On T.S. Eliot's 'The Waste Land,' ADHD and the Siren Call of Screens
The ailment of screen-fueled distraction can sometimes lead to delightful serendipity and moments of clarity.
I have never been diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I suppose when I have my annual physical next month, I should ask my doctor about it, because a couple decades of web-surfing, hundreds of thousands of phone pickups and Twitter doomscrolling have left my brain in a condition that I imagine replicates it.
And yet, that is not an entirely bad thing.
Last week, inspired to quote the first line of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land here in Artlandia, I grabbed my copy, the slim paperback (now with a cracked spine) that I’d bought for college lit. I recall little about that course other than being intrigued that a classmate always lugged the Gabler edition of Ulysses with her, presumably for another course.
Anyway, I found myself distracted from the work at hand, which is what reliably happens to me all day long. But my pivot to The Waste Land coincided with a thought I’ve had in the last year or so: That one drug-free way of combatting ADHD, or what at least feels like ADHD, is to train one’s mind to slow down by reading aloud. And in particular, reading poetry aloud.
Which is really how it ought to always be read. My go-to has been Shakespeare’s sonnets, a practice of “slow reading” I’ll occasionally do a few minutes before bedtime as a sort of literary mindfulness practice.
So with Eliot in hand, I sat down late one morning and read the poem, all 434 lines. And I’ll grant that it is possible (my exposure to The Waste Land in Condon Hall at the University of Oregon in the late 1980s notwithstanding) that this was actually my first complete reading of the text.
And then, as frequently happens when a hungry but distracted mind encounters an astonishing work of art and flirts with a sort of Buberian I/Thou relationship with it, I became, candidly, a little obsessed with the poem.
From serendipity to synchronicity
Eliot was part of the post-WWI, post-Bolshevik Revolution cultural wave that blasted through art of all kinds. “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,” he wrote in 1921, maintaining that such variety and complexity “must produce various and complex results.” The Waste Land was published the following year, along with that other famously complex work, Ulysses. This was the birth of Modernism. The Waste Land did for poetry what Ulysses did for the novel: Both were just …weird. Because—in my view and with the benefit of hindsight—they drew out and gave form to the weirdness that was and is always latent in both life and art. Another writer from that period, Willa Cather, called 1922 the year that “the world broke in two.”
It was around the time last week that I was reading The Waste Land that I stumbled, in one of those mindless, endless scrolls through the swamp of Facebook, upon a post by a local author and poet, Barbara Drake, who was clearly lamenting the “variety and complexity” one is subjected to in the news these days. She wrote:
Listening/reading all the bad world news today I thought of Eliot's "The Waste Land." About 25 years ago I saw Fiona Shaw perform it in an old theatre in Paris. I searched online to see if I could find her amazing performance …
Say what you will about Facebook; if you follow the right people and avoid politics, you will sometimes find gems. In this instance, the gem was Shaw’s electrifying performance of The Waste Land. The Irish actor, perhaps best known today as Aunt Petunia from the Harry Potter films, has been engaging with this poem since the 1990s, and we can see her performance today on YouTube. Because of course we can.
Near as I can tell, the version you’ll find on YouTube is actually the 1995 film directed by famed British theater artist Deborah Warner. It was screened the following year at the Cannes Film Festival, and Shaw has been taking her Waste Land show on the road ever since. It’s a fantastic way into the poem.
But within a day or two, I found an even better way.
Say what you will about devices and screens, there’s an app for The Waste Land. Which features another performance by Shaw, this one shot by Warner in an old house just a few years ago. On a windy night after dinner earlier this week, I retreated to my office, turned the lights out, settled into a reading chair, and watched Shaw do The Waste Land on my iPad once again. She’s spent her entire adult life living inside this strange poem and clearly, it lives inside her, too.
The app (for iPads) was rolled out in 2012 to international acclaim by the publisher Faber and The Red Green & Blue Company and was updated in 2022 for iPhones to mark the centenary. It costs ten bucks and is worth every penny. Along with Shaw’s filmed reading and her own musings about the poem, there are also full readings by Alec Guiness, Ted Hughes, Jeremy Irons with Eileen Atkins, and Viggo Mortensen, all synchronized with the text. You can also hear Eliot himself read it—twice: In 1933, then again in 1947. Interesting, to be sure, but he’s not nearly as good as Shaw.
Along with voluminous, interactive notes, there’s also a nice collection of mini-commentaries, delivered on camera by Shaw and others: Seamus Heaney, Paul Keegan, Jim McCue, Craig Raine, Frank Turner and the British author Jeanette Winterson, who remarks on the poem’s reputation as being “hard.”
“I often say to people who say ‘Eliot’s very difficult, Eliot is very hard, I can’t understand him,’ I say first of all, you do what you do with any poem: You read it out loud, then you’ll start to hear it, and second you read it at least six times. Because that’s what it needs. I can’t offer you any shortcuts, because there ain’t none.”
My recollections of early encounters with Eliot tend to be more about the shorter poem we hear Marlon Brando read (as the mad Col. Kurtz) in Apocalypse Now: The Hollow Men. Now, after having abandoned the longer poem on the porch in the 1980s as a college kid, I’ve crashed through the front door of The Waste Land at that odd age where young people think I’m old and old people think I’m young. Good time for it, given that those unsettling waves of “variety and complexity” roil us still.