Footnote Fridays w/ CT Ballentine

A few nights ago we were watching Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. That dude that Scatman Scrothers' plays, the awesome chef who gets all psychic with the little boy, talked about how locations can carry around extra-spiritual energy.

I'd read about a similar idea down at the Oakland Public Library (a really awesome library which certainly can't replace the beloved Harold Washington library I left behind when I moved out here from Chicago, but is at very least filling the hole in my heart somewhat) in a book about Romantic poetry.

I've been staying up late at night, reading this one, hoping to inspire awesome dreams--staring at my window at the trees, the moon, the highway.

I read one essay about how poetry is like plants, spreading through a place, bringing everything else into its environment. I've been feeling plants extra hard recently. I started a garden, thinking maybe that would bring some positive energy to our back yard. It has too, plus lots of free food and butterflies. The squash is about to sprout and the basil's been going really strong. I made a really delicious pesto pasta last night! Another about how poetry is like chess, infinite possibilities that get funnelled into one reality. It's true! I've been playing a lot of chess lately (mostly loosing) after buying an awesome chess set from Creative Reuse for about a dollar and a half! Creative Reuse is seriously the coolest thrift store I've ever seen.

The book also had a poem that really got me:

I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,

As being past away.--Vain sympathies

For, Backward, Duddon! As I cast my eyes,

I see what was, and is, and will abide;

Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide;

The Form remains, the Function never dies;

While we, the brave, the mighty, and the wise,

We Men, who in our morn of youth defied

The elements, must vanish;--be it so!

Enough, if something from our hands have power

To live, and act, and serve the future hour,

And if, as toward the silent tomb we go

Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,

We feel that we are greater than we know.

It's by Wordsworth, a poet who went to France during the revolution thinking he wanted to be a revolutionary. All the beautiful talk behind the revolution was great for him, but the mob mentality of the guillotine struck him as hypocritical. On top of that, he'd had a kid with his French teacher and her parents, who were Royalists, were not stoked on their daughter getting knocked up by some broke ass revolutionary.

I think a lot about where Wordsworth was in his head at that point. I've been there before, separated by distance from loved ones and horrified by violence and ugliness in the society around me. I like the way he reminds me that Form and Function will go on forever, that the stream of life (Duddon, fyi, is the name of a river close to his childhood home) even if it seems meaningless, is powered by crazy humans that think, every now and then, that we're far greater than we know.

I'll be digging into Wordsworth more in the coming week. He's been plucking my heart strings, one, and anyway his rhyme schemes are convoluted and genius. I'll probably steal a few of them for cooking silly love songs.