One thing I should clear up first: I am not J. Alfred Prufrock, nor do I wish to seem to be. I didn’t discover T.S. Eliot in a high-school English class, and I don’t view that one poem as some kind of modern scripture, to be iconized or somehow lived by or even just to wear as some kind of badge.

But given that blogs are generally communicated by means of patterns on a screen, referring to mine as a magic lantern seemed irresistible.

I actually listened to a recording of Eliot reciting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — and “The Waste Land,” and “Ash Wednesday,” and others — many, many times before I ever read them. My mother copied a library’s vinyl record to cassette tape and would play it in her car stereo, along with tapes of other poets, and show tunes, and English folk songs, some classical pieces — and the Beatles.

I was too young and insufficiently well-versed to pick up on a great deal that Eliot had in mind when he wrote, and his delivery tended to blur all the poems on the recording into one endless meditation. What I did take in were the more fundamental aspects of poetry: the sound itself; the choice of words and word order both for their ranges of meaning and to serve the sound; the deliberate construction of images which defy the ordinary senses of words but which succeed, often with great precision, through the ambiguity of natural language.

“Prufrock” tended to stand out from the rest, primarily because in the recording Eliot delivered it with more humor — certainly more than I think most people read it with. There is much discussion among critics of how many speakers there are in the poem, and who might be talking to whom at different points. As a child it always seemed that there was basically one speaker, but that he (or she) at different points relayed comments from other people, with nothing to identify or distinguish them except the things being said and the way Eliot said them. And it seemed fairly clear that the central figure, whether it was he (or she) speaking or being spoken about, was unhappy and had some problem with no solution. It was something deeply serious, large, and complicated.

At the same time someone, whether the central figure in self-awareness, or the poet as a co-speaker, regarded the central figure with great amusement, in a mixture of fondness and contempt. So that part of the very difficulty of whatever great problem it might have been was the trouble it had in being taken, or taking itself, seriously.

I did read the poem in more than one English class, and discovered that other people have tried to take it very seriously. And I have read it now as an adult, who has known the arms already, and as a more widely-educated reader, who catches the prophet references, and so on. I have given the poem careful and careless examination as a child and as a teenager and as an adult, as one mired in my own quandaries of existence and purpose and alienation, and as one singing with mermaids.

I’ve only become more attached to my early conclusion that it’s a beautiful and delightful piece of work. But I don’t wave it around as a banner, as if it managed to say all the things I’ve thought or felt but haven’t been able to put into words myself, or as if it were the Ultimate Truth in Code.

And I know Eliot was a flawed human being. Some of his genius lies in the degree to which his poetry cannot be inescapably bound to his personal weaknesses and mistakes.

Anyway… that’s not what this post was going to be about.

Today is the celebrated anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by the United States of America, theretofore colonies of the British Empire. This post is also not about that, even thematically or metaphorically. It just seems an auspicious occasion to begin a blog.

This post is essentially about itself, about my being up at 4:30 in the morning by local time, not having slept yet since yesterday. This is, by the standards of my whole life up till the last few months, completely uncharacteristic and seemingly impossible. But here I am.

I don’t know what it is exactly. I don’t get sleepy at the proper time, it’s true, or I don’t notice it. Then as more time goes by I do get sleepy. But… for some reason I start fighting it. Even though I may have nothing that needs to be done now, that can’t wait till tomorrow. In fact most of the things I need to do would benefit from waiting for the next day, when the rest of local society is open for business and I’m more fully awake.

That must be part of it: this is time I feel like I can control, and also which I can’t use for some tasks. So I don’t have to get sucked into the black hole of priorities and justifications. I need sleep, though. I like sleep. But lately I seem to have the will to drive myself sleepless.