Green Eliot

T.S. Eliot liked to powder his face green. That the fusty, Christian, high-born Eliot could be this weird is a clue that he had interests in something deeper than mere tradition. Green of course is incipient in The Waste Land; the poem takes place in a state of advanced cabin fever, in that unbearable moment between a winter that never ends and the unstoppable force of spring: the April of 2022 is no less cruel than April 1922. Has anything changed? What has changed is that the magic mushroom has made a reemergence. Little did Eliot know that the “vegetation ceremonies” he mentions in the poem’s notes were psychedelic: ancient Phrygian mushroom ceremonies that revolve around the psychoactive amanita muscaria, or fly agaric mushroom; the same mushroom that gave rise to Christmas and that Nintendo immortalized in Super Mario brothers. The drug-virgin Eliot deploys a mythology that he does not understand but that he can sense; he mistakes it for the eucharist. The force of the mushroom’s significance is the felt anticipation of an epiphany in the thunder of rain shuddering the far hills and the “Shantih Shantih Shantih” that ends the poem; this phrase, as stoners in the Uttaranchal Pradesh once explained to me, is Hindu marijuana-slang that means slowly slowly slowly: or puff puff pass. Spring may be slow, but it waits for no man. Eliot’s later mistake is to think that this epiphany is transcendental, deferred by his God until the end of time, when “the fire and the rose are one.” Spacewhy refuses this deferral and points out that the fire is in the rose right now: the epiphany is happening everywhere, all the time; The Waste Land concurs: line 386: “In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing.”