smokingboot (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
smokingboot) wrote2019-02-21 02:06 pm
smokingboot) wrote2019-02-21 02:06 pm
The Drowned Phoenician Sailor
A curious thing when a phrase randomly catches up with you and follows you around for a while in your head and then the next day you find it again.
'The pearls that were his eyes,' found me yesterday, and the Drowned Phoenician Sailor, from respectively, Shakespeare's Tempest and T.S Eliot's Wasteland. I love the first and, er, admire parts of the second. It's hard to love The Wasteland entirely isn't it? Parts of it hypnotise. Perhaps I wasn't remembering two different works but one:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
Anyhoooo, things trail through your head and out the other side when you're looking for new research. I let the phases swirl around me, saw my own version of the Phoenician Sailor and his changed eyes, dismissed it.
Today a mate features it on her blog; http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2019/02/the-waste-land-tarot-drowned-phoenician.html?spref=fb&fbclid=IwAR0Be6txW_mqs6DUICW0xt3HZzFT5lQ4yUQGLfm-qaYv-CIOx5MfixXWGCU
It tickles me when things like that happen, like little post-it notes from Nowhere. Eliot's Wasteland is about London as a city of the dead. For me the Drowned Phoenician Sailor is not recovered from the Thames, nor does he lie on a Tarot card by an un-named ocean; he is dredged up from a canal in Venice just before Carnevale starts.
There is a story there somewhere, but I don't know if it is somewhere to begin. These are old ghosts and I need fresh air.
'The pearls that were his eyes,' found me yesterday, and the Drowned Phoenician Sailor, from respectively, Shakespeare's Tempest and T.S Eliot's Wasteland. I love the first and, er, admire parts of the second. It's hard to love The Wasteland entirely isn't it? Parts of it hypnotise. Perhaps I wasn't remembering two different works but one:
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
Anyhoooo, things trail through your head and out the other side when you're looking for new research. I let the phases swirl around me, saw my own version of the Phoenician Sailor and his changed eyes, dismissed it.
Today a mate features it on her blog; http://www.badwitch.co.uk/2019/02/the-waste-land-tarot-drowned-phoenician.html?spref=fb&fbclid=IwAR0Be6txW_mqs6DUICW0xt3HZzFT5lQ4yUQGLfm-qaYv-CIOx5MfixXWGCU
It tickles me when things like that happen, like little post-it notes from Nowhere. Eliot's Wasteland is about London as a city of the dead. For me the Drowned Phoenician Sailor is not recovered from the Thames, nor does he lie on a Tarot card by an un-named ocean; he is dredged up from a canal in Venice just before Carnevale starts.
There is a story there somewhere, but I don't know if it is somewhere to begin. These are old ghosts and I need fresh air.
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