It’s time to cross fingers, hold breath and pray for strength.
“I’m not afraid
to believe
I won’t be asked to carry
more than I can bear…”
Love holds loss in the hollow of its hands. Stay tuned…. as with many things in my life, I may be cavitating, levitating, warping, woofing, weaving and ducking for no good reason at all.
Hang onto the warping and woofing (or wefting, more properly) and the cavitating and levitating will trouble you less. And those references put me in mind of your poem, the Netmaker.
Here’s a quote – roughly – from The West Wing’s third season episode, The Poet Laureate. “The poet doesn’t write of TRUTH. The poet tries to captivate you for whatever time you are prepared to give, and if a truth comes of that, it’s a bonus.” This goes with the other comments about poetry and creativity which I have been collecting, including, “It’s in my skull and it has to come out,” and, “You just open a vein.”
Meanwhile, I’m doing enough cavitating and levitating for a mob, and will require your weavings to tie down my pumpkin. I have been puzzling over the term, “authentic” and trying to work out what it means. What is an “authentic” response to a given stimulus? How would I know it when it bites me on the nose?
Interesting question. Authenticity has a number of meanings, in dictionary terms, and then there’s the question of usage.
Authenticity here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authenticity. For me authentic means… unmediated. Realtime. In person. Not run through the frontal lobes. Not subject to external judgement. A reaction which is not on the basis of WHAT you think other people will think is an authentic reaction. Like when LTGW pulled out a cell phone camera and snapped a pic of me WHILE I was EATING and I said, “You fucking bastard,” in front of the CEO, who rocked with laughter, which happened about two hours ago, and that was all quite authentic.
Authentic has an artificial sense of “this gun is better than that gun, in terms of desirability, because Billy the Kid shot a man with it”. People PAY for authenticity. It is my contention that true authenticity is marked by a quality of interaction which derives from chunks of the primate brain entirely separate from our modern Kultur. Authenticity in human relations over time – I’m not talking about a momentary reaction, as above – derives from relaxed concentration. You can’t have it unless you’re paying attention, and you can’t have it unless SOMEbodies in the interaction knows what the hell they are doing, or at bare minimum have a clear idea what they want.
Authenticity also has something to do with how you respect something once it comes into your possession. Do you keep the gun in a locked room, or do you donate it to a museum? Do you take it to the range and fire it? Do you loan it to a film company making a Western? Collectors of musical instruments who don’t play them can have a room full of Stradivarii, all lovingly attested to, and it don’t mean squat to me.
An authentic reaction to a work of art can range from boredom to bafflement, from debilitation to exhilaration. I’ll let Doris Lessing take this one. “Read the first ten pages” (I am paraphrasing) “and if you don’t like it, PUT IT DOWN!” Life’s too short to read shitty books and ghastly poetry.
The guy we were saying goodbye to completely floored me tonight. He told me, in front of witnesses, that he would make arrangements to come to our office for town hall meetings so he could hear what question I would ask. Because I was the only one foolhardy enough – I would not call my bravado courage – to say what everybody else was thinking.
Mom, that guy’s GOT NO PANTS.
Hush now.
Mom, how come he’s got no pants?
Shhh.
You can always tell when there’s authenticity happening… the parents say shush.