Twelve years ago I had to commute two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening to a very miserable job. Drive time radio was inane drivel (this was at the height of Rush Limbaugh’s popularity), radio stations didn’t play my kind of music (they still don’t), and I hadn’t discovered NPR yet. And MP3 players were a decade away.
A year or two earlier, I had picked up a copy of The Wasteland and Other Poemsat a second-hand bookstore and it was something of a revelation.
Faced with a bone-crushingly boring commute each day, I ran across the Caedemon recording of Eliot reading The Wastelandand I probably listened to it every day, sometimes the whole thing and sometimes only smaller sections. I listened to it every day for months.
Eventually, I realized I didn’t need to listen to it anymore. I had it all in my head, that creamy monotone half-chanting his way from The Burial of the Deadall the way to the last gentle “Shanti” at the close of What the Thunder Said.
A decade or more later, it’s still there — or most of it, anyways. The tape is long gone but Eliot enjoys a permanent installment on my iPod. The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, Prufrock. . . they’re all there when I want them. Although, thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber, I haven’t the stomach for his Practical Cats.
It was that first tape that got me started on listening to authors reading their own work. Poetry and prose, and everything in between. It was T.S. Eliot and The Wastelandwith it’s complex and puzzling imagery, the juxtaposition of myth and contemporary sensibilities, the invasion of the unseen into the everyday.
Which is, of course, the same world I’ve been living in since I was eight years old. Would that I could write about it as well.
I continue to find little echoes of Eliot in my writing — patterns or phrases, little moments of tone and syncopation that are uniquely his and his alone. Most of them are gone now and I find that I have to weed out the voices of other, newer writers from my work. But from time to time, he’s still there, Tom is.
I suppose he always will be.
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Another Eliot episode, this one from my dreams.
It is afternoon or early evening and I am driving through a maze of parking lots in a commercial development area. Row after row of anonymous warehouses and manufacturing plants designated only by address numbers or bland corporate logos.
Eliot is on the radio reciting Prufrock, nearing the end.
The sun is setting and everything is cast in a faintly gold glow. I have my window down and the breeze is very dray and very warm against my face.
Turning corners and backtracking through the rows of buildings and generic landscaping — short little trees and woodchips and groundcover that, as a child, I always referred to as “iceplant”. I do not know where I am going, in my dream. Nor why I am in a hurry to get there.
From the radio, Eliot says, softly “I do not think they will sing to me…”
I take a corner too fast and have to brake quickly to avoid three people running across the road in front of me. Three women of varying ages shriek and laugh and stumble across my path and onto the curb, long black hair and beads trailing behind them.
I wonder for a moment if they are drunk or stoned, consider extending my middle finger and then think better of it.
They keep laughing as I accelerate forward, turn another corner and find myself facing a little cul de sac. I curse and reverse, craning my neck as I spin the wheel.
I see him walking, a rolling shuffle that I recognize from generic police dramas. He is at the side of the car before I can even consider locking my door or rolling up the window, resting his hand on the roof and bending down to smile at me. His eyes dart around the interior, from radio to backseat to my briefcase on the passenger’s seat.
“Hey man, this is a really nice car.” He smiles wider.
I shrug. It’s a three-cylinder piece of crap.
“We have lingered in the chambers of the sea…” Eliot intones from the radio, the volume suddenly far too loud. I glance down at it for a moment.
When I look back up, the muzzle of the gun is just an inch or two from my forehead. He smiles again and recites, in perfect time with the poet, “…till human voices wake us and we drown.”
He makes a flat, abrupt gesture with his hand.
I turn my face away, feeling the force of it pass through the base of my skull. My body goes cold and my cheek is suddenly lying against the rough fabric of the steering wheel. I look out through the speckled windshield as the golden autumn sky gently fades into darkness.