Sharon July 28th, 2008
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days. - The Wasteland
The Wasteland is fundamentally a narrative about an internal disaster - one of my college Professors, the remarkable John Burt, used to say that you could actually track Eliot’s trip through Boston and Cambridge through the narrative, watching as he walked, engrossed by his own depression and misery, decompensating with each step. And it raises an interesting question, I think - which is how our imagining, our understanding shapes what is happening around us.
A while back I wrote a post arguing that we are experiencing a rapid crash in food and energy, and we can’t see it - that is, we are in the midst of a disaster. But because most Americans and other rich world denizens are comparatively wealthy, and comparatively insulated - although that insulation is fraying rapidly - we can’t see the disaster when it strikes us as a disaster. In a way, most of us see the world through brighter lenses than most people actually experience it. Simultaneously, those of us who are aware of peak oil, aware of the realities of our changing climate and economy see the world through darker glasses than most of our neighbors in the rich world. It is impossible to ever find a “normal” perspective - that is, there is no point at which we are seeing all the truth, or seeing clearly - it is common to want to say that one group sees the future better than others, but all of us pick and choose and see partly through the lens of what is, and partly through the lens of who we are and where we are and a host of other things.
There’s a fascinating moment in _Lucifer’s Hammer_ at the end of the narrative of Harvey Randall’s survival preparations. He doesn’t really believe that the Hammer will fall, but he thinks it would be prudent to prepare. But the experience of preparing seems, in itself, to make the thing real. Niven and Pournelle write,
“Because I’ve got Hammer Fever, and my wife knows. Loretta thinks I’ve gone crazy - and I’m scaring her, too. She’s convinced I think it is going to hit.
And the more he did to prepare for Hammerfall, the more real it became. I’m even scaring myself, he thought.”
I thought in my last post of this month’s discussion, we might talk about whether this experience Harvey has is true. Eliot provides a more subtle exploration of the question of the relationship between anticipation and experience, but also suggests that there’s a great deal of danger to both knowing, and thinking you know what will happen in the future.
My own experience is that choosing to look at the future as I have does sometimes make it feel much more real and immediate - I sometimes have to make sure that read a wide range of material, because it is a little too easy to read only the bad news, only the things that push one to greater immediacy. I also find that I warn myself against a sense of artificial scarcity - that is, we are not now where Eileen and Tim were - and while I don’t want to be wasteful, I also don’t want to stop giving things away, to cut my charitable donations before the time comes that I have to.
But I also think that what doesn’t appear here is the sense that knowing (or rather, believing, because while I think the future I predict is likely, I do not claim to know anything with certainty) is empowering. That is, the fear that Harvey reports is partly a real response to a real danger, partly a perceptual response, but it is, IMHO, most lessened by taking action, and making things happen. That is, it does simultaneously seem to increase and ease fear.
I talk to a lot of people whose partners, like Loretta, don’t want to know things, because they are too scary and too hard. And I think sometimes people do need their information doled out in small bits. But I wonder sometimes whether the need not to look sometimes adds to the fear - the fear caused by a partner who does know, is afraid, but without any of the empowering pieces?
It seems fitting, then, to end as Eliot ends things, with the question of whether we should, in fact, at the very least, set our lands in order even as things are falling down falling down.
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?London Bridge is falling down falling down falling downPoi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam ceu chelidon-O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
“The Wasteland” is, on one level, the account of a human being having a nervous breakdown - the disaster is internal, rather than external. It is in part a narrative of an internal world that looks, from inside, as though a vast disaster has already occurred.
I think it raises the question of how our internal understanding of the world shapes the experience we’re having - “The Wasteland” could be viewed as an exercise in pure pathology, the transformation of something clean into something damaged - or the transformation of real fears into something quite a bit greater than those ordinary fears - both simultaneously.
There is, I think, a danger in seeing disaster behind every tree, the end of the world in every action