grateful Dead:
Shall we go
You and I, while we can
Through the transitive nightfall
Of diamonds?
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I'm no English major, but if I recall my Eliot, the themes of the poem are about 180 degree opposite what you described. The "Love Song" is one man's rumination on powerlessness ("When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall"), frustration ("I do not think they will sing to me"), and irrelevance ("Am but an attendant lord").
The poem is also a woeful lament about sex -- the narrator being ambivalent about marriage ("That lift and drop a question on your plate"), deeply suspicious and untrusting of women ("But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!"), and resigned to declining number of, um, romantic opportunities ("Do I dare eat a peach?")
It might be the most depressing and cynical poem in 20th century literature. It's hard to imagine more crushing lines--lines stark enough to get even the most chipper gunner to throw down his or her books for the night and say, "Eh, fuck it" -- than the concluding stanza:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
On the other hand, if 19th century, High Romantic cheerleading is what you're after--a pick-me-up for Am Jur perfection, a "rebel yawp"--you should consider some Longfellow:
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight
But they, while their companions slept
Were toiling in the night
Personally, though, none of that's for me these days -- I'd rather go read about the Warriors lighting up the Yay Area. Somewhere, Bill Business is on the top of the world.
All I know is the enigmatic ending of "The Waste Land" is just one big shout-out to public interest lawyering, if I ever heard one...Keep in mind the Sanskrit, "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata"-- Give, sympathize, control...
yeah, love song is pretty messed up. great, great poem, but not exactly something that puts a bounce in my step. EW covered the bases. I love the juxtaposition of daring to disturb the universe with daring to eat a peach.
as far as the end of the wasteland goes, i also wouldn't draw too much inspiration from that (unless you meant it in a cynical sort of way, which I could see). as the fisher king (impotent to do anything while his land is ravaged) fishes, london bridge falls down, a man wallows in purgatory hoping someone will remember him, we get the sanskrit. again, man is powerless, and the world is a mess.
it is more a prayer for the failings of man hoping (vainly) for some kind of redemption and perhaps a giving over to the nothingness of death. the world is fucked. individuals are powerless and will not be remembered. maybe there is redemption of some kind. the rain does come. but it's mixed in with death, as it has been the entire poem. those words seem to be more about surrendering than a prescription on how to live.
anyway time to stop procrastinating, despite the endless amounts that can be said about this poem. i like eliot a lot (despite him being a fascist and anti-semite). but i can't see drawing much get-out-there-and-change-the-world sort of inspiration from him.
if you really want some poetry to shoehorn into the finals experience . . .
you do not have to be good
you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting
you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves
[-mary oliver, "wild geese"]
SP says: "be consistent."
Walt Whitman says (in "Song of Myself"):
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Ralph Waldo Emerson says (in "Self Reliance"):
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
and in the immortal words of operation ivy: "all i know is that i don't know; all i know is that i don't know nothin'; and that's fine."
-operation ivy, knowledge
IZ: hilarious. Consistent, and hilarious.
To all my critics: I remain steadfast that the Eliot of whom I spoke was, too, speaking to changemakers--morbid and depressing or not. Besides, in my limited experience in this field, it is 1% text + 99% interpretation.
(Inane question: why do so many posters here remain anonymous?)
"Besides, in my limited experience in this field, it is 1% text + 99% interpretation."
perhaps this is what is wrong with lawyers and the law today. context does in fact matter. sometimes, an interpretation can be wrong. not trying to be mean, just saying.
"In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."
doesn't that scream futility to you?
12:15 am, here, and no, no cynical interpretation for me. I appreciate your reading, 9:43, and agree with it largely. But I think Eliot sees these 3 concepts of giving of oneself, compassion, and self-discipline as some means of salvation for a morally bankrupt world.
For all its griping about man's failings, this poem is very much about re-birth too, don't forget. The Fisher King can be healed; the buried or drowned god may be restored and bring back with him the fertility of the land. We need only be worthy. That's where what the Thunder God said comes in: Give, sympathize, control...
9:43 here. 1:21, I definitely agree with you about issues of rebirth. I didn't mean to imply the entire poem suggests hopelessness. It's clearly more nuanced.
I found it interesting that in the liner to the version of The Waste Land I have, it mentions that those 3 words are all different interpretations of the word "DA" spoken by the creator to gods, demons and men, and each interpreted that differently (into the 3 words--gods heard control, demons sympathy, and men giving.
I just always felt weird about the issues of redemption--yes we can give in to the "awful daring of a moment's surrender," drift with the "aethereal rumors" that release people from prison, but I have a tough time figuring out the control portion--the "your heart would have responded." Who is in control? the controlling hands seem disembodied. are we to give in to some sort of outside control? of other people? or something supernatural? Or is it that the individual's hands are in control and must somehow invite/open that up to the rest of the person?
These three words may be a means to some sort of inner peace or realization. i guess that's worth something, but the world is still falling apart all around and I don't think any individual can do much about it in this poem. I'm still having some issues with the collectivism of the "we" and "our" in the DA stanzas, in contrast to the "I" in the last stanza. that's where I'm interested in how it connects to public interest lawyering, or the public interest in general. There's so much isolation throughout the poem. the giving, sympathy and control seem collective, whereas the individual is out of control. There seems to be some salvation in just giving in and letting go of the earthly world, but I don't know if I feel like it's empowering.
Isn't public interest lawyering here to change practical conditions of here and now? In the Datta portion, what seems to matter is that surrender "which an age of prudence can never retract." Our existence isn't about the things that will show up in obituaries or whatever (i.e. he doesn't seem to care about earthly, "prudential" concerns), but in some sort of spiritual release. Changing the world just doesn't seem possible--you gotta let it crumble and then rebuild itself.
2:08: "I'm still having some issues with the collectivism of the "we" and "our" in the DA stanzas, in contrast to the "I" in the last stanza."
I think this reaction comes very close to the heart of Eliot's metaphysical and political preoccupations. He stuggled to understand how individual identity could survive in the post-Victorian age. In his own words, "The Waste-Land" does not have characters so much as "zones of consciousness" with highly indefinite boundaries.
Whatever message we take from the poem's language, it's important to understand that Eliot's own politics and religion were profoundly conservative. He saw modernity and industrialization as an attack on the individual human being as a center of value. This is part of why he sees urban crowds in such dismal, dead terms:
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
(Note the last sentence is a quote from Dante's description of hell.)
I can't believe I'm jumping in on the literary thread, but here goes.
Ever since I first read Prufrock in AP English many moons ago, I always associated the narrator with being stuck in some 19th Century British drawing room entertaining a decidedly boring crowd of society women.
"In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo."
PS - Lots of fun interpretations going on at the Wikipedia entry on the poem.
What's even better is the separate entry entitled "Cultural references to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
This one's relevant for all of us law students: "The 2nd Season Finale of The Paper Chase (May, 1984) was entitled "Not Prince Hamlet (aka Rashomon)", referring to a student's suicide note quoting lines 111-15 of the Eliot poem."
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