This poem is killing me right now. It is called "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke. It turns my brain inside out. The first three lines alone stop me in my tracks.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
It's the last line there that I relate to this trip. So many times my expectations and the reality experienced are so different. We rely on our personal myths to get by, and it is scary to confront them. And we always learn from going and seeing for ourself. That notion is probably in every self help book out there. What I am interested in is the distortions that occur when we lay one set of beliefs over another. This can be described as aliasing, some sort of cultural aliasing, and perhaps it is the artists and travelers who are performing the anti-aliasing.
read the whole poem here
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I like going to new places because I learn a lot about myself when I take myself out of context. Your instincts are dead-on, and Portland is way cool.
thanks for sharing your experience. it is interesting to read about your new encounters with familiar territory and then off to new ground. i'm very interested in what you mean by tourism and travel as art. i can understand art that is derived from these experiences, but these activities as art is another story?
right now i'm teaching debord and the theory of the derive where he talks about psychogeography. psychoanalysis is to language what psychogeography is to the totality, someone writes. debord writes that written descriptions are only passwords to the great game. he explains that psychogeography is a type of conscientious wandering through familiar territory in which you explore your own psychic terrian that has been inextricably formed by that environment. the purpose being to understand yourself as separate from your normal associations, your identity as fluid, and that you examine the control that you have over your experiences in comparison to the control that your environment does.
i think also:
I sleep to wake, and take my sleeping fast. I see my life in what I must fear. I go by learning what I have to learn.
Post a Comment