Gospel & Universe ♒️ A River Journey
Prufrock
The quote and stanza below (in bold print) are from the start of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock,” a 1915 poem that’s famous for its description of the mental and emotional uncertainty of the modern intellectual. The poem is at once comic and serious: Prufrock’s nervous insecurity is a function of the collapse of certainty, which was wrought by humanism, the Enlightenment, science, philology, industrialization, Darwin, etc. It’s no laughing matter, and yet Eliot manages to find humour in Prufrock’s equivocation between the grandiose and the down-to-earth, and in the juxtaposition between his lofty and impersonal vision of human history and his complete lack of personal confidence.
The opening quote Eliot uses (from Dante’s Inferno 27.61-66) suggests a sublime ambition to follow in the footsteps of the Medieval Italian poet and to tell his Modern English readers what lies beyond the grave. And yet because he’s living in the Modern Age, this sort of knowledge is impossible to assert. Prufrock’s journey into the raw, mundane, superficial city proves anything but epic.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse [If I thought my answer were given]
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, [To anyone who would ever return to the world,]
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. [This flame would stand still without moving any further.]
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo [But since never from this abyss]
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, [Has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,]
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo. [Without fear of infamy I answer you.]
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
Every ideal Prufrock dares to lift into the sky is instantly brought down to earth by the most insignificant thing, such as the smell of a lady’s perfume or the bald spot on the top of his head. His oracular propensity to dare to “disturb the universe” becomes a quasi-sexual worry about whether or not he should “dare to eat a peach.” Enticed by the sight of bare arms, he suggests he’s an aesthete lover, but then immediately surrenders to insecurity:
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Much can be said about the negative side of doubt, yet much can also be said about the freedom it can bring. Doubt can allow for a critical distance to ply new angles, for a playfulness which hasn’t ascribed to previously agreed-upon rules, for a mirth that can slide gently from one subject to the next, and for a laughter that can rebel against the logic that tries to contain it. I remember telling an instructor in an American Literature class that I found Eliot’s poem hilarious. I told him that my sister and I read it together, almost weeping with laughter. He replied that I must be a very callous young man. Perhaps. Or perhaps he was a very serious middle-aged man. I wish I had been witty enough to say, “You should meet my sister.”
In trying to understand the history of agnosticism, I use Prufrock because he’s both a comic and a serious figure. I also use him because he embodies the desire for the oracular epic ideal, as well as the modern inability to embrace or articulate that ideal.
I see doubt in a million ways, because it leads everywhere. Because it has no fixed position, it allows for the exploration of all positions. Doubt can be seen in terms of a mountain with its holy Greek spring, or in terms of the mountain ranges that lie beyond that spring. These mountains ranges may go from Geneva to Vienna, from Islamabad to China, or from Alaska to Peru.
Doubt can also be seen in terms of pathways, be these of water or cobblestone. In this sense, doubt meanders in the rivers, canals, and underground waterways and in the high streets and back alleys, from Paris to London, from Athens to Rome, and from Varanasi to Shanghai. At times, the streets lead to a dead end, to a brawl in a pub, or to a girl sitting reading by herself, occasionally looking up to see if anyone’s looking her way. Certain half-deserted streets “follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question” and other streets lead to domes and spires, obelisks and Elysian Fields. The pathway of rivers are equally diverse. Sometimes they’re synonymous with history, like the Thames, the Seine, and the Tiber. Sometimes they’re synonymous with religion, like the Jordan or the Ganges, which/who is both a river and a goddess. Sometimes they’re underground, like the Ilisos beneath Athens. And sometimes they’re invisible, like the goddess Saraswati, who meets the Ganges and the Yamuna in the city of Allahabad.
Doubt can also wander into the green vineyards of Southern France, and linger along the Dordogne. It can intoxicate, like Keats’ wine in his famous “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) “that hath been / Cooled a long age in the deep-delvéd earth, / Tasting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!” It can course through your body like soma, making you alert to every shift in value, sense, reality. In its unknown universe of all possibilities, it can even make you watch for mermaids in the estuary of the Gironde:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
Prufrock says, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” yet also says, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Behind Prufrock’s personal predicament lies a more universal one: the rational can eclipse the mystical, just as the “magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.” Reality can trump fantasy, so that the “human voices wake us, and we drown.” And of course no one, however deep their insight, can escape death: “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”
Prufrock’s desire to hear the mermaids singing may not be realistic, yet it suggests a deep urge in human nature to experience the beauty, joy, and depth of life, all of which are antidotes to the skeptical realism and to the stark naturalism that the 21st Century is heir to. Much the same sense of emotional and phenomenological rebirth can be found in the English Romantics, who listened closely to the beauty of nature, which can be symbolized in the song of Eliot’s mermaid or Keats’ nightingale, both of which combine the beauty of art with the half-submerged yearning for the ultimate escape and release. The nightingale’s song is like opium and wine to the poet who is “half in love with easeful death”:
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim […]
The nightingale sings outside of Prufrock’s salon, where “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” It sings along the forest with its brook babbling some incoherent tune, and it meanders along the rivers that lose themselves in the ocean. Its song suggests an answer to the overwhelming question, one so confounding that Prufrock couldn’t bring himself to ask it.
What is the meaning of life?
I don’t know.
♒️
Next: Rome 1: Sunset
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