"The Waste Land" as Metaphor for Memoir
"The Waste Land" metaphor explodes into a galaxy of a thousand stars
Nothing much grows in the waste land. But as I learned Eliot’s famous poem, there is a way out of the waste land - give, sympathize, and control.
But first, an update:
Editing Update
It’s less than 2 weeks from the Atlanta Writers Conference. My manuscript now sits at 115,900 words, far less than the 203,000 and 168,000, when I called it done the first two times. My goal is to reach 98,000 words. I’m not sure that I can make it. There are 6 chapters plus an Afterword remaining to edit, a bit over 100 pages. These last few chapters are fairly lean from previous cuts, so there won’t be as much to edit. The notes sections takes up 6,000 words. If I can cut another 10,000 or 12,000 words, I’ll be in the ballpark. I’m excited about the conference, to see if I can find out from professionals where to go with my efforts.
At any rate, the memoir as a whole is in much better shape than it was, I think, for all the cuts.
Hey, if it ever catches on, I’ll have a director’s cut in my back pocket to release at a later date.
“The Waste Land” as Controlling Metaphor
Once I saw the initial connection to The Waste Land as a metaphor for a memoir, the connections between my actual lived life and the poem multiplied and exploded into view.
The short story is - from the time I started in a Ph.D. program until now, it’s felt like a downward sprint into an abyss - failed jobs and relationships, estrangements from family, financial ruin.
I’ve read many memoirs, and most deal with serious problems - psychological or physical abuse, sexual abuse and trauma, war trauma, addictions of all kinds (drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, gambling), extreme poverty. My life, however, didn’t follow that path. Everyone around me (spouses, partners, family) had serious problems and I was dragged into and down by a lot of it. In short, I was thrown off my path, but not through direct alcoholism or drug dependency or serious illness or other factors. So when I looked at my life, I had trouble seeing how I got from point A to now - what wrong step did I make? what path did I go down that I shouldn’t have?
I’ve made mistakes, of course, but for the most part, I’ve kept my positive attitude and tried to do the best I can through my life. Why, then, have I ended up where I am?
Analogues of My Life to “The Waste Land”
“The Waste Land” metaphor helped me to sift through my life and see just how I got here.
In telling my story to an acquaintance recently, he said, “It’s important to have people in your life who stand by you and have your back, who believe in you.” And I realized that I’d been abandoned by almost everybody in my life - family, friends, lovers, included. I was raised with the ideas to do your best and life’s not always fair, and rely on yourself, but people in my family stood by each other in times of crisis. That just wasn’t my experience.
So I started digging deeper into The Waste Land for connections to my life.
The professor (Louis Owens) who introduced me to The Waste Land, the man who first encouraged me to keep writing, committed suicide.
Louis also reminded me of my brother - who also committed suicide. If I was close to anyone in my family, it was to my brother, practically twins in so many ways.
After my first relationship ended, I was distraught. I had tied a noose in the rafters of the garage where I was living. I’ve since learned that many people think about suicide without seriously acting on those thoughts. But of course, it was a scary moment. I went to a counselor immediately and they gave me a “there’s other fish in the sea” speech, which was like a slap to the face that woke me up. After almost 4 years of struggling with that first love, I was over it. In The Waste Land, there is the line, “I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.” Considering the noose in the rafter and my brother’s suicide - jumping from a bridge into the Willamette River, that line resonates boldly.
My ex was always interested in Tarot cards and actually collected packs. She claimed her grandmother or distant relatives were gypsies. In The Waste Land, one of the prominent characters is Madame Sosostris, a tarot card reader.
The Tiresias character, with knowledge of men and women. In my own life in the leather community, I’ve had roles as both Dominant and submissive. These are directly analogous to the Tiresias character.
The game of chess - I used to play chess by mail with my brother.
The whirlpool - I actually survived a whirlpool while on a canoeing trip. Also, my ex’s teacher once called people with BPD, “sucking vortexes” of personality. The whirlpool is a powerful symbol of sucking everything down the drain.
Debased sexuality - while I don’t think the leather lifestyle is debased, many people do, including my ex. The River Thames daughters has resonance with my life in that regard.
Sailing - there was many sailing motifs in The Waste Land.
The Drought - the California drought from about 2005 - 2012 encompasses much of the time in my memoir. The landscape mimics the crack, dry earth without water that is depicted in The Waste Land.
These are just a few of the great many connections between my life and The Waste Land.
Next time, I’ll discuss how the five sections of The Waste Land helped me structure my memoir, in a 5-part structure similar to the 5 acts of a play.
Until then, have a pleasant week. For me, I’ll…
Just keep writing (and editing!)