The final paragraphs of Mary Karr’s introduction to the Modern Library paperback edition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land
But why read something so darkly despairing? And repeatedly? I mentioned its beauty before. But the poem acts for me as a sort of vaccine against the horror it describes by injecting a nonlethal dose of it. One can’t get the same immunity by abstractly, willfully constructing a theory about the world and one’s place in it. Theories are fine, but unfueled by feeling they remain gaseously theoretical. Few human beings can run very long on the fumes of an ideal. I begin each morning fairly intent on seizing the day and often abandon that wisdom with the first snapped shoelace. “The Waste Land” delivers a dose of feeling that enters you with a hard jolt. It changes you, for perhaps only passion can lend conviction to such a change.
If you’re no stranger to such soul-paralyzing mind states as the poem creates, it may also serve as balm to the loneliness such states evoke by speaking out to your own hybrid species of spiritual pain.
In this way, it can work like the miracle of communion–you take the Eucharist of the writer’s words into the rough meat of your body in order to be transformed by someone else’ mysterious passion. It brings you into a community of like sufferers. There’s healing in that, I think, despite the old Dale Carnegie wisdom that reading such stuff is a depressing wallow in the mud of one’s own misery. I disagree. Having once kept an apartment in similarly barren regions to those in the poem, I return there now through art–or memory or premenstrual syndrome, or by intensely loving friends still stranded there. Reading the poem gives me conviction to live my life, not with despair and angst rendered, but with the alertness the poem demands. People spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in therapy for the same sense of presence in one’s life, the same fusion of inner self with outer experience. The mere exercise of attention–eyes wide, ears pricked, heart open–is not a bad way to move through the world.
To read “The Waste Land”, go here.
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4 responses to “Eliot’s Vaccine and The First Snapped Shoelace (According to Mary Karr)”
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Wow, amazing writing and insight! what should I first read by Mary?
Ellis! You’re in for a treat. Liar’s Club is her first memoir, and it’s extremely funny (and insane/tragic). Lit, her most recent one, is the story of her recovery and conversion and probably has the most direct relevance to Mbird. Cherry (the second of the three memoirs) is the one I haven’t read, but the passage that Emily posted a couple years ago remains a favorite.
https://mbird.mystagingwebsite.com/2010/06/mary-karrs-memoir-cherry-you-dont-earn/
Of course, Mary considers herself first and foremost a poet–indeed, that’s what she’s probably most renowned for in critical circles–and her poetry packs a punch, to say the least. I’d start with the collection “Sinners Welcome” (need i say more?). It also contains the essay “Facing Altars” which is so good it makes me never want to write again.
I would toss in a quick glance at another poetry volume, Viper Rum. For poetry nerds there is a great essay in the back called Against Decoration, a real punch in the gut to the doily-making poetry out there.
Also the poem “Incant Against Sicide” contains these great lines that I’ve never forgotten:
…Your head’s a bad neighborhood:
Don’t go there alone, even if you have to stop
Strangers to ask the way, and even if
Spiders fall from your open mouth.
This talk’s their only exit…
Thanks David and Dan. Looking forward to reading Mary.