What's That Corpse Still Doing Here?

Opinion: They couldn’t even wait until Ruth Bader Ginsburg was in her grave https://t.co/N4AHQPCdgk

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 21, 2020

Word is Trump may wait until after the funeral of Justice Ginsburg to announce her replacement.

Then again, he may not.  Well, nobody else did, why should he?

If you came this way, 

Taking any route, starting from anywhere,

At any time or at any season, 

It would always be the same: you would have to put off 

Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity 

Or carry report. You are here to kneel 

Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more 

Than an order of words, the conscious occupation

Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying. 

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, 

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. 

Here, the intersection of the timeless moment

Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, 

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. 

I remember those words on the stone marking Eliot's memorial in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.  It didn't seem that day that the words of the dead poet were tongued with fire for anyone; except me.  I noticed those words from "Little Gidding" for the first time, set apart as they were.  The communication of the dead is tongued with fire; but we have to listen for it.

There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: 

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment 

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference 

Which resembles the others as death resembles life, 

Being between two lives - unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:

For liberation - not less of love but expanding

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation 

From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country

Begins as an attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent. History may be servitude, 

History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, 

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, 

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. 

Sin is Behovely, but 

All shall be well, and

All manner of thing shall be well.

If I think, again, of this place,

And of people, not wholly commendable,

Of not immediate kin or kindness,

But of some peculiar genius,

All touched by a common genius,

United in the strife which divided them; 

If I think of a king at nightfall,

Of three men, and more, on the scaffold

And a few who died forgotten 

In other places, here and abroad, 

And of one who died blind and quiet, 

Why should we celebrate 

These dead men more than the dying?

It is not to ring the bell backward

Nor is it an incantation

To summon the spectre of a Rose.

We cannot revive old factions 

We cannot restore old policies

Or follow an antique drum.

These men, and those who opposed them

And those whom they opposed 

Accept the constitution of silence

And are folded in a single party. 

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate

We have taken from the defeated

What they had to leave us - a symbol: 

A symbol perfected in death. 

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

By the purification of the motive

In the ground of our beseeching.