Tonight's poem is T.S. Eliot, because I've just read a piece on concentration and distraction that quotes him. I worry about that sometimes. There are mornings when skimming and scanning becomes so compulsive that it makes my regular anxiety bubble up (like the frozen beer in our kitchen) and explode. My interest in an article wanes long before it should. One of the books on this phenomenon/moral panic that the author cites is Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson. I'll get it so that I can prohibit my students from surfing in class.

Burnt Norton, T.S. Eliot - extract
III
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy.
Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

First,
eructation:a burp! Nice.
tumid: adjective 1 (of a part of the body) swollen or bulging. 2 (of language) pompous or bombastic.
Oxford Dictionary

I'm not even one of the people Eliot was talking about (although, I supposed I really am...) and I feel ashamed of my

Monday

Depression ain't no picnic. The production of this and other 'no shit!' insights keep me from falling into a stultifying stupor, although last night I stared at the ceiling unable to move in a mini-version of the catatonic paralysis states I used to get into (for fun, in a weird, anxiety-releasing, akin-to-cutting way) in my early 20s.

Depression isn't now nor has it ever been singular and exotic. Even your doctor will refer to 'garden variety' depression, a tag that I feel should only be applied to snails.

POEM: Sylvia Plath's Mirror.

Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful-

The eye of the little god, four cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Having now reached my 30s, I see that the terrible fish might be lurking. Fuck that fish! I'll eat it before it eats me. Not having prolific beauty to lose, I'm perhaps less scared of the old woman than Plath was.

The words 'in me she has drowned a young girl'...reaching this age allows me to feel the irony of them. Just as Plath realises that she has spent too long searching the mirror and condemning the person she finds there, who is now dead and gone, I realise this too.

So: you've drowned (i.e. killed) the innocent, non-self-loathing you that perhaps once existed. It's a tragedy because killing young girls is wrong, especially if there's no clear motive. It's also banal - but does that make it less of a tragedy? If evil can be banal, can tragedy also?