Lost in the Wasteland

We actually did a few weeks on the Wasteland in my high school AP English class. Even so, talking about it in class we touched on so many different things...and still none of them were what we discussed in High School. Which is interesting, its always fun to learn new stuff, but frustrating nonetheless.

The only way to sum up what we discussed in High school was that we focused more on the time factor in the poem? that still doesn't sound right but I'l just go with it. It seems that the wasteland is kind of a place where time and everything in it is stuck; where one is caught in the middle and cant move forward or back (which seems rather preferable when you think about what Eliot is saying concerning the present). Every character, I guess you can call them, is trying to pull something from the past, which is why everything seems like broken snippets of memory, and piece them together to try and remember/recreate something that is better than what they are in: a decaying but unmoving wasteland, where "heaps of broken images" are all that is left of the better days. We also talked about how history and tradition played an important part in the poem in showing how the the present, modern is failing and to highlight the past. For back then, a sailor wanted to die at sea like a hero wished to die at war. There was this beauty and heroism in destructiveness, in going out and doing something, anything. The wasteland is a place where people have forgotten how to do that. A place with no obstacles and nothing to overcome, where time is washed over and everything is stuck in a fog with nothing but their memories...where one is "neither living or dead, and knew nothing, looking into the heart of...the silence", where one "can connect nothing with nothing." Structure is also a big part in this. Structure gives one something to hold on to, whether it be the past or an actual object, or the human body itself. All of these seem to be slipping away in the poem. The last thing I remember my teacher saying about this poem in high school is asking us a question which took us in a different direction than what we had learned...she asked us something like: If everything wasn't so fixed, if Achilles never fought and died and the sailor never went to sea, would we be in a wasteland then too, and if so would it be the same as Eliot's or different?
Well there it is. I tried to combine what I learned in High school with some of the stuff that we touched upon and I actually understood in class. It probably doesn't make any sense.

Commented on Ben's Jesus and the Doctor