Word games people play, now
Joe South said it pretty well then: Oh, the games people play now/Every night and every day now/Never meaning what they say now/Never saying what they mean. Eliot found words for the way words don't want to be found: Words strain/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden/Under the tension, slip, slide, perish/Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,/Will not stay still. I listened to South as a boy. My parents had cool LPs. I found Eliot as an undergrad. I love those lines from Burnt Norton. The poet uses perish and decay to talk about words! As if they were alive. And that word still that ends the line, what connection is there to the plea in Ash Wednesday to teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still .? (Perish. St. Francis Parish. Larry Parrish. Parrish played for the Expos before the parish had perished, and before the Expos had, too. Perish/Parish/Parrish the thought. Anyways.) I was considering these and other things yesterday a...