"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
"Possibility is neither forever not instant. It is not easy to sustain belief in its efficacy. We can sometimes work long and hard to establish one beachhead of real resistance to the deaths we are expected to live..."
- Audre Lorde, "Poetry is not a luxury."
It's eerie how much my collapsed drained self today wrote things that echo the very bits and pieces of Audre Lorde I also started to read this afternoon.
What I wrote, before reading her:
I need to free myself from the fear puzzle of
how will I survive?
how will this vision survive?
am I failing at being in this world?
These hard binaries make no room for the hope and possibility-creating that are actually needed for a way out of our present difficulties.
The closing down of possibilities in the mind by fear - this is what we must shake loose. What a task, in this world where there is so much that activates fear regularly.
So much that stumbles us over the past
threatens us with the future
but hope comes from learning from those who have fought these fights before.
And indeed, I am learning from Audre that it is poetry that will save us. Which is something my deepest self has always known. But it's been easy to forget that in the bustle of life-maintaining, of business strategizing, of apartment hunting.
I think the unexpected gift of collapse right now, of not being able to do shit, of lying on the bed with an ice pack baby moaning in a cloud of September heat and fatigue, is that it's returning me to a visceral sense of poetry. That as I think all three of us having learned many times in our lives, when all else seems elusive and out of reach, poetry is always there, somehow, waiting to restore us to ourselves.
"These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The [Feminine's] place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep." [I'm using Feminine instead of "woman" here.]
She also says this, astonishingly, which is reaching me at a deep level right now because I am unusually exhausted and unable to hold my usual fountain of ideas, which are what I'm used to relying on for hope.
"When we view living in the european mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious.
"But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living... [we] respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes."
The other part of what I wrote today, again prior to reading her (!), is this:
I want to write my way out of urgency. Out of the mind-numbing dread. Away from the jaded derelict treasures of late capitalism parading themselves around as its own guilty pleasure. I should like to move towards an open field, towards a cool bath for my heart.
I am starting to understand why Audre Lorde is a refuge for so many. I think I need to get off my Facebook feed more often and read her when I am heartsore and in need of hope. Because clearly, I'm not the first to struggle with these things, and our generation is not the first to be in search of answers in the dark times. <3
- T
