The Mermaids' Song

By way of introduction, it’s been a little while! It is my fervent wish that this signals the recommencement of a more regular service and I am very much hoping this is a realisable aspiration! As to the subject matter, we are mostly with the work of one of the greats, T.S.Eliot, in this piece. If you are familiar with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock then read straight ahead. If not, or you’d like a refresher, you can find the poem here.  Reading Eliot before my insignificant words is highly recommended.

It’s so quiet. There’s something about a southern Californian afternoon that can catch you by surprise and have you almost falling through a space where time resonates at a different frequency altogether. It’s one of the aspects of life here that I treasure; somehow we feel very close to other worlds. Perhaps it’s the endless emptiness vibrating finely all around us or the scale of the sea and skies but I often sense echoes from another place; skipping along just up ahead. They always vanish when I try to hear them though.

It reminds me of a dinner we had with His Holiness Sakya Gongma Trichen Rinpoche, on a beautiful August evening last year. As I watched him surreptitiously, during the breaks in conversation, I could almost feel the vastness of the worlds in which he was dwelling. The awesome power was still, but utterly present.

Other echoes, of the muses and their vassals, fill my mind in current times. In The Manjushri School we have continued to devote ourselves to the internalization of beauty, spending our fall and winter months memorizing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S.Eliot.  Coming in at 131 lines of free verse, with a loose rhyming structure, it was our most ambitious project yet. Ambitious too, bordering on the hubristic, would be an attempt to sum up the essence of this masterpiece, intoxicating in its layering and fragmention of the human experience and undeniable in its telling of human sorrows. I spied Virgil’s lacrimae rerum (tears of things) in all the nooks and crannies of Prufrock’s travails.

There were times when we could memorize whole chunks with an insouciant ease and times when just a single line would defy us..for days. I’m still reeling. When the last line was learnt, I knew that I would never be the same again. I think it was the mermaids who summoned the tears I shed, when the magic came to its inevitable end. On the day that we finished, we celebrated by listening to Dylan’s Desolation Row in our English class. The original version, which still contains the all important lines, marking the lineage of transmission.

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

I can’t use words to describe the joy of owning this poem in its entirety. My daughter and I quiz each other now on the minutiae; exactitude of course being of the utmost importance. But for me, it’s being able to call up any line or verse, anytime I want and cherish it, that is a gift I hold close to my heart.

I studied Prufrock for A Level although I’ve long ago forgotten my lessons. All that remained was the haunting opening refrain,

Let us go then you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table

This image alone had me bowled over, flat as a pancake, for years. The personified evening engulfing the sky. In my current garb of teacher, it led my student and I down a fascinating path all about the history of ether and Eliot’s time when it was indeed in use as an anesthetic to alleviate the dreaded pain of surgery.

That theme of personification, coalesces once again several lines later when the fog and the smoke take shape as a giant creature, always a cat in my mind, who licked its tongue, lingered, slipped, leapt and finally curled up around the house and slept. It’s a wonderfully active sequence of lines where the soot and smoke of a London evening in the 1910s all but rise up off the page to pull you into their dark embrace.

My daughter and I journey the length and breadth of Eliot’s odyssey, stopping along the way to spruce up our memory’s image, polish a phrase or two. We might take a pause in the twilight with Prufrock and the ‘lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows’ or visit with him after the party and share in his all too human failure to shift the weight of the everyday into the terrain of the transcendental.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

Or maybe we’ll just watch the light show and allow the kaleidoscope of sunsets, sprinkled streets, teacups, novels, porcelain, marmalade, dooryards and trailing skirts to wash over us.

Eliot’s range is staggering. From the sublime heights of profound dilemmas,

Would it have been worth while
….
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question

and irridescent magic,

as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen

to the bathos of life’s prosaic questions,

Shall I part my hair behind
Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers
And walk upon the beach

and insecurities ,

(They will say:”But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

never once does it transgress and fall into melodrama.

There is so much of beauty, usually arising directly from the mind of Prufrock. Who can unhear the mermaids ‘singing each to each.’  Often though, it is  a beauty undercut or split apart by an insidiously creeping darkness. Think of that peacefully sleeping afternoon following the night before, ‘smoothed by long fingers,’ lulling us into an easy trance which is craftily interrupted by the next line:

Asleep… tired…or it malingers,

The rhyming of fingers with malingers; Just a delight! Or consider the evening of the opening refrain itself. Picturing it spread against the sky, one could almost fancy oneself in Homeric territory, perhaps an epic simile will follow, but suddenly we are jolted to the science of the modern age; the evening is ‘etherised’ like that patient on a table… slumbering unawares as the surgeon’s knife descends….

The existentially toned tragedy of the repetitive nature of experience and humdrum passing of time calls throughout the poem like a beating drum. You can’t say it better than Eliot..

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

Prufrock understands the limitations of such an existence, he longs to be the disruptor, to explain his awareness of the transcendent that shines through the dull monotony of life which all others seem absorbed in, and yet he prevaricates, alone in splendid isolation. As he says to himself,

Then. how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways
And how should I presume?

Eliot’s renditions of human sadness, complexity and pain are exquisitely drawn. We move alongside Prufrock, in the poem, through his shifting and divided internal and external landscapes as though seeing through two mirrors simultaneously. We witness the vaulting capacity of his interior; this is an individual who will hear the mermaids and visualize them into being, riding atop the white black waters! But we can not look away from the extent of his neurosis and self doubt which bleed straight through his external world; nothing is safe from their stain.

We stand with him atop the stairs, prevaricating at the party, while he nervously fusses with his hair and imagines the mockery of his peers,

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

It is this hesitation, this struggle and this self doubt that causes Prufrock, who despite his insecurities knows the stakes of the game - he hears the mermaids’ song - so much suffering and will bring him, in the sorrowful end to that very last line of the poem. He will lose the profundity of his vision. All along, he gave too much credence to the brutal realism of the external world. It’s complex for sure, Prufrock can see through it all a million times over, but in the end he cannot stand against it because he cannot quite have the courage of his convictions. He allowed the wasteland of the ‘real’ too close to his heart and ends up trapped in the desert, unable to act. He turned himself  into an ‘attendant lord’ when he could have been the prince, he listened to those vain and frivolous women, talking of Michelangelo and settling their pillows and shawls, women who had no time for a ‘Lazarus come from the dead’ and so he shriveled into the Fool.

And yet…and yet the beauty keeps flowing all the way through; alongside the aching sadness. I waited until the final stanzas of the poem to reach the lines I most keenly wished to own. No surprises for anyone who has read my work to know that we’re talking again about the mermaids and the Dylanesque connection. Committing them to memory was an incandescent sensation and I will quote the lines in the entirety of their terrible wonder and beauty. Traces of Pound in Eliot’s luring of water and wind onto the page.

I have heard the mermaids singing each to each
I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’

Oh Prufrock! Those mermaids did sing to you, after all.

Afterword.

I wanted to add a little afterword to this piece. I have been working with my daughter in The Manjushri School for five years now.  Memorization has been one of our daily activities since the very beginning. It’s grown with us over the years and an average day will contain a peripatetic learning session, in the style of the Ancient Roman ‘ludus’ where we’ll run through a combination of learning and repetition of dharma study, English poetry, Latin and English grammar, Maths, timetables, formulae and such, and key historical dates- of both East and West.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I see the value of this approach daily in my daughter’s ability to appreciate poetry, handle complex information and absorb knowledge.  There is no method to help a young mind to gain a foothold in her or his world more powerful than this one.