Weeks 10/11/12: The Waste Land III

[Memory and Desire] are key.

1. Sibyll - what do you want?
2. I want to die.

Quotations from Satyricon
Petronius - arbiter of elegance to Nero - told to commit suicide, did so at a high point of a party...

Eliot wanted "the horror, the horror" from Heart of Darkness - the ultimate futility of existence..

April cf the opening of The Canterbury Tales, and rebirth / resurrection / crucifixion

E's pilgrimage = recovery from a nervous breakdown..

Accepts the motion of the mystical experience.

[Whitman - homoerotic communion with nature, the transcendent impulse // Lilacs in Whitman's poem - representative of Lincoln. cf hyacinths...]
[Beckett acknowledges the experience but denies the significance...]

Borges: certain kinds of images reccur... the deeply personal...
//
Munich - Wagner -> Wagenrian echoing
Mad king Ludwig drowning in Lake Starnberg
cf Parsifal / Tristan & Isolde

The idea of rootlessness - unreal city - bertrand Russell -> London as unreal, a hallucination. (cf Conrad's Heart of Darkness)

Memory buried - will it reawaken?
- past sensations of desire and love, quickened by memory.

"Dog"//"God" - nails, travesty of resurrection, cf Joyce - Dog's body...
"hypocrite lecteur" - Baudelaire - hypocritical reader - my likeness, my brother!
- "you will find these experiences in common with me, don't presume to judge..."

Therefore - a process has been set underway - read on...