Love and ‘The Waste Land’

‘The Waste Land’ is the name of a poem published in 1922 by the Anglo-American writer T. S. Eliot. Widely acclaimed as a masterpiece, it is, nevertheless, by the measures of everyday speech, a highly peculiar, even mystifying, bit of text. Yet it is also, in some ways, a poem about love and the hidden self. It is constantly hard to work out quite what might be going on, like a voice heard in another room in another tongue in a narrow hotel in a foreign city:

The language is dense, elusive and unwilling to satisfy any impatient desire for clarity:

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

When I count, there are only you and I together

But when I look ahead up the white road

There is always another one walking beside you

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

….My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

Nevertheless, we allow the poem to do what it does. We delight in its peculiar, resonant majesty. It flies under special diplomatic cover: it is poetry, and therefore free of the demands we make of the people around us when we ask them for a screwdriver or the way to the dry cleaner. We allow it to totter on the line between nonsense and clarity; we enjoy the vertigo-inducing sense of balancing over cultures and centuries, genders and media. We wouldn’t want a friend to answer us like this if we asked them the time, but we are opened up by lines like:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon

Or even (in one especially memorable passage where logic and order break down completely and we are suddenly children, seers or madmen again):

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

The Waste Land Within Us

Most of us are very far from writing poetry like this (or anything else), but there is – arguably – a Waste Land part in all of us. It lies very deep; we’re in touch with it chiefly in the night (after 1 a.m.), and it’s as mysterious as it is essential to our flourishing and self-awareness. Here, in the zone of The Waste Land, we are neither men nor women, but boys and girls who don’t know what we are and don’t care too much either. Our sorrows are vast and unreconciled: we are still crying about everything that ever happened, especially when we were nine and sat alone in pieces in the attic room, holding Mouse to our cheek. We are tragic but also silly and joyful and daft. We are everyone and no one: we speak in riddles; our language is chaos; and 4 and 4 are 8,00091.

We clean ourselves up in the morning. We do a very good job at fitting back into normality. The mad are just ordinary people who haven’t woken up properly. The groggy period between first opening our eyes and the first coffee is the zone of The Waste Land, which gradually (‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’) gives way to the chatter of the day (‘Over by the mantelpiece, next to the bowl with the keys in it …’).

Love and the Hidden Self

One of the ways of thinking about love, and why it matters very much and why we might devote seven and a half years to mourning a lover who understood us properly and then left us without saying goodbye, is that it should, in its highest forms, allow for The Waste Land part of us to emerge; the bit of us that belongs to darkness, that is scared, that is sexually muddled and that is – always – very young. 

A lover can, through their gentleness, their patience, the warmth of their eyes and their own disclosures, signal that it is uncommonly safe for us to walk into The Waste Land with them. They won’t say, as everyone would at work, ‘that sounds odd …’ at the first mention of the time when… or the feeling that…. They let out that they are going to hold us, gently but firmly, as we wander the debris of our inner landscape, away from the trees, towards the headland.

‘How much room can there be to be odd with you?’ That might be the true marker and question of love – and, only incidentally, of great literature.

The Strange Safety of Love

Everything is strange when we look at it from the right angle, when we allow it to reverberate as it wants to. The simplest word – charitable, discord, chew – becomes mesmerising and odd when we’ve repeated it eight times. After twelve, the walls wobble.

We have no option but to live in the normal zone; it’s where we do contracts and children are raised. Order has to have its due, but we’ll be hampered and ever more furrowed if there isn’t someone in our orbit who has space for the rest:

What shall we do tomorrow?

‘What shall we ever do?’

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

We know; we’ve been there, and you have been too … and that is friendship and art and most of all, love.