ZOMBIE LOVE

Eliot's Unreal City

Yesterday’s poet was Alfred Lord Tennyson and the poem Marriage Morning. A perfect poem to read at a wedding!  Today I shall take a dramatic U-turn and write about love in a very different way. 

We are now in a new century, the 20^th, after a devastating First World War. I shall show you how the lack of moral and spiritual values in that period caused love to plummet into an abyss of squalor and apathy. The poet who best expressed this degradation was T. S. Eliot, who wrote a very long articulate poem with the symptomatic title, The Wast Land; a dry, new land, but also a dry new soul, made up of ashes and dust.

The Waste Land through the dead eyes of Dr. Eckleburg 

The extract from this long and difficult poem that best portrays the demise of love (and sex) in all its positive aspects, is The Fire Sermon. In this poem even sex is depicted as being as arid as the waste land. Let’s face it, sex is a beautiful and passionate part of love. Actually sex can be a beautiful act in itself, even without love. Eliot manages to portray the death of sexual pleasure and physical sensuality, describing sexual activity as frigid and robotic. A kind of zombie love. The narrator of the story is the mythological character Tiresias, a transsexual, blind seer. I shall be writing about Tiresias tomorrow.

Here is the story. A typist returns home in the evening after a long day at work, in a dystopian robotic world where the human engine waits like a taxi. She returns to her dingy little apartment which is untidy and messy. Her breakfast stuff is still around, her clothes strewn all over the place, and her washing is still hanging out the window. She clears up and starts preparing a meal for he boyfriend, who is about to arrive for dinner. What is she going to prepare? It is, after all, a special romantic evening with her boyfriend. Which crockery? Which porcelain? No, she simply “lays out food in tins.”

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back

Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits

Like a taxi throbbing waiting,

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, 

Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see 

At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives

Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, 

The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights 

Her stove, and lays out food in tins. 

Out of the window perilously spread 

Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,

On the divan are piled (at night her bed) 

Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs 

Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— 

I too awaited the expected guest.

She waits passively for her guest. He finally arrives. What’s he like? A knight in shining armour? No! He is an insignificant little man with pimples on his face and arrogance in his ways. They eat with lassitude and when he thinks the time is ripe, he tries to engage in sexual contact.  She is totally cold and apathetic. She doesn’t even react to his caresses and lets him do whatever he wants to do.  Any other man would stop and ask why she is being so cold. Any other man would be hurt that his approaches are being ignored. Any other man would be disgusted at her lack of reaction; at the fact that his partner is acting like an inanimate mannequin while he is trying to make love to her. No. Not at all. He is satisfied and “makes a welcome of indifference”. He ploughs forward to make love to this cold, lifeless being. He completes his physical sexual act and sees it as a victory, after all “His vanity requires no response”.

He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,

A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, 

One of the low on whom assurance sits 

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. 

The time is now propitious, as he guesses, 

The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, 

Endeavours to engage her in caresses 

Which still are unreproved, if undesired. 

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; 

Exploring hands encounter no defence; 

His vanity requires no response, 

And makes a welcome of indifference.

He is ready. His job is done. He gives her kiss; but not a loving kiss. It is a “patronising kiss”, a soulless kiss from a heartless man. When he leaves the apartment, he ominously walks into darkness, “finding the stairs unlit…”

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all 

Enacted on this same divan or bed; 

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 

And walked among the lowest of the dead.) 

Bestows one final patronising kiss, 

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

The situation up to this point is squalid and depressing, but the final reaction of the typist is devastating. She barely notices that her lover has left and almost pragmatically says, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” She then continues with her robotic existence by fixing her hair with “automatic “ hand and putting on some music.

She turns and looks a moment in the glass, 

Hardly aware of her departed lover; 

Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: 

“Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over.” 

When lovely woman stoops to folly and 

Paces about her room again, alone, 

She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, 

And puts a record on the gramophone.

A devastatingly depressing description of love, sex and relationship.