"Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves"

When I was young, in my twenties, I saw the movie "The Lover". Then I began to devour Duras. I went to Paul's Books in The Loop and bookshops in New Orleans looking for Duras. I found "Emily L." I found "The Passion" and "Sexing the Cherry" by Jeanette Winterson, who concedes she modeled the latter on "Four Quartets". I did not read Eliot's "Four Quartets" until last year, last April, while poring over "Reading Lolita in Tehran". I stopped reading that 2/3rds through to read "Lolita".

Now that I am back at reading about atrocities to women, i.e., FGM and stoning for adulteresses in Iran, and reading and seeing plays about Palestine, and feeling beleageured by the Middle East...I find myself wanting to write again. I think of my very first short story, more like a part of a larger work, say, in the style of Amos Oz' "The Same Sea", and remember how it was inspired by a love affair going bad, and the ravaging, or ravishing of my soul at 26. I called it: "A Death Not Mourned". Maybe it should be: "The Ravaging of Mary Rose"...to reference my fake album cover, and the sinking of a ship.

It had a lot about roses, dried roses, love never truly experienced. And today, I reopen "Reading Lolita in Tehran", to find words which waft like a musty closet scent from my old manuscript, infused before I even knew it, with words I had not yet read from Eliot's "Four Quartets":

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

My lover and I disturbed the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves....and to what end?

Let my twist my heart while I twist my legs. I do not want to do Bound Lotus today.