The Double Refuge 🍷 Prologue
Prufrock
Argument - The Epic Hero - Learning to Fall - Mermaids
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Argument
On this page I’ll step aside slightly from the Persian poets, in order to look at two poets whose work suggests (to me at least) that when it comes to religion the metaphorical trumps the literal. Comparing the sublime certainty of Dante’s Comedy to the penetrating doubt of Eliot’s “Prufrock,” I’ll argue that we can fly higher on the wings of metaphor than we can on the wings of doctrine.
I’ll argue that spirituality is grounded in physical reality, and as a result metaphor does a better job of unifying body and spirit than doctrine does. Metaphor serves as an intercessor, a connection between what we live, what we think, and what we feel, so that ambiguity and doubt connect to our true changing selves, rather than to some fixed idea that gets stuck in our minds. As a result, it’s easier to connect to elevated, otherworldly religious ideas when one sees them as living metaphor rather than literal truth. In this sense we might see sacred scripture itself less as the living Word than as the living Metaphor.
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The Epic Hero
While T.S. Eliot became more traditionally religious in his later years, he was riddled with doubt in his early years. Throughout The Double Refuge I’ll touch on his mystical long poem, Four Quartets (1943), yet on htis page I’ll focus on his more down-to-earth, doubting, skeptical long poem, “The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock,” (1915).
If ever there was a poem that concisely inflated and deflated the epic, it would be “Prufrock.” And if ever there was an epic hero who didn’t have the courage to talk to mermaids, it would be Alfred J. Prufrock. While Prufrock is in many ways an absurd fictional character, I’d argue that he’s also every man and every woman who feels out of place. He’s all those people who try to grasp a grand Cosmic Design yet get lost in the details of their own microcosm, slink back to their computer screens, and watch another TV series.
Eliot starts his long poem with a grand aspiration: he will, like the great poet Dante, tell us all about the afterlife. Eliot prefaces his “Love Song” with a quote from one of the many tortured characters in Dante’s Inferno: “since never from this abyss / has anyone ever returned alive … I answer you” (perciocche giammai di questo fondo, / Non torno vivo alcun … ti rispondo). Yet of course when Dante comes back from the afterlife, he blabs all about it.
Unlike Prufrock, Dante never gets lost in the details. 🔻 He gives us a breathtaking series of interviews with famous figures, 🔻 he plumbs the depths of Hell, where Satan is jammed in a lake of ice and grinds the great traitors Judas, Cassius, and Brutus in his giant maw, 🔺 he climbs the Mountain of Purgatory and flies up to Heaven with Beatrice, and 🔺 he shows us, in an increasingly elusive series of metaphors, the cosmic perfection of Heaven. At the start of his journey he was a frightened, uncertain man, yet at the end he knows the design of the universe and the secrets of life and death.
Eliot starts his poem with this elevated reference, yet the poem which follows couldn’t be farther from the unified, cosmic, epic vision of the great Italian poet. Dante comes back from Hell with bone-chilling warnings and stories of acute personal danger — especially when Dante and his guide Virgil nearly end up in the clutches of the Malebranche demons (who fish for lawyers in a lake of pitch!). Prufrock on the other hand faces no such dangers. Instead, he worries about imminent baldness and whether or not he should speak to a group of ladies drinking tea: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” Dante comes back from Heaven with tales of mystic transcendence and layered poetic metaphors of light, while Prufrock imagines the figure of Death and confesses, “I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; / I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”
Dante descends to Hell and climbs to Heaven, yet Prufrock can barely get himself to climb the stairs to where the ladies are, worried that they’ll see the bald spot on his head. He tells himself there’s still “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!”). In contrast, Dante sets sail for the skies of Heaven, warning his reader:
O you, eager to hear more, who have followed in your little bark my ship that singing makes its way, turn back if you would see your shores again. Do not set forth upon the deep, for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.
O voi che siete in piccioletta barca, desiderosi d'ascoltar, seguiti dietro al mio legno che cantando varca, tornate a riveder li vostri liti: non vi mettete in pelago, ché forse, perdendo me, rimarreste smarriti. — Paradiso 1.1-6
Prufrock, on the other hand, can’t even start off on his journey. At the end of the poem, after having gone nowhere at all, he imagines the open sea of Ulysses, with its dangers and seductions. He imagines the beauty of the mermaids “singing each to each,” yet concludes prosaically: “I do not think that they will sing to me.”
In brief, while Dante follows in the mythic, epic wake of Ulysses, Prufrock is the modern anti-hero. While Dante is certain about everything, Prufrock is certain about nothing.
And yet Prufrock is still a hero in a very specific way: he doesn’t pretend to know it all. Indeed, he’s honest enough to admit that he doesn’t know much. Yet in his lack of knowing, and in his knowing his lack of knowing, he’s perhaps truer to the human condition than the great humanist and visionary of Things Unknown, Dante. In addition, Eliot has made a work of art from this unknowing, belying the notion that an epic scope and a deep look into the human condition must be accompanied by an all-encompassing, myth-drench superstructure.
In this, he follows in the footsteps of Byron, who at the start of Don Juan (1832) promises to write an epic, yet then deflates this claim at every possible opportunity. Byron’s poem may be one of the longest on record, but in it he refuses to tie everything together into an epic unity, and he refuses to pronounce on the truth about this life or the afterlife. The furthest he can go in this regard is to say that doubt appears to be more of a possibility than certainty: in a wonderfully paradoxical line he says, “I doubt if doubt itself be doubting.”
Like Byron, Eliot resembles open agnostics who realize that however educated they are, they still don’t know much about the bigger scheme of things. He’s also like open theists, who realize that the grandest descriptions of God, Heaven, Hell, & The Meaning of It All aren’t believable in any solid philosophical or psychological way. The descriptions may be valuable, and they may point us toward a greater meaning, but their details and their poetic articulation of the meaning itself — the glitter of their high-sounding words, the coherent framing in golden frame upon frame which dissolve into the Infinite — are human words. They are constructions of sound and ink, dependent on the time they were written in almost every way — from stylus on tablet to ink on papyrus, paper and iron press, to keystrokes on screen. They may be beautiful, inspiring words, but they’re hardly a record of absolute, eternal, certain things.
The farther artists claim to see into the “true meaning of life,” the less we believe them. Except perhaps Shelley, who admitted in Adonais that words and art are “weak / the glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.”
Once humans finally realized the Earth was round, they sailed to the other side of the globe. They found kangaroos, not Dante's Mountain of Purgatory. While Dante’s ideas of Heaven are as possible as ever, a Mountain that will take us there seems highly unlikely. Heaven may exist, but we can’t imagine how to fit it into an astronomy textbook. And if we could see into the invisible realm of spirit, perhaps we would see Mount Meru instead, or the Sufi’s Mount Qaf. And instead of peering into the ether, perhaps we’d peer through akasha, the Hindu equivalent which they believe to be everywhere. Angels and devils might exist, yet so too might apsaras and jinns. I’m not arguing that these things don’t exist, just that we can’t prove any of them. More to the point, we can’t say that one version of these things is the true version. It’s only natural to doubt specific metaphysical versions of the universe.
While my suggestion might seem anti-religious, I think it’s in fact pro-religious. Just as secularism separates religion and politics, and thereby creates a free space for any religion, skepticism about religious specifics creates a free space to consider other religious constructions, systems, architectonics — or whatever word one wants to use to refer to metaphysical constructions that try to frame what remains stubbornly frameless in both our perception and our conception.
I suspect that people would be more willing to consider that some miraculous purpose lies at the core of existence if priests and pastors didn't insist on impossible specifics. If they dispensed with all-encompassing structures and grand words (and especially with disdain, warnings, and threats), people might be more willing to consider that spirit lies or floats somewhere near the core of existence.
I suggest that when reading Dante or listening to a preacher talk of Heaven and Hell, we dispense with the literalism and engage with the metaphor. In this way we would stop trying to make imagination into historical and geographical fact. We could appreciate the layers of Dante’s Purgatory and the golden frames of his Paradise, peeking into the Infinite, without turning this poetic construction into dogma. We could then move on to other constructions, while yet retaining the first construction and its ideas about God, the soul, transcendence, love, and cosmic meaning.
We could stop trying to fix our hopes for a grand cosmic meaning into a pattern, into a specific construction in time and space. We are, after all, talking about the Infinite. Why try to fix it in the finite? Any such finite construction will eventually crumble, like the Babylonian Tower that reached for Heaven.
It's here that Eliot is more penetrating than Dante, who remains the most powerful, subtle, and dexterous of poets. Eliot starts by suggesting Dante’s grand otherworldly construction, yet he lives in the Modern Period — post-Columbus, post Darwin — and he therefore knows how quickly ethereal religious constructions can become grounded by concrete detail. What’s the point of trying to turn the spiritual idea of angels into actual flying beings in the air? Eliot knows that such constructions — even Dante’s vision of Gabriel’s wings encircling Beatrice with heavenly music — can ultimately tie down the imagination, like the tar-covered wings of his devils Alichino and Calcabrina.
If we see Gabriel and Beatrice as mythically true — not as physically and historically true, as if they were moving about within the same space-time continuum we inhabit — we can keep them in sight, in our mind’s eye, and they can forever lead our minds upward, with no gravity to ever pull them down. In the air and the ether of our imagination they can soar with Vishnu into the galactic akasha. They mount on Zhuangzi’s “bird of the light and empty air, proceed beyond the six cardinal points, and wander in the region of non-entity, to dwell in the wilderness of desert space.” They can alight with the thirty mystic souls on Mount Qaf, who realize that God can only be understood in light of human unity: the thirty birds — si murgh in Persian — realize that together, shorn of their selfish claims to this or that, they are the great King of Birds, the Simurg. Gabriel and Beatrice can then fly back to us and be our angel guides, if we can manage this belief. If not, they can still give us the sensation, or at least the idea, of spiritual flight, of being forever unbound, like Shelley’s Prometheus, at one with the range of the spiritual universe.
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains,— / Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man: / Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless, / Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king / Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man. — Prometheus Unbound 4.4
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Eliot quotes Dante and tells us he will take us on an epic journey, yet he takes us instead into the grimy streets of London. In doing this he embarks on a different sort of quest, similar to that of Freud and Jung, into the mental and emotional uncertainty of the modern intellectual.
Some see Prufrock’s hyper-sensitive doubt in a tragic light, yet I find that the poem also opens up a wide, rich field of artistic and philosophical experimentation. Eliot suggests that we might lever ourselves from the fixities that turn science into positivism and religion into doctrine. At the end of the poem, Prufrock drowns in the depths of anomie, yet the reader resurfaces with a deeper understanding of alienation, as well as a comic distance from our human plight.
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Learning to Fall
Eliot’s poem is at once comic and serious: Prufrock’s nervous insecurity is a function of the collapse of certainty, which was wrought by humanism, the Enlightenment, science, philology, industrialization, Darwin, etc. It’s no laughing matter, and yet Eliot manages to find humour in Prufrock’s equivocation between the grandiose and the down-to-earth, and in the juxtaposition between his lofty and impersonal vision of human history and his complete lack of personal confidence.
In prefacing his poem with a quote from Dante, Eliot suggests a sublime ambition to follow in the footsteps of the Medieval Italian poet. Just as Dante went to Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven and came back to tell us about it, so Prufrock will take this journey beyond the grave.
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse [If I thought my answer were given]
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, [To anyone who would ever return to the world,]
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. [This flame would stand still without moving any further.]
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo [But since never from this abyss]
Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, [Has anyone ever returned alive, if what I hear is true,]
Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo. [Without fear of infamy I answer you.] — (Inferno 27.61-66)
Eliot starts with a wonderful contradiction: he’ll take us on this journey, except of course most of Eliot’s readers (and Eliot himself) didn’t believe that Dante really took such a journey. Eliot didn’t live in the late Middle Ages, when a belief in the afterlife was nearly universal. He lived in the early Modern Period, in the second year of WWI. Dante’s sort of afterlife knowledge was now impossible, so it made more sense to give up on it as soon as it was suggested. Better to take a journey into the real world instead; into the raw, mundane, superficial city that proves to be anything but epic. Better to turn the real into the poetic, than the mythic into the real.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
The rest of the poem follows the pattern set up by this juxtaposition between Dante's epic journey to the afterlife and Prufrock's disillusioned meanderings through the foggy streets of London. Every ideal Prufrock thinks of lifting into the sky he instantly brings down to earth by considering the most insignificant thing, such as the smell of a lady’s perfume, or the bald spot on the top of his head. Prufrock’s oracular propensity to dare to “disturb the universe” becomes a quasi-sexual worry about whether or not he should “dare to eat a peach.” Enticed by the sight of bare arms, he suggests he’s an aesthete lover, but then immediately surrenders to insecurity:
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Much can be said about the negative side of doubt, yet much can also be said about the freedom it can bring. Doubt can allow for a critical distance to ply new angles, for a playfulness which hasn’t ascribed to previously agreed-upon rules, for a mirth that can slide gently from one subject to the next, and for a laughter that can rebel against the logic that tries to contain it.
I remember telling an instructor in an American Literature class that I found Eliot’s poem hilarious. I told him that my sister and I read it together, almost weeping with laughter. He replied that I must be a very callous young man. Perhaps. Or perhaps he was a very serious middle-aged man. I wish I had been witty enough to say, “You should meet my sister.”
In trying to understand the history of doubt, I use Prufrock because he’s both a comic and a serious figure. I also use him because he embodies the desire for the oracular epic ideal, as well as the modern inability to realize that ideal.
I see doubt in a million ways, because it leads everywhere. Because it has no fixed position, it allows for the exploration of all positions. Doubt can be seen in terms of a mountain with its holy Greek spring, or in terms of the mountain ranges that lie beyond that spring. These mountains ranges may go from Geneva to Vienna, from Islamabad to China, or from Alaska to Peru.
Doubt can also be seen in terms of pathways, be these of water or cobblestone. In this sense, doubt meanders in the rivers, canals, and underground waterways and in the high streets and back alleys, from Paris to London, from Athens to Rome, and from Varanasi to Shanghai. At times, the streets lead to a dead end, to a brawl in a pub, or to a girl sitting reading by herself, occasionally looking up to see if anyone’s looking her way.
Certain half-deserted streets “follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent / To lead you to an overwhelming question” and other streets lead to domes and spires, obelisks and Elysian Fields.
Rivers are equally diverse. Sometimes they’re associated with history, like the Thames, the Seine, and the Tiber. Sometimes they’re associated with religion, like the Jordan or the Ganges (the latter is both a river and a goddess to Hindus). Sometimes they’re underground, like the Ilisos beneath Athens. And sometimes they’re invisible, like the Saraswati, the river (and goddess) who changed its course, went underground, and now meets the Ganges and the Yamuna in the city of Allahabad/Prayagraj, at least according to Hindus.
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Mermaids
Doubt can also wander into the green vineyards of Southern France, and linger along the Dordogne. It can intoxicate, like Keats’ wine in his famous “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819) “that hath been / Cooled a long age in the deep-delvéd earth, / Tasting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!” It can course through your body like soma, making you alert to every shift in value, sense, reality. In its unknown universe of all possibilities, it can even make you watch for mermaids in the estuary of the Gironde:
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.
Prufrock says, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” yet he also says, “I do not think that they will sing to me.” Behind Prufrock’s personal predicament lies a more universal one: the rational can eclipse the mystical, just as the “magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.” Reality can trump fantasy, so that the “human voices wake us, and we drown.” And of course no one, however deep their insight, can escape death: “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid.”
Prufrock’s desire to hear the mermaids singing may not be realistic, yet it suggests a deep urge in human nature to experience the beauty, joy, and depth of life, all of which are antidotes to the skeptical realism and to the stark naturalism that the 21st Century is heir to. Much the same sense of emotional and phenomenological rebirth can be found in the English Romantics, who listened closely to the beauty of nature, which can be symbolized in the song of Eliot’s mermaid or Keats’ nightingale, both of which combine the beauty of art with the half-submerged yearning for the ultimate escape and release. The nightingale’s song is like opium and wine to the poet who is “half in love with easeful death”:
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim […]
The nightingale sings outside of Prufrock’s salon, where “the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” It sings along the forest with its brook babbling some incoherent tune, and it meanders along the rivers that lose themselves in the ocean. Its song suggests an answer to the overwhelming question, one so confounding that Prufrock couldn’t bring himself to ask it.
What is the meaning of life?
I don’t know.
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Next: 🍷 Refuge and Absinthe