- Hello, I'm Victor Strandberg here for another session in the study of the poetry of T.S. Eliot. In this session we're going to take up part four of The Waste
Land, Death by Water. In part three we had a
look at the influence of Buddhism on T.S. Eliot who saw Buddhism in that section as a system of ethics, that is to say the Buddha
preached to his sermon a code of behavior that he advised his 1,000 monks to follow that involves suppression
of the five senses, that is to say the physical body and suppression of the mind, both the body, the five senses are on fire with various passions and the mind likewise. So, to achieve the Buddhist
objective of desirelessness, that blessed condition
beyond the reach of suffering it was necessary to cast aside or suppress both the body and the mind. If one could do that, one could form you might say a path to the other dimension that Eliot was interested
in concerning Buddhism, that is to say Buddhist metaphysics which I think are the ultimate subject of part four, Death by Water. By Buddhist metaphysics we are speaking of the concept of nirvana and I need to explain the thinking behind these concepts for a moment before we launch into the poem proper. In the original Fire Sermon at the bottom of the page that I gave you in the file that goes with these lectures we find the Buddha making
a promise to his monks that if they follow his instructions of suppressing both the mind and the body we can thereby reach the deepest, truest, and only eternal part of the self, what westerners might call the soul but which Hindus and
the Buddha was a Hindu living in India what the Hindus called the atman A-T-M-A-N, that particle of the universal soul that lives on for all eternity and which it is the Buddhist
or Hindu's purpose to realize, that is to make real,
to have contact with, to give full expression to and indeed, to give dominion over his entire being to the atman being the object of
Buddhist or Hindu worship. Now, at the end of the Fire Sermon then the Buddha says the following, in conceiving this aversion for both the five senses, the body and for the mind one becomes divested of passion, that is desire, and by the absence of passion one becomes free. When he is free, one becomes aware that
rebirth is exhausted, that one has lived a holy life and that one is no more for this world, which is to say reaching the state of nirvana, this state of oneness
with the universal soul after casting aside the mind and the body or suppressing them, reaching that blissful state means that one gets off
the wheel of rebirth, one does not have to
come back to this world of misery and suffering and live another life incarnated in a mind and a body of temporary existence. In the Western view this
state of entering nirvana means oblivion, that is we have no separate consciousness from the universal soul which in the Buddhist or Hindu's view is a state of being in sin to have a separate identity but nonetheless it is the
most desired objective of righteous living. Now, as we go to Death by Water I do discern this Buddhist concept nirvana as one way to cope with the Waste Land. We ended part three, the Fire Sermon with St. Augustine praying to be plucked out of the burning and with T.S. Eliot noting that the Buddhist and Christian forms of aestheticism, of denying the body seem to meet in this concept of desire to escape the burning of desire. In part three of course
this is sexual desire above all others. In section four then, Death by Water we meet Phlebas the Phoenician, a character that showed up in some of Eliot's earlier poetry, particularly a poem written in French called Dans le Restaurant, In the Restaurant where Phlebas the Phoenician
makes his first appearance. We also remember earlier in The Waste Land that in the fortune teller episode, Madame Sosostris advised her clients who feared death by water. In that case the word fear
seems a little misplaced which is to say in part one, The Burial of the Dead, certainly there is fear of death but Eliot held contradictory views of this subject as indeed
perhaps most of us do in some fashion. The other side of this view of Eliot's comes in the voice of the Sibyl in that epigraph that
introduced the entire poem. When those young men went
to this voice of wisdom, the Sibyl who had immortality, and when the young men asked her what do you want, her answer was I wish to die. If indeed death or oblivion is the only answer to The Waste Land perhaps it is a welcome relief from that veil of
suffering, sin and sorrow. So, coming back now to part four, and Phlebas the Phoenician, he is we are told a fortnight dead as the poem begins and therefore he forgot the cry of gulls and the deep sea swell. He was a sailor, the Phoenicians
were a commercial people invested in trading around
the Mediterranean Sea. We come now to the first
of the three false values that dominated The Waste Land which Phlebas now being dead can and does forget. Phlebas the Phoenician a fortnight dead forgot the profit and the loss, the flow of money circulating through The Waste Land
of ultimate importance in the naturalistic scheme of things but ultimately of no importance in the final reckoning. Now, in the middle of this
section Death by Water, originally it was 10 times longer than it is now before Ezra Pound got
out his pruning shears and cut it down to size, so in the middle of this
very short, concise poem we have what looks to me is an inviting set of images welcoming this state of oblivion, a courage undersea, picked
his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell he passed the stages of his age and youth that of course was the
wheel of time journeying during his lifetime but now he is entering the whirlpool and this is an image
that comes up importantly later in Eliot's work, the idea of seeking a still point at the center of the churning world, that is the wheel that the world represents, that the dimension of time represents, the wheel has at its very center a still point that does not turn. In Eliot's view naturalistically there is only one way to
reach this state of bliss beyond the turning wheel by reaching the center and that is to die. That will get you to the center of the wheel, the still point where Phlebas now reposes. So, Phlebas enters the whirlpool and here we have the second of those three false values that dominated life in the naturalistic waste land. Gentile or Jew. Well, back in his earlier life, in the earlier poems, T.S. Eliot took some consolation from his social superiority to the low class rabble that he describes in a number of poems. The Sweeneys, the Blisteins, the Greeks and Poles,
the recent immigrants that he could look down on from his perch as a sigh of the blue
blood Eliots of Boston long established as an upper-class family in that honorable city. Nonetheless Eliot knew deep down that like the profit and the loss, being a Gentile or Jew means nothing ultimately, it is a false value. Phlebas is better off
for having forgot it. We move in the last two lines
of this very short section to the third of these false values, a familiar motif in Eliot's earlier work. He addresses the reader now, oh, you, who turn the wheel and look to windward which is to say those of
us who are still alive in the upper world on
the surface of the sea, still experiencing our life in this world. You who turn the wheel
and look to windward, he has some advice for us, consider Phlebas who was
once handsome and tall as you, that is to say
Phlebas was a winner in the sexual selection process or the sexual competition, a supremely important value in The Waste Land but ultimately once again a false value. T.S. Eliot feels that if these are the only prevailing values, money, the social hierarchy, success in the sexual competition, then life in The Waste
Land is not worth living and so, oblivion or the Buddhist nirvana is a welcome alternative as we end section four, Death by Water. We'll turn next to section five, What the Thunder Said for his other alternative
to The Waste Land.
