paisleypiper's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- wagons travelling west Today I entered negotiations for a federal grant -- the big grant. I am uncomfortable for the end-outcome they want me to target, steer and eventually meet. On the phone I was tough, questioning, summarizing, negotiating. Who was that who sat in the chair opposite the esquire, trying to make sense of the man who suggested that an example of a good end-outcome is that service-learning could impact smoking cessation. It was this other piper -- this work piper. I don't recognize myself as I get stronger and more confident. But, on the flip side, I wouldn't want the old me back. The old me who had such a weak stomach a bad day at work could make me throw up. I wouldn't want back the worrying about little things and making them large as a way of justifying my worth while knowing that I had something larger to which one day I would amount. I'm in my leadership moment. I'm learning what I need to learn. And I've been invited into a poetry group with a group of people who have completed at some point the master's program. I think this will be great for me, but hard. I just have to learn to overlay the negotiator piper on the poet piper. The poet piper is much younger. So often in our creative lives I think we are all much younger, yet at the same time, if we have much to offer, much wiser. With this combination comes the freshness and vitality required to write something worthwhile. I keep thinking the old cliched thought -- what survives of a culture thousands of years later is its arts. I also know that more than that will survive of our culture because we have become so indelible with such vast quantities of junk. It is the irony that a page of manuscript has less chance of surviving than a hotdog when burried underground, in a landfil, for example. Sometimes I fantasize about writing my poetry in concrete slabs and putting them in the backyard. What a patio would be created. And one day, long after I'm gone, some workers will unearth them as they are building a highrise recouperation unit. What a find it would be -- I mean, who wouldn't love that? Or at least be amused? Once Quinn and I were roaming through an abandoned house in the country. We found all sorts of treasures. As a rule, we only take a few little things from these places -- I take photographs and maybe we get a few teeny tiny things for our collection of littles. We found a tablet and opened it. It was an old math tablet from the turn-of-the-century. The word problem read "a covered wagon heading west travels at eight miles per hour..." (it might not have been eight but you get the picture.) Is that not the most incredible reminder of how we swap metaphors for basic meaning and theory that spans the ages? So yes, I'm searching for something beyond publishing. The internet is wonderful but if a hotdog would outlast a piece of paper, what about diaryland, my computer, a cd-rom? Part of me wants to say, yes but we've added more institutions. But then I have to laugh at what an institution the word problem has become. Covered wagons, folks walking, trains, automobiles, planes and rocketships. The word of the day was avatar. I'm used to thinking of this in terms of Hindu myth as the descent of god to earth in human form, not of how I might represent myself in the cyber world. It kind of turns everything on end. It kind of hooks back up with this something I've been writing my way around today. In my writing I'm younger, but more timeless. But I want it to have some undeniable form -- I want it to be concrete and usable somehow. A patio is probably not the way, of course. Because I'm not certain that it is only through work that I've grown. I think that work benefits from the rest of me -- benefits from my happy home life, benefits from my master's degree, benefits from the insights I've earned through contemplative pursuits.... And it would just be good to have some way of feeling that I have accomplished something besides noticing how much I've changed over the years in my fierce conversations. Writing group, here I come.
7:32 p.m. - 2003-09-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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