I have no idea what to write.  What do I/you want?  (Che Vuoí?) That is the question.  Do I know?  Does anyone know?  Usually I do not think about it.  When I do, I realize how unsure I actually am, how torn, how tossed about by a confusion of inner voices.

I offer a passage from the Little Gidding poem by T. S. Eliot that I’d like to think about.  The individual speaking within the poem has an extended conversation with him/herself.  The conversation is an attempt at introspection.  The look back forms a summation of a life lived to the full.  Unable to sleep the speaker walks the streets alone in the dead of night thinking.  Then as in a dream-vision someone appears walking alongside, a person who might be an old teacher.  This conversation ensues between the speaker and the ghostly apparition.  This scene is a spoken exchange taking place between the world of the living and that of the dead:

Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves

…In concord at this intersection time
Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
I said: ‘The wonder that I feel is easy,
Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:

So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
Second, the conscious impotence of rage
At human folly, and the laceration
Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.
And last, the rending pain of re-enactment
Of all that you have done, and been; the shame
Of motives late revealed, and the awareness
Of things ill done and done to others’ harm
Which once you took for exercise of virtue.
Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains.
From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit
Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
The day was breaking. In the disfigured street
He left me, with a kind of valediction,
And faded on the blowing of the horn.

Upon pausing to consider “what do I want?” the three points conveyed by the ghostly, yet familiar stranger strike home.  First, there is the daily awareness of the wrack of the passage of time, the toll taken by age on youth, on my quotient of energy on the idealism projected toward the future.  Aging is bitter.

Second there is the sardonic sense of humor, my helpless rage against the machinations of a capitalist system, the politicos who are marionettes of Jeff Bezos, of Zuckerberg, of Dorsey.  Given the rules of the game, we cannot get out of our own way.  I am no longer amused.

Finally and painfully personal, how much of my past would I change if I could?  And if I had to re-enact it all over again, could things be any different?  How self righteous, how determined I was at that time to be virtuous…

The conclusion is the aspiration of the ghostly speaker’s spoken conditional:

unless restored by that refining fire
Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’

There is no doubt in my mind, this is what all of us want at some level:  able to move in perfect proportion ‘like a dancer,’ in our thinking, in all of the movements of our living.

To enjoy Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot, CLICK HERE.

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What tune, a song to get us through the day !   Walk of Life by Dire Straits.

And after all the violence and double talk
There’s just a song in all the trouble and the strife

… He got the action, he got the motion
Yeah, the boy can play

Walk Of Life

By Dire Straits

Here comes Johnny singing oldies, goldies
Be-Bop-A-Lula, Baby What I Say
Here comes Johnny singing I Gotta Woman
Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay

He got the action, he got the motion
Yeah, the boy can play
Dedication, devotion
Turning all the night time into the day

He do the song about the sweet lovin’ woman
He do the song about the knife
He do the walk, he do the walk of life
Yeah, he do the walk of life

Here comes Johnny and he’ll tell you the story
Hand me down my walkin’ shoes
Here comes Johnny with the power and the glory
Backbeat the talkin’ blues

He got the action, he got the motion
Yeah, the boy can play
Dedication, devotion
Turning all the night time into the day

He do the song about the sweet lovin’ woman
He do the song about the knife
He do the walk, he do the walk of life
Yeah, he do the walk of life

Here comes Johnny singing oldies, goldies
Be-Bop-A-Lula, Baby What I Say
Here comes Johnny singing I Gotta Woman
Down in the tunnels, trying to make it pay

He got the action, he got the motion
Yeah, the boy can play
Dedication, devotion
Turning all the night time into the day

And after all the violence and double talk
There’s just a song in all the trouble and the strife
You do the walk, yeah, you do the walk of life
Mmm, you do the walk of life

Lyrics by Mark Knopfler