Week 24: God In The Abstract
This is a fragment from college days, a found poem scratched into a journal, my search for contentment and the culmination of tangent considerations, leading me to realize that every thought is a prayer.
06/10:
TWL, Line 111: The Nervous Speaker
111 “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me...”
111. CAST OF CHARACTERS: This is the fifth directly quoted passage of The Waste Land, after THE SYBIL’s wish to die (line 0.3), THE HYACINTH GIRL remembering how she was named (lines 35-36), THE POET calling out to his reader STETSON (lines 69-76) and the inviolable cry of THE NIGHTINGALE (line 103, and see lines 203-206). Only three more direct quotes will follow: single lines from THE LOVELY WOMAN (line 252) and the Tempest’s ARIEL (line 257), then the songs of THE THREE THAMES DAUGHTERS (lines 292-305).
With a total of fourteen lines (lines 111-14, 117, 119, 121-123, 126, 131-134), THE NERVOUS SPEAKER has the most extended of the quoted passages, and it is interspersed, sans quotation marks, by the responsive dialogue of THE SPEAKER’S COMPANION. The two speakers hear one another, so the lack of quotations of the companion appears to be simply a means to distinguish them. This also happens, though without interactive dialogue, after the Hyacinth Girl speaks (lines 37-41), and the two passages are even related: “I knew nothing,” says the Hyacinth Girl’s respondent (line 40); “Do you know nothing?” the nervous speaker retorts (lines 121-122); the Hyacinth Girl’s respondent observes “your hair wet” (line 37) while the nervous speaker mentions going outside with her hair down (line 133), after which her companion considers that it might rain (line 136).
Separately, several other characters appear without quotation marks, often in pairs: before this, MARIE and a GERMAN COFFEE DRINKER (lines 5-18), a PROPHET speaking to THE SON OF MAN (lines 19-30), a VIGILANT SAILOR (lines 31-34, 42), MADAME SOSOSTRIS (lines 46-59); after this, LIL and a BARTENDER (lines 139-172) and the blind TIRESIUS (lines 215-248), endured by the Lovely Woman.
Beyond these, there are no clearly distinguishable speeches in the poem, though myriad other voices, or “fragments,” as the Poet suggests (line 431), can be heard within the flow of musings and allusions. One could cast these fragments as separate characters, but really they are more reflections of either the Poet, e.g., THE FISHER KING (lines 182-202 and 424-426), or the city around him, e.g, BABY-FACED BATS (lines 380-385). There are also at least six prominent characters in the poem who do not speak: the spoken-to STETSON (lines 69-76), the Cleopatra-like QUEEN (lines 77-110), MR. EUGENIDES (lines 207-214), PHLEBAS THE PHOENICIAN (lines 312-321), THE WALKING COMPANION (lines 360-366) and a BLACK-HAIRED WOMAN (lines 378-385).
So who is the nervous speaker? There are ambiguities tying all the characters together throughout the poem (see note 39), and here it is no different: by the context of dialog, the nervous speaker would seem to be the Hyacinth Girl or the walking companion; by appearance she might be the lovely woman or the black-haired woman; by her melancholy she could be the Sybil or the nightingale or one of the Thames daughters; by her spouse-like behavior she could be Lil or the queen or, with an external reference, Eliot’s wife Vivienne. Perhaps most conclusively, within the continual stream of fragments she, or he, would seem to be an extension of the Poet himself.
DIFFERENT VOICES: See F&T: Before it was The Waste Land, this poem’s working title was “He Do The Police In Different Voices.” See James Joyce, Ulysses, Circe 555 (1922), and compare the echo of this passage at lines 308-311:
“VOICES
Police!
DISTANT VOICES
Dublin's burning! Dublin's burning! On fire, on fire!”
06/11:
TWL, Lines 112-138: Talk Of Wind And Nothingness
112 “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
113 “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
114 “I never know what you are thinking. Think.”
115 I think we are in rats' alley
116 Where the dead men lost their bones.
117 “What is that noise?”
118 The wind under the door.
119 “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
120 Nothing again nothing.
121 “Do
122 “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you
remember
123 “Nothing?”
124 I remember
125 Those are pearls that were his eyes.
126 “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”
127 But
128 O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
129 It's so elegant
130 So intelligent
131 “What shall I do now? What shall I do?
132 “I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
133 “With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?
134 “What shall we ever do?”
135 The hot water at ten.
136 And if it rains, a closed car at four.
137 And we shall play a game of chess,
138 Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon
the door.
112. SPEAK: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.1.127-138 (Hamlet addressing the ghost of his father): “Speak to me.”
113. QUESTIONS keep coming up, don’t they? One is left unmarked, at line 112 (Why do you never speak), but questions are regularly punctuated at lines 20, 34, 72ff, 113ff, 131ff, 164, 299, 360ff, 402 and 426. Questions are also alluded to by the epigraph and by lines 26, 30, 48, 118,182, 186, 309, and 400.
116. RAT’S ALLEY was a World War I slang term for battlefield trenches. See also the recurrence of bones “rattled by the rat’s foot” at lines 194-195, and see note 186.
118. THE WIND: Eliot: “Cf. Webster: ‘Is the wind in that door still?’”
See John Webster, The Devil’s Lawcase 3.2.164 (1623), and see all of scene 2 for the context. Two surgeons come upon a man being stabbed, ostensibly to death; the surgeons consider how they might make money off of the perpetrator by promising to keep quiet, when the victim groans. They first pretend it is only the wind they hear, but they know better and quickly realize that by healing the victim they can profit from both sides.
123. NOTHINGNESS: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.4.128-131:
“HAMLET: Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAMLET: Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN: No, nothing but ourselves.”
Nothingness, emptiness and brokenness pervade this poem. See lines 22, 40, 119-126, 173, 177, 303-305, 385, 389, 409, 410, 417 and 427. Compare these lines with the humble thoughts of Kurtz’s “last disciple” in Conrad, Heart of Darkness 3:
“I am a simple man. I have no great thoughts. I want nothing from anybody.”
125. PEARLY EYES: Eliot: “Cf. Part I, l. 37, 48.” This is Eliot’s quiet hint tying the hyacinth prince of line 37 (“...your arms full and your hair wet”) to the drowned sailor of line 48 (“Those are pearls that were his eyes,” alluding to Shakespeare, The Tempest 1.2.399).
126. ALIVE, OR NOT: Wondering about being “alive, or not” follows lines 39-40: “I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing...” which alludes to Dante, Inferno 34:25:
“I did not die, and I alive remained not.”
128. HAMLET’S LAST WORDS: See Shakespeare, Hamlet 5.2.342-349 (Folio ed., 1623):
“O, I die, Horatio.
The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit,
I cannot live to hear the news from England,
But I do prophesy th'election lights
On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.
So tell him with th’occurrents more and less
Which have solicited – The rest is silence.
O, o, o, o.”
In the earlier Quarto editions, Hamlet’s words end with “silence” (compare line 434, ending this poem with “Shantih shantih shantih”). See also line 172 for an allusion to Ophelia’s farewell words ("Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night"), from Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.5.70-73.
130. RAGTIME: See Gene Buck & Herman Ruby, The Zeigfield Follies, That Shakespearean Rag (1912):
“That Shakespearian rag-- Most intelligent, very elegant,...”
Ragtime literature, a term coined by Clive Bell, criticized Eliot and others for “flout[ing] traditional rhythms and sequences and grammar and logic” and following the less than serious trend of jazz performers. See Bell, Since Cezanne: Plus De Jazz (1922). Eliot was talented, Bell premised, but
“...[his] agonizing labours seem to have been eased somewhat by the comfortable ministrations of a black and grinning muse.”
If anything, though, Eliot's "comfortable" passages are dissonant and uneasy. Socialites talk of their day plans (lines 131-138) in a snippet conspicuously placed between the emptiness of a domestic difference (lines 111-126) and the gossipy ramble of a soldier’s return to the homefront (lines 139-171). These bits are interspersed with brief notes of mortality, a “ministration” based on Hamlet’s fading breaths (line 128) and a string of pub farewells that echo Ophelia’s morbid goodbyes (line 172). There will be more songs in the poem’s next section, and they will become less oblique, but this is, for now, as musical as it gets.
SHAKESPEARE VS. DANTE: In the midst of this Shakespearean “rag,” we are reminded of Dante’s continuing role as escort throughout this poem. Eliot would later pose a comparison of the counterparts in Eliot, Dante: II. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso (1929):
“...Gradually we come to admit that Shakespeare understands a greater extent and variety of human life than Dante; but that Dante understands deeper degrees of degradation and higher degrees of exaltation. And a further wisdom is reached when we see clearly that this indicates the equality of the two men.”
(For a similar, if tangential, take, see Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, 1934: “...When the question, often put, ‘If on a desert island what one book?’ was again raised, Joyce said: ‘I should hesitate between Dante and Shakespeare but not for long. The Englishman is richer...’” But see Joyce's recapitulation in Richard Ellman, James Joyce (1959): “‘I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast.’”)
For the record, these annotations have more references to Shakespeare (45 different passages; see note 0.1) than the Bible (34 passages; see note 0.1) or Dante (22; see note 0.1) or any other source. The next most frequently turned to sources are Virgil (9; see note 0.1), Whitman (9; see note 2), Augustine (7; see note 307), Ovid (7; see note 0.1) and Conrad (7; see note 0.3).
131. WHAT SHALL I DO: More questions, and more Hamlet allusions. See Shakespeare, Hamlet 1.4.57, for Hamlet’s reaction after his father’s ghost appears:
“Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do?”
See also Hamlet 3.4.178, when the Queen fails to see or hear her late husband’s ghost and asks, even after her son challenges her:
“What shall I do?”
Compare the indecisiveness of Hamlet and his mother in the face of a familiar ghost to those whom death has undone at the gates of hell for having “lived withouten infamy or praise.” See note 63 and Dante, Inferno 3:35-57.
137. DIVERSIONARY GAMES: Eliot: “Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women Beware Women.”
See Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (1624); and see also Middleton, Women Beware Women (1657), in which a girl is seduced while her mother in law is kept busy in the next room playing chess. See also note 76.5 for other games of chess.
138. LIDLESS EYES: See Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Inclusiveness (1881):
“The changing guests, each in a different mood,
Sit at the roadside table and arise:
And every life among them in likewise
Is a soul’s board set daily with new food.
What man has bent o’er his son’s sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?—
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
May not this ancient room thou sit’st in dwell
In separate living souls for joy or pain?
Nay, all its corners may be painted plain
Where Heaven shows pictures of some life spent well;
And may be stamped, a memory all in vain,
Upon the sight of lidless eyes in Hell.”
In an earlier manuscript, in a section edited after Vivienne’s objection, Eliot had referred to the statuary chess pieces in an extra line between “a game of chess” and “pressing lidless eyes”: “The ivory men make company between us.”
Compare the “vials of ivory and coloured glass” at line 86, and also compare the pearly eyes of the hyacinth prince and the drowned sailors (note 125). See also Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx (1894), speaking of the statue that “strains his lidless eyes Across the empty land.”
For an alternative and perhaps more disparate image, see W.B. Yeats, Upon A House Shaken By The Land Agitation (1916), referring to the eagle’s ability to stare at the sun without blinking, with “the lidless eye that loves the sun.” By way of reconciling this with the chess pieces, compare the image of line 22: “a heap of broken images, where the sun beats,” and see also the white skeletons of soldiers at note 186.
06/12:
Prayers As They Occur
Journal Entries from June 1990
God, when the job at hand is more than I can handle,
God, when the pressure weighs heavy upon me,
God, when things are out of my hands,
when I am helpless, lost and looking for answers,
God, when I’ve buried my head in the sand,
sulked in my sorrows and wondered aloud
in a roomful of sufferers, selfishly cried “Why me?”
God, when I don’t know the answers,
God, when I think I need to know
as a matter of survival, life and death,
God, the power and the glory
and the answer, God, is yours.
~~~~
Parul is not happy with her mother today. They don’t want her going to India —because of money, because of safety, some other time maybe —and she’s disappointed. She threw some shoes at her mother and walked out of the house, eleven miles to 520 Stewart. She got rained on several times along the way.
She’s never been anywhere, she says, and now, forget it, she doesn’t want to go to India. “One day we’ll go together,” I said, and she said, “No, I don’t want to go.”
I brought her to her uncle’s house. She’s not sure what will happen next. She’s even having second thoughts about medical school.
“This too...” I said, but she wasn’t ready to believe me.
Tomorrow, God, I pray for Parul.
~~~~
“I talk to God a lot. In the shower, in the car. Some people might call it prayer, but I like to think of it as a kind of thought process, a figuring out.”
“Does he hear you?”
“God? Sure. God hears us whether we’re talking to him or not.”
“Hey, Joe, come on, what makes you think God would take the time to listen to you?
“I don’t know, Jim. I don’t know why. I just know he does.”
“How do you know?”
“He answers.”
06/13:
Thoughts And Prayers
Journal Entries from June 1990, continued
Faith: such that I long for, a faith of such power to give me the strength to recognize my weakness, to repulse all illusions of my own credits, to relinquish my whole self —faith to say no more me, just God. Faith, trust, that I could walk within every shadow of darkness, that I could believe that light awaits me, that darkness will be defeated.
God, you lay it all out for us. You give us a one word direction and it ought to be easy. But I... the self gets in the way, and yet you have given us the self, too, God; you leave us all sorts of mysteries and then you give us this mind, that wants so much to know.
Thank you God, for the promises you have given Josh today and for the strength you have given to Don; for the smile you have given to Parul today and for the grace you have given her family. Thank you God for everyone close to me —Annie, Mom, Dan —and thank you too for everyday people, most of whose names I do not know, but thank you God for their patience —your patience —and acceptance of a man with measly faith. I am afraid to be weak, God, and I am afraid of relinquishing myself, even to my maker, but thank you God for your ears and your hand and your presence. Thank you for your strength and your smile and your grace, your light and your direction.
P.S., just one thing more: God bless my studies and my tests this week. I need you.
~~~~
The thought occurred to me that things will never be the same.
This wasn’t a pessimistic thought, either. Josh has realistic hope of a lasting remission. Don went to work today; he’s feeling much stronger and it makes me consider that with the extent of last week’s pain for him followed by this week’s recovery, the chemo might really be doing what we want it to do.
So I thought: what if Don’s tumor disappeared and Josh’s remission were complete? Things wouldn’t be the same; they would be better for the ways we would —and will! —be stronger: in spirits, in confidence, in faith. There is, of course, a “best case” scenario, to believe that Josh and Don will live forever. And why not? By faith, God promises that they will!
For now, however, I must continue to pray.
06/14:
Every Thought Is A Prayer
Journal Entries from June 1990, continued
How about this:
Every thought is a prayer to God, and every prayer has an answer within it. God is with us all the time, and when we remember this and believe this, his spirit responds in us and directs us. God directs us as long as we acknowledge his presence (Proverbs 3:6), but when we forget this, where are our thoughts, our prayers? Even then, God is still with us, waiting for us to call on him again.
Every thought is a prayer, how about that? But every day —isn’t it a shame? —we spend so much time being thoughtless. And still God is with us, waiting for us to come to our senses, to think, to pray.
God is more than an abstract thought, however. The proof is not, and cannot be, my own, but it is this: our thoughts do not sustain themselves. One private thought cannot sustain another, yet there is an answer, always, like the voice that came to Moses and said “I am.” God is an answer. Yahweh is the answer to our prayers. God is not a thought; God is “I am,” the answer.
But what about the so-called great thinkers of the world, those who say they do not pray because “there is no God”? God is still the answer, waiting for the question to be asked, the prayer to be prayed, the thought to occur (There are thoughts that have not yet occurred, even to the greatest thinkers). Every thought is a prayer, I said.
So what about the thought that God does not exist (and who has never cried, “Where are you, God?”)? Isn’t this simply thinking without direction, aimlessly pondering, oblivious meditation? Thoughtlessness, really. And still God waits with an answer. Is there a God? Yes, Yahweh say, I am.
06/15:
God In The Abstract
with apologies to Concise American Heritage Dictionary, 1980
God
adj.
I AM: considered apart
from concrete
existence
or
(AM I) a specification
thereof.
I AM: theoretical;
not applied
or
(AM I) capable of being
put into effect.
I AM: thought of
or
(AM I) stated without
reference
to a specific
instance.
I AM: Fine Arts. with
nonobjective
design, form
or
(AM I) content.
06/16:
Moleskin 3.6: Noticing The World
In 1974 the world started creeping in. This was the year Nixon resigned, not long after the Tribune published the Watergate tapes. I had apparently lived a sheltered life up to this point, rarely if ever hearing people use “expletive deleted” in their conversations, and suddenly here was the president for all the world to read, absolutely full of it. Prior to this, for all the craziness going on in our country in those days, I had only seemed to notice the upbeat news: watching the first moonlanding at Hank and Vi’s Minnesota cottage, for instance, or sharing Dad’s late interest in the Beatles. Even when he went out and bought John Lennon’s Imagine, I heard none of the blue chords, only the harmonies. Even Give Me Some Truth was a cool sort of anger. But then came Tricky Dick, daring me to take a peek behind the curtain.
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