In a desperate ploy to ramp up my procrastination skills, I've recently become somewhat addicted to Pinterest. This morning as I skimmed the page of new pins, I had to scroll back up ~ I swear, I thought I had glimpsed a photo of my sixteen-year-old self.
She's actually an Italian actress named Asia Argento.
Think boarding school student lounging on floor, smoking a cigarette (contraband, of course), and listening to Abbey Road before settling in to write a paper on The Wasteland.
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As our advanced English class rolled toward the end of the school year, our teacher asked us what we would like to study. It was a girl from Maine with waist-length red hair who weighed in with her vote for T.S. Eliot.
Different portions of that lengthy poem have called to me as the years have passed. I've just glanced at it and I see that now almost every single line mirrors something of the recent past. This morning it's the titles of the five sections that catch my attention:
I. The Burial of the Dead
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death By Water
V. What the Thunder Said
II. A Game of Chess
III. The Fire Sermon
IV. Death By Water
V. What the Thunder Said
It's because of Eliot that I took a course on Dante in college, and so I suppose that it's because of Marjorie with the red hair that I so often interpret my life through their words.
Anyway ~the photo really does reflect the girl I was when I started reading poetry seriously.
I think of Eliot a lot, especially the center that does not hold.
ReplyDeleteLove this post.
I'll do field ed this fall at the hospital, and part of that will be research, but there's a part of me that wishes the research could be creating a chaplaincy anthology of literature. (Maybe that will be a personal project.)
(YEATS!! Sorry, it's Yeats. I don't know why I insist in mixing them up.)
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