Days end yesterday I read the poem Gerontion by T. S. Eliot. That was my second reading of the poem this week.  I was taken by Eliot’s words.  Scholarly analysts say Gerontion is one of his most enigmatic works.  There is much enigma in all of Eliot’s poems.

Yesterday afternoon I heard that Sergio Marchionne died at age 66.  He was the chairman of Fiat Chrysler.  Marchionne  rescued Chrysler from bankruptcy after taking the reins in 2009.  Now he is gone.

I am still around at 69

A full-out trade war has been initiated against close allies, Canada, Mexico, the EU and also against China.  “Tariffs are the greatest,” the President tweeted after announcing a 12 billion dollar one-time aid program for farmers to tide them over the loss of markets for an indefinite period into the future.

The breaking news reminded me of an email response owed to a friend.  In reply to a email that I sent critical of the administration, I was asked to be specific regarding my assertion that our President is a tyrant. The trade war is specific.

The Eliot poem Gerontion struck home, hard.  The title alone, meaning “Little Old Man” in Greek seemed addressed to me personally.

I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.

The lines refer to Leonidas, king of Sparta who turned back Persia, the super-power of the day that threatened to snuff out the Greek city states.  The battle took place at ithe narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC.  The Persian ruler was Xerxes, a tyrant by any definition of the word.

Another tyrant is now pressing at the hot gates.  Will he, can he and his mercenary party be turned back?

I am struck by the invocations throughout the poem to the reader to think.  Yet thinking itself is not sufficient.  Think now, think, think at last…..

Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What’s not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

The problem with reason is that reason is guided by one’s vanity.  Reason is not universal.  Reason is always contaminated by vanity.  There is no objective reason, unlaced with the prejudices of our assumptions.  Thinking gives into weak hands.  Yet, reason is what we have, all that we have…..

Neither fear nor courage saves us.

Awareness of surrounding events nationally and globally threatens the will to keep focused, to deal with my own quotient of life, personal and professional with resolve and purpose.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors..

I connect with the poems conclusion.  I am a solitary seagull, or a lone clipper ship at sea, running a difficult passage on a gale swept ocean.  The image of white feathers in the snow portend the gulls end.  And so it goes.

Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.

Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

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To read the full text of Gerontion CLICK HERE