Bruce Springsteen wrote it as a gift for Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke... a great actor, he grew as an actor when I was just an intrepid but timid spectator of my life... it was New York then...

I´ve seen great movies from him, “Body Heat”, "Dinner", “The Pope of Greenwich Village”, "9 and a half weeks" and recently “Sin City”. I admired him because I saw myself in him... both trying to live life with the outmost intensity, no matter what.

Now, there are moments such as the other day watching “The Wrestler”, a revival of a defeated real man, the defeat of a fighter. I cry with him while enjoying his character and his hope for love.... oh! Marissa Tomei -since “My Cousin Vinnie” there is no other like you- together are great. Life is portrayed as it is, in a place surrounded by emptiness, cold winter, cloudy days, being excluded of his own daughter, paying his debts… paying and paying.

I felt myself transported to another time, another place, when I was happy, irresponsible… now when I see movies such as this, I go deep within my heart and I can only find ashes of a life well lived, the spark is there but the drive is gone. It went away some time ago... perhaps a year or two. It went away in the darkest way, somber as night… left me empty, it took my guts out and they were left in the middle of the street. Yes, indeed, hence when you glimpse those eyes behind dark glasses you know this man does not want to live anymore, there is no reason for that. He is fighting to the end, he is already surrendering to life.

That is why when I see a drama of a man like “The Wrestler” it drills my soul with pain, takes away the armor and leave only sorrow. Then I remember T.S. Elliot and his poem “Four Quartets” in its Second Poem “East Coker” third section… I can spent my night reading it, over and over… and perhaps I will read it in my podcast tonight…

Victor Almandoz

III
O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory
of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.

And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of
darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant
panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—

Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too
long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness
deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious
of nothing—

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness
the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

T.S. Elliot