The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T.S. Eliot

Recording this reading of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock brought up the feeling of a hundred slow heartbreaks -

the kind I remember shepherding friends through as their worlds quietly imploded into black despair,

the silent pathos of a forgotten life of precious chances gone by with the wind, the slow tick-tock of time slipping away - notice the tragic irony with which “there will be time…” rings time and again, as the bell tolls, the exquisite dissemblance of his then-saying “there will be time” when this tale, told in the twilight of his life, renders it so bare that, no -

There was no time -
His hundred hesitances, being found wanting, right at the moment when he could have “squeezed the universe into a ball/To roll it towards some overwhelming question…” -
But fails himself.

Fearing rejection.

In my middle age, seeing others plus-or-minus twenty years behind and ahead of me,
having, too, had my face ground in the unutterable pain of soul-level suffering,
and now, having turned to immerse myself in the giant black hole that is the loneliness of men and boys -

This hits home like it has never had.

I was rereading this Substack earlier today:
https://open.substack.com/pub/goransh...

The ache is real.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poet...

—-

But we artists also know - have ever known - that the cracks are where the light gets in.

That there is beauty, of the most piercing kind, present here, existing on the edge, fed on tears, inhaling sorrow, its flowers masterpieces of melancholy intricacy in which the beauty is not only inextricable from the pain, but constituted by it.

If the fundamental truth of life is that it is suffering, then perhaps the deepest root of #mindfulhedonism is that the pleasure and beauty inherent in the acts of recognising our common humanity, our essence as interconnected and interdependent, in perceiving, empathising with, and holding in compassion our suffering as common with the suffering of others -

would suggest that it is our very suffering that can awaken us most deeply to resonate with the suffering of others.
And that it is of the greatest beauty, and potentially healing, to share that suffering with others.

There is a fundamentally redemptive quality about this all.

—-

For it was the beauty of Eliot’s cadence in this most beloved of poems for me that reeled my elderly neighbour in this afternoon, that enabled this indelible moment of singular delight and solidarity to be forged and shared between us.

When I went over to give her the crumble I had baked her, she told me she had just come back from being with her girlfriends at the village hall. “There were five of us, the weather was lovely so we got to sit out in the sun as we read poetry together.”

🤩🤩🤩

She showed me her books, and I told her how acutely I long to do the same; to return not only to savouring poetry in my life again, but also how much poetry had meant to me and brought me joy in my teenage years.

She asked if I used to learn poems by heart. The first immediate lines rocked rhythmically to the surface:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
An ancient pleasure-dome decree,
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea…”

She smiles in recognition. Everybody knows that one.
“I love Prufrock.”
“Which one is that?” She asked. “I don’t know it.”
“How can you not know the Love Song?…”

So I dashed back next door to mine, grabbed my ancient poetry anthology - yes, the very same one I’d annotated all over, tabbed for easy reach of ny O-level exam poems plus a few more favourites three decades ago - photocopied it for her, then went back and read it out loud to her some more, her bright eyes fixed on me and shining as we both sank deeper into its spell.

The feeling cuts through too many layers of my life to be describable.

—-

So after tonight’s beautiful, blissful meditation circle, accompanied by a chorus of very noisy ducks quacking! 😅🦆 -

I had to give it voice.