"Yet shall he live..."

Every thought...

Week 13: Earth

Even before its first line of poetry, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land sets up its struggle: after hearing an oblique Sybil curse her immortality, we are immediately turned to face our own earthly fate.


03/25:

TWL, Part I: Characters

0.5 I.  The Burial Of The Dead

0.5. ACT ONE:  Eliot’s poem follows the structure of a five-act Shakespearean play.  Act One opens with a series of character introductions, beginning with the Austrian Countess Marie and followed by an Old Testament Son of Man, the mythological Hyacinth Prince, a modern day Clairvoyante and, obtusely, the Reader’s Brother. The characters generally seem eager to live, to speak and be heard, but death, or a tiredness of life, lingers around them.

The title to this first part alludes to The Order for the Burial of the Dead, from The Church of England, The Book of Common Prayer (1662). The order of service begins with a passage from John 11:26, and specifically from the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead:

“...whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”

Lazarus is revived and promised eternal life, ostensibly something to celebrate, but this allusion also follows the Sybil’s lament over her state of never dying (see note 0.3).

THE CLASSICAL ELEMENTS of earth, air, fire, water and wind form another structural premise for this poem, as the elements, almost characters in their own right, make successive appearances in each of the poem’s five sections.  This, the first section, is sometimes called the “earth” section.

Eliot would later repeat this structure with the first four elements and the quintessential wind in Four Quartets (1943), a collection of poems he wrote over the course of six years (1936-1942), reflecting air in Burnt Norton (1936), earth in East Coker (1940), water in The Dry Salvages (1941) and fire in Little Gidding (1942).  See notes 64, 306 and 434 for other references to Four Quartets.

Designation of the classical elements can be found in early Babylonian, Indian, Greek and Chinese philosophies. See Anon., Enuma Elis (ca. 1800 BCE, tr. as The Seven Tablets of Creation by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1921), a Babylonian cuneiform text which describes creation through personifications of water, earth, sky and fire.

See also Upanishads, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2:12 (ca 400-200 BCE, tr. Robert Ernest Hume, 1921):

“When the fivefold quality of Yoga has been produced,
Arising from earth, water, fire, air and space,
No sickness, no old age, no death has he
Who has obtained a body made out of the fire of Yoga.”

For more on the Upanishads, see note 400.

See also Plato, Timaeus 48b, (ca. 360 BCE, tr. W.R.M. Lamb, 1925):

“We must gain a view of the real nature of fire and water, air and earth, as it was before the birth of Heaven.”

Finally, see Anon., Mawangdui Silk Texts (ca. 168 BCE), presenting the Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing and the five phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water.

For more on the classical elements, see notes 7, 26, 76.5, 172, 307, 311.5 and 321.5.

EARTH is the prevailing element of Part I, marked by three separate gardens (lines 10, 37 and 71) but also roots (see note 4) and the dust of graves (see note 30).  Mountains (line 17) and rocks (lines 24-26) are introduced and a brown fog pervades (line 61).  Attention is given to planting (line 71) and digging up (line 75), and there is a retreat from fire (lines 22-23), a fear of water (line 55) and, in short-breathed sighs, the death of air (line 64).


03/26:

Resurrection

It was Monday morning, two hours after midnight. Two brothers lay motionless in a ditch on the side of a country road. Beer cans had scattered on either side of them and behind them towered a fat oak tree. Nineteen and eighteen years old, they were in the early morning stage of drunkenness, full of philosophical questions and profound shrugs.


“Could you picture us being old farts?” the younger one asked.

“No.”

“Sitting around all day, lying under the trees, farting...”

“And drinking beer.”

“Sure. Where do you think the farts would come from?” He giggled.

They finished their beers together and started in on two more.

“What do you want to be remembered for?” asked the older one.

“I don’t know, the other answered. He paused, considered. Finally he said, “I just want to live.”

“Yeah. Me too.”


They breathed together for a while, looking up at black sky through the tree branches, then the older one sat up and leaned against the tree. The younger brother sat up with him.

“I mean it, Sal,” he said. “I just want to live, that’s all. That’s the whole answer.”

“Hey, it’s a good answer,” Sal replied. “And it’s what I’m going to remember you for now. I’ll even put it on your tombstone: ‘Dave Nekro. He wanted to live.’”


His hands framed the epitaph in the air and he pronounced the words with exaggerated drama. They laughed together. It was funny to be irreverent, to pretend that they would die, one before the other. But then they fell quiet and lied down again, because it was serious to be thinking of death at all, and strange to be laughing at it. A third brother, older than both of them, had died not so long before, and suddenly they were sober again.

He had crashed his car into the same fat oak tree —it would come to be known as “the family tree” —that loomed behind them. He had got drunk, passed out while driving and veered off the road. Now Dave and Sal were sprawled next to the same tree, lying flat against the same ground. And one was talking about writing the other’s epitaph.

“So you plan on outliving me.”

“Yes,” Sal answered. “Maybe six, seven years. I guess I just want to live a little bit more than you, that’s all.”


Dave tried to match his brother’s wit. “Then we’ll have to put it on your tombstone: ‘Sal Nekro. He wanted to live longer.’” He swept his hands in the air, just like his brother had done, and they laughed again. “That’s how you want it, right?”

“Yep, just like that, remember me that way,” Sal said. The beer was making him speak more slowly. “If I’m the first one to go, I mean, which like I said, I won’t be. But put it in stone. I’ll do the same for you.”

  They shook hands and called it an old wine pact. “That’s what the old farts would call it,” Sal explained, and they sealed it, in lieu of wine, with their last two beers. Dave suggested that the pact be written down, but Sal reminded him that the key word was ‘remember,’ and ink would be a hypocrisy. They didn’t have a pen with them anyway, Dave pointed out.


Then they began to meditate on this pact, and each separately thought how they could not be hypocrites now, how they would have to remember each other in a special way. And each was reminded again of where they were, at the sight of their brother’s death, under the family tree.


“What’s on Jim’s stone?” asked Dave, after they had been quiet long enough. They were getting sleepy, but had not fallen off yet.

“I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

“Me neither. I think it’s a bible verse.”

“Try to remember.”

“I am...”


They lay next to the oak tree quietly. Sal picked bark off the tree, reaching mindlessly behind his head, and Dave returned to staring at the pre-dawn sky. Eventually Sal stopped picking bark, and Dave closed his eyes, and they both slipped away into the darkness of sleep.

It was the same night, exactly one year before them, that Jim had rested against the tree. Metal caged him in and separated him from the bark and the stars and the ground, and when it was light —Sunday morning light then —he did not wake up. There  was no one there to shake him at the sunrise, and he would not have responded anyway. When he was finally discovered several hours later, it took blow torches and power saws to get to him. Even then, with all of the racket and commotion he did not rouse. He just lay there, with his head covered with drying blood, in the middle of metal and beer cans and broken glass, next to the big old oak.

Dave had dreamt the scene many times in the last year. They were bad nightmares at first —Jim would not move! —but they evolved slowly to a kind of afterward serenity. In the early dreams he had tried to shake Jim awake, but eventually he would come to just sit with him. Sal would always be there, too, and after a while they began to take on a sleepy sameness, Jim lying there, Dave and Sal next to him, and the fat oak standing like a monument.

But on this commemorative night something different appeared in the dream. Above the wreckage Dave noticed —and they must have been there all along —three tombstones that read like a roll call: “Jim Nekro: He wanted to live ...Sal Nekro: He wanted to live... Dave Nekro: he wanted to live.” Dave thought, in his dream, that he ought to start screaming, but he found he had neither energy nor will.

When it was daylight, both Dave and Sal continued to sleep. Finally, several hours after dawn, Dave was the first to stir. His eyes opened, fluttered, closed. He raised an arm up to his forehead, brushing against empty beer cans beside him, and he groaned. His eyes opened again and he saw oak leaves and blue sky. As if these conscious senses had rung an effective alarm he sat up and reached over to shake his brother.


“Sal. Hey, wake up, we’re in deep shit.”

Sal grunted, rolled over with his face to the ground, and covered his ears and head with both arms. Dave shook him harder.

“Come on. We were supposed to go see Jim this morning.”

“No.”

“Sal, we never made it home. Mom’s probably just now telling Dad how our beds haven’t been slept in. We’re going to get it big this time.”

Sal rolled over again, uncovered his head and opened his eyes halfway. “Dave, will you please cool it?” he said. “My head hurts and yours ought to, too.”

“But Sal...”

“Yeah, okay.” He started to pick himself up slowly; it was clear that he was in no hurry. Dave tried another tactic.

“Sal, Mom wanted us all dressed up and at the graveyard this morning. She’d probably be crying as it is, and here we are making it worse.”

“All right, all right. Let’s go.”


They stumbled over to their car and got in. Sal started the engine up and began driving straight to the graveyard. They would not have time to go home, he said. Dave agreed, but he was convinced that one place or another their father was going to kill them and their mother was going to cry.

For the better part of the drive they were silent. Dave finally spoke.

“Hey Sal, do you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“Last night. Our pact.”

Sal paused, thought, and said, “Yeah. We were going to live forever, right?”

Dave looked at him, didn’t answer. Sal thought, remembered more clearly. “We were talking about our epitaphs.” Dave nodded, and they continued the trip quietly.


The graveyard was a large estate on the edge of town. It smelled of drying lawn and withered flowers. A scattering of trees gave character to the rows of marble and granite, and the green leaves balanced the yellowing of the late August grass.

The family was already at the graveyard, standing in front of the family plot. Their mother wore a summer dress with a big floppy hat. Their father had on one of the same sport jackets he wore every Sunday. Their little sister Susan was dressed up like her mother but without the hat. She stood between mother and father, who each had an arm around her. She looked like an only child, sure to be held tightly in the years to come.

The three were looking down at Jim’s grave marker now. “James Allen Nekro,” it said, giving his life span of twenty one years. “Rest in peace” was inscribed below it. “I am the resurrection. Even though a man dies, yet shall he live.”


Sal and Dave had stopped their car a hundred yards away and were standing beside it, inconspicuously watching the family’s frozen pose. For several minutes the brothers stood frozen themselves, not daring to approach. They smelled of beer and their clothes were dirty and ruffled, and their stance, up to that point, had a sway from the night before. But now they did not move.

Sal finally said, “Dave, let’s not go.” Dave nodded, and they quietly got back into their car, opening and closing the doors without giving themselves away.

“Are we going home then?”

“No. We’ll go back later, when they’re asleep.”

“What about Jim? His gravestone, we were going to see what it said,”

“We’ll have to come back after they’re gone.”


And they left the graveyard and drove off as quietly as ghosts, back to the family tree where they decided to kill some time.


03/27:

The Point Of Life

1 looks to the stars
turns to the east
leans on the powers
 of reason & truth.

1 pays for the view
waits for the feast
contemplates beauty
 & holds on to youth.

1 bows to the throne
flees from the beast
stands off alone
 while one sets up
  a booth.

1 searches within
struggles for peace
sees time begin
 to grow long
  in the tooth.

1 takes up the cross
suffers the sentence
‘s less where he is now
 than where he
  is going.

1‘s done what he’s done
comes to his senses
turns to the one
 hanging next to him,
  knowing

1 speaks of a presence
lives for today
lifts up the other
 and shows him
  the way.


03/28:

Remembering...

Everything is a gift, from rising sun
to evening tide: we are given heaven’s light
even as we journey into night
and come to find another day is done;

the fires in the sky keep burning on
like memories, not letting us forget
how much we’re given, even at the set
before the dawn, how much we carry on.

Some gifts will not be what we might expect
and I don’t know yet what tomorrow brings,
but every nightfall is a gift: believe
that heaven’s grace endures most in the things
we strain to see and struggle to accept
but slowly find the presence to receive.


03/29:

To The Eulogist

Your words to my lips to their hearts:
What you speak from your soul
I would seek to, strive to understand
That they, your audience, would feel
More than hear what I say,
That I, your agent, would sing
More than simply recite,
That you, my brother, would be in spirit here
To touch their hearts directly
And make some subtle difference
To the beat of their lives
In the slow, sometimes painful dance of time,
That we could render this poem complete:
Your soul to my song to their beat.


03/30:

In Memory Of Grandma Berenice

She lives in your warm smile
     and your easy laugh,
     your purposeful hugs;

She lives in the way you keep house
     and home and family together,
     in the part of you too that would see the world;

She is in your eyes and all they have seen,
     in your hands resting gently on tired shoulders,
     in your heart of tender steel;

She drives with you through Minnesota,
     away from the cities and farms
     to where the trees turn birch
     and the lakes become personal;

She stands with you at the front door,
     welcoming, and again
     with your smile your laugh your hugs;

She will be forever the reason
     you are cousin, sister, brother,
     the ones to call her grandma,
     the man who named her Bunny;

She will linger
     in your lefse heritage, your Norwegian souls,
     in the percolating aromas of morning coffee
     in the happy of happy hour;

She will resonate
     in your day to day testimony,
     your quiet evening prayer,
     the hymn you hum.

Once she was the one
     who worked the lathe
     and weaved rugs
     and moved heavy stones to a beachfront dock;

It was not long ago
     she paddled a canoe
     and cleaned the fish we caught;
     not so long ago we drove to Idaho

And she worked crossword puzzles
     and knitted sweaters
     and baked pies and cookies

She would gently massage the knots out of your neck
     without you ever asking
     and one day she hugged you
 from the back of your chair
     and said I am so happy you are here.

Now you hike through the woods
     and walk a beast of a dog;
     you find your lifelong companion
     and you keep planting trees
     and watching them grow;

And you travel the world
     and you never run out of places to go
     but you keep coming home

To sit on the deck, to watch
     the rising sun, the setting sun
     or in the house by the hearth
     you watch the fire

And you will hold this as long as you can,
     maybe you will glimpse heaven,
     or simply appreciate the moment

But you will smile
     and she will live on in your smile.


03/31:

Moleskin 2.5: Botherhood

Four years is as good as a generation apart when you’re five and one. I don’t think we played together much in those first years, in North Dakota and then in New Hope, Minnesota, as Dad finished up his seminary studies. We were on two different tracks: I was learning to read as Dan was learning to walk; I was off on errands with Dad while my brother, with our mother resuming work as an English teacher, was left with the babysitter. I’m not sure how early it was that I began to look back at my brother as an annoying tag-along, but it was a perception that stuck well into our teenage years. And yet in our next station in life, when I was six and Dan was two, we did start to play together more, just as we approached the time Dan could no longer be considered, by me or by anyone, the baby of the family.