I need to fully acknowledge another debt.
I’ve already redressed the balance in terms of what I owe Koestenbaum and Buddhism for helping me find the spiritual path I currently tread.
It was my love of poetry that in fact paved the way to my encounter with the book that changed my world. As a result of my enforced idleness while searching for a job after qualifying as a clinical psychologist, I had frustratingly re-read T S Eliot’s The Wasteland, whose footnotes somewhat misleadingly draw the reader’s attention to Frazer’s The Golden Bough. As I had long ago lost my copy of that book, which I had never got round to reading, I decided to go to the library and take out a copy just to see if it helped my crippled understanding of Eliot’s poem.
Once in the library, I checked the catalogue and found the reference number for the book. I located the shelf. To my disappointment the book I wanted wasn’t there. In fact, there was, in this library containing thousands of books, only one book on the shelf with that category number: The Message of the Masters by Robert Scrutton. I took one look at it and immediately put it back on the shelf. Why would I want to read another book on religion? I’d just been through all that nonsense at my Aunt Anne’s request all too recently – she was still upset that I had remained godless all those years and begged me to take another look at faith.
I stomped off round the library.
Generally half an hour in this well-stocked bookaholic’s paradise used to provide me with my maximum entitlement of six books after several difficult decisions had been made to reject at least another three. For some reason, that day, the philosophy, psychology, sociology, fiction, poetry, drama and biography sections yielded absolutely nothing of interest. I went up the stairs to the record section, another usually reliable source of entertainment: not a single thing attracted me.
Having walked to the library on a cold day I was reluctant to feel it was a completely wasted visit, so I went back to the first shelf I had visited and picked up the book I had rejected. I grudgingly felt that I might as well borrow this one rather than leave the library empty handed.
When I got home I threw it dismissively onto the sofa, went off to make a cup of coffee, and turned on the radio. Nothing. The television: nothing. Flicked through my record collection: nothing seemed to fit my mood of the moment. The discarded book was lying next to me. I picked it up. I might as well read it, I thought, really disgruntled by this stage. What a pointless way to end the day!
Having picked it up I came very close to putting it right back down again. It clearly had quite a lot about spiritualism in it, something that my scepticism regarded as blind superstition.
What caused me to read on was that a religion I had never heard of, but which matched almost all my long-standing preoccupations, was described in compelling detail in its pages. There were many quotations from people with strange names I couldn’t pronounce, but I was drawn to the ideas and the evocative language in which these were expressed.
I skipped the stuff that would have put me off and homed in on the sections most concerned with Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá.
It was impossible for me to believe that this could be real. It was claimed that an exile and a prisoner, enduring innumerable hardships over many decades and without the access to scholars and massive libraries Karl Marx had enjoyed, had unfolded to humanity’s gaze what seemed to perfectly combine compelling spiritual principles with credible social action. This activism was apparently rooted in a nonviolent honest process called consultation that underpinned what seemed to me would be a truly beautiful system of administration, if it existed. All this was presented in such a powerful way that I was sure, given my constant scanning of the landscape of ideas,that I would have met with it already if it were real. After all I had been actively searching for something like that for as long as I could remember, without knowing exactly what it was I was hoping to find. Even the God-problem was probably solved because the Bahá’í Faith did not believe in the God I didn’t believe in, as far as I could tell.
When I look back at my whole life trajectory from the moment I shocked my mother by saying I was not a Catholic anymore to when I made the declaration of intent we shorthand as becoming a Baha’i, I realize now I had always been on a quest. In fact in some ways of course I still am. Declaring as a Bahá’í is a declaration of intent indicating a determination to follow that path towards the truth. For reasons explored at length on this blog, reaching my destination will take me well beyond this life. I was unconsciously searching for something then with rather more desperation than I am searching now, when I feel I am at least pointing in the right direction or digging in the right place.
Then, forty-one years later here I was sitting in a café inside a church talking about this again, this time with a friend and former colleague, who shares my interest in the arts as well as harbouring a desire to explore spirituality more deeply.
I ended up talking about Matthew Hollis’ recent biography of The Waste Land and being powerfully reminded of how much I owe this poem. We both felt that this poem might be just as, if not more relevant now than when it was written.
I had come across the book in Waterstones in Worcester but hadn’t bought it though I was tempted, thinking it would just derail me from my decision to focus exclusively on consciousness for the time being. Subliminally, I suspect, my heart was nagging me to change my mind, and I soon found that I couldn’t get the book out of my head. I knew I just had to have it.
‘I should have bought it when I saw it,’ I muttered to myself, when I checked on the web and it looked as though the Hereford branch didn’t have a copy. Anyway, I decided to pop in when I was next in town, to order one.
Just in case, when I got there the following day, I checked on the shelves which held the latest books, which is where it had been in Worcester, and there was no sign.
However, the lady behind the till seemed to feel that they did in fact have a copy in stock. She went to the shelves I’d checked. Nothing. Doing her best to control a cough, she said she’d go and check in the upstairs storeroom. The people waiting in the queue behind me were beginning to shuffle their feet, I felt.
At just that point a staff member I’d never seen before appeared on the scene to help them. He’d shortened the queue by a couple of people when she reappeared.
‘Not there,’ she said.
‘What are you looking for,’ the guy asked.
She explained.
‘Have you tried the cupboard we put books in when they arrive?’ he asked.
She hadn’t and when she did she found it. I was clearly meant to get a copy as soon as possible.
I feel I owe it to Eliot to have at least one more try at entering the world of this poem. A recent BBC documentary TS Eliot: into The Waste Land was an earlier trigger. The blurb reads:
2022 marks the centenary of one of the defining poems of the 20th century, The Waste Land. TS Eliot’s ground-breaking work first exploded into the world on 15 October 1922 and has continued to resonate with successive generations.
For decades, Eliot actively discouraged biographical interpretations of his work, developing an ‘impersonal theory’ of poetry in which the private life of a poet was deemed irrelevant. Instead, numerous scholars have been guided by Eliot’s own seven pages of footnotes to the poem.
But in 2020, there were dramatic new revelations that demonstrated how, behind Eliot’s mask, there was a much more personal story to be found within The Waste Land – which can now at last be explored.
That caused me to have a half-hearted attempt. Now I think I might be ready for the real deal. I will be trying to keep track of what is likely to be a bumpy journey.
Ash Wednesday would be so much more accessible, with a theme that would obviously resonate with me – but I must stay focused if I can. Sustained focus is not easy for me, with my butterfly mind. And focus on densely intractable texts is virtually impossible.
Why, then, would I bother to even attempt to scale such an Everest as The Waste Land? Because it’s not just Eliot to whom I am indebted, but this poem as well. Reading it clearly proved less of a waste of time than I had thought. If it had not been for its trigger I would never have found the enriching spiritual path that I still tread to this day.
Predictably, I had only read as far as page 226 in Hollis’s book before another book derailed me – The Good Life by Waldinger and Schulz. I have now reached page 212 in that exploration of ‘lessons from the World’s Longest Study of Happiness.’
The books I read tend to nest one within the other like Chinese dolls, often stacked as high as a dozen or more.
Which one of these two I eventually finish first is anybody’s guess, but my reason for flagging up in public my intentions concerning The Waste Land is to increase the probability that I will eventually stick to the plan.
A complicating factor is that Hollis makes no direct reference as far as I can see to Carole Seymour-Jones’ biography of Vivien(ne) Eliot, a key influence on the shaping of the poem, though he cites it in his list of ‘other works’ as well as quoting frequently from Vivien(ne)’s letters. I read it way back in 2001 and will therefore need to revisit it, I feel, if I am to do the poem justice. I have a sense that I may end up on the not unfamiliar territory of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Mad Woman in the Attic, the post about which I republished in October last year.
Wish me luck!
Everybody Means Something 
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