Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Too Many Questions



Too Many Questions
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(Pardon my bravado, but I believe I have, with this freshly baked combo, just done the best drawing, poem & video I may ever have done.
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But what do I know, right?)
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What is excellence?
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Can it be defined as honoring the efficacious
application of a skill? Is it entirely obsessed
with an assessment of design? Does it mainly
cheer about a clear establishment of form?
Must it entail minute attention to detail? Does it
emerge from the amorphous as a mystery? –
or as the moral substance, then the tool and then
.
the servant of an artisan’s direct intent to civilize
the swarm of the competing instincts of the world
into another paradigm which might induce
a less disastrous norm? Does it suggest the tale
that we’re perfectible might after all be true?
Does it mainly have to do with altering the notion
that humanity is faltering, seeking through
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its offices to bring us to believe again in an ideal –
and that achieving excellence is how to make it
real? Does it depend on will or serendipity or luck?
Does it flourish in that fluctuating moment
just before created things appear, just before
the lonely object is enmeshed in all the warm
accoutrements of flesh, or does it show itself
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right afterward, in harsher specificity, primally
adjusting to incarnate life right here? If it had
a face, what would it be like? Shocked, delighted,
frightened or excited, unknowing or omniscient,
calm or overwhelmed? Does it describe when light
consumes the sight from floor to rafter, illumining
us into newness, intoxicating us with clarity?
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Is it the smoothing of disparity? Does it make
us feel enormous or so tiny that we can’t believe
we are permitted to be in its presence?
I was told once by a poet who is greater
than I’ll ever be: “never fill a poem up with
questions. Let them be implicit, like a sigh.”
Oh my. I’ll never be that kind of fancy dancer.
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I want an answer.
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