Friday, May 20, 2005

BusterStronghart@Gmail.com


.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

4. Rhapsody on a Windy Night


TWELVE o’clock.

Along the reaches of the street

Held in a lunar synthesis,

Whispering lunar incantations

Dissolve the floors of memory
5
And all its clear relations

Its divisions and precisions,

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drum,

And through the spaces of the dark
10
Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.


Half-past one,

The street-lamp sputtered,

The street-lamp muttered,
15
The street-lamp said, “Regard that woman

Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door

Which opens on her like a grin.

You see the border of her dress

Is torn and stained with sand,
20
And you see the corner of her eye

Twists like a crooked pin.”


The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things;

A twisted branch upon the beach
25
Eaten smooth, and polished

As if the world gave up

The secret of its skeleton,

Stiff and white.

A broken spring in a factory yard,
30
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left

Hard and curled and ready to snap.


Half-past two,

The street-lamp said,

“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
35
Slips out its tongue

And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”

So the hand of the child, automatic,

Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.

I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
40
I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

An old crab with barnacles on his back,

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
45

Half-past three,

The lamp sputtered,

The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:

“Regard the moon,
50
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,

She winks a feeble eye,

She smiles into corners.

She smooths the hair of the grass.

The moon has lost her memory.
55
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,

Her hand twists a paper rose,

That smells of dust and eau de Cologne,

She is alone

With all the old nocturnal smells
60
That cross and cross across her brain.”

The reminiscence comes

Of sunless dry geraniums

And dust in crevices,

Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
65
And female smells in shuttered rooms,

And cigarettes in corridors

And cocktail smells in bars.


The lamp said,

“Four o’clock,
70
Here is the number on the door.

Memory!

You have the key,

The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.

Mount.
75
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,

Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”


The last twist of the knife.
BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

"people are dying because of a belief in an imaginary God.
Sam Harris.org
"
...The end of faith, religion, error--and the beginning of reason."

Stem cells; Blastocyst. 150 cells in a spheroid shape. The brain of a fly has 100,000 cells.
Sam Harris.org

You are trumping the needs of a little girl with diabetes, a total burn victim, a parkinsons victim, an alzheimer's patient when you deny the use of stem cells for reserach.
Sam harris.org

Dogma can be secular too--Stalinism, Naziism, Polpot, --political religions. When mass murder of innocent non-combatants occurs ask yourself what the motive might be. What do the murderers believe. Always it will preposterous.

SamHarris.org

We shouldn't close the door on belief until all the possibilities have been exhausted.