The Reluctant Poet

And yet, try as you might,
you cannot escape the fact
that words must be used--

ideas expressed,
beauties acknowledged,
praises sung.

And no matter how much, Moses,
you plead weakness with words,
still, someone must sing,

and even in the face of
years of wadded paper
the question remains

why not you?

Words to think with

The semester has dwindled to a sliver of its former self, the way an ice cube shrinks when you pour water over it in the sink, and I am just watching and waiting now for the last few weeks to melt away. And I'm studying, of course. And rehearsing. And writing papers. And memorizing lines. And planning summer projects. And summer trips. And summer work. And next semester's classes. And vacillating, all the while, between bleary-eyed complaints about the workload and moments of utter wonder that I am allowed to eat and drink and breathe history, literature, philosophy, music; that I have lived through the hardest winter in living memory to see a spring which is the loveliest in history, as every spring is; that I love and am loved by a woman who is fair and seemly and wise beyond my highest hopes; that I continue to wake up every morning to find that someone else has been up before me scrubbing the sky and pulling up the sun and pouring dew on the grass—in short, that I keep on living in God's good earth under God's bright heaven. This must be the way a sprout feels when it wakes up from hibernation in its seedpod to find itself planted in rich soil with clean air swirling around it and the sun beaming down overhead.

Meanwhile, time slips away from me and it's early morning and I should try going to bed. I oughtn't to be blogging at all, except that I was studying late and broke policy and bought a coke and now I'm awake on caffeine. I'll rue it tomorrow.

I heard a lecture this morning about modern women who are writing—Annie Dillard and Toni Morrison and people like that. It was a good lecture from start to finish, but this simple quote stood out to me. It comes from Toni Morrison, whom I've not read. It returns to the question of ownership, which I've pondered before, but Morrison makes it more personal that Steinbeck did:

Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Words to think with, words to live by...

Concerning the history of ideas

Lewis once again hits the nail on the head:

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

- C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, ch. 1

I think the folks here at school need to make this the motto for the humanities program.

Fun fact: I'm reading a library copy of the book, and these lines are underlined and starred in this copy. Apparently someone else liked what Lewis had to say, too. (There's a parallel about the universality of human thought in that somewhere...)

Ownership

From The Grapes of Wrath, which I'm reading for school:

...It's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, and died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

What do we mean when we say we own something? The word has different shades of meaning. We say we "own" our clothes, by which we mean they are our property. But we also say we "own" someone as a friend, by which we mean we acknowledge the relationship, not that we possess them. What makes something our property? A book may sit on your shelf, but can you really say it's yours until you've read it and slipped bookmarks in the folds or dog-eared the pages or stuck sticky notes to favorite paragraphs or added notes in the margins or whatever you do with books—in other words, until you've made it yours by spending time with it and letting part of yourself become involved in it? The relationship makes it yours, not the purchase.

In the library--

In the library reading
a journal of poems
I found much to be
dismayed at, a little
to give pleasure, for
in those I read were some
laced with crudities, some
effusing nothings, a few
full and firm and sweet
like the first ripe apples in summer,
none a satisfying meal. But
among the readers' letters
someone quoted Frost, saying
poetry should tell of griefs,
not grievances. At that
I rose and left, for here
at last was sustenance,
and I knew
it was enough.