| So, what is the point to this page? Nothing. Everything. I made this page to express myself within the scope of my poetic selection. This is in direct response to the presentations from Tuesday, which made me "in short, . . . afraid." While sitting in class, watching each presentation I found myself wondering what exactly was unique about what I did?--and asking such things is not too helpful for the old confidence! So, I still don't know. I do not know how to tie Prufrock to voice and the materialization of the world, I cannot discuss its sexual inuendos and I cannot modernize it for '05. I can't do those things because I don't want to, I don't know how to, I don't think I can. Perhaps that speaks volumes about how I read into something, perhaps none at all. To me it tells me two things: One--I must not read into things too deep and (two--don't talk about fight club). I should have seen this coming! I should have known it all before, my greatest fear is that it is not it at all! What was Eliot saying through Prufrock? What was Prufrock saying through Eliot? Could it be that "To be nobody but yourself in a world that's doing its best to make you somebody else, is to fight the hardest battle you are ever going to fight. Never stop fighting." Or so says Cummings. But I think he has it right. I think he knows Prufrock. I think Hemingway, Spenser, Wilde, Faulkner, Whitman--I think they all knew Prufrock too. I know Prufrock as well, if I may be so well. Certainly I don't know him as intimately as the afore mentioned sages, but he is like an aquainted friend--I think I know him, but I can only guess. He is that poet within all people who are willing (or unwilling) to listen. That self doubt that plagues all writers, that inner voice which comments and sees all things, and that overwhelming drive to want to be alone. Forsooth, Prufrock appears to wish human contact at first--whether sterilized from the influence of materials and the sullied touch of technology, or the touch of a man or woman depending on his sexual preference, etc. But he has "known them all already, known them all," leading me to believe he wants that which he does not know: Death. I see him standing on the a beach at dawn, watching the waves pummel the sand and retreat. I see him watching the moon and the stars and the signs of an bright sun rising. I see him there pondering what he has left to live for. He seems to believe what people have to say as unimportant, even deadly--"Till human voices wake us, and we drown." So the silence and solitude of the sea calls to him. The mermaids, like Odysseus's Sirens, would lure him to his death, but not today. He stared into the face of the abyss and heard nothing, at least nothing today. And so he will grow another day older, another day toward the torture of same-ness that plague's his life, since, according to his account, he knows it all; all save when the sea will sing to him one morning and it will all end. To know when it ends, to know all, is the telos. But, I don't. I don't know it at all. |