Obituary: Dr Murray Cox - People - News - The Independent

RePost: Obituary: Dr Murray Cox - People - News - The Independent
                            Dr. Murray Newell Cox died 28 June 1997.
....I have met people who walk off the edge of language - and then they DO THINGS."
They point to the astonishing simplicity at the heart of Cox's practice: he listened, took patients at their word, and really noticed what they said - not just in words, but in emphasis, expression and gesture. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his respect for the dignity of patients who had been doubly written off as "mad and bad". He risked disappointment again and again and had said once about his Broadmoor work:                       

                                      "There is nobody I can't have hope about"...


If that was the simplicity, the complexity of what he brought to bear on his therapy was dazzling. He was superbly well-read in his own field and many others, had intensive friendships with a wide range of people, loved music, and was a Christian who knew much of the Bible by heart and had a profound, well- considered theology.
The most striking of his therapeutic resources was Shakespeare. Not that he just "used" Shakespeare. Rather he revelled in those dramas, knew large parts of them by heart, lectured on them and savoured their "paraclinical precision" about the sorts of extremes of evil, madness, horror and death with which he dealt daily. He was an honorary research fellow of The Shakespeare Institute in Birmingham University, and from 1989 an adviser to the Royal Shakespeare Company.
With the director Mark Rylance, he began an extraordinary tradition of having RSC productions performed in Broadmoor, and later edited Shake- speare Comes to Broadmoor (1992), describing the effects on patients, staff and actors...

Among the last things he wrote was an article called "A Good Enough God? Some Psychology-Theology Crossing Places", and when he died he was working on a collaborative book on "the secret self" in theology, psychology and psychotherapy.

"What seest thou else?" was a favourite quotation, and he excelled at seeing more, deeper, wider, from new angles...co-author of two books on therapy, Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy (1987) and Shakespeare as Prompter (1994)...  ===============
Thank you, Dr. Cox, for enriching my life when I was at my worst and lowest. May you rest in peace.

PTSD Awareness Day

Today is National PTSD Awareness Day; an auspicious day to share with you some truths about posttraumatic stress disorder that you don’t yet seem to fully grasp. Even after 9/11 and our decade-plus war, there’s still often confusion about what causes PTSD, how many of us suffer with it and some other very salient points about coping and recovery...
Heal My PTSD blog

Outposts

It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.  Sally Kempton, Esquire, 1970

"If I were you I should not worry with de Caussade and his ilk. Most books of that sort are written by and for religious (monks and nuns), and once they have made a clean break from their family and the world, they have not got the same kind of troubles that we have. It is much easier to be "abandoned" when you are not tied up and twisted and rooted into those you love; and if you are a married woman with a family, you must love your family and you must mind what happens, and whether you can pay the rent, and whether there is anything in the larder, and so on. Your sanctity comes from putting your trust in God for yourself and your family, and you are not expected (by God) to be indifferent to those whom He has given to you to be loved by you! If you try to apply (as many do) ideas which even in a monastery are difficult to practice, to life in the world, it will end in depression.

It's not wrong to worry or fear, but it is wrong not to accept worry and fear if they are your personal cross. Only hand out the worry and fear to Our Lord; ask Him to bear it with you."   --Caryll Houselander, Letters

                      

"No greater love has any man than this that he lay down his life for his friend."

Jean Pierre de Caussade, in case you are not aware of him, was an 18th century French Jesuit who for a time was spiritual director to a congregation of nuns, and wrote (for them, I assume) Abandonment to Divine Providence.

                         "The Sabbath was made for man not man for the Sabbath." -Jesus

Making of a perfect victim

     It's hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.  Sally Kempton, Esquire, 1970 
"A child comes into the world with no preconceived ideas about how to go on.  They might come with their own energy levels, little quirks, or a tiny personality but for the most part they don't know what to expect from this world.  Caregivers are in a position of establishing life long habits and expectations.  Hundreds of articles tell parents how formative and powerful their influence is during the first 5 years of life. A toddler screams when it is hurt, cries when frustrated, uses anger to get their way.  Punish a toddler for screaming when hurt, spank a child that cries, and punish their anger and above all else do not give them what they need or want.  To really finish the job, tell them it is because you love them that you did this.  As a child grows use selected and out of context scripture to back up twisted behavior.

 The Mill Stone
Soon the lectures, berating, and twisted thinking takes up an outpost in the child's head.  Once there, the caregiver is free to do almost anything they want with out retaliation because the child believes they deserve it.  A child is hurt; they hide their shameful reaction; a child is frustrated; they blame themselves for being stupid; they no longer believe they will get what they need and what they want is no longer considered. 

I tried a group counseling situation shortly after starting counseling.  One of the sessions they were trying to get us to try different things and realize how outside influences can confuse us.  My turn came and they blind folded me then asked me to walk across the room with chairs placed in my way.  I could only hear the instructions called out by my friend.  I was stressed to the max.  I hate being blind folded.  I am partially deaf.  Fear of falling and really getting hurt had me nearly out of my skin with anxiety.  Then one of the leaders of the group stood in my way.  She kept standing in front of me giving me counter instructions.  First I froze, not being able to sort out what I was supposed to do.  The leader taunted me.  I finally grabbed her and shoved her out of the way to finish the task.  The group leader than chastised me for my violence.  I didn't say it, but I thought, "Bitch, you are lucky I didn't put you in the hospital and traumatized all the other women all over again." I complained bitterly to KavinCoach at the next session.  He asked me, "Why didn't you take off the blindfold and say you can't do this?"

He may as well have grown two heads.  What he proposed was so outlandish to me that I would never consider not doing what I was told to do.  I was indeed a perfect victim.  Easily manipulated and twisted as the other person desired.  I could not convey to KavinCoach how completely I didn't consider that as an option.  I brooded about it for a week until the next session with KavinCoach.  I finally came up with an answer for him.  "I would no more think of quitting than you would think to strip naked right now and run down the street for two miles."  He stared at me to process what I said.  His answer, "You are right I wouldn't even think of that."

Ten years of counseling and still my greatest enemy is still inside my head.  If a computer has faulty program, I can rewrite the hard drive.  If a person has faulty thinking, first they must unlearn the false, then relearn the truth.  I needed to realize that the twisting of scriptures was done by taking things out of context and distorting meanings.  I needed to accept that my childhood wasn't the ideal that I believed at one time that it was.  I totally restructured my thinking.  I am a work in progress and continue to struggle with believing in myself and destroying the enemy outposts in my head.   

I mulled that over for a couple of days and then I watched the documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone (directed by Marc Wiese). The story is all there, and amplified (there were parts I couldn't watch).
But to me the most haunting segment occurred at the end, as Shin reflected on his life of "freedom" in South Korea:
When it comes to my body, I live in South Korea, but in my mind I still live in the camp. I still feel I haven't quite managed to leave the camp for good. I would like to return to North Korea, my home. If it wouldn't be a labor camp any longer, I would like to live in the home where I was born. I want to farm there and live of the fruits of my own labor. Even if I would have to grow corn. [Prisoners at Camp 14 ate cabbage soup and corn three meals a day, seven days a week]. If the border to North Korea ever opens up, I want to be the first to travel back there. I want to live in the camp where I was born.

When I lived in the labor camp, I had to suffer a lot of pain. I had to go hungry and put up with beatings and punishment because I didn't do my work well enough. But in South Korea you have to suffer when you don't have enough money. It's exhausting. It's all about money. That makes it tough for me here. When I think about it, I rarely saw someone committing suicide in the camp. Life was hard and you were an inmate your whole life. But in South Korea many people attempt suicide. They die. It may look like the people here don't want for anything. They have clothes and food. But there are more people committing suicide here than in the camp. There are news reports about that every day.
Interviewer: What do you miss of the life in North Korea?
[Shin gets out a phone and starts tapping. Looking down at the screen--]
I miss the innocence and the lack of concerns I had. In the camp where I lived I had a pure heart. I did not have to think about anything. I didn't have to think about the power of money like I do in South Korea. Though I don't miss everything from that camp, I miss the purity of my heart.
I don't know how else to say it. I miss my innocent heart."

~Ruth, We Are One

=============

"I lived in the camps my whole life. That is what my family life was--the camps.  Degradation, abuse, lying and weeping...weeping...The outer scars, like these(he showed me.), heal but not the inner ones.  I don't always know about the inner scars until they bleed."   ~Jesse

Savagery and Brutality

                                          "...he never even saw Lazarus..."
         "There is no city of the well as opposed to a city of the ill, we all live in one and the same city."
                    -William Lynch, Images of Hope

In this 'age of savage inequalities' and even greater brutalities, society, especially the Church, must shake itself loose from its demonic shackles of indifference and indecency to address the terrible pain of massacred souls. 

                  O Church, Mother of Souls, embrace and love your lost children!

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must, in yet longer light's delay.    –Fr. Hopkins

In this Agonising Heart alone..there is hope…

...”to dispel the dark clouds of mental sorrows and of external sufferings from the hearts of many of the Faithful, by leading them to find their consolation in consoling others, in converting the dying, in promoting the salvation of souls exposed to the greatest dangers.’

   The ‘Spirit of the Lord Himself, which raises us to Heaven by resignation and prayer, and brings us back to earth by self-devotion and compassion. …How many hearts are in agony all through their life!  

They ought to be all the more ready to console their fellow-sufferers, and to succour the dying in their perilous agony…This Divine Sympathy for all human woe is an inexhaustible source of consolation for all sufferers,…This is to ‘be full of zeal for…the Agonising Heart of Jesus, for the consolation of the afflicted and the conversion of the dying…’

The story, The Streetsweeper, loosely based on a true story, starts out as an interesting tale of intersecting lives...

“Sing to God, sing praises to His name; Lift up a song for Him who rides through the deserts, Whose name is the LORD, and exult before Him. A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows, Is God in His holy habitation.” -Psalm 68:4-5 

Please, pray

Please pray for the peace of the soul of Joel Trevino who just died and for his family he has left behind, especially the two boys.
=================


                 To death and night and all that draws a line
                 In time – what ties to stone our names
                And dates – what pulls at earth with rusty cry
                And rips the frozen hinges off the sky.    ~Job, Korrektiv

Joel, dear shooting star, shot across the blue sky above the pines on his day, pulled from earth with ‘rusty cry’.  He ‘rips the frozen hinges off the sky.’   

Another friend of the unloved and loveless he taught himself to play and sing about warming frozen hearts and souls--something he did all the time.

 

I will not be posting for awhile.

A 'vicious double bind': Updated

Reflecting on ‘No Comfort Zone’....and ...'the Betrayal Bond'...and 'Hope'

                                        Stay In Touch

 I noticed that the Finger of God in the painting is reaching out to the finger of the hand below the fractured crack in the wall.  Did you?   [The painting was removed.]

Both the body and the spirit of man are constantly reaching out for a sense of touch, so much so that the consequences become serious wherever there is any extraordinary frustration of this drive.  To be in a foreign country without friends, to be alone for a long time in a deep fog, or to be in a fogbound plane that is trying unsuccessfully to contact the hidden earth below---these are passing hints of the terror of being out of touch.  It is not the sick alone who are out of touch, but all of us.  

And now we know, more clinically and in greater detail, to what degree men can and cannot tolerate deprivation of actuality.  We can put deep gloves on a man [..the Rabbit lost his gloves and his fan…Alice put on one of the gloves and almost shrunk to ‘disappearing’!...down the Rabbit-Hole..], cover his eyes […blinders…], close his ears, separate him from events, and introduce scheduled monotony; the psychic results of all this will often be extreme, to the point of creating hallucination in the victim.  He cannot do without the touch of reality […’Divine Spark’…], and when he is this much separated from it, he must do something desperate.  Through hallucination, he creates a substitute world that he calls reality.

   We may conjecture that, in all those situations of illness where human beings hopelessly thrash about within structures of endlessness, they are seeking that sense of contact without which there is desperation.  But the methods of search are always indirect, and intensify the hopelessness.  They handle the present by living in a past that screens the present; they try to heal the terrible image of the self by seeking approval in a thousand places but cannot give it to themselves; they cannot find any beginning or end to their circles of action.  It is a thrashing in a vacuum where nothing is touched.⁷  The important thing is that all these endless processes, whatever their concrete or clinical form, create helplessness, partial or total.

   I propose that the sick person is really helpless, and that there is nothing more human than to be helpless.  He is helpless.  For he is operating within his own fractured, closed system of fantasy and feeling, unable, as a result, even to see or to imagine what is on the outside.  He needs another’s imagination that will begin to work with his own, and then the two can do it together.  He must put on another’s imagination in order to rediscover his own.

   Being helpless, being unable, that is, to help himself, he suddenly finds himself confronted, at so critical a moment, with a culture, and sometimes a medical situation, which tells him that he must help himself, that the help must come from within.  It was bad enough that he be told that hope needs the help from the outside world.  Now the final blow falls: he is told that even the help must come from within.

This is what a Japanese analyst looking at our culture from the inside and the outside calls a “vicious double bind.”  The entrapment of the double bind will become clearer….but our present example is classical: you who need help....       p.78       ~William Lynch, Images of Hope

...from another, it asserts, must help yourself---“…the philosophy of self-help, as it is understood today,” says Dr. L. Takeo Doi, “is entirely a Western product.”

          I believe that the idea of self-help or the intrinsic autonomy of a

          person gradually became popular in western Europe during the

          early Renaissance.  One may perhaps associate the development

          of this idea with the saying, “God helps those who help themselves,”

          which seems to have become popular by the seventeenth century.

          It was used by Algernon Sydney, in his political essay, Discourses

          Concerning Government, written around 1680, and a similar saying

          appears in George Herbert’s Outlandish Proverbs, first published

          in 1640.   

                    Interestingly enough, this saying in another form can be

          found in old Greek authors, but NOT in authentic Judeo-Christian
         literature, including the Bible.  One might well argue, then, that the

          “God” of “God helps those who help themselves,” who does not

           take the initiative in helping people, but only waits for them to

           help themselves, is NOT the Judeo-Christian God.  Incidentally, such

           an interpretation is quite possible from Sydney’s book, since he uses

           the saying primarily to point to the grim, skeptical, almost cruel reality of the

           hostile world, and scarcely a helping God.  Such a God can easily be

           dispensed with, because He cannot be depended upon, and what

           counts, after all, is whether one helps oneself or not.⁹

                                        .......................
 Added:
The rich and the happy can choose to keep silent, 
no need to bid for attention. 
But the desperate must reveal themselves, must say: 
I am blind or: I am going blind or: 
It's not good for me here on Earth or: 
My child is sick or: 
I am not holding it together... 
But when is that really enough? 
So, lest people pass them by like objects, sometimes they sing. 
 And sometimes their songs are beautiful. ~Rilke, Book of Images
===
'But what can I do?' he said.

"Shudder.
But what can you do, in the face of such horror? The answer, obviously, is: take a stand."
--------
"Love one another AS I HAVE LOVED YOU."  -Jesus

Patience Mason's PTSD Blog: What PTSD is by Myke Cole

Patience Mason's PTSD Blog: What PTSD is by Myke Cole
Excerpt:
picked that apart with some friends for an hour. I’m not saying that there aren’t people out there for whom PTSD is like that, but it sure as hell wasn’t like that for any of us. As I thought about that spot, as I con­sid­ered the mounting reports of sui­cides, home­less vets, col­lapsing fam­i­lies, I began to get the uneasy feeling that PTSD is a lot like autism: A thing iden­ti­fied, but poorly under­stood. I read about the sup­posed symp­toms, the height­ened alert­ness, the re-experiencing of spe­cific trauma, the going numb. It was all true. Up to a point.
When James Lowder invited me to write an essay for BEYOND THE WALL, we started brain­storming what it would be about. After a few rounds of back and forth, I real­ized that I wanted to write about PTSD, and how I saw it man­i­festing in fan­tasy char­ac­ters. I used the Cooper Color System, talked about how living in the per­petual state of readi­ness known as “Con­di­tion Yellow,” both enfran­chised and hurt people. Con­stant vig­i­lance has its uses, but it is exhausting and, over time, transforming.
After the book was pub­lished I real­ized that I hadn’t gotten close enough to the issue. Arya Stark and Theon Greyjoy aren’t real people, and so addressing their PTSD was tack­ling the issue at a safe remove. It was a toe in the water. It wasn’t good enough.
Because the truth is, I’ve never heard anyone, med­ical pro­fes­sional, spir­i­tual leader or oth­er­wise describe the PTSD I know. What I see are people embracing a def­i­n­i­tion that explains PTSD using the vocab­u­lary of clas­sical pathology. It implies that, like a dis­ease, you can pre­scribe a course of treat­ment and fix it.
But, in my expe­ri­ence, PTSD doesn’t get fixed. That’s because it was never about get­ting shot at, or seeing people die. It was never the snap trauma, the quick moment of action that breaks a person. PTSD is the wages of a life spent in crisis, the slow, the­matic build that grad­u­ally changes the way the suf­ferer sees the world. You get boiled by heating the water one degree each hour. By the time you finally suc­cumb, you realize you had no idea it was get­ting hotter.
Because you kept adjusting.
Because PTSD isn’t a dis­ease, it’s a world view.
War, dis­aster response, police work, these things force a person to live in the spaces where trauma hap­pens, to spend most of their time there, until that world becomes yours, seeps through your skin and runs in your blood. Most of us in indus­tri­al­ized western soci­eties live with feeling that we are safe, that our lives are sin­gular, mean­ingful, that we are loved, that we matter. We know intel­lec­tu­ally that this may not be the case, but we don’t feel it.
PTSD is what hap­pens when all that is stripped away. It is the cur­tain pulled back, the deep and the­matic real­iza­tion that life is fun­gible, that death is capri­cious and sudden. That anyone’s life can be snuffed out or worse, ruined, in the space of a few sec­onds. It is the shaking real­iza­tion that love cannot pro­tect you, and even worse, that you cannot pro­tect those you love. It is the final sur­ren­dering of the myth that, if you are decent enough, eth­ical enough, skilled enough, you’ll be spared. The war­riors that the media ascribes so much power are the first to truly know pow­er­less­ness...

Tell it slant--till it kind

O Surprise!

Never believed I would chase a peacock,

—Of all things—loud harbinger strutting stock

Beyond cages crowning ancient greening arches

Disdainer of dragon’s defeat under peeling larches.

Pour this oil, mercy kind, draped in tears—he cries

From his ‘galaxy of gazing, haloed suns’—O surprise!

[...]                       7/25/12

3 Caráfes Poured                    

    And in the sun all morning binds the sheaves,

   Then here, at noon, comes back his stores to use;   

    Here will I sit and wait,

  While to my ear from uplands far away

   The bleating of the folded flocks is borne,

   With distant cries of reapers… Matthew Arnold, The Scholar-Gipsy

                                               “Now Lamb’s Dog was ‘Dash’.”

‘ Before the summer's leaf and its repose

                 Mowers will pile the white-gold hay in windrows.’   ~Helen Pinkerton

In the case typograph I’v search’d the——dash

From silly-lily to—shuts the Door—caráfes

Poured, riddle- bitten rocks—of unbidden stokes

At the veritable canon core lie broken brochs.

I’ve known—Choose One—absurd limitation,

Peevish quaint disguises of manikin imitation.

Billowed sparklings of bioluminescent flash

Glowing, rowing, unfurling peak-ed silver’d—crash.

‘Conspiracy of doves’— ‘ungathered thews’—

Clayed jouissance—memic evolve —Sad ruse

Scarce accounting chaos shadings dark hair-lined

Chechaquo—chidden froze-frail—spring silverseam fined.

Delicacies rapt, sharp-crackle-frost firebolt

Rose crystal crimson jagging amber-snapped jolt

Charring searing bearing bubbled foaming cottle

Hidden fiercings—chained- chance- clashes—dottle.

Tell it slant—till it kind—donning sparsing threads

Mouldering misty-rambling brambled beds—

Shook shucks—Alpine breezes—tassle- braided knots

‘Gathered’-round —moonmarks— Carr-fenned lots.

Aid the prickers’ bow—avoid snags—-e’er with wind

Sheaving selving inward—outward—willow-limned

Standard time flag straight—stickle-fit—snath swathes

Bearings moorings loosings ——tying knotted cloths.

Vitruvian in anthropometic time—of late

Orientation of snaths and grips to blades-gold weight

Forged sheathing scythe-breathing steps-in rhyme

Swathes—hubs—rickles—placks—riving time.

           

Talk of This—Hint of That—ponder—finely graced

Frankly scrutinized——routine in room faced;

Rose- steeped—uplike—an immense granite cliff

Abolished embellishment—Time’s—mischief.                     ~7/1/2012

Sidran: Help for Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) and dissociation.

Sidran: Help for Post Traumatic Stress (PTSD) and dissociation.
Excerpt:

Clinician's Guide to Medications for PTSD

Matt Jeffreys, MD Overview Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has biological, psychological, and social components. Medications can be used in treatment to address the biological basis for PTSD symptoms and co-morbid Axis I diagnoses. Medications may benefit psychological and social symptoms as well. While studies suggest that cognitive behavioral therapies such as prolonged exposure (PE) and cognitive processing therapy (CPT) have greater effects in improving PTSD symptoms than medications, some people may prefer medications or may benefit from receiving a medication in addition to psychotherapy... [My Note: My family did not have good results with any of the medications.  It was a nightmare.  The writer of PTSD and Me blog also had awful difficulties.  There are two of my close friends, however, who have benefited greatly from finding a medication that stabilized them enough to function normally. As with all chemicals it is best to be very educated, wary and realize the long-term commitment of testing, re-testing and evaluation that has to constantly go on.  Sometimes they just don't work.  It is wise to remember that medications are not cure-alls and the body itself changes over time as is true of all medicine treatments.]

From Night-Lights to Stars

                              

We go through life with dark forces within us and around us, haunted by the ghosts of repudiated terrors and embarrassments, assailed by devils, but we are also continually guided by invisible hands; our darkness is lit by many little flames, from night-lights to the stars. Those who are afraid to look into their own hearts know nothing of the light that shines in the darkness.            

~Caryll Houselander, Catholic mystic, poet


Miss Houselander was educated at the French Convent of Our Lady of Compassion in Olton, Warwickshire, England. Her two last years at school were spent at the English Convent of the Holy Child, St. Leonard's Sussex. During 1945 she worked in an advertising office, and did layout for advertisements, being skillful with her hands. She likes to draw with pencil and chalk. Her illustrations appear in many books, her latest being Joan Vindlsani's New Six O'Clock Saints. In 1936 she drew the pictures for the book A Retreat with St. Ignatius in Pictures for Children by Reverend Goeffrey Bliss, S.J.
She prefers carving to painting and is planning to carve crucifixes for a Belgian firm.
Much of her spare time was devoted to occupational therapy for the benefit both of child refugees from the Continent, whose nerves had been jarred, and shell-shocked soldiers, in the war...Catholic Authors


"...in the childhood lies the whole life, hidden like the life of a flower or a tree in the seed. Certainly we can't always read its secrets, but they are there."
 
...Her first book, This War is the Passion, was published in 1941 and in it she placed the suffering of the individual and its meaning within the mystical body of Christ. For a time, she became publishers Sheed & Ward's best selling writer, drawing praise from people such as Ronald Knox:

"she seemed to see everything for the first time, and the driest of doctrinal considerations shone out like a restored picture when she had finished with it. And her writing was always natural; she seemed to find no difficulty in getting the right word; no, not merely the right word, the telling word, that left you gasping."^[1]

During the Second World War, doctors began sending patients to Houselander for counselling and therapy. Even though she lacked formal education in this area, she seemed to have a natural empathy for people in mental anguish and the talent for helping them to rebuild their world. A visitor once found her alone on the floor, apparently in great pain, which she attributed to her willingness to take on herself a great trial and temptation that was overwhelming another person.
A psychiatrist, Eric Strauss, later President of the British Psychological Society, said of Houslander:
                    ..."she loved them back to life... .she was a divine eccentric."
Houselander titled her autobiography A Rocking-Horse Catholic to differentiate herself from those termed "cradle Catholics". She died of breast cancer in 1954, at the age of 53.     -Wikipedia

• "Caryll Houselander 1901-1954" by Margot H. King
• "Seeing Christ in All People" by Karen Lynn Krugh
• Caryll Houselander: Essential Writings, reviewed by Francis Philips 

   

I dedicate this

to all those who did not live

to tell it.

And may they please forgive me

for not having seen it all

nor remembered it all,

for not having divined all of it.  ~Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago (I)

   
     In a Foreign Hospital
Valleys away in the August dark the thunder
roots and tramples: lightning sharply prints
for an instant trees, hills, chimneys on the night.
We lie here in our similar rooms with the white
furniture, with our bit of Death inside us
(nearer than that Death our whole life lies under);
the man in the next room with the low voice,
the brown-skinned boy, the child among its toys
and I and others.  Against my bedside light
a small green insect flings itself with a noise
tiny and regular, a 'tink; tink, tink'.

A Nun stands rustling by, saying good night,
hooded and starched and smiling with her kind
lifeless, religious eyes.  'Is there anything
you want?' -- 'Sister, why yes, so many things:'
England is somewhere far away to my right
and all Your letter promised; days behind
my left hand or my head (or a whole age)
are dearer names and easier beds than here.
But since tonight must lack for all of these
I am free to keep my watch with images,
a bare white room, the World, an insect's rage,
and if I am lucky, find some link, some link.    ~Bernard Spencer, With Luck Lasting (1963).
(h/t Stephen Pentz, First Known When Lost)