Thursday, September 23, 2004

Father Walt speaks:

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament after filament
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman


9:40:53 AM    comment []  


A possible corrective to yesterday's post

Improving Your Dreams
by William Stafford

The way you are supposed to dream is this--you study the dreams of others, especially those who have succeeded, those whose dreams have met the test of time. You extract from successful dreams the elements that work. Then you carefully fashion dreams of your own. This way you can be sure to have admirable dreams, ones that will appeal to the educated public.

As your technique improves, you will find your dreams accepted more and more: what doesn't work, you learn to leave out.

Of course, now and then (you won't be able to help it) some strange, untried elements will creep into your dreams--you can't be careful and responsible all the time. And of these stray flaws, a few may be good luck, and you will keep them; they are signs of some rules not yet discovered. And if you are scholarly you may set up an account of them, and later offer the account to apprentices so that they may dream properly.

Thus, over the generations, the quality of dreams will improve; a tradition will accumulate, with skills and crafts that can be passed along. Ambitious and reliable people can study about dreaming and gradually become worthy of dreaming for themselves. If they start a weak dream, one with clichés or irregularities, or if they let themselves wander into an unstructured dream that violates the best in the tradition, they can stop themselves and hold staunchly to standards.

Quality is achieved by cleaving to those standards. As one respected critic has said, "Every time you accept an unworthy dream, you are damaging the tradition of American dreaming."

(from You Must Revise Your Life, 1986)

9:40:31 AM    comment []