The Cruelest Month

Since college, I’ve been a sideline fan of T.S. Eliot. My theatre professor’s favorite poem, which he recited often by memory, was The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Since then, I’ve been daring to eat peaches and measuring out my life in coffee spoons. I once spent a look long while how to sort out how to get something Prufrock made into a tattoo, but nothing ever felt quite right. And of course, that very fact is not without irony. Prufrock is about a lot of things and one of them is indecision.

My Shakespeare graduate school friend, Rob, whose birthday is today, once worked with me on a script about a lion of an academic whose time had passed and who jealously guarded his last bit of identity which was, as it turns out, all about loneliness. I suggested we call the script “Proof Rock.” I think I got shot down. We shelved the script. Once again, life imitates art.

Also in graduate school, at a play competition, I once inserted a whole sequence from The Waste Land into the text. This was not a good idea. I thought it would be a challenge for the actors and I was on a deadline. It turns out that poem is a challenge for everyone.

Some small few years later, my wife and I were looking for a name for our firstborn child. Partly because I had in mind a tip of the proverbial hat to this favorite of poets, partly because of a favorite television character of ours — that practice runs in the family; I’m named for J.R. Ewing — partly because we daily passed Elliott Road on our way from town to our rented farmhouse — 100 years old or so — on the banks of the Middle River in the shadow of the Alleghenies in Western Virginia. And partly because, as the poetry of life would have it, the tallest of the mountains behind our then-home is called Elliot Knob.

Back then, we had a garden. Back then, our landlord, who was the child of a once famous person who had seen Presidents dine at their table, used to raise grass-fed cattle all over the place, including the pastures out front and out back. The cattle would come through every now and again and we’d hear a knock on the door. Come on out and help us get this calf across the road, will you? The mama is disagreeable. We did this once with other famous people from the radio. One, a well-known musician to this day, came by the house on another day while I was mowing the lawn. I had my headphones on. As she walked up the sidewalk I waved hello and she motioned me over with a question: That’s not Coldplay you're listening to, is it? No, I said. Thank God.

It’s now been nineteen years since the latest of those years, and in true T.S. Eliot fashion maybe almost everything’s been lost. I moved to town to become a college professor like J. Alfred. And moved to another town. All towns are Waste Lands. Unreal cities. I traded Creation for creativity. My aptly named eldest child grew up. My college’s theatre program, where I first encountered Eliot, is closing. Shakespeare doesn’t scratch my itch like he did in graduate school, but here I am with a bit of a career that I’ve not always been sure what to do with. I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. More Prufrock.

Eliot’s poems here, and a few I’ve mentioned, are all written against the backdrop of Dante’s Inferno, among other things. And, to be sure, life is Hell if you let it. And it will pass you by, even if you don’t. The coffee spoons signal jitters and the peaches aren’t in season. We’re etherized upon the table. The lines of poetry eventually run out.

April is the cruelest month. Springtime. A season of crucifixions, and the resurrection of some things we’d prefer stay buried in the Winter. And some things that stubbornly insist on resurrecting even if we’re not into it. The moment will soon be forced into its crisis.

It’s also Monday in Holy Week today, and the Word will resurrect us soon enough. But for now, it’s just fine — for a little while longer — to stay buried in this week whose punctuation is death by water. We’ll breathe again soon.

I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all