Preaching Eliot!

I have an Eliot incident to report, and I am sorry to say that it is at best quasi-intellectual. Here's a story about what I did this weekend:

I have a theory, and I think it is a popular one, that words lose effect through abuse. ('abuse' is not necessarily negative here; it often results from over-use, or colloquial use, catch phrase or cliche). It is for this reason that we unconciously but constantly innovate our language, and the meanings of words adapt. If it did not, we'd get bored. We would never be able to say anything that could make someone cry (or smile, for you optimists).

Bright and early (speaking of cliche) Saturday morning (okay, mid-day...MY idea of morning), I was showing off my great big Eliot book to my boyfriend. He likes to torment me about things I enjoy, like poetry. So as I took it out he grabbed it from my hands and began to read Eliot's poetry aloud in booming mockery. I tried to get it back, but couldn't.

He wouldn't stop reading so I ran away. I ran away and blocked my ears. I didn't want him to ruin it for me. At first it was a joke but then he began reading aloud the Waste Land, and I gasped. I ran outside. He ran after me, shouting the words so I could hear them mispronounced...

I ran outside, past my garage, up the side of my house, covering my ears with my hands, with a man running after me shouting from a heavy Eliot book like he was preaching the Bible, me crouching against the wall refusing to hear, both of us in pajamas and no socks.

And then he started to read from my FAVOURITE parts of the Waste Land..! "April is the cruellest..." AHHHHHH!

K, so in the end he got bored and dropped the book, or had to use the washroom or something, but I was exhausted and now I get to write about it and think: Something about him reading Eliot aloud in that way makes it lose its effect on me. When you reduce something to a joke, it manifests that way. Similarily, when something is built up as an object of respect I understand it as such. I certainly felt differently that day then I did when we read it in class...

However, there was something about hearing Eliot read in a loud, preaching, apocalyptic tone that was so fitting...

(Ironic: What was meant as a joke, is actually how Eliot's words sound as you read them. As a profound declaration. A speech. A condemnation of something dead brought back to life. Or maybe I am placing upon Eliot's rhetoric my impressions of Ash Wednesday...that is how the poem really feels, in form and content: Eliot's voice is being resusitated, as are the ideas in the text, as was biblical Jesus, etc.)