Saw this gorgeous Obama poster on a walk recently. Illinois is crazy for Obama. He's one of ours, so that makes sense. But there's something more here too, because this is the first time I've seen artists making art for political campaigns. Wow. 
This is what the orchard of my favorite, farmer's market fruit vendor, Seedlings, looks like.... the path to knowledge that I'm most familiar with, in which thoughts and images constellate, converging, sometimes violently, in the subconscious. The sounds of words and the silence of images are more important at this stage than sense or "meaning." In composing a poem, one often seems to move directly from ignorance to revelation, instantly from a muddled sense of things to a clear picture with only the vaguest sense of how it happened. ...And:
A line from Hildegard's sequence for the virgin martyr Ursula: "The girl has no idea what she means," has great resonance for me. Although it is the crowd that speaks, mocking the young woman as she is put to death... I see the mockery transformed, in Hildegard's hands, into a statement of defiance. Poets understand that they do not know what they mean, and that this is a source of their strength. I wonder, if in our modern, literal-minded age, being able to declare "what I do not see I do not know" is a mark, even a cornerstone, of a poet's faith. I do not mean that we're pragmatists, like Thomas, who asked to see and touch Christ's wounds, but rather that writing teaches us to recognize when we have reached the limits of our language, and our knowing, and are dependent on our senses to "know" for us.
The discipline of poetry teaches poets, at least, that they often have to say things they can't pretend to understand.
Again? What IS this?
Here's a quote from the article:
“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."
Good grief. So she essentially LIED to the reader and called it a "memoir." You have got to be kidding. It's not like memoir is the only way this story could have been told. It sounds like she lied to her editor for at least three years.
This passage in The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" is something I've been chewing over the last few days, so I thought I'd share it. (By the way, Norris is a Christian -- and while we're at it, I am one too -- and Norris' conviction is abundantly clear in the following passage.) She's talking that contemplation often comes as we do routine tasks. Here's the quote:
"No less a saint than Therese of Lisieux admitted in her Story of a Soul that Christ was most abundantly present to her not 'during my hours of prayer...but rather in the midst of my daily occupations' (emphasis mine). We can become aware of and limit our participation in activities that do not foster the freedom of thought that poetry and religious devotion require; I cannot watch television, for example, and write a poem. I might be inspired by something I hear or see on television, particularly in the news interviews, but this is rare. The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread and doing laundry." (p.14)
Norris wrote this in 1998 (when it was still possible to be free of our current internet wonderland). Anyway, for days this quote has been rumbling around in the back of my head. I'm wondering about "fostering the freedom of thought." It's an interesting phrase, because I think of my freedom in terms of being able to do whatever I want to do, and so, I do not associate it with quieting myself, which feels like a discipline (more often than not). Norris seems to suggest that one freedom may hamper another, or that it's a system of give and take. If it is a system of give and take, then one freedom may rob another one. This makes sense to me, though I have to admit I've never thought of it like this before. So which freedoms do I really want? I need to choose.
I'm also wondering about which activities in my daily life are fruitful for contemplation and which are not.
Hmmmm....
--Amy Timberlake
