"and the soles of your shoes are all worn down, the time for sleep is now --"

"Poetry should be as unconscious as possible."

"One of the few good qualities I think I have as a poet is patience. I have endless patience. Sometimes I feel I should be angry at myself for being willing to wait 20 years for a poem to get finished, but I don't think a good poet can afford to be in a rush."

-- Elizabeth Bishop

"Take off, take off your glasses. . . . Let me see your sightless eyes? I will be beautiful then."

-- Brigit Pegeen Kelly

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I realized something funny the other day. Daniel Finch reminds me very strongly of Robin Pettey, my violin teacher. They are both relentless in their demands of competence from their students, and in their demand for genuine effort. Both prized tenacity and persistence. They're both hardcore, which is an undefinable quality that you know when you see it -- it has to do with passion for their subject matter, and it has to do with their willingness to send you back to the fifth grade, so to speak, and tell you to start again if you've missed something along the way, but it also has nothing at all to do with either of those things. Realizing the similarities makes me suddenly understand a lot more about why I gravitated towards Daniel Finch as someone I would like to be my mentor.

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"It always seems impossible until it's done."
-- Nelson Mandela

That's a quote for Liz, who read it out of my day planner today in World Views.

I also understand, this week, the urge to send characters back into the valley for their happy endings. Do you know what I mean? The protagonist ventures into the wild hills, finds and fights evil, and returns to the valley where he began in order to complete his happiness. Why? Returning to the valley at least provides some semblence of order and control, some semblence of a circularity that the protagonist chose. The protagonist did, after all, defeat the evil. . . they are quite capable of going anywhere, but they return to teh valley, the safe place, the bounded, the familiar.

I have to read Nietzsche for my World Views class. Imagine my surprise -- Nietzsche is not what I thought at all. He is so vehement, passionate, vindictive, not giving up or giving in or reductionistic at all. In his mind, he seems to be fighting against reductionism -- he wants to get rid of all the head-fluff going through culture (particularly Christianity) and return to the vital, forceful, pervasive, complex & complete natural world. At least, that is what his first 30 premises tell me. We shall see more as we go along.

There is a peculiar kind of intelligence that I am just catching glimpses of in this, my senior year of college. It is the kind of intelligence that is self-aware -- how could one critique or present one's own work without a measure of self-awareness? -- And it is also the kind of intelligence that is framework-oriented. Let me explain that a little bit more. It is the kind of intelligence that, when presented with an argumment, could argue the points presented, but instead goes straight for the assumptions behind the points presented -- it questions the very framework on which arguments are based. I kind of like this intelligence, even though I lack it. It's the part of intelligence that asks "why?" to the complete degree, and it is the part of intelligence that is always seeing & seeking possibilities. I hadn't gotten much past recognition. But I think it would be fun if I could be that sort of smart someday.

at your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses and this fragile earth, our island home