Tagged — Jamie Lyons
T.S. Eliot was a banker who wore three piece suits and spoke with an accent he basically shoplifted from the British Museum. But the guy understood something essential about the twentieth century that most of us are still too chickenshit to admit: we're all living in the rubble of something we never got to see when it was whole.
The Waste Land wasn't poetry. It was a nervous breakdown set to iambic pentameter, a five part scream into the void that somehow got published in respectable journals. This was 1922, and T.S. Eliot was showing us the future: fragmented, referential, stealing from everyone and everything because originality was the first casualty of modernity. He was sampling Dante and Sanskrit like some proto hip hop collagist, except instead of beats he was working with apocalypse and sexual dysfunction.
What gets me is how he nailed the particular horror of being educated enough to know you're lost. Prufrock measuring out his life in coffee spoons. That's not quaint metaphor, that's the ice-pick reality of middle class paralysis. The guy saw us coming: overeducated, under lived, drowning in allusions we half remember from sophomore year.
And then T.S. Eliot goes and gets religion, becomes a royalist, an Anglo-Catholic, basically the least radical move imaginable. Except it was the ultimate fuck you to everyone who wanted him to keep chronicling despair. He found his tradition, his authority, even if it was backward looking and conservative as hell.
But those early poems? They're still out there like live ammunition. They refuse comfort. They don't resolve. They show you the abyss and then quote Baudelaire at you in French. That's not literature. That's assault with a deadly weapon.
FalseArt 2023
Strauss’s Daphne directed and designed by Romeo Castellucci Castellucci knows what you know but pretend to forget… that pastoral is a lie… always was. Those sunlit meadows and nymphs dancing? Bullshit. The world’s a wasteland and nature’s not your mother, she’s indifferent, she’s cold, she’ll bury you under six feet of snow and not think […]
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Wanderlust 2017
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice. And to make an end is to make a beginning. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding There’s something pure and merciless about that stop sign planted there on the tracks in Davenport like some bureaucratic punctuation mark that wandered off the […]
ReadSpeculation 2016
Aleta Hayes and The Chocolate Heads are building Ghost Architecture, and I’m here trying to capture what happens when sculptural performance becomes something between séance and construction site. It’s ephemeral by design, chocolate edifices that exist in that sweet between solid and melting, between here and gone, like memory made tactile. This is the kind […]
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