gratuitous east coker: wanna know what i'm doing?

want to know what i am doing... right now, this very minute?

this:

addendum:  mdvip go-to-guy added clonazepam to my drug arsenal but it's too soon to say whether it's helping. yesterday (sunday) was the first full dose day.  due to constant clinching/declenching, my hips are sources of agony, and my knees, totally unreliable, and reluctant to bend. hard as it is for *me* to understand, i cannot expect for you to get it... but the cries and curses are a surprise -- the pain, a shock.

note that even dear dobby and dim buddy no longer respond to my whimpers. why should they? do i whine and give them a treat?  no.  do i yelp and offer a wunnerful wunnerful ear scratch?  no.  in all terms of feline / human interchange, i am a big nada zero zilch, the big nil.




So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt 
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment 
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.