A friend posed the dilemma yesterday: what is the distinction between the real, and the unreal in a photograph?  The three of us engaged in conversation love the challenge and the enhanced awareness which comes from viewing the ever-changing world through a viewfinder, or a LCD screen.  A split second judgement “captures,” freezes the evanescent, –and one has a photograph.  One can argue persuasively that the photo is real or unreal.  And that’s not just a frivolous word game.

I stopped in at Starbucks to read and do a bit of writing.  I had with me a copy of the T. S. Eliot poem, The Hollow Men which Eliot wrote in 1925. This was after he had penned The Wasteland, in the aftermath of WWI.  I took my copy and as I read, I knew these verses were prescient of our own time, in the early 21st Century.  For personal reasons, my 70th birthday being near-at-hand in a few days, and recent conversations with a family member who, older than I, is soon to pass from all that she loves —I cannot deny that death is a hard boundary.

I am convinced there is something that is worse than departing from this life, and that is the state of being the living-dead, of existential  vacuity, such that nothing has meaning.  The act of attributing meaning is a privilege of the living.  Meaning is an act of appreciation, the synthesis by a healthy mind of the range of sense experience presented by the five senses.  A sick, dysfunctional mind stutters, runs on and on, failing to achieve a judgment of the real and the unreal, spiraling into incoherence.

I am reminded of how delicate and fragile the formation of meaning is, whenever I hear the President speak.  For days I’ve felt a chill upon the memory of hearing just a snippet of his two hour rambling speech to the CPAC conference, The Conservative Political Action Conference. No I did not hear or read the whole speech, only a few lines.  I’ve never heard a more unhinged, cringe-worthy discourse.  We may well be f____d with this man in the White House.

Anyway, here is Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men.

The Hollow Men

by T.S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz – he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when 
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour, 
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom 
Remember us – if at all – not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men 
The stuffed men. 

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear: 
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column 
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are 
In the wind’s singing 
More distant and more solemn 
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom 
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer – 

Not that final meeting 
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom 
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone. 

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places 
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of this tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men. 

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning. 

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion 
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom 

Between the conception
And the creation 
Between the emotion 
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm 
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom 

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper. 

40

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