The Cruelest Month
“April is the cruellest month,” TS Eliot declared in his epochal poem, The Wasteland. If the latest projections emanating from the CDC and the World Health Organization on the spread of COVID-19 turn out to be accurate, Eliot might be right by a mile. In the US and many other parts of the world, with just a few exceptions, the pandemic’s toll each day is graver than the day before. The cruelty of April will relentlessly mount throughout the month, likely giving way to an even crueler May.
With this opening line of his masterpiece published in 1922, Eliot purposely subverted a staple of the English literary tradition – Spring as a luxuriant season of wild fecundity, a trope that began with Chaucer’s celebration of April in the Canterbury Tales – to evoke, instead, a metaphor for the demise of western civilization following the unprecedented horror of World War I’s killing fields. The world had been turned on its head—so much so, Eliot surmised, that even the natural order of things had been toppled.
In the coronavirus tsunami we need not reach for metaphors. The Wasteland is here in real time, and April, which, at least in the northern hemisphere, should be teeming with new life, is hunkered down and facing the mounting shock waves of an unexpected pandemic.
Like Eliot, we are wrestling with present losses and future unknowns. He was part of a generation that came out of the Great War reeling from the unspeakable catastrophe of trench warfare, mustard gas, and the first aerial war-fighting that left millions dead to no perceivable purpose. We, too, are beginning to reel with the vertigo of the current onslaught – and, like those a century ago, we share a deep distrust of those in charge, who plainly don’t seem to know what they’re doing.
At the very moment Eliot was writing his dour, brilliant work, another creative effort was brewing halfway around the world. It, too, was taking root in the wake of the war years. But rather than being disoriented, it was steadily laying the groundwork for a very different way to shift history, minus the tanks and pitched battles.
In his ashram in India throughout the 1920s, Gandhi was training his colleagues in what he called “Satyagraha,” a term he coined that loosely translated from the Sanskrit into English as “Soul-Force” or “Truth-Force,” a way of getting at the deeper meanings of “nonviolence,” a word he also continued to use for the process he was experimenting with for personal and social transformation. Throughout the decade, Gandhi organized pointed and small-scale campaigns, which would culminate in the Salt Satyagraha movement in 1930-31, that shook Britain’s grip on India and boosted the confidence of the Indian people that change was possible, that the cruelty of a centuries-old occupation would end.
Ours is a very disorienting moment. But, in the midst of the pain and suffering of this horror, it may also be a time for imagining a world beyond the Wasteland. A world which has invested in the things that make for peace—including ventilators and masks, and the comprehensive infrastructure of universal health care that goes along with them—is the masterpiece some of us long for.
Perhaps, as we shelter in place, we can get the online training we need to sharpen our skills as the next wave of satyagrahis waiting to step forward, in the coming moment, as part of the coming movement, for the coming struggle…for a less cruel world.
There are a growing number of nonviolence trainings online these days. I highly recommend the series my friend and colleague Veronica Pelicaric is leading. Click here for information.
