Dare I say it (sorry, Tim! - and Jason if you visit here) but the opening of Chris Uhlmann's commentary on the election helps confirm my allergy to high brow poetry as an artform. I'm just not enough of a pretentious wanker for it, I think!:
After the concession and victory speeches were made in the sleepless small hours of Sunday morning, a line from The Journey of the Magi worried away in my head: “Were we led all that way for birth or death?”
T.S. Eliot continues: “I had seen birth and death but thought that they were different; this birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like death, our death.”
I have no idea what that means. And when does Uhlmann retire - can't be long now, surely.
4 comments:
T S Eliot is famously abstruse but is this passage really terribly unclear to you? The Magi meet with Christ, but of course what Christ offers is sacrifice and ultimately death (of self).
Uhlmann's quote seems rather silly here, certainly; he does that awful newspaper hack thing of omitting the line breaks (or the slashes that signify line breaks), and it doesn't add all that much to the column. In fact, he seems to be adding it in for added portentousness.
I had thought about saying that it didn't mean anything to me especially in the context of the election result and Uhlmann's reaction to it.
But then, even allowing wing for the Magi story having some foreboding of the future death of Christ, the second line seems a nonsense to me...
There are other allusions in Eliot’s poem to the passion of Christ, but that of course is not obvious from the quote.
OK, I have gone and read the whole poem now.
It's fine up to the point it tries to make a point, if you know what I mean!
In other words, I still don't get the Magi's reaction, and don't put high value on obscurity in art.
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