V. What the Thunder Said

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 faces 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…

Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.  This is no happy poem.  The narrator takes me into the mountains.  I am surrounded by rock, without water, and there’s thirst. I cannot say that I am alone because there is the distant sound of thunder.  Nature has a voice.  But dry sterile thunder without rain.

Water is life. Where there is water there is life. Remember Thales of Miletus. Thales proposed a cosmology based upon water. The fluid, dynamism, change is the foundation, the first principle. Thales is said to have said that if there is change, there must be something that changes, yet does not change.  Water.  Nietzsche said that Thales great contribution to humanities armory of ideas was a origin principle that was not a story-myth fable of divine activity.

But now with Eliot I find myself in the rock-dry rarefied air, hearing the faint sound of sterile thunder.  “If” there were, but there is no… There’s just a fevered fantasy of rain, of water dripping, Eliot’s, Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
   But there is no water…

Dreams are by definition irrational, foreboding images, conjured monsters with unclear but real links to the ordinary world of Starbucks, of books, of conversations with friends. This dream vision is what the narrator sees:

Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains

From the New York Times newsletter of today:

In the last debate before the Iowa caucuses, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley called each other liars and largely shied away from discussing Donald Trump.

And this from The Early 202, Washington Post newsletter of today:

Former president Donald Trump is dominating the congressional endorsement game, picking up the backing of every member of the House GOP leadership as well as an increasing number of senators.

But a key group has not endorsed him: the most vulnerable 17 House Republicans who represent districts where President Biden beat Trump in 2020.

…“The so-called moderate House Republicans – who are slow-walking their inevitable endorsement – will ultimately go all in on Trump.   To quote Donald Trump: ‘They always bend the knee,‘”

The hooded hordes swarming a dry plain, but are they real or unreal?  What do I/we mean to mean by reality?