who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology
This might be a big time reach, but this line feels to me like a comment on how religion provides less and less comfort to us as society/science advances. Illness feels less like God's plan and more like a problem for mankind to solve, which makes it all the more glaring that we haven't solved it.
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup
These are the important things: spiritual connection, human connection, and soup. Houston is an interesting locale for this stanza, as it's not necessarily known for its jazz scene, but maybe that's the point. Your wants are present no matter where you are, but certain wants are more abundant in certain place.
boxcars boxcars boxcars
This looks like the profile of a train. I guess he could've written it caboose boxcars boxcars boxcars engine. These scenes, especially this one and the earlier one involving the Bronx, Benzedrine, and the zoo really draw me in and make me feel like I'm looking at an old candid photo from a private collection. The can of soda on the table in the background carries graphic design that I remember but had forgotten about.
only a relatively few enlightened minds have been able as the phrase puts it “to rise above” prejudice. The ordinary man has had until recently only a hard choice between the alternatives of supine and humiliating submission and stimulating but hurtful counter-prejudice
This is so interesting. In both cases (supine and humiliating submission and hurtful counter-prejudice) the person sinks "below". To "rise above" means to neither take nor give anything that bring one's self or any others "down". I love that.
O Southland, dear Southland! Then why do you still cling To an idle age and a musty page, To a dead and useless thing.
A great question. Culture dies to become the fertilizer for the next wave of progress.
His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism
I wonder if there's a balance between sentimentalism and progress. We want what's familiar, but the familiar things we love were once new and exciting. Nostalgia suffocates our judgement if we hold to this notion that things were perfect as they were. The evidence for this is that we knew things weren't perfect back then, because we were still clinging to things they way they were before then, too. If you come to a fork in the road marked "familiar" and "new" I say take "new". There's a lot I'd like to see left behind.
don’t amuse us too seriously
Incredible. If you tell the artist what you want from them, doesn't that make you the artist? Doesn't your uninspired art forced through the hands of unwilling artists make for uninteresting work?
We want to worship the Lord correctly
Why couldn't Jesus have mentioned that what's "correct" is a matter of opinion when it comes to faith, art, food, etc? He could've saved us a lot of trouble. How many have died because someone thought they were "wrong" in some completely unquantifiable way.
jazz is their child
This, to me, is evidence that the dominant culture is always worth resisting. Jazz is music played on the outcast instruments of the orchestra. The lonely saxophone, abandoned in the closet at the symphony, found its true voice in Sidney Bechet, the Hawk, Pres, and Bird. Jazz took the individual drums from the orchestra and combined them into the kit that we hear today in almost all forms of music in the west. Just because the rich people do it doesn't mean it's the only way.
In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain
In this passage I see un/natural time in regards to the decayed hole and the cock on the rooftree. Where there is no organic matter like fauna and flora to decompose, such as the case of the "decayed hole amongst the mountains" the only actual decay is that of the things man has built: the church, the graves, the door swinging on its hinges. To me this brings about images of the desolation this church will face as time continues to wear it down. Once all of man's manipulations of the earth are swept away on the wind the notion of decay will blow away with them. The process of decay is only happening while there is something there to be decaying. Un/natural time is also represented by the rooster's crow. Roosters crow on their own (we had one when I was a kid and it was very annoying), so their relationship to man's conception of time is irrelevant. It seems silly to include the motif of voices in regards to the rooster's call, the rooster is given a single line of dialogue. Maybe this is Eliot showing that all voices deserve a platform.
The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door. When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said— I didn’t mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.
The first motif that I noticed in this part of II. A Game of Chess was that of wet/dry. The passage I've highlighted opens with "The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four". I don't know exactly how bathing worked back then, but I'm sure people still preferred hot water, so Eliot is setting up people who are looking forward to hot water and hoping for no rain. People could wait for the rain and bathe themselves in it, instead of waiting for the hot water. I see a connection here between un/natural time, too. The people want to be clean for sure by ten; they won't wait for nature to pick a time to provide water. Nature provides people with what they need, but not always a way to form these things to suit themselves. I'm thinking toilet paper, loin cloths, fire, etc. People manipulate nature, including its timing, to create comfort and order.
The thing about the teeth could be connected to to zombies, as well as desire frustrated. Lil needs new teeth because our bodies only give us one set, which can (and often does) decay before the rest of our bodies. This decay -a dead or dying thing residing within a living person- reminds me of zombies. Somewhere in the corpse that is a zombie something lives. Not unlike how in the body of a living person something dead (fake teeth) can live. That she wants and needs new teeth because at age 31 a person is expected to still have them is an example of her desires being frustrated.
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
I talked about this in the writing for today, but what is the dead sound, I wonder? I definitely don't see myself as a "things used to be better back when the plague was jumping off" kind of person, but I do think we take sounds for granted these days. I'm sure by the time a modern baby is a year old they've heard a wider variety of sounds than Eliot heard in his whole life, so what was his relationship with sounds? What sounds did the clocks back then make?
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
I don't hear the heart of light as silent, so this passage is curious to me. Everyone sees something different I guess, just like how everyone has a different Blue Heaven.
Son of man, You cannot say, or guess
Can we not say or guess because we are the sons of man?
and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth
This reminds me of the quote "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they'll eat the rich". When everyone is eating filth the prisoners will be fed? I don't know, I think I'm missing something from this idea.
peasant traditions to give them character
Sometimes I think peasant traditions are the only place where character can be found at all. It reminds me of bohemia, or what we'd call "hipsters" today.
devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure—
Now that's a modernist idea. The hobo lifestyle as a fun thing instead of a survival tactic.
As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.
You can swing while playing to a metronome, but you become a lot more accountable for the rhythm that way.
To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation
That's a pretty wordy way to phrase that...
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Even in something as technologically stunning as a train station, it's still the human faces that stand out.
An iron cortex of its own
Something about ignorance being bliss, maybe?
I might be driven to sell your love for peace, Or trade the memory of this night for food. It well may be. I do not think I would
These are the two biggest concerns out there: safety for the world and food for the individual. The poem makes a good point about how love isn't meant to solve problems, but it does make them more pleasant to endure.
Of easy wind and downy flake.
Wow I don't think I've read this one. These pastoral images are scratching my John Steinbeck itch.
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence
This stanza is so classic. To me, it's almost more interesting to think of it without any connections to the obvious metaphor about the spirit of adventure and individuality, and think more about what he actually found down that shady wooded path.
Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
Lost me there, but up until this moment the poem felt to me like a concise story. I've been reading poetry differently, lately. Before, when I didn't much care for poetry, I'd read a poem once and be like "yeah, and?" Now I read each line a couple times until I make a strong connection with the line before it, then I move one. I picture it as a sort of web of comprehension forming as I read, and I can finally really enjoy it. Cool!
And yes, there was a shop-worn brotherhood
I know two crusty old guys that run a guitar shop in Tiburon that fit this description to a tee.
“Well, Mr. Flood, we have not met like this In a long time; and many a change has come
It was around this point that I very much began appreciating this storytelling. These poems that are actually just stories in a fun format are very fun.
Life all around me here in the village: Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth, Courage, constancy, heroism, failure– All in the loom, and oh what patterns
The loom of the village. Finally someone not calling it a"tapestry".
Ballades by the score with the same old thought:
This poem has a very satisfying rhythm. I think it's even more satisfying if you read it out loud, as the shapes your mouth has to make to do the sounds all transition nicely from one to the other
I’m feeling ever so much better! I don’t sleep much at night, for it is so interesting to watch developments; but I sleep a good deal in the daytime.
This whole part of the story is so chilling. She writes with such a happy tone (while declaring her happiness), but she also says unsettling things (like how she sleeps a good deal in the daytime).
I suppose John never was nervous in his life. He laughs at me so about this wall-paper!
This guy sure does think he knows it all.
Away with the black man’s ballot, by force or fraud
This world is just too gross. Can you believe this? Remove 12.5 million people from their homeland, strip them of their culture, enslave them for hundreds of years and then deny them voting rights and access to education when slavery is finally abolished? But it wasn't really abolished with Lincoln's proclamation, was it? No, it went on and on because of course it did. People are currently fighting to keep Harriet Tubman off money, still giving people like Rush Limbaugh the medal of freedom.
The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon his race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home
Looking at you, Thomas Jefferson...
Canaan
Where the soul of a man never dies
votes
Fun fact: a republican has won the popular vote in a US election precisely once since 1988.
The would-be black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood
It seems that Du Bois is saying that African Americans are at the mercy of white Americans. Even though they're not enslaved any longer, they're still dependent on the white people for any opportunity to advance. In America we have a system that's set up to hold certain people back automatically.
I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination-time, or beat them at a foot-race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade
We studied this book in a class last year, and I remember the veil being a big theme. That he doesn't want to see past the veil is human nature, I think; to find peace with where you are is a noble endeavor, but you miss out on so much. It's not up to him to fix American society's huge problems, so instead he has to overcome them on his end. This is asking way too much of a person.
Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.
Protestantism at it again...
he would risk translating rays into faith
Wow, what? There have been allusions to the confluence of spirituality and technology sprinkled throughout this piece, but this is where it really comes together. To worship science is just to worship man though, right? The only thing that makes science science is our understanding of it.
He wrapped himself in vibrations and rays which were new, and he would have hugged Marconi and Branly
I very much enjoy being able to look things up on the same device I'm reading them on. It took two seconds to discover than Marconi helped develop radio and Branly helped develop telegraphy, and now I'd hug whomever developed the internet. Al Gore, I guess.
Among the thousand symbols of ultimate energy the dynamo was not so human as some, but it was the most expressive
The dynamo is a less human symbol than some, but it's more expressive? It makes me wonder what it is that's being expressed when we use the word "expressive". Not human-ness, I guess?
They Lion grow.
They feed the lion and it grows and grows. I took this to mean that they're sort of adding some kind of fuel to some kind of fire, and I appreciate Levine not using a common cliché like "fuel to the fire".
From the sweet glues of the trotters
I've learned from my fellow students that 'trotters' means shoes, so my original thought of "aw he's talking about making horses into glue" is out.