You are the Sun

The Wasteland as a Motivational Text

T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) is usually held up as an essentially negative work - a razor-sharp critique of a broken, fragmented, post- First World War Western civilisation. Eliot had not yet become a Christian when he wrote The Wasteland. The poems that comprise his Four Quartets, on the other hand, were composed well after his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. It’s easy, therefore, to pigeon-hole The Wasteland as a poem of ‘despair’ and the Four Quartets as poems of ‘hope.’ But that would be an over-simplification. As we saw in the previous post here, there is plenty of ‘tough stuff throughout the latter sequence, while the former poem, in my view, is by no means as gloomy as folk often make out.

Many of you reading this will know The Wasteland already. If you haven’t read it, it’s available online here, and I’d say it would take no more than half an hour for a deep and thorough first reading. Certainly the critics are right in that it’s a stinging depiction of civilisational breakdown and how that manifests along the social scale, from the (as Eliot portrays them) effete aristocracy to the boorish working classes. In many ways as well it feels more relevant to the 2020s than the 1920s. Post-modernism wasn’t a thing back then and the overarching narratives of God and homeland and goodness, truth and beauty, hadn’t yet taken anything like the hammering they get in the public square today.

Eliot can be seen as a prophet in this sense, yet for me I’ve never seen The Wasteland as a primarily despairing work. On the contrary, from my very first reading three and a half decades ago, the dominant motifs I took away from it were ones of hope, resilience, faith in the future, and the certainty that higher powers exist and that even though they might be harder to perceive than in times gone by, they are still there for us and we can reach out to them in confidence and hope and so begin the task of rebuilding our desacralised lives and world.

These, coming up, are the key passages for me, and they occupy a sizeable chunk of the poem’s fifth and concluding part. It all about the three Sanskrit words that the Thunder pronounces: Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata, loosely translated as Give (Datta), Sympathise (Dayadhvam) and Control (Damyata). Here it is:

Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves 
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
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 
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
DA 
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours 
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands.

What do we make of all this? How do we apply these oracular words in our time, place and situation? How do we use them to escape the quagmire/quicksand of whatever personal or public wasteland we’re trapped in right now? Let’s take each in turn:

Datta. ‘What have we given?’ What indeed? Tell me this. What can you bring to the table of your life that will make you truly great? What can you do, be or make that will resonate and shine with top tier quality? If not now, then in time, with practice. There must be something, something you’d really like to have a go at and develop and hone as far as it will take you. It could be artistic or religious or sporting or it could even be caring for a loved one or a person with special needs. Whatever it is, if you can drill right down into that with laser point focus to the exclusion of all else then a wonderful future awaits. It’s the single-pointed focus, this closing the door on alternative options, that’s so hard to achieve in the contemporary world which loves to beguile you with the vast array of choices you have to do x, y or z, while all the time scattering and dispersing your energies. Your rejection of that, your embracing towards one-pointed action, is Eliot’s ‘awful daring of a moment’s surrender’, where you shut off all rival paths and possibilities and concentrate on one thing only. Attention! Attention! Attention! At bottom, this is the master word behind all the master words, the only thing that truly matters.

Dayadhvam. To sympathise, to have compassion on ourselves and others. We live in confusing and decadent times and we all, to a greater or lesser degree, get caught up in unhelpful ideologies and patterns of thought and action. We don’t always make the right calls. To say the least! We’re all wrapped up in the ‘prison’ of the times we live in - the ‘matrix’, if you like. But we need to look forward, not back. ‘Fare forward, fellow voyagers’, as Eliot puts in The Dry Salvages. It’s not where we’ve come from that counts but where we’re going to. Are we facing the Sun or not? Let us not look for purity or perfection or a flawless track record in ourselves or others. Let us acknowledge, rather, that we’re all bound up in the illusions and delusions of the Iron Age and to embark on ‘purity tests’ for others and self-recrimination for ourselves is pointless and self-defeating … ‘each in his prison, thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.’ Let us be humble and penitent, therefore, kind and considerate, but confident, assertive and expectant too, knowing that we’ve all come through failures and losses of one kind or another and that a better future and a better state of being is right there waiting for us if we can believe more in ourselves and in the inherent goodness of the cosmos.

Damyata. Control. What does this mean? We need to start at the beginning - before the beginning even - and unlearn so much of what post-Enlightenment rationality has poisoned our spiritual and imaginative wellsprings with. Secularism has made us deeply unhappy because it’s essentially not how we’re made. We’re not wired for agnosticism, still less atheism. If we’re to make the wasteland bloom again, both within us and without us, then we need to reanimate the most basic, primal relationship of them all, that between a man and his maker. None of us are here by chance. We were created by a higher Divine Power, who is personally invested in our flourishing and growth. That is the only coherent, consistent way of looking at things. Any other view is inaccurate and self-defeating.

That’s the first connection to be re-established. Then, during the course of your life, if you come across anyone who radiates the magnanimity and splendour of this great Being in his or her own being - in whatever degree, however big or small - then you should make that person your captain and leader and follow them wherever they go. ‘I love the sun in a man,’ writes D.H. Lawrence in his poem Democracy, ‘when I see it between his brows, clear and fearless, even if tiny.’ That’s what it’s all about. The world is alive and charged with meaning. It’s not a hunk of dead matter as the materialists assert. We will encounter such ‘Sun Men’ sure enough once we are turned the right way round and plugged back in to the energies that sustain and animate the universe.

We might not think it possible now, but we ourselves can become Sun Men and Sun Women. ‘Become the Sun’, the police inspector Porfiry advises Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov is staring down the barrel of a lengthy spell in jail for double-murder but despite this Porfiry sees great potential in him and believes that he can become someone truly outstanding - even in prison, maybe especially in prison. ‘Become the Sun.’ Why not? What else is there to do? Why else are we here?

Become that Sun then. Become who you are. Give. Sympathise. Control. Rebuild your life. Rebuild the world. Bring light and warmth and glory and magnificence to the wasteland. And may it and you be transformed and transfigured, today and always.

The Feast of St. John Chrysostom, September 13th 2024.