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• W855455864 abstract "In this edition, we offer a review of absence. John Coopey writes on the marginalization of issues of environment in contemporary society, and uses T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland as a vehicle to draw together a diverse range of critical revelations and provocative questions. TS. Eliot's poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Had he been writing now on the same theme - the spiritual emptiness of people's lives - he might well have called it `The Waste World', resonating with contemporary spiritual issues concerned with safeguarding the wider natural world of which we are part. The epigraph to the poem sets the scene for this transition. It tells how the God Apollo grants the wish of the prophetess, Sybil, to live as many years as there are grains of sand in her hand. As she ages and becomes feeble Sybil cannot die and her life becomes an agony of boredom and suffering. When Eliot drew on this myth the idea of a radically extended life was a subject solely of the newly created science fiction genre. Now, however, biological and medical scientists claim to be developing technologies that will offer `the real thing', responding to our Sybil-like urge to defy mortality. Already, some rich Americans arrange that, when they die, their heads will be deep-frozen - taking advantage of the burgeoning science of cryogenics - in the belief that the time is not far off when they can be grafted on to newly created bodies. In his TV dramas, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, Denis Potter parodies this urge, exploring the existential horrors likely to accompany these Frankenstein-like notions. In any case there seems little sense in extending the human lifespan when it is forecast that there will be grave problems in sustaining the increased number of human beings predicted to be on the Earth by 2050, a population growth that, ironically, threatens the existence of many other species on whom we rely for our physical and spiritual wellbeing. In the poem Eliot describes how in a winter dawn ... a crowd flowed over London Bridge... sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, and each man fixed his eyes before his feet. This scene is still played out most days across London Bridge and at thousands of similar sites around the world. Rich financial experts go to their offices on their way to being `burned out' at thirty, or bored at forty just hanging on until `retirement' at fifty. Others dawdle at all times of the day and night to their `work stations' in call centres. Once there, eyes fixed on monitors, they can only hope that some chatty customer will free them from the boredom of their choreographed script without fear of reprimand from invisible watchers within their technological panopticon. Then there's the 27 million modern slaves held illegally, `more than twice the total number taken from Africa during the 400 years of the Atlantic slave trade'. Unlike the earlier slaves those of the new millennium are cheap - cheaper than slaves have ever been - and disposable. Nor do they have the freedom, be it painful or pleasurable, of walking to work. They live where they work, like the six year old cousins, Huro and Shivji, taken hundreds of miles from their home village in India to labour 18 hours a day in separate, gloomy cells where they slept alone. There is Drissa, lured into slavery on an Ivory Coast cocoa farm and locked in a small room at night with 17 other young men with only a tin can as a toilet. Surely a contemporary Eliot would use the words of Vincent, another Ivory Coast slave, on his release: `Tell them, when they are eating chocolate, they are eating my flesh'. Such wretches don't need Eliot's Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante ... known to be the wisest woman in Europe, with a wicked pack of cards to tell them their fortunes. As good a prediction of their life chances can be gleaned from knowledge of their place of birth and father's occupation. This is true too of those who are not enslaved, as in parts of Russia, now re-branded as a free market', or of the USA, the richest country of the so-called developed world. …" @default.
• W855455864 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W855455864 date "2001-01-01" @default.
• W855455864 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W855455864 title "From the Waste Land to the Waste World" @default.
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