Eliot published "The Wasteland" in 1922, four years after the end of World War I, a cataclysm of national desires that reduced to memory Europe's old order. England was the nominal victor, but wounded veterans haunted its coal-tarred streets and cynicism prevailed—about politicians who had mismanaged a ruinous war, about the clergy who had trumpeted young Christians to the slaughter, about England itself. If its leaders could have turned a few cards with Eliot's fortuneteller, Madame Sosostris, she might have revealed a fading empire, and England's reduction to history's margins.
In later years, Eliot would become a conservative Christian, without the resonances those two words sound today. His last major work of poetry, Four Quartets, is a brilliant evocation of the mysteries and mysticism of faith—"In my beginning is my end ..." And he cherished the culture that seemed to crumble with the social order that had sustained it. Eliot saw culture's contracting citadel besieged by the cheap and easy—"strange, synthetic perfumes ... the sound of horns and motors ... a record on the gramophone."
And so life seemed to him reduced to the empty carnality of "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME"—the demobilized soldier whose wife should have used the money he sent to fix her smile; the crude, tactical sex between a typist and "the young man carbuncular." But he fashions these scenes from high culture's residue, sampling Renaissance poetry, invoking the Sophoclean soothsayer Tiresias, and their philosophical setting is the eternal return, death and renewal. "And I Tiresias have foresuffered all/Enacted on this same divan or bed."
Eliot merged memory and desire in Tiresias possibly because industrial technology, for all its terrible efficiencies, could not close the chasm between what we want from the future and what we rue or rejoice in the past. Although in many respects that gulf has widened in the media age, we have found ways to bridge it, virtually and dreadfully.
Picture Eliot weathering October's pitiless media storm: The manias and misfortunes of Anna Nicole; revelations of widely known official dishonesty; a congressman baiting pages with text messages; armed assaults on schools. In Nevada, we wonder if a censured state official might have conspired to kill a husband with the later husband who—allegedly—murdered her. In the 60 Minutes that gave us Bob Woodward's damning confirmation of the already known, Las Vegans were reminded of the Bumfights videos, partly shot here, which have been cited as inspiration for attacks on homeless people. Unrepentant filmmaker Ryan McPherson, posed with an "Indecline" poster, shrugged off responsibility with something of an anarcho-libertarian air. Is he merely chronicling our decay, or hastening it?
This is worth asking in the wake of two similar, but apparently not copycat, school assaults, carried out by adult men, not disgruntled goth teens. Creepily, they targeted girls for molestation and murder, pulling into view once again the ageless tangle of sex and power, of desire without memory or end. The second shooting, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, achingly contrasted a media-mad world with that of the helpless victims, and it confirmed the confounding of memory and desire in the media age. It might be that all desire, particularly in our age, reduces to sex, one way or another. But it is no secret that for the scorned loser, sex is about power. And for some, power is about claiming a place in the images tumbling from a screen near you.
Half of memory is regret, and how you deal with it drives your desires. As Thomas de Zengotita notes in Mediated, your desires are the focus of intense media-marketing attention: It is, indeed, all about you. At the same time, "memory" is as broad as the media universe; it includes Bumfights and war games and whatever bandwidths your tribes troll. In these memories you might bury the regrets you pull from the ample evidence your desires are not really being met. Or you might use them to salt your wounds: You're not a star, you're not rich, although you deserve to be. Shit happens, all right—to you. So make yourself a star, make your desires memories, make a video of the rage you vent on helpless victims. Or make a date with the future, make a certain memory of your most horrid desires.
But if guns didn't kill those girls, media didn't, either. Suppression and censorship will only further coarsen a me-driven world. What Eliot missed in the wasteland of postwar London, a combination of good taste, good sense and spirituality, seems as quaint today as an Edwardian top hat, but it hints at taming the rampant id, twisting memory and desire into vital equilibrium. Perhaps as a society, we might throttle back on the maximum aggrandizement of self and learn responsibility, community, purpose: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin..."
Chuck Twardy has written for newspapers and magazines for more than 20 years. His website,
www.members.cox.net/theanteroom, has a forum.