Fear in a Handful of Dust

Mixed media on canvas, 24” x 48”
Acrylic, marble dust, ash, paste, various glazes.

T.S. Eliot’s great modernist poem, The Waste Land, is more meaningful to me now than when I was a young third year English major and had to do a whole semester on it. The Editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature say that the poem "is about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value to men's daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death heralds no resurrection." So it is just the thing that a slightly jaded corporate project manager needs to be reading on the symbolic eve of her midlife crisis.

This painting is inspired by the following series of lines, 19 to 30, from the first section, The Burial of the Dead. The biblical drama always appealed to me.

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. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Classic mortality theme. Big tip, if you’re up to reading the whole poem: water = faith, but not necessarily religion – just faith (hope, willingness to live and carry on, and so on). Strangely, the poem does end on an upbeat note. One could also read a big fat carpe diem into it. Shantih.