Reading the Brihadaranyaka source that connects to this section of the poem, I notice in Chapter five that the descriptions of "truth" and "falsehood" remind me of the third/fourth person from our previous readings. "The gods worship truth (satya), pronounced with three syllables, "sa-ti-yam". Sa and yam represent Truth, ti represents falsehood. "falsehood is surrounded on both sides by truth, and becomes truth." Falsehood being in-between is similar to how the "third person" is in-between, and if falsehood becomes truth by being surrounded by truth, then could the entity that is the third person, what does the "third person" become?

Each mention of Wind in Across South Georgia is a personification. It is first a "fierce wind" which has "cut in the snow and ice [a tremendous gully]." Then, a "little breeze", making cooking difficult for the three men, until they "break the wind with [their] bodies." They then notice a cloud of fog, which tells them "the wind and snow are likely to come," and subsequent mentions of it reference it "chilling" them or "dusting them" with white snow. During their entire journey, they are followed by the wind–until they make it to the whaling camp and become "civilized men" again. The narrator (Shackleton), when recalling the journey, says "it seemed to me often that we were four, not three." This connects to Retelling of an Indian Legend, a story of three travelers who seek shelter in a dark veranda, and become "troubled by the presence of a fourth person." They realize that it is Lord Vishnu, the Hindu god of salvation. If the fourth person in the Retelling of an Indian Legend is a God, and "wind" in The Wasteland has a home in the "house of god" (a chapel), then could wind be an incarnation of God, making the fourth person Shackleton and his men are recalling on their journey the deified wind?

Lord Vishnu is known as the preserver and guardian of men, and his four arms are depicted holding sankha (a conch), chakra (discus), gada (mace) and padma (lotus) (the conch stands for the 5 elements: air, water, earth, and fire, the discus the light bearing sun, higher consciousness, destroying all illusions, the mace the power of knowledge, and the lotus self-realization). The connection of the wind and the "fourth person" to Lord Vishnu is evidence that Shackleton and his crew are enlightened by their journey. At the beginning of Chapter X, the sun is depicted as beating down on Shackleton and his crew, making them hot and nearly blinded by the reflections on the snow (conch). At the end of the chapter, after his journey comes to a close, it is apparent that Shackleton is no longer trapped in the illusions of the physical word: he reflects on the superfluousness of tangible things, explaining that his journey "had pierced the veneer of outside things... [he had] seen God in His splendors, heard the text that Nature renders. [He] had reached the naked soul of man."

The mention of an ambiguous "he" throughout the poem ends with this quote: "he who was living is now dead." The identity of the subject is unclear, but as we've spoken about in class, could be Tiresias. With this in mind, this quote is especially interesting, considering the mentions of the Thrush bird at the end. John Keats, in "What the Thrush Said", writes "And he's awake who thinks himself to sleep." This could be read as a reference to reaching enlightenment, as it is often associated with "waking up", and, according to the Buddhist Fire Sermon, requires the rejection of all human perceptions of reality. The idea that it takes a state of unconsciousness, or "sleep", to be enlightened, is even more compelling when considering John 11:11-13, where it is written "howbeit Jesus spake of his death: but they thought that he had spoken of taking of rest in sleep." All of this blurs the lines between enlightenment, sleep, and death.

The rest of the passage focuses on the lack of water (which sustains life) and the abundance of sterile rock. The path "we" are on persists through these conditions, and we can not stop to "drink" because there is no water, and we can not stop to "think", either. In Psalm 63, it is written "my soul thirsteth for thee [God], my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is." Even when the body is deprived of water and food, in a desert land, instead of longing for the material substances that would save its life, the narrator longs for God, because "thy lovingkindness is better than life." This further emphasizes the nature of enlightenment as being a prioritization of God (ambiguously) over one's own body and mind.

In Historical Annotations 1, Lauren Sonneborn explains the differences between how fire is portrayed in Christianity vs. Buddhism, and the contradiction that occurs when considering Dante's Inferno, where the lowest, most torturous levels of hell are actually icy and cold. What strikes me about this contradiction is that it actually (ironically) bridges the previously mentioned gap between Buddhism and Christianity. In the translated The Ādittapariyāya Sutta (Pali, "Fire Sermon Discourse”), it is explained that "all things are on fire," as fire is an umbrella term that describes all indicators of human emotion–anything from passion to hatred. By the nature of these emotions, this fire is fueled by one's consciousness. Fire could be a metaphor for the ego (honestly, I use "the ego" for lack of a better word to describe the force that drives the human mind to be self-centered and subjective), because later on it is explained that the only way to avoid the fire is to avoid, or "conceive an aversion" to any feeling, perception, or earthly/mortal sensation entirely. Ultimately, once successful in creating such an aversion, one becomes "free". The text then seems to suggest that the tangible things and sensations of the earth are actually restrictive, and that any illusion of personal autonomy is false, since one is not free until their mind is completely sterile and removed from the world. The way that Pali Canon describes life is not "unsimilar" to how Dante pictures the last ring of Hell: complete lack of freedom, surrounded by reflections of yourself (ice is reflective), and burning (both fire and ice have the capacity to burn). Lauren then poses the question,

Is the waste land a space in the mind, extinguished and waterlogged?

After previously explaining that

Perhaps, this is why the next section is titled "Death by Water," as the same water that quenches a fire also extinguishes the human spirit.

She suggests that Eliot is skeptical of the sterility that Buddhism describes, and that he is actually in favor of maintaining the "human spirit", not quenching it. However, I see Elliot as aligned with the Buddhist philosophy. He writes "O Lord Thou pluckest me out," following his reference to the burning, seemingly begging to be liberated from the Earth–the use of the word "pluck" illustrates the "plucking" of a flower or plant from the ground. This image further solidifies the connection between human consciousness and vegetation, trapped by the land that sustains its life. So, instead of the wasteland being a fragment of the mind that is "waterlogged", which suggests that "waste" is a discrepancy, I wonder if it is actually the entirety of human consciousness.

In the annotations from two years ago, Stephanie notices that "[Eliot] highlights themes of decay, loss, and the aftermath, as the sailor is "a fortnight dead" and the sea "picked his bones."" What is interesting about this is that in the draft of Death by Water, there is a section where Eliot references a scene from De Quincey's "Dream Fugue", in which a woman has "white draperies streaming before the wind." Eliot writes "Three women leaning forward, with white hair streaming behind, who sang above the wind." "Dream Fugue" highlights the opposite of decay and aftermath, as it is centered around the theme of sudden death. It appears that Eliot made the active decision to keep the lens off of that theme, since it completely changes the tone of the piece and distracts from Eliot's clear focus on death as a process, not a finite end. What is interesting about death by water is that it is one of the most drawn-out deaths one can have, and afterward, the body is preserved as decomposition processes happen slower in water. It is by no means "sudden". I see Eliot comparing life to a whirlpool–inescapable, torturously cyclical, the inhabitant desperately turning the wheel away from the inevitable end: drowning. If the whirlpool is life, it is the slow sinking to the bottom of the ocean that is death.

In Edmund Spencer's Prothalamion, nymphs are ethereal characters, gathering flowers in "wicker baskets". Here in The Waste Land, however, the "nymphs are departed", and the land is brown and barren. What is interesting about the Prothalamion story is that it contains starkly different representations of male-female relationships: marriage (the lovely maidens for whom the nymphs are gathering flowers) and rape (the swans, the myth of Leda and Lena). From the former, I am reminded of Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, where he writes "My vegetable love, should grow, vaster than empires and more slow;" and throughout the rest of the poem, references to the eternity of his love continue, even past the mortality of his lover: "thy beauty shall no more be found; nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound." Considering the political environment in which Eliot is writing this, his country (and the world, for that matter) is polluted from the industrial revolution, and destroyed by the World War. Marvell's comparison of the growth of his vegetable love to an empire fits, as if this is one big metaphor for how, despite the country falling into ruin, the love of its citizens prevails only in memory (and desire). Could the country be "female", stripped of all beauty and autonomy, essentially raped, by the actions of its "unpure" men?

In this section of TWL, the references to glass and fruit made me think of this quote in A Martyred Woman: "the air is dangerous, fatal, where bouquets dying in their glass coffins exhale their final breath." The reference to a glass coffin is firstly, to me, a connection to Sybil. When following the logic of this connection, Sybil is thus compared to a flower, once beautiful, which is slowly dying after having been plucked from the ground and kept in a vase. This is interesting because when one thinks of how a flower withers away when it is not in the ground, the shriveling up and loss of supple body and color parallels her story. When you pick a flower, it is almost an act of selfishness: the beauty of the flower is so intense that you must take it for yourself, but in the very act of wanted preservation, ironically, you are actually shortening the lifespan of its beauty. You could keep the flower forever, yes, but it will just dry up, leaving you with both the "memory" if its former and the longing, the "desire", for it to return to that.

Death is humiliating when one's coffin is made of glass. A coffin is meant to be a final protector of dignity, but when made of glass, it can not function this way. Later on in Boudelaire's poem, despite being dead, the woman described is still "quite young". Her head has been cut off, but the rest of her body is extremely vulnerable and unprotected, as though it were in a glass coffin. I wonder if there is something to be said about the way flowers are kept in glass vases, essentially acting a their glass coffin, exposing their death and removing them from the cycles of nature, where death and decay would be welcome. What are the glass coffins that humans create for ourselves?

I noticed in Walt Whitmans When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, that flowers and their perfumes are used to cover up death. They are placed upon a grave, or they are "bred out of dead land". I then noticed the previous allusion to Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield with the line "when lovely woman stoops to folly". In context, the line is:

When lovely woman stoops to folly, / And finds, too late, that men betray, / What charm can soothe her melancholy? / What art can wash her guilt away?"

Could there be a connection here between covering up death with flowers and perfume, and covering up the guilt and shame of rape with charm and art? In this case, the art is music, as she "puts a record on the gramophone." But, in the case of Boudelaire's "A Martyred Woman", the dead prostitute, who's job was filled with sexual abuse, is literally dead. Her body is still covered with jewels, and it a room still thick with perfume.

Chess games have a time element to them. Players may choose how much time they would like to allot to their turn; speed chess can be as low as 3 minutes, regular chess can be as high as 24 hours+. With this in mind, the repetition of the phrase "Hurry up please its time" suggests that it is the "turn" of whoever it is the narrator is addressing. I get the sense that the lines in between are portraying the feeling of knowing that move is the last. The "goodnights" thus suggest that the narrator is giving up, in the same way Ophelia from Hamlet gave up her sanity and life. In a game of chess, sometimes a player must resign in order to preserve their dignity, since allowing the game to go in circles would be a waste of time and a recipe for madness. This entire section, I am noticing, seems to be about women. Having children, jewels, etc, so is this Elliot's way of saying that "mad women" are just women who are breaking the mold, and haven't "resigned" to their social narrative? Ophelia is surely a good example of this.

Her hair is wet–there are couple connections that stood out to me: 1) a reference to one of the rain charms (drowning) of the nature cults 2) suggesting that she has been "watered" like a plant, thus the blurring of the lines between human and vegetable. Actually, as I write this, I am realizing that the rain charms are performed by the cult member posing as the Vegetation Spirit. With her wet hair, suggesting the completion of the rain charm, she is effectively deified.

I am interested by the choice of the word "forgetful" in this context. It implies that snow inhibits the previously mentioned "desire" and "memory", acting as not only a blanket literally "keeping us warm", but keeping us ignorant. It is another form of water, but this time it does not act as a fertilizer/catalyst of life, but instead as a sterile, removed entity from the process.

In Huxley's Chrome Yellow, there is a moment where Mr. Scogan mutters "where ignorance is bliss, tis folly to be wise." With the previous reference to a an "blank card" in TWL, which with tarot readings represents a "blank' future, it is implied that his reading is too appalling to be fortold. The following vision, "I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring" reminds me of the nature cults described in "From Ritual to Romance". There are many modes of sacrifice that the cults use to beg the gods for fertility, but one that connects here are the "rain charms"–in other words, drowing. If he must "fear death by water", is the vision some kind of metaphor (which the narrator is blind to, or ignorant to) for what these cult sacrifices represent?

In the "Ethnography" text, the author cites Mr. Basevi's interesting point: that graves are not "receptacles for the dead, but refuges for the living." He also suggests that graves weren't always separated from the living spaces, and that people were actually buried underground because that was where people lived. I am interested in how this connects to the portrayal of nature in the Wasteland. Eliot calls April the "cruellest month, breeding lilacs out of dead ground". It is a strong juxtaposition–in the way a grave is a "refuge for the living", this muddy, deadness is a refuge for growth and newness. This led me to realize the many ways humans are reminded of their mortality. One of the most subtle, and I would argue the most haunting because of its subtlety, are the reminders of one's expendability. In the same way that no matter how harsh a winter gets, a flower will always end up peaking its head out of the ground come April, there will always be a cycle of "new people", or youth, to replace the older generations. The ego does not enjoy realizing its own superfluousness, so it is for these reasons that we damn the youth for their "newness", and April for having the audacity to grow new flowers and new grass in the very ground which is a graveyard for last-year's life.