Wastelands and Bog People: Part 1

This is part 1 of a three-part series

"I've been in Tunisia," said our friend Ann. "Carthage and all. It was fascinating..."

It was a rainy cold day, and when we got home and had had lunch, I settled down on the couch for an afternoon of reading. Carthage, I thought, and clicked through a few screens of information about the ancient Phoenician city, founded in the ninth century BC and finally sacked by the Romans in xxx.

"To Carthage then I came, burning, burning...." responded my brain.

"Yes, The Wasteland, I thought, and a few moments later I had in front of me not only the reference but an annotated, hyperlinked digital copy of Eliot's entire poem.  I may have known the original quote from Eliot, but I didn't know that he was quoting St. Augustine's Confessions:  "to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears." So I went back to the beginning, and began reading, checking links; I learned quite a lot over the course of the next hour or two, and also did some remembering...

When I was in university, three friends and I got together and did a reading - I guess it was a dramatic reading, since we built a stark abstract set and had costumes and music - of The Wasteland. We lived in a residential college at Cornell, called Risley Hall, for students interested in the creative and performing arts. Not all of us were necessarily majoring in those fields, though some were. Of the four of us, I was in classical civ; Bill was, I think, a theater major; David was a pianist majoring in music; and my roommate, Anne, also a pianist, had a double major in music and comp lit. Every Friday night, Risley put on a "Musical Dessert" in the basement theater - a program of music, dance, theater of various sorts including spoofs and skits. These evenings were all homegrown and entirely student-produced, and often quite good and well-attended. I don't remember the details of our performance, but I remember that we worked pretty hard on it, under Bill's dramatic direction, with some music composed for the occasion by David. And to this day,  I can still sing the songs he wrote, and recite large sections of the poem. The music of its words seems deeply embedded in me, although I still don't understand much of Eliot's poem.

I'd been thinking of Eliot before Ann reminded me, through the reference to Carthage, because it's impossible not to think of April's cruelty in northern New England and Canada this year.

Continue reading Part 2

Comments

[ann rollins]

How wonderful to be reminded of those days. I too can sing my part to "trams and dusty trees"(?) all the way through.

[beth]

Oh, Annie, I was really hoping you'd read this! I kept hearing, "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant, had a bad cold..." in my head all the while I was writing it. You probably remember details I've forgotten, and it seems to me that David wrote music to lyrics that weren't in the poem, too - like the song I sang, "All in green went my love a riding." And there was another we did to "My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart under my feet"; I remember some bit about "I raised my feet, supine on my back in a narrow canoe." It's possible I still have that folder of music somewhere. Was I right that Bill was the instigator? And if so, why?