Passing Thoughts on Eliot - the Unreal Cities

Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

~T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

I'll probably be accused of being too much of a literalist, but here goes anyway.

I think Eliot's assessment of the "unreal" cities is wrong. Or, at least, only half right.

The unreality he describes is perhaps best understood not as a quality of the cities themselves, but as indicative of one man's perception of them and relationship to them. In other words, the description of such cities as unreal reflects a desensitized form of detachment; what we see when reading the poem is the speaker's own delusional sense of his place in the world. Calling these cities "unreal" is a type of cultural hundred-yard-stare.

The speaker is shell-shocked -- and never sets foot in a trench.

So, how did he get that way? And why did (and DOES) the image resonate so strongly with so many people?

It would be easy at this point to impute to the poem some of the disarray of Eliot's own personal life in the period during which The Waste Land was composed. In fact, it is quite tempting. (See, for example, "Preludes", one of my personal favorites, as well as "Rhapsody on a Windy Night.")

But I'm digressing. I wanted to talk about cities. The cities are real -- as real as your body, as real as the mind that thinks deep, profound, privileged, fashionably nihilistic, avant-garde thoughts. (Eliot and I are much alike: we've both been well-cared-for.)

And the cities have a feel -- not just the spatial, or the locative, but the rhythmic and organic. Something like a kaleidoscope: a set of constants, which refract into 1,000,000 different patterns. A Greek Chorus of individual lives, moving like blood through the veins. Ballet? Modern Dance? Too-apt metaphors. Alive, and you're a part of it.

I don't know that any of this has a thing to do with Eliot. Except maybe to tell him "lighten up on London!" I've never been. But I'd like to go see it.