Memoir and Meteorology

In which I relate the meteorological in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and my own memoir

Photo by Fiona Smallwood on Unsplash

In “Part V - What the Thunder Said” of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the dry earth makes an appearance. Dry sterility, a physical dryness and a metaphorical spiritual dryness, mirrors the desolate post-WWI landscape and the internal moral decline of humankind.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen races sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water

And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water (lines 331-359)

This is the water-dripping song in The Waste Land, a famous passage with its haunting, hypnotic rhythms. This passage sets up the climax of the poem, with the Fisher King, sitting with the arid plain behind him, contemplating setting his lands in order. For the lands are intimately tied to the health of the Fisher King. His physical and spiritual illness is manifested in the dryness of the lands. Only with the coming of the rains, or through some spiritual waters, will the lands be refreshed and revitalized. But for now there is only “dry thunder without rain.”

Later in Part V there is a “flash of lightning. Then a damp gust / Bringing rain (lines 394-395). This is the promise of the coming of the rains that will revitalize the lands.

Photo by Eugene Triguba on Unsplash

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I arrived in Seattle on September 1. From September 1 until yesterday, Oct. 20, we had no rain. I read that Seattle (the rainy city) has been without rain since June, the longest stretch in the city’s history without rain, almosts 5 months.

Wherever I go, the rains stop. Drought follows me like a shadow.

Living in Kansas, I loved the late summer thunderstorms, methodically rolling in every afternoon. They were something to be relied upon. Gargantuan storms echoed the skies with thunder and thick, dark clouds turned day to night. The rains were hard and swift, sometimes with large hail stones, sometimes heralds of nights of terror, pregnant with the possibility of tornadoes.

When I moved to San Diego in 2005, you could feel the dryness in the air. 72 degrees and sunny was not just a joke. It was the reality of living south of Los Angeles in a sleepy border town along the bay. The only exception was that the thermometers had inched up. San Diego had grown hotter in the 20 years since I had lived there previously. And the rains never came. One of the greatest droughts on record started when I moved to San Diego and continued throughout my time there, until the ending events of my memoir in 2015.

Even now, the drought in the West continues. Forests are tinder dry. Seattle had the poorest air quality in the world yesterday due to neighboring fires and lack of air movement. We wore masks just to breathe. Not to breathe, but to keep the smoke out.

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Of course, I know that I don’t cause the drought. My life is not spiritually dry, though my memoir has included periods of moral and spiritual challenges and the sterility of decay common to dealing with mental illness and dysfunction. But what else to account for the deep correspondence and coincidences between my own life and The Waste Land? I know other works of art quite well - why didn’t my life mimick As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury or The Great Gatsby?

Or is it that The Waste Land captures life so expertly and exquisitely that it can be seen, in all its myriad voices to contain the individual and idiosyncratic, at the same time that it contains multitudes?

When I found the first vestiges of correspondence between my story and The Waste Land, I grew excited like it was Christmas morning. It was like . . . meaning bestowed. I dug through my closet to find my old copy of T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems. Rereading and studying The Waste Land after all those years was like putting on an old sweater, forgotten in the back of the closet. I had studied The Waste Land for years with Professor Owens, my copy dog-earred and scribbled with annotations. But the correlations between my life and The Waste Land, between actual lines in the poem and the events in my life, it mystified me how coincidences could run that deeply.

Is it possible that my life on some unconscious levels grew to mimick The Waste Land? Did I force a pattern onto a template? How could a work of art 100 years before know that I would be moving to an area of the world where drought would engulf it, to encompass those very years of which I was writing about? The correspondences are astonishing.

But there is no force involved in that pattern. The shape of my life happened and I merely recite the events. The meanings underneath may vary with the warp and weave of my tale. But the exterior skeleton, the framwork - the drought, the mental illnesses, the sterility and spiritual dryness - those are as concrete and hard as the rock upon which the water drips its song.

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If you can leave a comment, tell me what you think, we can start a conversation, you and I. Let us go, then . . .

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Today, the rains have returned to Seattle. I’m staring out my window at the pines with their drooping boughs and clusters of rust-colored needles. Fall is here, and the first rains since we’ve arrived are here. I can’t even see the rain. It’s just wet, the Seattle I remember from when I used to visit my brother all those years ago in my childhood.

Now I’m here, in his place. And he is still gone.

Rain has already started to revitalize the land. Yesterday there was smoke. Today, the air is fresh, breathable again. We are heading into winter and will read, much of the night.

Happy fall to you. I hope wherever you are, the rains are refreshing and replenishing to body and soul.

For me, I’ll . . .

Just keep writing!