A Heap of Broken Images
Not long after World War I, T.S. Eliot had what used to be called a nervous breakdown. He took leave from his job at Lloyd’s Bank and checked himself into a hospital in Margate, England. He wrote a few lines there that would eventually become his famous poem The Waste Land. Watching the waves lap onto the shore one evening, he concluded: “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.”
The Waste Land has always stood for me as a kind of fragmented testament to feelings and truths beyond the rational — art that tries to connect nothing with nothing. It’s spastic. It reads like our minds work. One moment you’re a child again, sledding down a hill in the snow, the next you’re lost in the desert, dying of thirst, contemplating “fear in a handful of dust.” I admire Eliot’s unmoored but intentional structure. At times we become third wheels, eavesdropping on conversations about lost love, desperation, the war-dead. Then we’re singing. Then we’re boozily gossiping at the bar, only to be told that the bar is getting ready to close: “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME,” we’re reminded.
TIME, indeed. The Waste Land is very much an extended meditation on the inevitable march of time and our relation to it:
Remember when? How our memory transports us back in time.
Maybe later we’ll…. Can you not see yourself in that distant future, more complete then than you ever were or are?
Writing this now — How can this be anything other than a desperate attempt at immortality?
The very act of creation is liminal. We stand always, in every moment, at a threshold that combines past, present, and future. Eliot proves this in The Waste Land. We watch empires fall and rise; we move between epochs, between generations, between seasons, between cultures, between people. We’re never fixed. It’s always TIME — always now and not now. Eliot rummages through this “heap of broken images” and experiences seeking some torn center: answers to existential questions. It’s how he spends his time as an artist.
We know that physical time is relative to the speed at which one travels and can bend relative to the mass of an object (thanks Einstein), but I wonder sometimes if time isn’t also relative to our perception of time. Is our subconscious even aware of time or subject to it? How do you experience time in dreams (or if you don’t dream, in your sleep)? With trauma, can not one become stuck in time? Psychedelics warp our perception of time. So does meditation.
I’m fascinated by the idea of meditation but have tried it with intent on only a few occasions and have mostly failed. It’s hard to do well. Once, though, in a classroom full of students, I think I experienced the time-altering power of meditation. (We were studying American Transcendental writers like Emerson and Thoreau, so, of course, the hip thing to do would be to engage in guided transcendental meditation as a class). Sitting in a chair, counting my breaths, and then not counting my breaths, and then a slipping away of sensory reality. I don’t even know how to describe it with words (and I am not one who believes in extrasensory or metaphysical realities; I am more of a material agnostic). But, I had an experience that felt like pure mind. The experience was of a plane beyond the physical. Time seemed to evaporate altogether.
So it was, with all these inchoate ideas about memory and time, about collective and individual experience, about grief and rage at the wasted meaninglessness of it all, about meditation, about how to even write about such things — connecting everything and nothing all at once — that I came back to The Waste Land when I was working on “Peace for All,” the last song on Buyer’s Remorse. Think of the song’s premise like this: one person survives the end of the world. There is one person left in the waste land. As our lone inquisitor, she gets to ask god why. Why all of this? Why any of this? Or maybe (and I would argue more likely) there is no god at all, and our survivor is left alone, talking to herself. Asking questions to no one about nothing.
At the end of The Waste Land, we get a similar premise. A divine voice speaks to us amongst the ruins in the form of rolling thunder: “DA. DA. DA.” Followed by the feeble, desperate human response: “Shantih, shantih, shantih.” (Shantih is a Sanskrit word and mantra that can be translated as peace.) Eliot, suffering from personal crisis and witness to global catastrophe, ends The Waste Land with a meditation on and an invocation to peace: inner peace and peace for all. Isn’t that what we’re all searching for? HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.
The chorus of “Peace for All” echoes the end of Eliot’s poem. I sing: “DA: Shantih, shantih, shantih, Om.” I repeat the mantra over and over again. Sometimes, when I play the song alone, I just keep repeating the mantra. And, on occasion, I forget I’m singing a song, and that feeling of the absence of time slips in. Sometimes, singing the song can feel like a kind of healing.
The Waste Land in title and substance is very much about a world without god but a world filled with our many inventions of god. I read Eliot’s poem as an attempt at a new invention, an attempt at restoration, an attempt at healing, an attempt to find meaning in the meaninglessness, an attempt to build a new cathedral, one brick, one word at a time. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” he writes. That’s an interesting and potentially lifegiving aim for an artist — to make something out of nothing. These are ideas worth meditating on, I think. It’s how I spend much of my time.
