T.S. Eliot and the Dissociative Sensibility 1

T.S. Eliot was one of the few poets concerned with cultural coherency, that is, Western cultural coherency. What he found disturbing about modern life was the dissociative sensibility of artists in modern life. Modern artists could not reconcile their feelings with their intellectual and artistic sensibility. I will simply define sensibility as a way of looking at modern culture.

Now, it becomes apparent to me that this sensibility, although T.S. Eliot traces a different root, came from two sources for T.S. Eliot: Greek humanism and the intellectual monastic culture of the West from which the modern university came to be. "The women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo," T.S. Eliot says in the Wasteland. The glorification of actualized, glamorized human beings led to the birth of the Superman or Overman whose functions were so well organized and integrated that he could go beyond good and evil like God. Indeed Greek humanism led to the Superman, who is in essence, anti-humanist. The feelings related to the worship of the Superman has become universally democratized and we have "celebrity" worship in the United States which no secular humanist seems to complain about.

The monastic culture of the West is one that is very understated in Western culture. Monks, though, were the first intellectuals and the first ones to bring back the ancient Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle.

T.S. Eliot, in the "Wasteland," comes into the poem as Teiresias (All the letters of T.S. Eliot is in Teiresias except "l" and "o"), the bisexual seer who combines the feelings related to Greek hero and God-worship and the monastic, hermetic sensibility of the medieval monk.

Dissociative imagery abound in T.S. Eliot's poetry. "Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table." T.S. Eliot subverts the poetry of Dante and also Romantic poetry... he raises up your expectation of feeling and then kills it like a fly: "Like a patient etherized upon a table." There's nothing romantic or remotely spiritual about that. But it does make you think. Why did he say that? Is he, as some critics says, the suicide bomber of Romantic poetry? Does he blame Romantic poetry for elevating women to the level of Goddesses and elevating our feelings only to destroy them later?

T.S. Eliot, in reality, suffered from psychological paralysis and perhaps repetition compulsion. He was never able to figure out how to make the modern sensibility coherent. He basically just absorbed the psychological paralysis of the culture he lived in whether English or American.

America would go on a journey outlined in the "Wasteland," exploring discarded religions and practices (Tarot Cards, Satanism), Eastern religions (Upanishads, Buddhism, Hinduism), etc. but America did not find the "peace that is beyond all understanding," the fruit of pleroma.