I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/Shall I at least set my lands in order?
Thus TS Eliot sets out his stall: The Waste Land (1922)is all about the legend of the Fisher King. His take on a world trying to recover from the traumatic wounds of World War. The what King? What’s a modern shiny AI powered science-and-business blog like LSS doing with some crusty old Medieval legend, reworked not only by the saintly Eliot but by such questionable characters as Richard Wagner? The answer is very much indeed. For if we do not confront the message which the King encodes, all our technology will bring us to less than nothing indeed.
For all its tellings, the central myth of the Fisher King hasn’t changed much The King is a wounded guardian of the Holy Grail whose injury renders his kingdom a barren wasteland. He cannot heal himself, and his land suffers with him—infertile, desolate, and spiritually dry. He spends his days fishing, a symbol of passive hope and suspended vitality. According to Grail legend, only a pure-hearted seeker(Parsifal) who asks the right question can heal the king and restore the land. The myth embodies themes of spiritual paralysis, inherited trauma, and the redemptive power of inquiry and compassion.
Festering trauma, unhealed wound. There must have been lots of those around after the First World War, as Freud knew well. And we have plenty today. As money moves at light speed across the world, dragging goods and people after it, familiar landscapes are shattered. Shops close; factories are shuttered and streets fill with strangers. All too many suffer a psychic wound like the Fisher King’s. Trauma that renders the landscape barren. The soul, unable to heal itself, turns to ancient identities, mythic lineages, and cultural relics as if they were sacred springs. Or Fentanyl. And the name of that wound is Loss. Of empire, of power, of innocence, identity: of the essence that they were. But nostalgia kills the future, and with it all hope. The healer must come, and find the right words, soon. For the next war is very close. Perhaps it will feel, briefly, like these other words from The Wasteland
What is that sound high in the air/Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming/Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth?
Ringed by the flat horizon only/What is the city over the mountains?
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air?/Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London
Unreal
All quotes from The Poetry Foundation a marvellous source of learning and wisdom if ever there was one
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[2] The Waste Land | The Poetry Foundation
##economics #politics #poetry #parsifal #TS Eliot #Wagner #The Fisher king #legend
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