Yale just published a couple of books dealing with the 80 year old poem, "The Waste Land," considered by many of the literati to be the most famous poem to emerge from the 20th Century. For those unfamiliar with the poem, its most famous lines are its opening: "April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain."
A more telling line of the 20th Century goes, "Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many."
The rest of the poem celebrates the negative, turning the positive of life into barren images, life into a virtual waste land of past death, future death, with the contemplation of both filling the existence in between,.
This is not only considered to be the most famous 20th Century poem, it is the most dissected, interpreted, analyzed, commented on, written about, you name it, more people have found more meanings in these lines than in any similar number of lines in Shakespeare or the Bible.
A little context is in order. The Waste Land was written in 1922, shortly after the end of World War I. Up until the 20th Century, wars had basically been fought over resources. One country wanted what another country had. To either feed its own citizens, or to increase its citizen's prosperity, the country had generated sufficient national interest to carry out an armed conflict with another country. Before the invention of production, these wars were basically fought over the land that produced the food that fed the population, so that when the population was going without food, it was comparatively easy for leaders to raise the armies necessary to seize the farming lands of others.
However, with the invention of production, sources for raw materials and markets became the farms of old. When wars were fought over farmland, they were limited to wars generally between contiguous countries. With the discovery of new lands and the riches those lands held, wars expanded to sea powers, with Spain spreading its expanding land warfare to sea warfare with the Dutch and English, who were also constantly battling at sea. The source of riches, spice in the Far East and gold in the Americas, gradually, with the advent of production, became the source of raw materials for production and the markets production needed to dispose of its products in order to maintain the salaries of the workers that were the beneficiaries of production.
By the time World War I came about, production had created two conditions for which the world was not yet ready. Widespread production had created widespread disputes among nations whose borders never touched. And production had allowed the creation of war machines, guns, munitions, automobiles, tanks, and even some airplanes, that turned war into something more than just the decisive battles that had so far marked, and even changed, the course of history.
The leaders of nations did not understand that production is hard to create and keep operating, that distant sources of resources and distant markets can never be secured by force of arms, and that therefore the traditional warfare over food producing land, easily shipped spices and gold were not appropriate to protect a nation's production, that production, once created, had to remain in place and successful production required efficiency and open markets to thrive and bestow its benefits.
Focusing on using one of production's results, the mass production of killing machines, and defending the indefensible, distant sources of resources and markets, the governments of production based societies aligned with one another and met on random battlefields. Having experience in driving the population to war fever, a war fever that was perhaps driven indirectly by hunger, the reduction in salaries that international production competition produced, armies were raised and equipped with the new fighting implements and shipped to distant fields for battle.
The result was horrendous. Instead of decisive battles, the new implements of warfare drove the armies to a standstill, a standstill that the pride of determined leaders would not allow to abate. Year after year, soldiers were shot, injured beyond repair or killed, or simply lost in the no-man's land between the armies, they were poisoned, gassed, blinded, bombed, they were subject to the elements and died of any number of horrible diseases, and they were subject to such mental stresses that a new field of medicine, psychiatry, gained a foothold in an attempt to explain the number of soldiers who were rendered speechless or worse, nonfunctioning members of society that could only exist in wards separated from other citizens.
As the sick and injured, maimed and mentally crippled filtered back into the population, the populace was horrified at what it had wrought but knew not what to do about it. Those like Elliot, in their teens, sensitive people who could only look ahead to a world of horror, could make no sense out of what was happening. Educated, and having felt themselves capable of understanding the world around them, they were presented with a world that defied understanding, a war that was seemingly being waged for no purpose to gain no end at an expense that defied comprehension. They could not find the words to express their bewilderment to a populace that was equally confounded. Later, authors such as Hemingway and Remarque would be able to describe the new form of senseless warfare using an economy of words, but those who faced the future growing up during The Great War, as it was known, could not elucidate clearly what they were seeing in front of their eyes.
Of course, in college, I knew nothing about the context of the poem, and the professors were not about to tell me. While I was an English major, a comparative literature minor, and was attempting to cobble together a comparative religion minor in case the comparative literature minor didn't fly (these fields are common now, but in my time, they didn't exist) and therefore had a fairly good grounding in the poem's specific references, many of which were elucidated by Elliot himself at the request of his publisher who needed the bulk to produce a salable book, we were taught that there was much more to the poem than appeared on the surface. Apparently, this is still being taught because a Google search brings almost 5,000 references to the specific poem and many of those references are interpretative.
Having been led to believe there was more to the poem than appeared on the surface, and having no understanding of the context of the poem, I spent about three days in the library surrounded by books interpreting the poem. None of the books bothered to clue me in on the context. However, after three days of attempting to coordinate all the references in a notebook, I finally had to conclude that all of the interpretations, other than those that specifically told me what obscure references referred to or translated the foreign language insertions, were circular, they went round and round and round, that if I wanted to pursue this mystery or meaning, I could very well devote my life to making up just about any interpretation that I wanted and given the proper credentials, which meant a stint in graduate school for a masters and then a PhD in some arcane corner of the world of literature, I could add my interpretation to everyone else's and die happy.
Fortunately, earning a living took precedence over interpreting something totally out of context, where it would have remained for me if I hadn't bothered to expand my horizons past the self-referential community of scholars that grow around narrow subject matters. Once the poem is put into context, however, it can easily be seen as a poetry of words that together evoke a feeling, a specific feeling, the feeling of bewilderment that must have plagued an entire portion of a generation, the portion that came of age during the war and saw themselves end with the war. Because it is a poetry of words, however, and a very accurate poetry of words, it speaks to everyone who has been battered by life to the point that bewilderment is all they can see, a bewilderment that makes the landscape barren, a wasteland whether it be spring, summer, winter or fall.
That's what poetry does, it speaks directly to people who aren't poets, but who are feeling the same thing the poet felt when the poet strung the words together. As Archibald MacLeish put it, "A poem should not mean/but be." I had, early in my college career given this type of poetry a shot. I wrote a piece, submitted it to the literary journal, where it was well received and published. Everyone in my creative writing class thought it was great although the professor said it sucked. Friends, who read it only because they heard I had written it, asked, what the hell does it mean? Reading the piece in light of this question, I found it had no meaning, it was just an attempt to establish a mood with words. With no meaning, and apparently no success in speaking directly to non poets, I had to agree with my professor.
While The Waste Land definitely evokes a mood that is easily identifiable when the poem is placed in context, and while that mood might well by transferable to the pessimists who seem to populate so much of the literary world, and indeed, the establishment in general, it does not hold up in the light of a reality in which we have seen more death and destruction carried out by ideologies without the cover of warfare while at the same time proceeding through a century that has created prosperity for over a fifth of the world's population.
Our minds operate by comparing recall, our knowledge and experiences, with reality, and when we are told there is something about reality for which we don't have recall, our minds tend to produce fantasies to make us comfortable, give us the feeling that we understand something we didn't understand before. When something simple like The Waste Land is taken out of context, we are left with a mystery and we spin webs of reason to dispel the mystery. Strip anything of its context, and it will have no meaning.
We get exactly the same effect with Modern Art, where the colors applied to canvas reflect no common reality, but rather are abstractions meant by the artist to evoke a reality peculiar to the viewer. Such art is defined in terms of mood along with composition, color, style, technique, diversity, and, of course, motivation rather than meaning, with any meaning left up to the individual viewer. The artist provides no context to give the work meaning. When the artist does provide context, it is usually not apparent in the art.
We also run into problems with creating meaning when we encounter things for which we can never produce an answer. The same paper that carried news of the Yale publications also carried news about physicists' latest finding that the universe began, not as a gas, but as a liquid.
The test of science is its ability to test reality. Testing reality is not a process in which arcane facts are predicted and convoluted, Rube Goldberg apparatus are invented to find those facts. The reality test in science is the extent to which its hypotheses and concepts can effect the production of technology. If questions involving reality do not, or can not have any effect on technology, then they are not questions of science, they are questions of religion, a belief system. In belief systems, the answers have little to do with technology and therefore the answers can be anything. It is a foolish science, indeed, that mixes up answers to religious questions, questions the answers to which can have no effect on technology and therefore no effect on reality and answers to questions of science, questions of reality the answers to which can affect the accuracy of the technology.
When we allow religion to dictate a reality that belongs to science, we end up with answers that have no basis in reality and a science that does not accurately reflect reality. When we allow science to spend its time answering questions that can have no effect on technology, we are paying for a pig in a poke, we are throwing good money after bad in an area that may very well determine our survival because it is our ability to produce a technology that reflects reality that determines whether or not we will survive both on this planet, and in the universe after this planet grows too cold to support our continued existence.
One of the major areas of reality that we will never be able to know, indeed the primary question we will never be able to answer, is how the matter in the universe came into existence. It is pointless to avoid the question by saying matter can neither be created nor destroyed. This is a godlike statement that actually presupposes a god that created all of the matter in the universe and perhaps disappeared. In like manner, making the assumption that matter just existed, and then hypothesizing about the origins of the universe is religion pure and simple. Assuming the matter that made up the universe and then talking about the beginning of the universe is not only contradictory, it is useless in any attempt to mould our technology to reality.
It is frivolous as science, and open to question as a belief system, although belief systems, based on belief, can never be questioned. They can mean anything the believer wants them to mean. This is especially the case when the nature of the universe is attempted to be divined out of the photographic jumble of lines and swirls that results from the operation of particle accelerators. Science has the peculiar penchant for seeing effects, creating a particle to explain the effect, and then naming the particle after the effect (see column 17-05). This results in giving a multitude of particles properties such as attraction, repelling and the ever popular angular momentum, or in my universe, the elusive spin that simply doesn't exist other than as an explanation for the swirls that emerge on the photographic plates.
Like some seer who forgot to brew the tea, empirical science peers at these photographic plates and sees pretty much anything it wants to see, giving meaning where there is no meaning. The analogy to the seer forgetting to brew the tea is to the ignorance of empirical science when it comes to energy. Fixated on the Newtonian notion that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction, and forgetting the Newtonian fiction that planets move in straight lines but for the force of gravity, empirical science fails to assign a property of motion to the elementary particles, fails to recognize that the patterns being formed for the benefit of the photographic plates, are the result of particles, with a property of attraction and motion, being released and, as they collide, reforming into other particles, attempting to once again form into the units that have been split asunder by the collisions in the accelerator.
Without the context of an accurate description of the basic properties of the elementary particles that form to make up solid matter, with only the fractured context of applying made up particles to visual chaos, empirical scientists peer into the particles accelerators and see first a universe formed as a gas cloud, then a universe formed as a liquid, in fact they see anything they want to see and who's to say they're wrong because they have no basis, no common theory, no consistent picture of reality that would even hint that they were right.
Peter Bros is the author of the 8 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com