Who Wasted Which Land?(1) a view of T.S. Eliot by Dennis M. Hammes(2) "The Waste Land," first published (without notes) by Mr. Eliot himself in 1922, is at least occasionally an exhibit of the "stream-of- consciousness" method of writing developed by Joyce a generation earlier and elevated to the ridiculous by Woolfe a generation later. The method has lent itself to fiction, the essay, and poetry indiscriminately perhaps because it is the method of indiscrimination. The fact is interesting in itself, because Mr. Eliot uses it nowhere else in his work. Unlike its other proponents, he knows that in order to write a stream of consciousness, one must first have a consciousness, and then one must train it to stream, as Byron trained himself to stream a stanza invented by Chaucer and almost unused since, and Haydn trained himself to stream the sonata allegro through 102 symphonies and dozens of string quartets and konzertstucke. Now, all professionals know this training to be utterly necessary, for they must be busy attending to the details of a communication while the amateur is busied with the details of the stanza, sonata, or other structure or medium in which the act of his art takes place. Yet, while the verses in "The Waste Land" stream almost (sic) as well as do his verses anywhere else, so that there are magnificent sounds, lines and figures almost anywhere chosen at random, in "The Waste Land" Mr. Eliot has failed of the one thing that any art other than the Baroque demands absolutely of its creator: he forgot to define what it was the piece was going to say. Instead, he fell into the bewildered and sometimes churlish amateurism of letting the elements of the art -- rather than of his consciousness -- stream at random, trying to get them to tell him what he was thinking. The question that shouts here is this, why did a poet who never did this anywhere else do it in what has been taken (however accurately) to be his principal work? Any answer must first presume Mr. Eliot's competence, for that competence is more than adequately demonstrated anywhere one looks at him, including in the piece in question. Then it must presume that no rational art arises out of "nothing and nowhere," for the effects of even the illiterate randomness of a midstream Pollock arise -- and are maintained uniformly from case to case -- at least of qualities inherent in the materials, not to mention that he developed a specific style out of a specific method, however random his initial finding. Finally, it must presume at least some measure of accuracy in the consensus that "the age" was the "end" or "culmination" of Romanticism (depending on whether or not one is a party member), and that Mr. Eliot was, if not utterly a Romantic, at least trained in and superb at executing the methodoxy of Romantic poetry. Indeed, we see that method -- albeit with more or less of that "twist" peculiar to "modernism" -- evident throughout his work. Even here. And that is what makes "The Waste Land" peculiar in a body of work so otherwise orthodox, for the indiscrimination of "stream of consciousness" is the precise antithesis to the deliberated construction that is the Romantic image, no matter what it is the image of. However, we may see that the "requirement," stated by or misquoted of Rand, Branden, and others before them, that the Romantic image be "ideal" (too often meaning -- falsely -- that it be morally superior), is fully met in all of Mr. Eliot's work -- save perhaps this "Waste Land." But suppose that "The Waste Land" is no more (nor less) than a perfectly and Romantically idealised description of a state of mind (whether that of an individual or "the age") that has no ideals, or, indeed, repudiates them? In that case, Mr. Eliot's work from the "Prufrock" to "The Waste Land" must necessarily be precisely what it is, including the utterly disconnected and perceptual-level "consciousness" of the latter. Indeed, if this be the case, "The Waste Land" is less than perfect, beginning as it does with that most Romantic handful of lines that the subsequent monologue proves totally unconscious of even as it elaborates them: for them, we must blame Mr. Eliot himself, for, while Prufrock might have written them and Mr. Eliot certainly did, the subsequent "stream" from his WasteLander could not have thought of anything so coherent, let alone of anything so perfectly symbolic of itself. Now, Ms. Rand and others note,(3) and Romantics generally practice, that the Bad and the Ugly may be quite as Romantically idealised(4) as the Good, and, indeed, both she and Hugo routinely create antagonists and antiheroes that are not so much infinitely more as they are absolutely more, than the vacant and ineffectual dilettantes at evil we find in life. And that is -- aside from that marvellous handful of lines that opens the poem -- just what Mr. Eliot has done in "The Waste Land": he has so perfectly described the essentially-random consciousness of the dilettante that has leeched on man as long as there has been man, and survives by being an amiable parasite (as governments survive by being belligerent ones), that the poem itself has become the animated trance it describes. The result, though identical with Bloom at the tobacco shop, is Bloom in the manor drawing room, and is achieved by the same method in both cases. If one objects that Mr. Bloom does not "belong" in the manor house, I must reply that not only did he originate in the manor house, he doesn't now "belong" in the tobacco shop, either. The real trouble with "The Waste Land" is not its utter portrayal in the first person of an antihero, a "trouble" that begins with the "Prufrock" and continues through the "Sweeney" poems and the "Murder," but rather that Mr. Eliot never addressed himself to the creation, by the same methods, of the hero that would defeat this nonsense. The trouble is especially vicious in "The Waste Land," for in the rest of his pieces the antihero defeats himself (whether or not he takes the reader along with him); in this, the antihero continues indefinitely to waste his (her?) afternoons jumping Rosebud. Mr. Eliot recognised this himself; the "Ash Wednesday" is his best attempt to analyse what went wrong with what his public did with his works to date and to apologise for it,(5) but even here there is still no hero and the bones (his, presumably, and by extension ours) continue to chirp in the desert. But this is merely one of two standard "metaphysical" excuses for mediocrity,(6) and his attempt to counter it with the other is more merely Baroque than it is anything else: whether the gargoyles ("three white leopards") crunch his bones or "the Lady" is to save them, both are merely exquisite bits of plaster in somebody else's church. And it is somebody else's. No matter how often it is said, it is still insufficiently considered that Mr. Eliot speaks in his own voice even less often than did Browning, his principal methodic mentor. And with less compassion in the poet for the speaker of the poem: while we may laugh at Browning's Bishop, when we are through reading the early Eliot, we want, like Pilate, to wash our hands. And as Lady MacBeth found out, it does no good, for no matter how perfectly one demolishes the butt of a satire with its content, one simultaneously elevates that butt by its attention. The more exquisite the satire the greater the elevation, and we are in Eliot presented not with a dramatic but exterior verbal monologue but with the internal functioning of a mind, and this so intimately as to trifle with the obscene. And yet this remains satire: not only is Mr. Eliot the "end" or "culmination" of Romanticism, he is equally the "end" or "culmination" (actually, the absorbtion) of Neoclassicism, so that the early Eliot is the attitude of Pope and Dryden at their snottiest, taken through the principal of subsequent poetic methods up to Browning. In short, Mr. Eliot is the next step (one of them) of poetry in his age. He took it; others did not. The reliance on "Imagism" is not Mr. Eliot's invention (nor even Mr. Pound's) however he developed and popularised the technique in English poetry; the selection of the kind of images, is. So is the selection of what it is they add up to. Some(7) "blame" Francis Herbert Bradley, a British philosopher of perhaps no more note than his influence upon Mr. Eliot, for all three selections. But not only had he selected his subject, method, and style before he met Bradley, it is well-known among sophomores that nobody but other philosophers reads any philosopher with whom he doesn't already agree. The world Eliot found was already collapsing (had collapsed) into a savagery that was far from noble when he found it, and neither he nor Bradley had anything to do with that. Neither did Rousseau, for the concept of the Noblest Man as a necessarily-erroneous perceptual animal had been formulated by Plato (who evidently thought either that it really was a good thing, or that he and his buddies could turn a trick by saying so). Bradley asserted to confirm Mr. Eliot's views of the perceptual communication on which Imagism is founded, but the point is that Mr. Eliot had already formulated those views empirically by working with his verses. But neither Mr. Eliot nor Mr. Bradley considers percepts to be erronius. No Imagist can do so, and write any poem that presents only the circumstances of the poem, leaving the reader to relive the essence of the conclusion from the given percepts. No serious scholar has done so since Hume shot down Berkeley on the subject. But the notion makes such a "good" excuse for ignorance and evil that the wilfully ignorant and evil continue to vomit it up routinely -- and it is these "people," that are the Mr. Eliot's early subject matter. If there is any error in Mr. Eliot's method, it lies in the fundamental problem of satire, that of asserting an object to be important by having held it up to inspection at all. The problem is compounded when only the antagonist or antihero is stipulated by the work. Wash as you will, the antihero is standing long after one's reading is over, maintained by it in the face of all one's objections, and holding between a man and his world a finely-constructed and most-durable pair of shit-colored glasses. And the more substantial the characterisation, the deeper the color. Here, the perception one is given of Prufrock, the down of light-brown hair, Sweeney's armpits, or the world from astride Rosebud, are so concentrated, so mutually- supportive, and so much more intense than the average muck of daily experience, that it takes over one's own and voluntary perception; his description of inanity is so far from inane that it takes over the discourse. But the problem is not confined to the Romantic method generally or satire specifically; the greatest power -- and danger -- of language itself is that it can specify what does not exist. "Ash Wednesday" tries to apologise for having created a bogeyman, but there are several problems with the attempt. The first is that Mr. Eliot didn't create the bogeyman; it has been with us, rather more or less, since Eve apologised for Cain without killing him. And so, once again, Mr. Eliot is preaching from somebody else's pulpit, so the resulting mea culpa rings a bit hollow. The second is that negating a negative does not specify -- or substantiate -- a positive replacement. The problem here is not Mr. Eliot's, but Romanticism's, or, rather, what has been a standard practice of isolating and concentrating widely-separated and otherwise random attributes in a single persona -- an error that has had many converts for the excuses it provides, since woman first blamed the snake. Finally, this particular bogeyman is a dilettante even at being a dilettante, and can defeat only those who insist on being defeated. "Mr. Eliot's problem" is not one of material, but of method: sulfur trioxide in small concentrations is a bit of a high tingle, but in pure form it will dissolve a dinosaur in a half hour. And it is really not so much a problem of method as it is the problem of using only a part of that method: he has shown us a bogeyman unopposed by a hero, and we are so scared by this most exemplary bogeyman that we have no attention left for the lesson. Like Brueghel, like Bosch, he has made us some perfectly exquisite portraits of the perfectly horrible. And we, as usual, take the vehicle for the tenor, to found yet another religion on the resulting icons: like cocker spaniels, we ignore the moon to lick the pointing finger. But Bosch's age believed in an omnipotent God that could demolish anything a Bosch could paint up, and Mr. Eliot's (ours) does not. And these are whacking good bogeymen: only in "The Waste Land" are some of his images merely gargoyles that have nothing to do with the architecture, but even here the Baroque is not Mr. Eliot's; it is his speaker's. And yet, the fault for the power of these bogeymen is ultimately Mr. Eliot's: his poetry is so damned good, but his Art is so damned bad. Ultimately, he is not a Romantic but a romantic methodist only, and in the end he quits the field to exile himself to a bootleg pastoralism with the Quartets. And even their "strong brown god" can't get the bogeymen out from under the bed; nearly a full century has had to live with them as best it can, which has been not very well at all. But what is needed is not so much to regain the course of Art (for poetry causes nothing), but to regain the course of philosophy -- a word so far off course it is today synonymous with insubstantiality if not downright disrepute. We are so in need of heros since Eliot's (Browning's? Telemachus'? Adam's?) generation abandoned them, that we have invented generations of bootleg ("supernatural") "heros" from "Captain Marvel" and the "Fantastic Four" to "Spiderman" -- each with a gimmick and every one so afraid of what Prufrock can do to him by settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl that he has to maintain a "secret identity" to survive in the same world that we do. Bah. We need human heros, and for that to happen, humanity has to think of itself as heroic -- not bovine. And in this endeavour, art can have an effect. However I have used techniques and scenarios shamelessly from every age that wrote anything I could steal in any manner, I have never taken my outlook from any piece or school of High Lit'rature. I got that from a baker with whose daughter I went to school (and like all artists who read philosophers, I already agreed with him). Throughout my childhood, a sign in his shop window read As you ramble on through life, brother, Whatever be your goal, Keep your eye upon the doughnut, And not upon the hole. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- ____________ 1. "Who Wasted Which Land?" Moorhead MN: ScrawlMark Publishing. ©1997 by FISHHOOK and Dennis M. Hammes. 2, Mr. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Dr. Hammes is Chair of Poetry at FISHHOOK Academy of Natural Philosophy. 3. Nathaniel Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand, (New York: Random House 1962). Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto, (New York: Berkeley Medallion Books 1963). 4. "idealised" = extracted and condensed from the irrelevancies of raw experience, and the chaff discarded. 5. cf. "Oh, my people, what have I done to thee?" -- refrain from "Ash Wednesday" by T.S. Eliot. 6. Dennis Hammes, "Two Programming Archetypes Formed on an Erronius Bion," (Ellendale: ScrawlMark Publishing, 1985). 7. Hugh Kenner, "Bradley." From The Invisible Poet, (New York: Ivan Obolensky, Inc., 1959). R.P. Blackmur, "Irregular Metaphysics." From Anni Mirabiles 1921-1925, (Washington, DC: The Library of Congress, 1956).