I must admit to bouts of blindness; not ocular blindness, but worse, a failure to understand what was obviously before me. I have read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and always found it depressingly banal. I would read the poem, read various analyses of it, but in the end I just didn’t see what the fuss was about; it appeared to be some kind of glorification (he had written a long and complex poem after all) focused on the banality of modern life’s banality—then I read “Four Quartets” and I began to understand what Eliot was doing.
I have no pretensions at being Eliot expert and I don’t want to sound that way here, but T.S. Eliot was not praising the secular world arising around him with a poem, he was using the modern idiom in poetic form to condemn it. If “Waste Land” crucified modernity, “Four Quartets” resurrected it by hoping that the road forked, the wasted land would be escaped, and there would be new beginning. He does it in the Modernist language of course; when in France one must speak French. I only wish that we had taken that different road. Artists must point the way back to the future, but we are failing to do anything more than reflect the wasteland of modern thought. After all, we are not simply animated pieces of meat and artists need to capture that fact or what else are they for?
There is a great quote from Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, which is one of my favorite books. Mariette says:
And Christ still sends me roses. We try to be formed and held and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.
So, perhaps I should not lose hope because artists might just surprise me.
Blog 77: Surprise Me
I must admit to bouts of blindness; not ocular blindness, but worse, a failure to understand what was obviously before me. I have read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and always found it depressingly banal. I would read the poem, read various analyses of it, but in the end I just didn’t see what the fuss was about; it appeared to be some kind of glorification (he had written a long and complex poem after all) focused on the banality of modern life’s banality—then I read “Four Quartets” and I began to understand what Eliot was doing.
I have no pretensions at being Eliot expert and I don’t want to sound that way here, but T.S. Eliot was not praising the secular world arising around him with a poem, he was using the modern idiom in poetic form to condemn it. If “Waste Land” crucified modernity, “Four Quartets” resurrected it by hoping that the road forked, the wasted land would be escaped, and there would be new beginning. He does it in the Modernist language of course; when in France one must speak French. I only wish that we had taken that different road. Artists must point the way back to the future, but we are failing to do anything more than reflect the wasteland of modern thought. After all, we are not simply animated pieces of meat and artists need to capture that fact or what else are they for?
There is a great quote from Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, which is one of my favorite books. Mariette says:
And Christ still sends me roses. We try to be formed and held and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.
So, perhaps I should not lose hope because artists might just surprise me.