A buddhist interpretation of The Hollow Men by T S Eliot :

I particularly like this poem, as you can guess from the title that it will probably be tainted with a slight case of misanthropy. So after some researches on the web, i’ve found valuable interpretations of this poem, quite detailed actually, but i was still unsatisfied because it reminds me strongly of some buddhist teachings and nobody made the connection with it as far as i know. Although it is obvious that Eliot was strongly influenced by hinduism and buddhism, like for example the Fire Sermon (third part of the Wasteland poem) referring directly to the Fire Sutra. So here is my interpretation, please let me know if someone already treated it this way :

Mistah Kurtz-he dead
A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.


II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom


III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.


IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.


V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper. 

The main themes of the poem are duality and emptiness . Duality is present already in the epigraphs :

-          Mistah Kurtz – he dead : Mr Kurz from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a man of action but lacking empathy, moral standards, etc…what you could schematise as a « soul » let ‘s say..

-          A penny for the Old Guy : on Guy Fawkes Day, children burn straw figures of Guy Fawkes, whose idea was to blow up the Parliament  in 1605, a failed action for an « empty » / futile cause ? or even the futility of burning straw figures instead of continuing his action ?

These two violent  characters are disconnected from society and are hardly understood by noone, also emphasizing the idea of the world as delusion / mind’s construction.  Thus the duality and conflict between man and society / world, between the mind’s representation of the world and the world.

Also like i’ve read, Kurtz lacks a soul and the Guy’s straw figure lacks a real body.

 Particularly relevant are the lines 11-12 : shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion. It is a succession of oppositions reinforcing the duality and the meaningless, futility of life, followed by the despair and torments endured by the hollow men in the « other kingdom of death ».

Buddhism teaches that dual way of thinking is the prime cause of pain and suffering. Everything is connected mind + body, man + mankind, mankind + world etc... The most famous teaching on this subject is the Heart Sutra :

« Oh Sariputra, form does not differ from the void and void does not differ from form. Form is void and void is form. The same is true for feelings, perceptions, volitions and consciousness »

Form, like in Eliot’s poem, refers to the True / Inner Nature of man. Shunryu Suzuki in his book « Zen mind, Beginner’s mind », illustrates the Heart Sutra by the « clap with one hand » story : how can you applaud with only one hand ? you can not but your mind knows the sound of the clap, so it exists in itself, despite the fact that you can not hear it.

Back to the poem, the hollow men search a meaning in life, they have intuition of their inner nature but can not find it (allusions to the eyes and the fading star – or on a religious scale you can define it as « faith », « love of God », embodied by Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy). And this lack fills them with despair and guilt because they feel lost and incomplete. Also they are scared of death and try to avoid it.

The following stanzas are referring to purgatory and hell as in Dante’s books but you might as well compare it to the Samsara : the wandering of men in the circles of mental suffering.

Again here, I believe Eliot was enough cultivated not to believe in hell, purgatory, heaven as real places but rather as states of mind. This explains the « other kingdom of death » : the world is hell for the hollow men, and they are like dead men, even if their bodies are still alive. They lack the consciousness of their whole nature (body + spirit) and are only full of organic life (filled with straw). [on the subject of modern men lost in consumer society, with only sex as driving life force, i recommend you to read the excellent plays Les Disparitions followed by De passage, endormi by Christophe Pellet]

Line 41 « here the stone images are raised » + Line 50 « lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone » : Buddhism tells that images are false, they are merely mind’s schemes. But feelings, like love, are true. Once again the hollow men have the intuition of their salvation but can not initiate it.

Line 60 « gathered on this beach of the tumid river » : some say it would be the Styx or the Acheron, or one of the several infernal river but i’d rather say it is the image of time. The men are disconnected from it, apart from the flux of the universe.

And the last stanza is about nirvana, liberation of suffering, death and time itself. It’s a delicate interpretation because nirvana is oftenly translated as extinction but it is not fully appropriate, not in a hopeless, pessimistic meaning anyway.

The children song  reminds of youth and the goal for buddhists to become like children again : sincere, spontaneous, with a clear mind, not obscured with prejudices and society moral judgements.

The cactus land is nomore dreadful and children dance around a prickly pear. The cactus here refers to asceticism and abstinence because the « path » / « way to god » is harsh (numerous examples in all religions like the 40 days of Jesus in the desert)

It reminds me also of the « camino del nada » of St John of the Cross, saying that on top of the mountain, on the way to God, there is…nothing, but void, as in the Heart Sutra ( in the poem see line 92 : « for thine is », or line 93 « life is » ). It is not a discovery because connections between Zen and St John of the Cross have been made by many authors and probably Eliot knew it also verywell.

Line 72 : « Between the idea and the reality, between… : falls the Shadow » : the duality fades to black, the oppositions are blurred, melting together in the shadow. The hollow man can feel whole again and thus disappears the delusive perception of the outer world, of a world separated from the inner nature of man.

That’s quite funny because he is still empty after all but now at peace and not suffering infernal torments.

Alright that's about it....i was in the mood of writing...

El Dorado

So many times i had seen this place, through the window

And today I found a passage, a gateway,

Beyond a narrow path, full of mud at this time of the year,

Between the puddles and along the ponds,

A deserted territory, cleansed from man and sound,

Only echoes the whisper of silence,

The low frizzling of power lines,

And the squeak of snow under my footsteps.

Quand Bouddha fâché, lui toujours faire ainsi...

 

Ouais c'était un peu facile mais j'ai le cerveau qui lag en ce moment, à cause du manque de vitamine D et accessoirement je trouvais ce blog un peu trop sérieux dernièrement, promis je vais mettre plein de citations bien fun pour égayer tout ça, comme par exemple celle-ci :

 

 "Pourquoi faudrait-il un sens à nos jours ? Pour les sauver ? Mais ils n'ont pas besoin de l'être. Il n'y a pas de perte dans nos vies, puisque nos vies sont perdues d'avance, puisqu'elles passent un peu plus, chaque seconde."

Christian Bobin : Eloge du rien ( Ed. Fata Morgana -1990)

 

Sinon dernièrement je fais de la peinture sur ruines, ça me détend pendant les longues nuits d'hiver...