Reading between the lines

So, we're talking guns and celebrity. That's right, an entire sentence of links. Let's give you the gist of it if you're not an avid external link clicker or as you otherwise might be referred to, anyone who has ever browsed the internet. Let's begin with celebrity. What the hell do we do with Holmes? I've seen numerous articles trying to suss out just how we should treat the killer. The main question seems to be whether we should pay attention to him at all, if we're not giving him exactly what he wanted and inspiring other copy cat murders. Maybe.

Here's why they are doing it though, human nature, money. I'm more interested in Holmes than the victims because I can imagine being a victim. I can't imagine being Holmes. So I, and I think a whole hell of a lot of other people, are trying to figure out just what drives a person to do something that morally and spiritually reprehensible. In short, that f-cked up. We can't fathom it. And we want to fathom it. We want to understand something so foreign. At least I do. I don't know if it's for some great reason, as though understanding the motives or mindset would allow me or anyone else to stop something from happening in the future. I think it's just a deep fascination with the human psyche, one that should theoretically be like my own, but is apparently radically different.

This is all largely immaterial though, a perversion in and of itself, an exercise of the mind, the sort we resort to after tragedy rather than the exercise of the heart or the soul or the consciousness if you must that the victims families are embarking on. It's too late in the hour I know. I should protest the use of guns, or decry people trying to take away our freedoms. I should blame the media for covering it, or accuse them of trying to cover things up. In Afghanistan we use drone missile strikes to root out terrorists and sometimes miss and kill villagers. I don't want anyone to have guns or missiles or nuclear weapons, but we do. I want everyone to be relatively well adjusted and to live out to the proper end of their days, but we don't.

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

      A penny for the Old Guy

      I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

      II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

      III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

      IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

      V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.