#40 - The Waste Land

So it took me 12 hours after the initial reading, but I get it! And it's beautiful, it really is. I enjoy so much of the other work of the era, it's hard not to - although there is some manner of extra intensity added to it through poetry. The Fisher King, fertility and futility, Eastern and Western approaches, all very cool post-war themes that were expertly explored in this surprisingly short poem. 

I read my girlfriend Amy's (still love saying that) version of The Waste Land from the Norton Anthology of Literature. It was annotated, which was great and I later discovered wholly necessary if I were going to get through any of the work and its multiple languages, but it also wasn't typeset to preserve the breaks as designated. This gave me some initial confusion as to the different paragraphs and voices found in the work, something that I found a lot smoother in my subsequent reads.

The thing that aggravated me about The Waste Land wasn't the references or changing voices or the different potential explanations. It was the lack of that accessible - or nearly-accessible - base way of understanding it that gives the reader something to grasp on as they got through it. I found that even after I finished the first read, the core concept of the 'waste land' was somewhat lost to me. My first annotated read with Amy was better, but then I started being faced with denial - why my limited understanding was wrong, why this subverted that - and I was left even more frustrated, because there wasnt that starting frame to try and work higher-level thought off of. Reading more analysis and then rereading it made the poem now digestible, but it still lacked any kind of real resonance for me because I lacked that base plank.

Ulysses, in the end, after all of the form and structural changes, can be about an average day in Dublin, if you TRULY insist. There is the second reachable version of the Odyssey, bringing a thorough second set of meanings to every piece of the book. Then there are the thousands of references and allusions and things which add colour and interpretation and connection to other art, which make it magical, but only as something to look out at beyond the piece.

Instead, this felt like hanging from the monkey bars. My feet had nothing to stand on, so I couldn't appreciate the bars I was reaching desperately for, and I certainly couldn't enjoy the sights and stars around me. 

It is a great work, and I know it's only because I haven't given it time to open itself up to me, but this just wasn't impressive for me.

6/10