started machine, can’t
stop it, someone else runs it
yet I started it
Adapted from the play, The Cocktail Party (1950) by one Thomas Stearns Eliot, better known by his initials of T. S.
In the play, the character named Lavinia says:
I don’t know why. But it seems to me that yesterday
I started some machine, that goes on working,
And I cannot stop it; no, it’s not like a machine—
Or if it’s a machine, someone else is running it.
But who? Somebody is always interfering . . .
I don’t feel free . . . and yet I started it . .
What is going on?
The pace of each week seems to pick up faster and faster and its Friday when last night was Friday night when we went out for dinner but it wasn’t last night, it was a week ago.
Somewhere someone said years fly, days crawl.
This machine is running and running faster and I started it.
But when did I start it?
I am reminded of a scene in a Jim Harrison book where the hero, now in his 70s finds his journals written in his 20’s.
Our hero reads them, saying to himself, “My God, what will the fool do next.”
No Haiku For You 