Senator Rand Paul’s often may misapply poetry, but the poems he chooses tell us a lot about Rand Paul.
Between the motion and the act of my tennis game falls the shadow. Translation: too much thinking.
Posted in Eliot (T.S.), Robinson (Edward Arlington), Shakespeare (William) | Also tagged "Hollow Men", "Minniver Cheevy", E. A. Robinson, Hamlet, Marshall McLuhan, Sports, tennis, William Gladwell, William Shakespeare |
If we look at a drought through God’s eyes, Rumi tells us, we will see green corn. The same holds for relationships.
Obama’s youthful love letters see him moving seamlessly between great ideas with sexual desire.
Newt Gingrich reminds me of “the young man carbuncular” in “The Wasteland,” “one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
Spirit may seem less accessible after Christmas is over, Auden tells us, but that means we should focus all the more on seeking it out.
Should we dismiss all the rhetoric coming from the Republican presidential candidates as the gryphon in “Alice in Wonderland” dismisses the “off with their heads” commands of the Queen of Hearts?
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Posted in Eliot (T.S.), Euripides, Johnson (Samuel), Sophocles, Yeats (William Butler) | Also tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, Sophocles, Wasteland |
Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot’s well-known conclusion to “The Hollow Men” (read the poem here) came to mind after watching the Butler Bulldogs lose to the Connecticut Huskies 53-41.The game was so bad that it takes a masterpiece of modernist despair to do it justice.
Spiritual Sunday Although Epiphany is January 6, today is Epiphany Sunday. Epiphany is when Christians celebrate the entry into the world of the radical new idea that love is more powerful than death. To call the idea counterintuitive is a spectacular understatement. Our impulse to yield to fear is so overwhelming that we need constant [...]
Spiritual Sunday In a follow-up to yesterday’s post on football quarterback Michael Vick, I want to elaborate further on Coleridge’s argument for penance. Penance is not only the right thing to do. It also can make you feel very, very good. Coleridge gives us images in Rime of the Ancient Mariner that drive this point [...]
Sports Saturday Mistah Steinbrenner—he dead. So I imagine T. S. Eliot announcing the death of the legendary Yankee owner this past week. That’s because, if one goes by Eliot’s famous 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” one could not say that “the Boss” was “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” In fact, an [...]
On Monday I talked about how Silko says that, if we are to end our destructive (and ultimately self-destructive) assaults upon the earth, we must come into spiritual alignment with it. I’m aware that appealing to Native American religions is sure to draw jeers from certain sectors of the political right, especially the Rush Limbaughs [...]
Today is the Christian Feast of the Epiphany, the day celebrating the three wise men from the east visiting the infant Jesus with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Symbolically, this captures the world’s old wisdom systems acknowledging the new dispensation of love and renewal represented by God entering the world and taking human form, [...]
Yesterday independent filmmaker Sally Heckel visited St. Mary’s and showed us her most recent film, Unspeakable. Sally is most known for Jury of Her Peers, which was an Oscar nominee in the dramatic live-action short category. As powerful as Jury of Her Peers is, I like Unspeakable even better. The film is about the suicide of her [...]
This is the first of a series of posts I will be writing on literature and pain. There are a couple of reasons why I write about this now. First, in last night’s salon in honor of my cancer-stricken friend Alan Paskow, we discussed the introduction to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making [...]
