My Right Foot

I tried to resume my morning walks. I barely crossed the street when I realized that this is not going to happen. I was surprised by how much my right foot hurt. This handicap has been with me for several weeks already. I despair of it ever going away. Such nice weather, too.

T. S. Eliot

The brilliant American critic Randall Jarrell once described Eliot as one of the most “daemonic poets who ever lived”, arguing that all his critical talk of tradition and the individual talent was just a smokescreen, a means of disguising the “human anguish” that motivated his own sporadic eruptions into poetry.

-- Mark Ford, University College London

I was surprised by some of the dark side of Eliot's poetry that Mr. Ford brings out. As he comments, "Murderous sex, necrophilia, witchy succubae, bats with baby faces – Eliot, I think, owes far more to the gothic world of Edgar Allan Poe than he was ever willing to acknowledge." Ford argues that Eliot tones this down and transmutes some of this diabolical energy into the mythic tones of Christianity when he joined the Anglican Church in 1927. However, Eliot's fascination with Christianity precedes that date, as we can see in this discussion of "The Waste Land".

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From the outset, Eliot’s work fused satire and mysticism; his denunciations of society depend for their authority on his conviction that the religious vision of his great hero, Dante, offered a securer means of interpreting and judging culture and experience than the formulae and rituals of liberal democracy. “I had not thought death had undone so many” – a direct translation from Dante’s Inferno – Eliot observes of the commuters flowing over London Bridge in the first section of The Waste Land. The commuters are obviously not literally dead; Eliot must be saying that they are spiritually dead, that they have not yet been awakened to their limbo-like state, and therefore drift like unreal zombies in a Dantescan hell. Eliot was in the employ of Lloyds Bank on Lombard Street while at work on The Waste Land, so was in fact a commuter himself – but one with a difference: like the poem’s Tiresias, he had “foresuffered all” and “walked among the lowest of the dead”; thus he was able to see through the illusions of modern life, and deliver this withering verdict on his fellow commuters.

-- Mark Ford at The Telegraph

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The Natural World

Random Pictures

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Russia

The Washington Post has an interesting article conceptualizing the conflict over Ukraine from Putin's eyes as a move toward saving the world from the West, with a particular focus on the idea of being against Western 'tolerance' and the 'homosexual agenda'. As the writer mocks, "The West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels."

Interesting. It appears that Putin is trying to make common cause with our Republicans - divide and conquer!

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