About a year into writing about my brother, I re-discovered a connection to The Waste Land that thrust its way into my consciousness. I re-read the poem, a poem I knew quite well, though many of the previously memorized lines were fading after 30 odd years later. What I saw astonished me. The clarity with which Eliot wrote and the synchronization with my own life’s story was astonishing.
I lived drought, infertile lands and relationships, the Tiresias narrator both man and woman, and the darker sides, suicide drowning, hanging, the Fisher King myth and the questing knight, seeking redemption in a fallen world. There is a way out of the waste land, just as I found a way out of my own dysfunctional world.
Synchronicity.
As I wrote, it became increasingly clear that this book was not about my brother at all. This was my memoir, of which my brother was a major part. The Waste Land was the analogue version of my own dysfunctional life. I had studied The Waste Land in school with a brilliant professor who specialized in “waste land literature.” It’s not merely that I had read the poem once or twice in class. I had taken whole classes in “waste land literature,” had written papers, studied the poem in depth and even written a scholarly article that was provisionaly accepted for publication, an analysis of the ending of a Steinbeck novel - The Winter of Our Discontent - in light of The Waste Land.
I can’t say the memoir wrote itself. It didn’t. But The Waste Land provided a structure that fit my life and made the writing more fluid. I didn’t arbitrarily shove my life into a non-conforming mold. Form and function melded together. Lines from The Waste Land spoke to me, and the fragmented nature of memory along with my own experiences moved to the forefront of my conciousness and provided a most apt metaphor.
I printed out the poem and pasted it to my wall as a wrote, so I could see the whole thing. At that point, my writing accelerated.
Finding The Waste Land as the piece to connect to my own story is what brought my own story alive.
As I begin sharing more and more of my book, here is a look the table of contents, with most chapters titled after lines in Eliot’s poem. The outline of my memoir is as follows:
I. Burial of the Dead - covers 4 major deaths in my life, three by suicide. (short)
II. A Game of Chess - details the similarity between me and my brother. (short)
III. The Fire Sermon - difficult marriage and divorce, my introduction to borderline personality disorder. (long)
IV. Death By Water - a one-line allusion, 5 words. The shortest section of my memoir, to match the shortest section of Eliot’s poem. (short)
V. What the Thunder Said - difficult polyamorous relationship with someone with narcissitic borderline personality disorder, ending in ritualistic purging of pain and the beginning of healing, analogous to finding my way out of the waste land through Eliot’s catechism, “Give, Sympathize, Control.” (long)
Epilogue
Here is the table of contents:
Contents for My Own Private Waste Land
I. The Burial of the Dead
1 – Slouching Towards Oblivion 1
2 – Obituary #1 2
3 – How do you get over the loss of a brother? 3
4 – Obituary #3 6
5 – The young man carbuncular 7
6 – Obituary #2 12
7 – I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear death by water 13
8 – Not if, but when 16
9 – A decade of loss 19
II. A Game of Chess.
10 – Who is that always walking beside you? 20
11 – You have your brother’s arms 27
12 – He has grandpa’s hands 28
13 – That was my brother, and that was 10 years ago 29
14 – Aren’t you Lynn Hornbrook’s brother? 30
III. The Fire Sermon
15 – Bonfire 33
16 – Geodetic Center 35
17 – The Barges Drift 44
18 – At the violet hour 55
19 – Where Fishmen Lounge at Noon 77
20 – Borne back ceaselessly 80
21 – The Turning Tide 87
22 – Elizabeth and Leicester Beating Oars 93
23 – To Leeward, Swing on the Heavy Spar 99
24 – The River Sweats Oil and Tar 106
25 – To Carthage then I came 115
26 – Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant 132
27 – Burning burning burning burning 137
28 – Connecting Nothing with Nothing 159
IV. Death By Water
29 – Phlebas the Phoenician 182
V. What the Thunder Said
30 – Chapel Perilous 183
31 – The Agony in Stony Places 196
32 – He Who Was Living Is Now Dead 202
33 – Mountains of Rock Without Water 213
34 – Where the Hermit-thrush Sings 220
35 – Over Endless Plains 227
36 – Cracked Earth 238
37 – The White Road 252
38 – Empty Cisterns and Exhausted Wells 271
39 – London Bridge is falling down 281
40 – The Arid Plain 295
41 – Setting My Lands in Order 306
42 – Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata 314
Epilogue 335
Notes on My Own Private Waste Land 339
For those of you reading, please share this particular post with your friends. I’m querying this book to find an agent. It’s going to be a book that takes a village to sell.
The potential audience is huge. For anyone who has been touched by mental illness in their family, this book has something for you. For anglophiles and poetry lovers, the connection to The Waste Land makes this book for you. For T.S. Eliot lovers and for memoir loves, this book provides something for you.
For those who have struggle against dsyfunction in their lives and have survived despite the odds, this book is for you. For those who have been bullied or unjustly fired, or for those who have a dream of sailing, this book is for you.
For those who have seen the darkness, have recognized their own mortality and found the strength to persevere and recognized the good in this world, this book is for you.
Please share these efforts with everyone you know.
I look forward to sharing more of my book in the coming weeks. For now, I hope you enjoyed this special Wednesday edition of My Own Private Waste Land.
Take care of yourself and your loved ones. As the seasons change, there is much joy to look forward to - cold noses and eyelashes and hot ciders and toddies. For me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!