Breeding Lilacs
My apologies for last night’s post: I felt I wanted to post something to keep up the unbroken run but really didn’t have anything to say. I was also feeling a little out of sorts, still, and hence the two sentence post.
Afternoon, winter
It snowed overnight, and that’s added some variety to the day. Not that I went anywhere. The snow is already compacted on the main routes, we’re told, and I expect it to freeze later. I’m unlikely even to get as far out of the house as the shed for any length of time, although I did go up there to recharge the bird feeders. This afternoon I decided to have a nap but slept quite deeply for two hours, and feel the better for it, though still dopey. Dopiness seems appropriate to these dog days, somehow.
As I write, the six o’clock news on TV delivers grim news about the spread of the virus in England (I haven’t seen the Scottish figures) and almost overwhelming pressures on hospitals. Meantime, and at the risk of gracing Private Eye’s Pseud’s Corner, I was inclined to listen again to Eileen Atkins and Jeremy Iron’s reading Eliot’s The Waste Land (hear it here). Although published in 1922, the poem was originally composed in 1918 in the shadow of the Great War but also, resonantly, while Eliot was recovering from the 1918 flu pandemic. I’ve never really got to the heart of what Eliot was on about, or anywhere close to it, but the inherent darkness of the language, the shuttling between the mythic and the demotic, chime with our times, or maybe just with my dopiness and wintry mood. It also occurred to me that, in the music of poetry, The Waste Land is a prog-rock epic. It should be accompanied by a mark 1 Mellotron and presented in a gatefold Roger Dean sleeve.
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Music: a female Japanese metal/rock band? Sure thing. This is Band-Maid and Dice. What is that sound high in the air…? you might well ask.
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