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.

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.

Sacrifice: Seeking

      I

Eclipsing black, as if in punishment,
With a heaviness he tarries through the winter,
Eating scraps by the altar, praying unrelentingly
Loud to God in case there’s something in it.

He knows just whom to bully, whom to flatter,
He’s learned to ride the sheep and avoid the fox
And he shows he’s smart enough to get the water
But cursed to never quench his thirst with rocks.

He wears the coat of a murderer, pretending
To portend with all the ravens and jackdaws,
But there his story ends: he’s doomed to die
Unsaved for all his empty-promise prayers
And unable to impress the passersby
Who know the meaning of his meaningless caws.


      II

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.

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 coarse seduction scenes are staged through a series of walls that talk (see note 8) and then some chatty marital advice is set to a bartender’s “last call” mantra (lines 139-172).  All of this follows the beat of dying words in disguise, by the last gasps of Hamlet and the departing words of Ophelia (note 4, and lines 128 and 172).

Meanwhile, the title of the section refers to chess, a game in which words are practically unnecessary until the “check” and “mate” death knell at the end.  See note 137 for the source of this section’s title.

DYING WORDS range across a 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).  Rhetorical questions hang in the air (lines 111-134), souls sigh in limbo (lines 60-68), a riverbank weeper weeps (line 182) and a lovely woman sees death as her only escape (see line 253 and note 253).

There are allusions to the last words of Hamlet (line 128) and Ophelia (line 172), Agamemnon (line 198), Conrad's Kurtz (note 298), Webster's characters Flamineo (line 44) and the stabbed patient (line 118), and to tragic stories woven into tapestries (lines 97-110). 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 (note 7).  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."

But there is more: see, for starters, note 298 for the more enduring words of epitaphs.

Moleskin 3.2: On To The Next River

With Dad trying hard to make our weekends special, we made a point to see and resee all the major Chicago attractions — two zoos, a half dozen museums, the lakefront, Wrigley Field — and we kept the tourist routine up long after we stopped feeling like out of towners. But let this scratchy record be reconciled: this was not our city. We didn’t live by that backwards river and we didn’t even reside in Chicago proper.  We lived along a drainage ditch in unincorporated Cook County, much closer to the Des Plaines River than Lake Michigan. As far as our distant cousins were concerned, we were still Chicagoans, and we preferred this tag over suburbanites, but in our neighborhood we made no claims. My newfound friends and I were content catching crayfish in the ditch and filling up our wagon with muddy water. We walked four blocks to school, when we didn’t find longer routes to take, and on weekends we rode our bikes on vacant lot dirt paths. I was still Huck Finn, a few miles out of town, and home was wherever I happened to live.

Redbellies

A celebration of the Springs
on the banks of the Suwannee River: the Day.

Lepornis Auritus, of the Breams
and the main course of many Southern fries: the Fish.

Inky black, purple and garnet
with rich plum, red currant, liquorice and oak: the Shiraz.

Indigenous to the Oz bushland
where the Angove family makes their wine: the Snake.

A vegetarian Piranha cousin
colossoma bidens to aquarians in the know: the Pacu.

A ranging fish in a narrow curving band
from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island west: the Dace.

A pet store Melanophryniscian
with fire and crickets in its belly: the Toad.

A hook-billed conure of the house
where men can talk, but hens just squawk: the Parrot.

A turtle with yellow lined head, neck and legs
called Cooter of the Chesapeake Bay: the Terrapin.

A South American quadroped
in a multimale-multifemale social system: the Tamarin.

An arboreal Guinean of Nigeria and Benin,
finding the wet parts of dry tropical forests: the Monkey.

Billardiere's pouched weasel,
a Pademelon to the Aborigines: the Wallaby.

An Amazonian revolving life around Mauritius Palms
with a reedy high-pitched scream: the Macaw.

A North American, pressing its torso to the trees,
showing red better in hand and up close: the Woodpecker.

And all that remains,
the solid biomass incompletely combusted: the Char.

Domesticus

A Passing Tribute To Robert Frost  

    The bird would cease and be as other birds
    But that he knows in singing not to sing.
    The question that he frames in all but words
    Is what to make of a diminished thing.
   — Robert Frost

I’ve traveled miles and miles to find a bird
That’s different than the usual sorts I see
To supplement the life list that I keep
(To know the lovely dark and deep)
And live beyond the world surrounding me.

The bird I seek may have a special song
Or brilliant feathers or a way about it
That separates it from the daily throng
(Persisted in the woods so long)
And justifies the miles that I’ve devoted.

Perhaps the place I go they call a bird
Exotic that’s so everyday to me
I hardly hear (lost in the sweep
Of easy wind) its ordinary cheep;
Its ordinary looks I barely see.

And in this place, they keep lists of their own
And travel miles and miles just to find
Within the dreary world from which I came
(Having perhaps the better claim)
The gardenful of birds I’ve left behind.

Fire And Water

When love sets fire
to your soul
and lifts it from its place
its foot no longer
touches ground;
love whispers,
the ground moves
and stagnant reasons
disappear;
you are no longer there;
Your feet begin
to move, just as
a river finds the ocean
with no more talk
of searching; you
are nothing but the river
and there is nothing
in the end
but the ocean of God.

Rhyme For Mother's Day

(to the tune of any Dylan song)


A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.
— Samuel Butler

A mother’s basic instincts start and stop with being there
And everything revolves around the children in her care:
The raising up, the rearing, the protecting and preparing.
She just keeps keeping on, with evolution in the air:
She gets no formal training anywhere;
Her nest is made, her eggs are laid and all she does is care.
You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine
But God is in the details
  and the devil’s left behind.


The old brown hen and the old blue sky, 
Between the two we live and die...
— Wallace Stevens

She saw her mother do this from a different point of view;
The world was all around her then and everything was new:
The view itself, the air, the grass of green, the sky of blue,
The miles of horizon and a nagging hunger too,
And suddenly her mother coming through.
Nobody really told her what to do.
You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine
But God is in the details
  and the devil’s left behind.


Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime.
— William Shakespeare

And now she is the mother, got it all down to an art.
She’s facing danger daily, but she plays her precious part:
The watch, the cry, the flash of passion, every stop and start
Instinctively designed and yet distinctively so smart,
And even when things seem to fall apart
She takes the stage and plays it from her heart.
You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine
But God is in the details
  and the devil’s left behind.


If I were hanged on the highest hill, ...
If I were drowned in the deepest sea, ...
If I were damned of body and soul, 
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
— Rudyard Kipling

She cries out loud staccatos in a stuttered anti-phlegm
And then she starts performing her sublime dramatic gem:
The stumbled pace, the broken wing, the red beneath her hem,
To lead her looming enemies astray, away from them.
Some folks would automatically condemn
The way the mother has abandoned them.
You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine
But God is in the details...


if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one.  It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
— e. e. cummings

This is my rhyme for Mother’s Day, a silly killdeer song
With scant connection to the mothers I’ve known for so long:
The mother of my children, like my mother too, was strong
And not inclined to cry or play the fool when things went wrong
And yet when evil ever came along
I guess it never stayed around for long.
You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine
But God is in the details
  and the devil’s left behind.


My mother is a poem
I’ll never be able to write,
though everything I write
is a poem to my mother.
— Sharon Doubiago

God is in the details...
— Anon.

(The author of this platitude nobody seems to know;
It’s randomly attributed to many people though:
To Flaubert, Nietzche, Einstein, even Michelangelo,
Le Corbusier, John Ruskin, or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
No one is certain but the truth will show,
Beyond all words and birds, everything we need to know.
You’ve got your theories and I’ve got mine
But God is in the details
  and the devil’s left behind.)

My Own Translation

Preface to Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire

To the Reader

Stupidity, error, sin and stinginess
Busy our minds and grind our bodies down,
And we, like beggars nourishing their lice,
Keep our remorse in comfort and well-fed.

Our sins are stubborn, our confessions weak
And for admissions we demand a price;
Then, with a smile, we’re on our muddy way
Believing that cheap tears will make us clean.

We rest our heads upon an evil pillow
With Satan Trismegiste at the cradle,
And in the vapor of his chemistry
We lose the noble metal of our will,

And with the Devil as our babysitter
Charming us with his repulsive toys,
Each day we’re lured another step away
From fear, into the dark and stench of hell.

And like the poor bum who would kiss and nibble
The battered nipple of an ancient whore
We steal the secret pleasures of our passing
And squeeze the last drop from each shriveled orange.

Tightened, swarming, like a million tapeworms
Within us are the Demons who throw parties,
Dropping the breath of death into our lungs
Like an unseen river and a mute complaint.

If the artistry of rape, drugs, knives and fire
Has not yet stitched sweet lines into our souls,
Have pity on our empty canvases
And sorry fates: we are too cowardly,

And yet among the jackals, panthers, apes,
The bitches, scorpions, vultures, serpents, beasts,
Of all the vile menagerie of our vices
That bark, howl, grunt and crawl upon the ground,

There’s one more ugly, wicked and unclean
Who without dramatic gestures or great cries
Would easily turn our planet into trash
And swallow up the world with just a yawn:

See Boredom’s eye hold back a wanton tear
Welled up from gallows dreams and hookah smoke.
You’ve met him, reader, a consummated monster:
You! Hypocrite lecteur! My twin! My brother!

TWL, Lines 69-76: Seen in the Crowd: You!

69     There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
70     “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
71     “That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
72     “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
73     “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
74     “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
75     “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!
76     “You! hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable, —mon frère!”

69. STETSON, readers once believed, referred to Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound, who was known to wear the occasional Stetson cowboy hat and who, by being Eliot’s “lecteur,” or editor, was given the poem’s opening dedication. Eliot denied the Stetson-Pound connection but never gave a more satisfactory alternative, suggesting only that Stetson was not an actual person but a generic London banker with an arbitrarily common name. But there may be another more plausible explanation. In World War I, Australian troops, who would have been more associated with a naval battle and buried corpses than a London banker, wore felt Stetson hats, and it was among these troops at Gallipoli, where furloughed soldiers sang to Mrs Porter (see line 199), that Eliot’s friend Jean Verdenal died (see note 42).

70. THE BATTLE OF MYLAE (260 BCE) resulted in a Roman naval victory over Carthage, home of Aeneas’s onetime lover Queen Dido (see note 92).  In present tense, the battle is over and the surviving sailors are grounded.  Compare the return of troops at note 61, and see more references to Carthage at note 307.

71. THE PLANTED CORPSE: See 1 Corinthians 15: 37, 42-44:

“And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain ...So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption: It is sown in dishonour; it is raised in glory: it is sown in weakness; it is raised in power:  It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”

In a Moravian tradition begun in Germany and adopted in America, Easter Sunrise Service is held in a churchside graveyard called “God’s Acre,” with hyacinths decorating the graves where the bodies of the dead have been “sown as seed.”  See the legend of the hyacinth at note 36.  See also Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, God’s Acre (1866):

“With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod,
 And spread the furrow for the seed we sow;
This is the field and Acre of our God,
 This is the place where human harvests grow!”

Compare Longfellow, Hyperion 2.9 (1836):

“...the green terrace or platform on which the church stands, and which, in ancient times, was the churchyard, or as the Germans more devoutly say, God's-acre; where generations are scattered like seeds.”

Thus, this Burial of the Dead section ends where it begins, with the possibility of stirring dull roots in spring.  The reader’s brother (mon semblable, mon frère) remains uncertain, though, and still perceives the season’s cruelty; he closes the section with questions and exclamations that are all earth, no air, water or fire.

74. KEEP THE DOG FAR HENCE: Eliot: “Cf. the Dirge in Webster’s White Devil.”

See Webster, The White Devil 5.4.96-105.  This is Cornelia’s song as she lay flowers around a corpse, giving the impression that she has lost her mind:

“Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren,
Since o'er shady groves they hover
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the fieldmouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm
And, when gay tombs are robb'd, sustain no harm;
But keep the wolf far thence, that's foe to men,
For with his nails he'll dig them up again.”

Compare this to Ophelia’s final actions in Shakespeare, Hamlet 4.7.166-169:

“Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.”

See note 172. The “Long purples” in her garland are hyacinths; see notes 36 and 71.

76. HYPOCRITE LECTEUR: Eliot: “V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.”

See Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil: Au Lecteur (To the Reader (my own translation)):

“See Boredom’s eye hold back a wanton tear
Welled up from gallows dreams and hookah smoke.
You’ve met him, reader, the consummated monster:
You! Hypocrite lecteur! My twin! My brother!”

See also Eliot, The Lesson of Baudelaire (1921):

“All first-rate poetry is occupied with morality: This is the lesson of Baudelaire.  ...English poetry, all the while, either evaded the responsibility, or assumed it with too little seriousness. ...On the other hand, the poets ...who know a little French, are mostly such as could imagine the Last Judgement only as a lavish display of Bengal lights, Roman candles, catherine-wheels and inflammable fire-balloons.  Vous, hypocrite lecteur!”

For other takes on the hypocrite reader, see the fortune teller at note 55, and recall the editor’s role at note 69.  See also “you” as reader, at note 311.5.

LITERARY CRITICISM, a la Eliot as lecteur, is also discussed at notes 130, 165, 172.5, 331, 403, 417 and 419.

Moleskin 3.1: Chicago

Chicago. Home and hub of the Midwestern Irish, who paint their river green every March; of traveling Poles, their collective numbers second only to Warsaw; of transplanted Mississippi Deltans, giving the city its own brand of blues.  Windy City. Second City. City on the Lake. Home of Al Capone and Ernie Banks, Mayor Daley and our very own Bozo the Clown. In 1972 it was where the Cubs were still freshly reeling from the Billy Goat curse, the Bears still answered to Papa George Halas, the Hawks had known Bobby Hull for 15 years and the young Bulls had their first fifty win season. History —the Chicago fire, the Haymarket Riots, the stockyards —was entering modern times: the El still looped around the heart of the city, but the Hancock defined the skyline and the Sears Tower was climbing above it, and further out, O’Hare was outpacing Midway. I heard all about it that first year of being a Chicagoan —the sassage accent, the skunk-onion story of the city’s name, the constant sound of politicians, the pride of being the beat of the Heartland.

Rush Hour

every day, Chicago, every morning we crawl
down your lethargic distressways, the rivers named
with dignity — the Stevenson, the Kennedy,
and all the paths aimed purposefully at your heart.
we want to beat with you; the coffee in our blood
would have us flow through these veins to offer you life

but every morning, Chicago, every day, life
is slow to start as each cell of our self must crawl
through the same veins/at the same time/with angry blood
meeting on that hour so insistently named—
unwittingly converging, en route to your heart,
with words, the very rush, of John F. Kennedy,

“countrymen, ask what you can do,” cried Kennedy,
speaking now to citizens, who choose to do life
by committing themselves to fuel a city’s heart
yet sacrificing themselves—to wit, their great crawl.
to you, Chicago, our commitment is duly named;
for you, Chicago, we submit this daily blood.

Two Hours On The Pecatonica

To my son, on his birthday

One mile down a winding river,
full of overhanging strains
and random estimates, the father
listens as his son complains,
“I’m never doing this again.
The water’s cold, the waves are high,
The stretch we’re on is longer than
you promised. Everything’s a lie!”
Two miles down a rending river,
with the surface rippling
less from flow than from the weather
blowing six weeks into spring,
now the boy turns his teen anger
everywhere at once, turns mad
to the boats and to the river,
to Wisconsin, to his dad.

Three miles down a bending river
making slow turns south and east
through rural hills and rustic pastures,
answering a prayer for peace,
and in time the boy turns quiet,
sullen still but out of breath,
paddling the waves in silence
having beat the horse to death.

Four miles down a wending river,
later in the afternoon
the sun comes out from undercover
like a mouse predicting June
and the boy from broken shadows
finds the words he hadn’t said
and the father smiles at the
son, as two boats forge ahead.

Five miles down a wand’ring river
muddy shores turn into rocky
bluffs that would defy the river’s
native title, what the Sauk
had called wet earth, but for the moment
man and boy behold the banks
that rise above them as they lumber
onward with unspoken thanks.

Six miles down a wondrous river
four deer running up the bluff,
a turkey flushing into flight,
an eagle soaring just above,
and then the son: “When this is over
and we bring our kayaks home
I guess you’re gonna chew me out for
all the things I’ve said and done.”

Seven miles down the river
a snapping turtle almost bites
the passing paddle, then the father:
“No, son, everything’s all right.
I will be glad when this is over,
proud of you and thrilled that we
could have this afternoon together,
happy you were here with me.”

Eight miles down a winsome river
on a stretch we’ve made our own,
from Blanchardville to Thunder Bridge,
but there’s an island halfway down,
and there’s a goose nest on the island,
and all along the muddy banks
the world is fishing, farming, hunting,
living with unspoken thanks.

Introduction To Two Hours

In two hours' time
we wrote a poem
spent time together
rode a river
and enjoyed the day

we committed that day to memory
shared a moment as son and father
followed a downstream flow
and appreciated the heart of spring

we sang a song along the way
learned to be more than old man and teenager
let the current carry us
and took the moment as our own

we established a record
built a relationship
ran the course
and made good time.

This one I will remember:
son and father in the same story,
riding that river to the pickup point
and making the day count.

A record.
A relationship.
A course to follow.
A time to keep.

Movie Review Of The Bark River

This was a lazy river, an easy run
without resistance for those paddling
against the flow and gentle as the breeze
for those who want it breezy coming home.

It was a winding stream, each twist and turn
keeping the paddler’s journey interesting
but wide enough so that the water flows
around each bend in ordinary time.

It was a rural river with the smell
of fertile pastures just beyond the bank,
yet with rows of woods on either side it was,
for those who would prefer, a forest stream.

But in the end, and at the casting call,
this paddler’s lazy river was, for all
its wandering, a small town resident
with locals fishing at the final bend.

A Sonnet, Defined

It makes me smile to write these fourteen lines
With structure, cadence, balance, pattern, pose
But I have learned that just one thing defines
A sonnet and determines how it flows
More than the number of its syllables,
More than its meter or the way it rhymes,
More than the measure of its parables
Dressed up in templates drawn from other times:
A sonnet is a river that appears
To trickle out of nowhere; it’s a stream
That cuts its path, a course that winds and veers
With more beneath its surface than would seem
But what defines the river most to me
Is how, in time, it brings me to the see.

TWL, Lines 60-68: The Flowing Crowd Of An Unreal City

60     Unreal City,
61     Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
62     A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
63     I had not thought death had undone so many.
64     Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
65     And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
66   Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
67     To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
68     With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

60. THE UNREAL CITY: Eliot: “Cf. Baudelaire:

‘Fourmillante cite; cite; pleine de rêves,
‘Ou le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant.’”

See Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: Les Sept Vieillards  (The Flowers of Evil: The Seven Old Men, 1867, tr. James Huneker, 1919):

“O Swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where in full day the sceptre walks and speaks.”

The Unreal City recurs at lines 60, 207, 259 and 377, and see also notes 208, 209, 248, 259, 374 and 376.  Unreal or not, the City is also the name of London's long-standing financial district.

LONDON, the City and beyond, gets other nods at lines 60-66, 180, 207-208, 211-214, 258-260, 264, 275-276, 289, 293, 296 and 376, and see notes 66, 67, 69, 115, 209, 210, 215, 248, 258, 265, 266, 276, 283, 291, 293, 297 and 376.

61. THE BROWN FOG may allude to “the embrowned air” in Dante, Inferno 2.1:

“Day was departing, and the embrowned air
Released the animals that are on earth
From their fatigues; and I the only one

Made myself ready to sustain the war,
Both of the way and likewise of the woe,
Which memory that errs not shall retrace”

THE GREAT WAR, now known as World War I, casts its shadow throughout this poem; see also notes 15, 18, 70, 115, 139, 200, 291, 331, 374 and 419.  The crowd of lifeless city workers flows over the bridge, up the hill and down the street, with no mention of any water flowing under the bridge and only a brown fog above them. The human flow suggests a metaphor for the stream of dead and injured soldiers being sent home after the war.  See Whitman, Memories 6 (which in turn alludes to “the heads of the tired, miserable brothers” in Dante Inferno 32.21):

“With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads”

63. DEATH’S UNDOING: Eliot: “Cf. Inferno III, 55-57:

‘si lunga tratta
di gente, ch’io non avrei mai creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.’”

See Dante Inferno 3.55-57:

“... so long a train
Of people, that I ne'er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.”

See also Inferno 3:35-36, 43-46, where Dante sees, at the gates of hell, how death has undone them by denying them:

“     ...the melancholy souls of those
Who lived withouten infamy or praise.

...And I: ‘O Master, what so grievous is
    To these, that maketh them lament so sore?’
    He answered: ‘I will tell thee very briefly.
These have no longer any hope of death...’”

Compare the Sybil’s wish to die at note 0.3: “‘I would that I were dead.’”

64. SIGHS AND THE DEATH OF AIR: Eliot: “Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27:

‘Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare,
non avea pianto, ma’ che di sospiri,
che l’aura eterna facevan tremare.’”

See Dante Inferno 4.25-27:

“There, as it seemed to me from listening,
Were lamentations none, but only sighs,
That tremble made the everlasting air.”

Dante and Virgil have now passed through the gates of hell and are entering a suspended state of Limbo and an even lower level of hopelessness; see Inferno 4:41-42:

“For such defects, and not for other guilt,
Lost are we and are only so far punished,
That without hope we live on in desire.”

Compare Eliot, Little Gidding (1942) 2:60-61:

“The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.”

Little Gidding would later be made part of Eliot’s Four Quartets (see note 0.5).

See also Heracleitus, On Nature (ca 475 BCE):

“Fire lives in the death of air; water lives in the death of earth;
and earth lives in the death of water.”

66. KING WILLIAM STREET runs from Lombard Street to London Bridge over the River Thames (see note 266).  Eliot worked at the Lombard end of King Williams’ Street as a Lloyd’s Bank clerk from 1917 to 1926, a “stopgap” to make ends meet.  See Eliot, Letters.  See also notes 67, 68, 69, 209 and 214 for other references to Eliot’s employment.

67.CHURCHES appear several times in this poem.  See lines 67 (St. Mary Woolnoth), 202 (voices in the dome), 265 (St. Magnus Martyr) and 389 (the empty chapel) and their corresponding notes.  See also note 71 (God’s Acre).

St. Mary Woolnoth Church is at the southeast corner of Lombard and King William Streets, just across the street from where Eliot worked.  The current structure was built in 1666, but the first Wilnotmaricherche dates back to 1191 and evidence of even earlier Roman and pagan worship at the site has been discovered beneath the building’s foundation.

68. NUMBER NINE: Eliot: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.”

In passing, Eliot hears “a dead sound on the final stroke.“  The ninth hour is the start of the workday, but nine also marks  the hour of Jesus’s death, Beethoven’s ultimate symphony and the final circle of Dante’s Hell (see Inferno, Cantos 31-34).  Compare this to the first part of Eliot’s epitaph, at note 306: “In my beginning is my end.”

Moleskin 2.10: The Move

Chapters, a whole book, could be devoted to why we moved that year, but for now let me tell it as I saw it, having just turned ten. The move was fairly sudden, not quite three months into the school year, and there were no long goodbyes to my father’s congregation. We took two vehicles: our station wagon, carrying Mom and Gordon Hammedahl and my two brothers, and a U-Haul truck with my dad and Susan Hammedahl and myself. The Hammedahls were helpful neighbors, and they were always close friends to us, but then I remember Dad stopping along the way to buy Susan a rose. There were very few words said about that flower, and it would take years for me to see beyond its single thorny stem, or to notice the budding romance in the car ahead of us, but when we got to Chicago, suddenly Dad was living in a different place. He found a factory job and, for several years, he was no longer a preacher. And now it was an urban, backwards flowing river we were perched upon.

Identity III

Identity
Rolls down the face
Of farmers and florists
Lovers and loners
Parents and orphans
Teachers and learners
Workers and wanderers
Dreamers and doers
And poets,
And me,
And every tear,
Every line of sweat,
Every drop of rain
Is different and the same,
Hot and cold, salty and sweet.

Identity
Is a hard day’s work
And a longing for rest,
A burst of emotion
and a latent memory.
Sometimes I want to
Wipe my identity away,
Pretend it isn’t there
And hide my face,
But sometimes
I just let it roll
Down my cheek
And linger
For everyone to see.

Identity II

In the mirror I see
Reflections of a
Thousand faces,
Wrinkles of a
Thousand times,
The profiles of a
Thousand turns,
The shadows of a
Thousand truths,
A picture that will
Not stand still.
Identity.

This is identity.
This is the place
I come from: family,
The everywhere
I’m going: destiny
And all that’s currently
Home to me: security.

For now, forever is the way
I’ll always have some yesterday
In me: identity.
For now, eternity is how
It’s always been more than a soul
Can see: identity.
More than I want to be
Or used to be: identity,
More than I find myself
For now: this is identity.

Identity I

Identity
With a capital I,
Subjective me,
My own ID:
It’s who I am,
The verb “to be”
Implicitly
Included in
Identity.
I am:  The name
I call myself
I am: the entity of self
I am: the image of I AM,
Yahweh and Immanuel,
Their meaning in my heart,
And living waters in my veins,
The pulse of my salvation,
My spirit, my animation,
Every explication
Is identity.

I
ID
I AM
An entity
To be or not
To be: Identity

Beginning Of May

Originally there was a song in my head
   It was not sweet, like candy,
but fresh, like wind through the trees.

Once I was drawn to the songs of birds,
   until I began to hear the harmonies

of leaves, dancing ---
    less, I suppose, what the birds
         were singing about
    than where they were singing from.

Sometimes And Always

From my 1990 journals

Ideas, sparks abound; sometimes it seems like I could write all day long. I’m sure I’ve picked the proper direction at such sometimes; I’m positive then that I am a writer. But these sparks and ideas are all very much in their infant stages. I’m learning that I’ve got a lot to learn. Things don’t just flow from head to lead. The sparks fizzle more than they catch, and even when they seem to catch there are countless steps to the blazing success I dream of, countless steps past the few combusted embers I’ve managed to produce. I do like the ideas, though, while they sparkle and catch and smoke; even at these minor stages of combustion, I like what can be done with words, and I have to stop and appreciate what God allows me.

I’ve finished a rough draft of a story. It’s not great, and really it’s not very good, but I have a certain pride, a certain good feeling that I will never apologize for, because the spark has caught and filled five pages, 1,200 words. If it’s kind of an ambiguous fire, or a somewhat lifeless fire (and my story is all of these, I will be told), I will still have my good feeling and I will still thank God, because there is a flame where once was only a spark, and there was a spark where once was nothing at all.

That “certain pride,” by the way, is not just pride about what I have personally done. Maybe I don’t even have to say this, but I used the word... maybe the better word is fascination, about what I can do.  Yes.  God, thank you.

I will still work to improve the current story, because there is ambiguity and lifelessness and pointlessness and a lack of depth. Maybe I’ll work at it and never get it right, but that’s all right, because I’ve got other ideas after this one....

Sometimes it seems like I could write all day long —but thank you God, sometimes and always.

~~~~

And then some days I don’t feel like writing at all.

TWL, Lines 43-59: A Wicked Pack Of Cards

43     Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
44     Had a bad cold, nevertheless
45     Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
46     With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
47     Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
48     (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
49     Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
50     The lady of situations.
51     Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
52     And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
53     Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
54   Which I am forbidden to see.  I do not find
55   The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
56     I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
57     Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
58     Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
59     One must be so careful these days.

43. MADAME SOSOSTRIS: See Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, 27 (1921), introducing Sesostris, the Sorceress of Ecbatana, a transvestite palm-reader who predicted the manner of clients’ deaths and ended sessions with an abrupt “Thank you.”

Huxley’s influence on Eliot has been disputed, but the coincidence is still remarkable.

44. A BAD COLD: See Flamineo's dying words in John Webster, White Devil 5.6.311-313 (1612), a play about moral corruption:

“I have caught
An everlasting cold; I have lost my voice
Most irrecoverably. Farewell, glorious villains.
This busy trade of life appears most vain,
Since rest breeds rest, where all seek pain by pain.
Let no harsh flattering bells resound my knell;
Strike, thunder, and strike loud, to my farewell!    [Dies]”

The thunder theme will be picked up in Part V.

45. THE WISEST WOMAN IN EUROPE: See E. M. Arndt, Sketches of Swedish History, The Foreign Quarterly Review, Vol. 63, Art. II (October 1843): In 1796 at the age of 17, Swedish King Gustav IV Adolf “outwitted the wisest woman in Europe, the Czarina Catherine of Russia” by calling off his engagement to her granddaughter Alexandra just as the royal engagement party had begun, because she refused to convert from Russian orthodoxy to Lutheranism. This irritated Catherine, and she died of a stroke two months later.  Compare Queen Dido’s banquet at note 92.  See also note 307 for Augustine’s experience at Carthage, also begun at the age of 17.  Czarina Catherine, also known as Catherine the Great, was otherwise known to be an enlightened empress who ruled calmly yet effectively, traits often associated with the Empress Card in the Tarot deck (see note 46).

46. TAROT CARDS: Eliot: “I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the  Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people,’ and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man  with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself.”

The Tarot deck makes an extended appearance at lines 43-59. See notes 47-57 for specific explanations of the cards referenced by Eliot, and see also notes 209 and 311.5.  Tarot cards alluded to in this section include the Queen of Cups (note 47), the Three of Wands, or Staves (note 51), The Six of Pentacles, or Pentangles (note 52), the King of Cups (note 55), and three of the trump cards: The Wheel of Fortune (note 51), the Hanged Man (note 55) and the Empress (note 45).  See also Weston, From Ritual to Romance 2, comparing the Tarot suits and those of our modern deck of cards to symbols of the Grail legend: “Cup (Chalice, or Goblet)–Hearts.  Lance (Wand, or Sceptre)– Diamonds. Sword– Spades.  Dish (Circles, or Pentangles, the form varies)–Clubs.”

One of the most popular versions of the Tarot deck is the Rider deck, developed in 1909 by William Rider & Sons at the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, another American born English poet who lived in London in the early to mid nineteen hundreds. The Rider deck, exceptional for having illustrations on all of its 78 cards and not just the 22 trump cards, was sold with an explanation pamphlet titled A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910).

47. YOUR CARD is related to the drowned Phoenician sailor but is not otherwise identified.  However, see the fortune-teller’s final admonition at line 55, and see note 55 for further consideration of “your card.”

48. PEARLY EYES: See also line 125, and see Shakespeare, Tempest 1.2.399.

50. THE LADY OF SITUATIONS: See Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910): The Queen of Cups is a “beautiful” woman, or belladonna, who sits at the water’s edgewith rocks at her feet. Reversed (rotated 180̊), she is a woman not to be trusted, a femme fatale.  Belladonna is also the scientific  term for the poisonous nightshade plant. Visually, this card aligns with Leonardo da Vinci, Madonna of the Rocks (a/k/a Lady of the Rocks, 1486); see Tarot Deck: Queen of Cups, William Rider & Sons (1909).

Leonardo Da Vinci,
Madonna of the Rocks (1486)

Tarot Deck: Queen of Cups, 

William Rider & Sons (1909)

51. THE MAN WITH THREE STAVES: See Waite, Tarot: The Three of Wands shows a “calm, stately personage, with his back turned, looking from a cliff's edge at ships passing over the sea.” He has three staves and is called the “merchant prince.”  Compare the merchant introduced as a separate card, at line 52.

THE WHEEL: See Waite, Tarot: The Wheel of Fortune card represents cycles of change, e.g., winter to spring.  See also the wheel being turned at line 320.

52. THE ONE-EYED MERCHANT. See Waite, Tarot: The Six of Pentacles shows the one-eyed profile of a merchant giving coins to those around him.  He represents gratification and vigilance, and is “one who must not be relied on.” Compare the Smyrna merchant at line 208, and see note 219 for a spectrum of perceptiveness.

53. THE BLANK CARD, not part of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck (note 50), is an extra card that says nothing or at least shows nothing that the card reader can see.  This would seem to describe the fraudulent “clairvoyance” of Madame Sosostris herself, a fortune teller who cries out “Look!” but fails to see beyond the crowds of people around her (lines 54-56, 60); contrast this with Tiresias, who is blind yet foresuffers (see lines 218 and 219, and see lines 218-248 for what the merchant carries).

55. THE HANGED MAN represents life in suspension; see Waite, Tarot, describing him as a “seeming martyr.”  Eliot’s Hanged God of Frazer (see note 46) refers to a description in Frazer, The Golden Bough, of the annual hanging in effigy of Artemis, the goddess of fertility.  Eliot also associated the hanged man, whom Madame Sosostris fails to find, with the one who walks beside the disciples (line 360).  See also the epigraph, with its opening image of the Sybil “hanging in a cage” (note 0.3).

FEAR DEATH BY WATER:  This, the fortune-teller’s final conclusion, refers both backward (line 47) and forward (lines 312-321) to the drowned Phoenician Sailor, which is also the limited description of “your card” (see note 47).  Given the attention to water and the reader’s accompanying warning, the closest Tarot correspondence to “your card” might be the King of Cups, which shows a floating king holding a scepter and chalise, and of which Waite says, “Beware of ill will ...and of hypocrisy pretending to help.”  See Waite, Tarot.  Compare this to the call at line 76 to “you, hypocrite lecteur,” or hypocrite reader.

57. MRS. EQUITONE is, by her name at least, a more even-tempered person than Madame Sosostris; compare Tiresias’s “lovely woman,” who, after her lover leaves, “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (see lines 255-256).

59. FORTUNE-TELLING had been prohibited in London since the 1824 Vagancy Act and punishable by three months’ hard labor, but the law had been in flux in the years after World War I.  See Blewett Lee, Spiritualism and Crime , Columbia Law Review 22: 444-445 (1922):  The courts had briefly allowed a “good faith” defense in 1918 but then retracted this a few years later, holding that “professing to tell fortunes is an offense without regard to whether or not the person so professing believes he has the power to tell fortunes.”  For the deciding case, see Stonehouse v. Masson, 2 K.B. 818 (1921), overturning Davis v. Curry, 1 K.B. 109 (1918).