With a crooked scrawl...

Every Thought...

Week 21: Air

Air is the second classic element in Eliot’s pentalogy, and in his poem the section is marked by dying words: which are all our words, as long as we are mortal.  Morbid, yes, unless we believe...


05/20:

TWL, Part II: Words

76.5   II. A Game of Chess

76.5. ACT TWO: This is the “air” section, characterized by ostensibly meaningful words made empty in their presentation.  Several seduction and assault scenes are staged through a series of walls that talk (lines 77-110), rhetorical questions hang in an air of wind and nothingness (lines 111-138), some chatty marital advice is mixed with a bartender’s “last call” mantra (lines 139-172), and dying words are disguised, first by a ragtime beat (lines 128-130) and then with a round of closing time send-offs (line 172).

See note 8 for a foreshadowing of the talking walls.

A GAME OF CHESS: Within this Act Two, and by its title, we are invited to observe a round of chess, a game of concentration and strategy that can make its players oblivious to the world around them.  Chess is also a diversionary game for couples with nothing else to do.

Games of chess appear in several of Eliot’s recurring literary sources.  See note 137 for Eliot’s key inspirations for this title intwo Thomas Middleton plays, and see also Shakespeare, The Tempest 5.1.172, where Ferdinand and Miranda are revealed in the midst of a chess game.  See also Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isolde (1160; tr. Jessie Weston, 1899), a precedent for Wagner’s opera of the same name (see note 8), in which a young Tristan seems to impress the masters of a merchant ship with his chess skills, but as he loses himself in the game they steal him away to sea.  See also lines 137-138 and note 138 for a consideration of the“lidless eyes” of both the chess players and the pieces between them.

Following the “air” theme of this section, chess is also a game in which words are practically unnecessary until the “check” and “mate” death knell at the end.

DYING WORDS, offered literally but surreptitiously, appear several times in this “air” section through the disguised last gasps of Hamlet (line 128) and departing words of Ophelia (line 172), but mortal knells are scattered throughout the poem, covering a broad spectrum from the deathless speech of the Sybil wanting to die (note 0.3) to the speechless death of the drowned sailor/hyacinth girl (lines 38-40, 47-48).  In between, souls sigh in limbo (lines 60-68), a riverbank weeper weeps (line 182), a lovely woman sees death as her only escape (see line 253 and note 253) and a couple finds nothing to say (lines 111-138).  We are also given allusions to the last words of Agamemnon (note 198), Conrad's Kurtz (note 298), and two of  John Webster's characters, Flamineo (note 44) and the stabbed patient (note 118).  There are also subtle allusions to the speechless deaths of Marie’s cousin Rudolph (lines 8-18), the Earl of Leicester’s wife Amy Robsart (line 279), the children of Lilith (line 159) and Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal (note 42).

See also the “little life” allusion at line 7, referring to the final speech at the end of Shakespeare, The Tempest.  For Prospero’s extended speech, see The Tempest 4.1.148-154:

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And —like the baseless fabric of this vision—
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

Finally, see note 298 for the more enduring words of epitaphs.


  05/21:

Sacrifice: Seeking

I look for God in every godless place
Plagues send me, sounded in retreats of prayer
To an unknown God.  I offer sacrifice

On altars built with stones of sage advice
Directed by such sheep that lead me there.
I look for God in every godless place

Of gold and silver, crafted artifice
Finely designed with dedicated care
To an unknown God.  I offer sacrifice

Wherever sheep lie down to pay the price,
Poor creatures ignorant and unaware.
I look for God in every godless place

Where emptiness reflects on every face
That peers into uncertainty, and there
To an unknown God I offer sacrifice

But carry to the altar only this
Sublime insistence: God is everywhere
I look, in every godforsaken place,
Accepting each unknowing sacrifice.


05/22:

Altars: Allowing

Bow down to what you know, but know as well
You’re at the mercy of God’s time and place;
Within your temples God cannot be held.

In humble service you can give yourself
To the giver of all things in sacrifice
And bow down to what you know, but know as well

As you breathe God’s air and thrive beyond the realm
Of your contrived ability to embrace,
Within your temples God cannot be held.

As you live, move and exist between heaven and hell
Within God’s great unknowable universe,
Bow down to what you know, but know as well

Within this world and of the world itself
You will inevitably find a godly place
Yet within your temples, God cannot be held.

As you find yourself at last compelled to build
Your worship house, no less your private place,
Bow down to what you know, but know as well
Within your temples, God cannot be held.


05/23:

Truth: Sensing

Here on the prairie everything is true
And in your face: the sun, the wind, the rain
And all of God’s creation touches you

And you can feel the weight of it and you
Can sweat the sweet of it and know the pain
   of where you’ve been.
Here on the prairie everything is true

As sure as it is real, as good as new
And you know what will be has always been,
   will be again,
And all of God’s creation touches you

With earthy tones of yellow, brown and blue
And every range of color in between,
   each shade and stain.
Here on the prairie everything is true

But should the color of your point of view
Turn you around, just turn around again
   to where you’ve been
And all of God’s creation touches you:

The wilderness, the world that spins with you,
The marshes and the waves of wild grain.
Here on the prairie everything is true
And all of God’s creation touches you.


05/24:

Rumination

from Walled Gardens

I cannot wrap my mind
around God’s ways. I cannot comprehend
the shape of God, nor deign to understand
the details of God’s intricate design,
though I would try.

I cannot stretch my soul
around the grace of God. I cannot hold
the scope of God, delivered and revealed
so perfectly within my failing field
of vision. I am blind,

and yet I see
that God occurs to me as God allows,
despite these thoughts that drag their mortal chains,
beyond these dreams that lag reality,
and though my span of reason God restrains
God’s wisdom will prevail.

Within God’s house,
my reason is a guest; as God allows,
a servant soul invited to the host’s
parade; a child perpetually enrolled
in the master’s school, rewriting what’s assigned
with a crooked scrawl.


05/25:

God Birds

In the wood, God was manifest, 
as he was not in the sermon.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson  


Woodpeckers the size of giant crows
With jackhammers as long as their heads are wide
Drum against the hearts of hollow trees
Reverberatingly, and yet they hide
And months and years go by with nothing heard
From the great and legendary Lord God Bird.

Meanwhile, smaller packages descend
Without the tools for enigmatic echoes,
With flourishes of black and white and red
Reduced to sparrow size, and yet they peck
Away their beating purpose next to me,
Reporting how to live and simply be.
I’ve been off in the forest seeking drums,
Yet sometimes with a tap God speaks to me.


05/26:

Moleskin 3.3: First Job

At the somewhat ripe age of ten I got a job delivering Tribune newspapers up and down the halls of apartment buildings. The way I remember it, I took the initiative to get that job, clipping an application out of the Sunday comics section and mailing it in. It was the beginning of fifth grade, and I had seen a classmate coming to school with an inky canvas bag hanging at his side, and it immediately stirred me with envy. But more reconciling: I was never alone in that first employ; my parents must have approved, probably encouraged. I don’t recall them leading the way, but I know they were right there all along. I learned to wake up at 5 a.m. without rousing the whole house, but Mom was there at the onset, shaking me awake when my body wasn’t used to it. On Sundays, when the papers were thick and heavy, there was my dad with his station wagon, helping me to make the deliveries. Mom opened up a savings account for me and taught me how to deposit my $50.00 paychecks, and on Saturdays there was Dad again, taking me to Mr. Donut after the job was done.