I’ve noticed that from time to time I’d be reading something or listening to a song and a turn of phrase or a word would spark my curiosity, and I’d be on the internet researching Idlewild, or bread and roses or most recently search history – to see what l’ve searched for. (Delete all, jikes!)
I’ve done this recently with the word “prufrock”, and it feels like I’m one of those clowns that tries to pull a handkerchief from their pocket and ends up with a rope of them, each one tied to the next. I’m sure everybody that speaks English as their first language would recognise the word – T.S. Elliot’s The love song of J Alfred Prufrock has surely been taught to schoolkids the world over, but it’s the first time I’ve come across it, however hard that is to believe.
So where did I come across Prufrock first? This song: Frank Turner: I knew Prufrock before he was famous. Frank Turner, also stumbled across while looking at something else. This specific song made me light up like a Christmas tree, I tell you. Surely most of us are in the same boat, unlikely to be remembered by anyone other than our friends & family, if we’re honest. Still, I think the song is about finding the beauty in the human experience, that than looking for validation from being recognised.
Well, back to Elliot’s Prufrock. After going: “I wonder who this Prufrock person is – searchy searchy” I read the whole thing online. Don’t you just love it when someone manages to write something so beautiful, stripped out and true that it feels like you’ve been hit in the gut? And isn’t it funny how if you love something you see it everywhere? It’s like Elliot has soaked through all things being said in song or literature or TV.
The one instance that really tickled me though, is when Marcus Chown quotes a verse from this poem in his book: The Never ending days of being dead, when discussing the Omega Point cosmology theory that Frank Tipler has put forward. As far as I can understand it and in fairly simple terms Tipler said that when the universe collapses computational ability will increase to infinity, and with these infinite resources intelligence will be able to resurrect the dead by emulating the multiverse from the very start.
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
I guess as far as existence theories go I’ll probably go with Elliot’s Preludes, myself. I find myself looking at a scrawl of paint spilled on the road, an old lady in wheelchair smoking a cigarette, a tree bare except for white flowers and these things take on a weight of importance that I cannot explain, only feel.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
