Prints £85 for A3 size
After The Wasteland, then Prufrock, I decided on T.S. Eliot’s Preludes for Conceptual Art. Lines at the end of the poem set the scene: “The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”
This is a photograph of a disused area in Manchester with industry behind. I used to drive around looking for wild flowers in paradoxical places. I still find that interesting, and have many more shots. The point of it was to think of a story about nature in an urban setting. It also makes good scenes for Conceptual Art.
Read Eliot for a while, and you see the same ideas and similar imagery throughout his work. Time, morning worry, evening anxiety, the desolate city, unfulfilling romance; a search for meaning while creating cinema-like views with words. But the meaning is never in the street. You find it in a larger survey which includes past mythology in relation to a paradoxical now:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
The end of The Wasteland concludes with “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih” from The Upanishads.
Be kind to others, then peace, seems a simple message. But it’s not an instruction. It’s saying this is a greater reality known by the Thunder. It’s the greatest philosophy, because it is the ultimate goal.
Stillness, in a world of constant movement. Reconciliation with what happens, which includes mortality. A cessation to world hostilities certainly, but much more than that.
Preludes echoes some of The Wasteland ideas. There’s a feeling of void in Eliot, dreamy words then ultimately with sunyata, the Buddhist term for emptiness: create the art, let it go.