In the fire sermon of the Buddha, or in king's English God, the Buddha is describing what the karmic effects of sexual physicality and addiction could potentially do to threaten God or the Buddha who possibly would destroy the planet earth on Judgment Day. He is preaching and teaching a sermon of absurdity in a negative world because the human being, at 186,000 miles per second with the induced protein structures of the brain, neural system, and physical being, will, once embarked upon a course, relationship, sex, drugs, attitude, perspective, love, or training, become programmed to the habits developed, become comfortable with those good or bad habits acquired and continue to reprogram itself according to it's instilled desires. This is karma. Karma according to a dictionary definition is the sum total of the ethical consequences of a person's good or bad actions comprising thoughts, words, and deeds that is held in Hinduism and Buddhism to determine his {or her} specific destiny in his {or her} next existence as our desires shape themselves so we act and build up our coming fate, our (karma). Every motion in and around us is electrified protein buildup, just like a computer or cyborg. Even rape becomes addictive to a man or a woman, but because of the intensely greater pleasure which the woman utterly succumbs to, the woman becomes more addicted to whatever sexual tastes she has acquired or been forced into by her environment. Because of T. S. Eliot's realization that in a negative or falsely positive or positive environment the human protein neurological, absolutely mechanical organism, once the ball starts rolling, will not have the will to stop, The Fire Sermon quickly and briefly summarizes the entire poem and prose writing The Waste Land and is a futile attempt to scare, terrify, or cajole a karmicly degenerate people, particularly women under the negative and morally corrupt circumstance described and warned about over and over again in the bible just as the fire sermon of the Buddha and the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus attempted to do. Fundamental Thesis: Eliot's only hope with a living man-God, God, or Buddha for Judgment Day at potentially the end of all things was the lightning signifying the destruction of the tower {symbolically a tarot card representing the destruction of the Babylonian stairway to the heavens cursed by God}, the coming of water {symbolically magic, healing} and the Shantih or peace of a silent night with no stars, like a gigantic, empty Universe for Prince Aquitaine, the living God {symbolizing the voidal, living water God, the age of Aquarius, and the magic which comes from the voidal God, both being Himself}. And the water will come. This is told in the biblical book of Mark verse 13:24,25 & 32: {But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken. But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.} This may at first glance appear to be just a Buddhist Sermon, but it is the karmic key to the Christian book of Revelations in the bible {With the male/female triplicity of Satan, the Mother of Harlots, and God. Both God and Satan are rejected by the Harlot of Babylon. Satan {God?}is cast into the bottomless pit to burn to death and darken the sun at his extinction after His rejection by her and God's bloody wrath upon His woman ensues if Satan doesn't burn and the entire planet is destroyed and burned by fire and brimstone. The question then becomes is there really a duality here in Revelations?}. It also becomes the karmic explanation of the writer's of the Gospels karmic writings and gleanings from God {not Christ}, the explanation of Man's unloving treatment by Woman, and the karmic explanation for the Times we are in right now, The End of Times.
The fire sermon begins just after Hamlet's woman, Ophelia chants to every other woman "goodnight, ladies {line 172}." after losing her mind because Hamlet valiantly must pursue his father's killer instead of her love and even suspects her love for him. The fire sermon is about the possible truth of Albert's, Hamlet's, God's, Buddha's {who are collectively here represented as the Creator and potential rescuer through his woman's potential love and understanding}, suspicions of his woman's karmic love and fidelity under the negative karmic and psychological circumstances illustrated by the lack of loving exchanges between modern woman and her other lover {modern man in the preceding Chess game, the second section of The Waste Land, about Albert {Hamlet} and Albert's love's lover}. Albert sings "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME." Eliot here is insinuating, just like Hamlet, that Ophelia has been untrue and perhaps has another lover. Who knows with Ophelia as she commits suicide instead of standing by her man? "The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song{lines 173-176}." The first line summarizes the absolutely dire karmic and religious circumstances of loss of virginity of the woman of the river {God's woman or potential Goddess}, her fading karmic {everything is absolutely karmic or neurally instilled in our Universe}memory of her lover as she makes love to another man or woman, how her lover's {Buddha, Hamlet, Albert}voice crosses the land unheard, and all the women Ophelia chants to have also departed. The river still flows. The woman has completely and utterly failed her God. She is a chanting ghost. A nothing by her own lack of love and understanding and her own suicide in front of the other women.
"Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear{lines 185-86}." This is a poetic summary of the end of times, the entry into the biblical 'book of death' in Revelations and the karmic sarcastic chuckles of the modern masses in their negative, over-sexual, bored, cynical way about the Lord Buddha's {Hamlet's, Albert's} love's sexual betrayal of him. The end is coming, he "speaks not loud or long" as he introduces us to his fire sermon.
"A rat crept softly through the vegetation...Musing upon the king my brother's wreck...{Hamlet's uncle, the rat, musing on his murder of his brother, the king}...And on the king my father's death before him{Hamlet, the hero, musing on his father, the king's murder and murderer}White bodies naked on the low damp ground {Hamlet's woman making love to another man or woman} And bones cast in a little low dry garret {reference to the rolling of dice below Christ's cross just before the sun darkened}{lines 91-94}. The Judgment Day panorama is unfolded, the biblical "Harlot of Babylon" lies with her other lover, the rat, Hamlet's uncle, the king's murderer as the sun and Universe await darkening. This is a complex, symbolic verse. You have to realize that Hamlet thinks his Uncle, his father's murderer, is a rat and so does T. S Eliot. Again, in this poem, all of the male figures represent a single reincarnational future/past seeing, producing, writing, reading, interpreting, living God and all of the female figures represent His sexually betraying, unloving woman.
"But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney {Actaeon} to Mrs. Porter {Diana} in the spring{lines 196-98}." Actaeon saw the goddess of chastity in the nude, was turned into a stag and hunted to death. Eliot here is either hopeful that Actaeon{Hamlet, Buddha} will have his Diana or is fearful lest Actaeon see her naked and be hunted to his and the world's death. The horns and motors are the trumpets of the biblical book Revelations attempting to call her back to the Buddha before His soul is filled with universal destruction and perhaps a mindlessly triggered self-destruction because of His woman's infidelity. Another complex paratactic verse. Eliot feels that they shall be brought together in the spring, but who is to say what will ensue?
"O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water And O those children's voices singing in the dome{a reference to Parsifal's foot washing before entering the castle of the Grail {Christ's cup representing woman which he contemplated about in the garden of Gethsemane before six hours of pain on the cross}}. . Washing one's feet is a sign of purity and Mrs. Porter {Ophelia, Albert's cheating love} and her daughter in Eliot's opinion definitely are in need of purity. Another verse representing the Modernist duality of extremes and potential possibilities with this God-man and His woman.
"Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc'd Tereu {a reference to anightingale's song in Elizabethan poetry and Tereus who "rudely forc'd" Philomela. "Oh, 'tis the ravished nightingale./Jug, jug, jug, jug tereu! she cries{lines 203-05 and the footnote}.'" Here Eliot is describing the rude, loveless conversations of the men and women of the modern day and their rudely forced sexuality, almost akin to rape with permission, which they indulge in with a certain disdain. The Buddha's woman is among them and considers herself a part of them. Quite an apocalyptically dangerous situation for all of us.
"Unreal City {Babylon} Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole{lines 207-214}." Eliot is making a reference and comparison to the mystery cults of Phoenician and Syrian merchants and the modern wealth of a luxury hotel in London. Obviously Eliot has studied these mystery cults of spiritual, magical, Holy wisdom and sorcery and finds the cults the embodiment of the Buddha's bringing wealth, prosperity, absolute knowledge, and God's magical spirituality to the world and Universe. Also there is a reference to "Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn" in line 60-61 of The Burial of the Dead, the first section of the poem. After this quote Eliot writes about a crowd flowing over London Bridge {a reference to the symbolic bridge between salvation to life from death} and that he "had not thought death had undone so many." The earlier quote illustrates the karmic death of the people before the magical cult merchant arrives with spiritual and economic revitalization. Mr. Eugenides is another symbolic reference to the Man at the end of times who is the Buddha and God and who is struggling as God with his karmic machine, his woman with her lover, and attempting to bring God's peace and sustenance to the people of the world and Universe. It is an open invitation from God to the pleasures of God in his modern, potentially wealthy world.
Lines 215-48 describe Tiresias, man punished with blindness by a woman after he had experienced both male and female sex and had realized from direct experience that women experience far greater pleasure from sex than men. Women's nerves have, in this scientific day and, hopefully, age, been proven to be more mylenated {fat surrounding and strengthening the nerve and nerve impluses} than men's nerves making them more sensitive, less adaptive, and more strongly conductive sexually, emotionally, and more receptive mentally. Saturnalia {Juno} became disproportionately upset and condemned Tiresias to perpetual blindness, but almighty father, God, gave him the ability to know the future. Saturnalia is the period we all worship and celebrate as Christmas and New Year's Day and was the Roman time for high sexual activity, drinking of liqour, and festivity. Here Tiresias {Eliot} sees the biblical book of Revelations, the karmic, scientific truth of the physical nature of the Universal life machine, the God-Buddha writing himself or herself into everything, Revelations blaming everything on the Harlot of Babylon who says, "I sit as queen, I am no widow" and symbolizes it in prose and poetry in The Fire Sermon. "Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour {purple or violet being the occult color representing memory}, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the suns last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays{lines 219-27}" This is a truly complicated and subtly symbolic verse from Eliot. The "Old man" who sees the future and is sailing homeward on the sea of reincarnation, observes in his future, at the Judgment Day, a typist home at teatime who doesn't clear the breakfast dishes, but clears her breakfast {doesn't want or ignores the food of the dawn, her God's love}. Then she lights her stove {this is a reference to the bottomless pit of Revelations in the bible which burns like a furnace into which the Beast, Satan, or the Dragon {God?}is cast to put out the sun's fire by burning Himself to death, but here it is her stove. Eliot is setting her up as the potential male God's self-destructive authentic God}. Then she lays out food in tins {this is a reference to the final battle of Revelations where the armies are gathered together in one place for the final world-destroying great battle of God called Armageddon. The soldiers eat from tins. Babylon and the Harlot are burned in the conflagration. Here is God's woman or wife refusing God's advances, acting cold and indisposed towards him and setting up the world for self-destruction because, if she refuses God's advances knowledgeably, what is God's love worth, even to himself, no mentioning of what his or his wife's love is worth to the world. Utter, perilous disgrace for God.} Everything is sexual for her. She, after leaving her God and laying out the final military maneuvers of Armageddon on what is at night her bed with another or other lovers, piles all kinds of sexually alluring intimate garments with which to insight the wrath of her God upon her, earth, her kind, and her children in the Final Judgment of God against her atrocities against Him and Mankind. What a wonderful woman...
"I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest--I too awaited the expected guest. He the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a millionaire{lines 228-34}." Here, as said before, Tiresias {Eliot picturing the scenes in the Revelations of a future modern Judgment Day}, foretells the Godly accouterments of Judgment Day where God in Revelations judges the Great whore. The young, expected God arrives, a small house agent's {Christ's} clerk {has come prepared having also studied the accouterments of Judgment Day as written in religious and occult books of Holy knowledge}. Here is the Smyrna cult merchant who is implied to be as low to the women as the rest of mankind and who, with assurance, like the average man who thinks he is related to God the Father or at least thinks him to be the dominant being of the male/female duality we all live in and with, sits. Eliot is presenting the possibility that the woman may be the deceptive, pleasure-seeking self-destructive God and that all men are her dupes except but also, quite differently including the supposed God-Buddha.
"Endeavors to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired...His vanity requires no response, and makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit{lines 237-38 and 241-48}..." Here is your typical loveless sexual encounter, only this between God and His woman who He has created Himself. Again what is God's love worth?? And Tiresias says love between Man and Woman, since the dawn of time, has always been this way and will be this way even for God and His woman. And Tiresias has foresuffered it all.
"She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover: Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: "Well now that's done and I'm glad it's over." When a lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone{249-56}." I will here quote the footnote on the final four lines after the quotation marks: "Olivia, a character in Oliver Goldsmith's novel, sings the following song when she returns to the place where she was seduced: "When lovely woman stoops to folly / And finds too late that men betray / What charm can soothe the melancholy, / What art can wash her guilt away? / The only art her guilt to cover, / To hide shame from every eye, / To give repentance to her lover / And wring his bosom--is to die." Eliot is illustrating a woman's indifference to sex, her love of charm except when it is betrayed by sexual contact. Here Eliot has been offering us the possibilities inherent in the Revelation if God's woman gives in to him sexually with the inevitability of her own indifferent reaction to his love and lovemaking. The footnote reflects Goldsmith's and Eliot's insight into the average woman's psyche with regard to sexual indifference and fear of betrayal of charm at sexual contact. The rest of this poem, of course, states that she would make delirious love to anyone but her God-man and states bluntly that she could be the real God cheaply entertaining her vanities at everyone's expense. She would rather die than repent of her mistakes in front of her lover. Eliot takes it one step further than Goldsmith and states that a woman stoops to folly when she doesn't love or act loving to her partner particularly leading up to a similar exchange between the Buddha and herself.
Next we get a "momentary glimpse of a lost world {footnote lines 257-65}" of fishermen lounging, clatter and chatter, whining of a mandolin, "where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold." Here, in this hopeful rendering of the successful sexual encounter of God and His woman is the display of a happy and potentially wealthy world endowed with God's Holy splendor. This is a recognition from Eliot that this happiness is a lost world and though Tiresias sees the resultant more hopeful sexual exchange between the Buddha and His woman, it never occurred and has not been predicted in the Holy books Eliot has read. He is only stating that she won't even find it in her heart and soul to make love to the Buddha or God himself.
Now we go back into the actual, factual telling of the Revelation. "The river sweats Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar, The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenwich reach Past the Isle of Dogs. Weialala leia Wallala leialala {lines 266-78}" The barges {God and His woman} drift{apart} with the turning tide and they sweep past the Isle of Dogs {a symbolic reference to an earlier quote {lines 74-5} about Isis' dog digging up the cut up and spread about pieces of Osiris' Holy body which in Egyptian mythology represented the body of mankind similar to Christ's body's symbology. Only here Isis has even drifted past trying to dig up and rejoin Osiris' body.
"Elizabeth and Leicester Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers...Weialala leia Wallalala leialala" This is affronting to the preamble of the coming confrontation. Pleasure... Here the sexless virgin Elizabeth represents the Buddha's woman and Leicester represents the Buddha who his woman turns away as the rippling swells carry them downstream leaving the God or Buddha destitute as Leicester. And he as God is supposed to be wrathful and burn her, without taking to himself His absolute Universal Godly powers and forcing her indignity upon her own sorry soul in front of a tired, destitute, impatiently waiting world. Of course, there is still the possibility that this vain woman is the Real God and is setting up her own little love fest at the expense of all the rest of us.
"Trams and dusty trees Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me, By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe." Here the Woman of Buddha's dreams is supine on the bottom of a canoe. Here she is... Whatever she is...
"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised 'a new start.' I made no comment. What should I resent?" This is the woman making play at love with another man and dumping the Buddha's sovereign love. And yet he promises a new start. And Eliot {Tiresias} makes no comment.
"On Margate Sands Lean connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect NOTHING. La la"
Here my people expect nothing from Her, the Buddha's woman with the broken fingernails of karmically dirty hands. She states that her feet are in a dirty slum and her heart is under her spread legs. And what should the Buddha resent??? He speaks after all of this, "I can connect nothing with nothing." What is the Buddha's love worth? To His woman? To the Man-God? To anything? His people??? What is Her love worth to her?
"To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest burning"
And yet we still have a replica of love...the extinguishment of burning by the abused, absconded Buddha's Magic Hand...
But remember that there may not be a God. This Universe and planet may be some kind of painful, killing, negative karmic and negatively economic machine totally out of control and the Man illustrated in this poem as the Buddha or living God may well be not the victim of His woman, but a victim, as we all will be, of a self-producing, chaotic Nothing which produces automatically a world and Universe filled with anguish, negative karma, mindless, collective, lunatic consciousness and human beings who cannot and will not love. The woman acts, behaves, and is ambiguous. By her actions the self-produced Buddha or Buddha not produced by himself may well be cast into an unrecallable state of self annihilation which he either refuses to stop because of the loss of love or cannot stop because he is not self-produced and the Universe he has a central existence in is not self-produced. This, from what I know about God's Holy writings, is quite probable.
Of course the other modernist viewpoint would be that the Woman is God, has all of the power in the Universe, has been deceiving Her man or men and making them believe that they are the sole patriarch of the Universe, and that She is self-destructive, unloving, desires an orgy for her own pleasure ending in the utter and total destruction of the world by fire and brimstone {nuclear weapons...eventually}, and hasn't an iota of love in her heart for anything but Herself or Herselves. Knowing what I know about women and God's Holy writings this is also quite possible and probable.
Eliot's poem is a prayer to God or Buddha to put out the destructive, out of control karmic fusion fire of the Universe and bring his Shantih, peace, water, voidal powers before it is too late. It is the only karmic Hope.