MISC: Analysis, The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said, lines 400-410...

[etherati]

...as loosely related to eventual zombie!porn. D: D: YES I'M GOING TO GO THERE. BLAME LIODAIN. Well no that's not fair. Blame me. It's my freaking AU.  D|

11 lines from Eliot's Waste Land, analyzed, free associated, dumped into the stream of consciousness. Thought it might be of vague interest. If not, feel free to ignore.

Transcribed from paper!journal:

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"Then spoke the thunder                                                          400
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed."

Eliot is for once (and only once) condoning and accepting our lust and our surrender to it as conditional to existence. Sinful action at least signifies existence, and is therefore better than inaction, which signifies nothing. Reference? Earlier work, covered this already. Moving on.

Moments that hang on past themselves and give a sense of self, of a position within time; surrender to ourselves shows us who we are. I exist I exist I exist. He says 'friend'; contrast this with the anonymous encounter in the fire sermon so roundly condemned. (Ref to Jean possibly? Am I seeing slash in everything?) Is the end goal(life vs satisfaction of base desires) the important part, or is the context more significant - lust wrapped in love rather than more lust. Water a constant theme. Water is a symbol for life all throughout but water is also a common cultural symbol for love. Condoning surrender to emotion perhaps, rather than surrender to physical sensation, with the goal irrelevant.

"Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms."                                                               410

Imagery speaks very solidly - that after we have gone to dust, the existence we have cultivated in the space between ourselves evaporates, with no one ever the wiser - no one understanding our motivations, our reasons, our excuses, our follies. Why we chose to make our home amongst these strewn moments of dissonance and fear. We become bodies in empty rooms and the intangible connections between us do not linger. There is value in these connections, or the language describing their dissipation would not read like mourning.

What have we given? We give the only thing that is ours to give. We give connection, we give self, we give sin and evil and grace and surrender, we give sympathy and control and isn't that the rest of the story? Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata. Give, sympathize, control. We give when we cannot bear to take, accept when we cannot ask. Control when sympathy is not enough to quell the chorus in our heads. Sympathize when control shatters. Give of ourselves and hope that it is enough, that blood shakes the heart in relief rather than fear, that the daring is worth its risk, that the surrender is received as the fragile gift it is, handled lightly, unbroken. That we do not wish to retract it. That the giving does not diminish the greater scope of our existence. My friend. My friend. Blood shaking my heart - "My friend," he says. "Love," he does not say, as friends never do, as no one who really should ever does, because there are too many kinds and only one word and language cows the spirit every time. My friend.

Eventually all the rooms will be empty, all surrenders forgotten with the reasons and the excuses and the guilt - all friends dead and gone. Will it have been worth it? And would an age of prudence have been worth it? At death's door, would any of us ask for the memory of a pure life and in the bargain, trade away a hand, a breath, a voice in the darkness, tears to fall on a numb cheek, arms to die in? These connections hum in our hearts and if the giving is base and vulgar, it is still better than giving nothing at all.

My friend.

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Yeah, so. THIS IS THE KIND OF SHIT I THINK ABOUT WHILE PLANNING FICS. Brought to you by Bic and Moleskine, and by the letter C. For CRAAAAAZY.

Comments

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Nuuu not rehash (though to be fair, if you look up Eliot's notes for the poem I'm analyzing above it reads like a freaking bibliography or all of the images/themes HE rehashed from other people's work haha) more just wheedling out the basic human themes that make the piece mentally 'work' in the same way as the thing you're trying to write. Break it down into its constituents and start building from there, and build something that is new and not a rehash but still has that thread of common human experience running through it.

Again, I am aware of how pretentious this all sounds. I'm not trying to be.

[xiangru-yan.livejournal.com]

Haha, I kind of get what you mean. Are you a literature student, by the way?

[etherati.livejournal.com]

No, I'm a physics major. XD WHICH MAKES NO SENSE I KNOW. HAVE SOME UNEXPECTED!MOTHMAN TO DISTRACT FROM IT.

Re:

[(Anonymous)]

To that end, Im surprised that you have not written any Dr. Manhattan Fics.

On an unrelated note, are you in a phd program?

[etherati.livejournal.com]

D: Yeah I dono, he just doesn't grab me so much as a character, and as far as academics and so on, I'm less interested in particle/quantum/atomic physics(though some things like supersymmetry and entangled pair communication are crazy fascinating) and more interested in relativity, cosmology, the topography of the universe etc. Singularities, the finite vs infinite universe, and so on. And in unified theory research but that's really way beyond our technological development to much besides theorize on atm. Anyway this is all mostly hobbyist sort of stuff; feynman and greene and hawking make up a good chunk of my recreational reading, with vonnegut and random poetry(mostly eliot OBVIOUSLY) making up the rest. XD But you gotta major in something, right?

And no, just a BS program at the moment. :)