Lack of water is the metaphor of absence of the moisture of love causing the biological dryness as well as the dryness in the hyperspace of Eliot’s microbiological relation with Vivienne. Lack of water and dryness is put in the context of the poem along with the loss of water and the transpiration from leaves often surpasses the water uptake rate through the roots causing life to falter as Eliot’s relation does with Vivienne and what we have as a result in the poem is:
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
(The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S.Eliot 61)
The roots strive to uptake more water through their expansion and this ultimately adapts plants to minimize stomatal loss of water when there is a water deficit. This is where the posthuman entanglement takes place between phytocentricism and anthropocentricism. The duality of plant and human life are not only coexistent here but are enmeshed. The biological organism here becomes postexceptionalist as we see how the water deficit affected the cell division causing the reduction of the cell wall extensibility and turgor. In Shipwreck Modernity (2015), Steve Mentz explored “wet narratives [that] emphasize disorder, disorientation, and rupture” in juxtaposition with “a dry countermovement that attempts to make sense and meaning out of disaster.” (11)
The contrast between wet swirl and dry structure operates as a fundamental division that animates blue humanities thinking. The conceptual distinction between experience and knowledge and the felt difference between feeling and form flow from the contrast between the wet and the dry. To be wet—to be “in” (in Olson’s emphatic word)—generates an experience and distinctive feelings. Drying is the slower process, an imposition of form and accumulation of knowledge. (An Introduction to the Blue Humanities 14)
The above quotation links the blue humanities with our research on Eliot’s phytopoetics. The third section of the poem ‘The Fire Sermon’ brings out the aquapoetics and blue humanism as the garbological solid wastes invades Thames, and that is why ‘The river’s tent is broken’. The identity of the river becomes fragmented as ‘The nymphs are departed’. The clean and hygienic drinking water is threatened and so is aquatic life. The nymph can well be the metaphor of the spirits of water as well as aquatic beings. The health of maritime life is the most important aspect of aquapoetics, as the sense making of water life is gradually depleted by the anthroposcene we understand the disease of pollution has eroded the blue humanities. Thus the ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song’. The song is here also a nostalgic reminiscence of the past, where water bodies had not been encumbered by garbage: “The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,/Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends/Or other testimony of summer nights.” Here the word ‘no’ is an absence presence when looked at from the referentiality of present. The presentification of ‘now’ is where the plastic bottles dominate the space of aquapoetics. The emphasis the ‘empty bottles’, ‘sandwich papers’ and ‘other testimony of summer nights’ brings out the geographic invasion of pollutant in aquatic space and the immergence of the New Immortal, the plastic waste.
The sense-making of a botanist exploration of plant is the scientific methodology with the teleology of epistemic unraveling of life outside Andros. One the other hand, the poetic imagination of Romanticised ‘wonder’ of natural world and Darstellung created during the nineteenth century British and German poetics provided an ontological connection with nature. The aim of this chapter is to bring together these two outlook together while studying ‘The Waste Land’. The phytopoetics of T.S. Eliot is not simply biotic in relation to his masterpiece ‘The Waste Land’ but rhizopheric as we shift the cellular narratives from androcentricism to phytogeneticism back and forth. The dryness in roots of the plants and infertility is brilliantly amalgamated in the opening lines of the poem:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
The dry roots and the dry land is essentially a phytometaphoric counterpart to the infertility in male and phallic roots and the female womb-land. The botanical life here talks about the absence of optimal level of water availability which is the reason of both dull roots as well as the dead land. The fluctuation in soil moisture beyond optimal can affect the blossoming and survivality of the flowering and fruition. What we find in this botanical metaphor is the aporia of water in the rhizosphere, thereby making the absence-presence of growth and health-balance and a ‘dys’-functionality of the ‘body’ parallel with the lack of the plant nutrient uptake. The geoclimatic landscape of England and socio-political situation of the world runs in parallel with the intrapersonal life of Eliot. The cellular dryness is phytocentric as well as androcentric when we put Eliot’s conjugal life with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot in the context. Eliot follows the diachronic narrative in this poem of phytosemiosis and the anatomy of his marriage and create infinity that is rendered impossible by the Cartesian principle that has surgically scissored body from mind/soul and has given birth to the foetus of discourse.
Key words: Water, Blue Humanism, Aquapoetics, Disease, Pollution
About the Author
Debojyoti Dan is a poet and a literary critic. He has been teaching in Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya (College) in the department of English, since 2009. He has special interests in Modern and Postmodern literature and theories. He was the Head of the Department in English in Naba Ballygunge Mahavidyalaya (College), from June, 2015 to January, 2017. He learned French initially From Rama Krishna Mission and then pursued further diplomas in French from Alliance Française du Bengal. He has several publications to his credit including two books of poems Enigma of Red Shadows (2011) and Enigma Unveiled (2023). He has written various chapters in edited international books and peer reviewed journals. His recent one being “Question of Identity and Memory in Godard’s Lear and Kurosawa’s Ran” published in the edited book Woman and Cinema with the ISBN no: 978-93-5529-840-9 in 2024. He was awarded the first prize in the world French Poetry Competition known as ‘Le Printemps des Poètes’ in 2007. He had worked in Alliance Française du Bengal as a cultural co-ordinator in the Cine club from 2007-2009. His email id is debo.ange.dechu@gmail.com, mobile number is 9163205852 and his home address is 7 B, Beniapukur Road, West Bengal. Kolkata 700014.