Today in the Artist's Way

"Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention" (Cameron, 66).

This is why poetry is not a luxury. Poetry and art are about survival. Or at least, they are in their deepest iterations. Bourgeois poetry, poetry funded for the purpose of perpetuating an ideology, poetry institutionalized and perpetuated as a continuance of an oppressive order casts poetry as a luxury, something for which we must pay (and perform bourgeoisity) in order to enjoy. The waitress writing a poem on a napkin between shifts cannot write poetry (at least, nothing worth reading). Poetry is for the professors, the professionals, the artists. The "truly gifted." The "discovered" (meaning, signed to a record label--supported and thereby controlled).

The same too with church. The institutions sign us to record labels where we sign away our obedience and obesance. One is a presbyterian, an episcopalian, a baptist. We confine our art to one intitution (and its institutional partners). Meeting God outside a church? I'm not so sure about that. We must speak a thousand words with any piece of art, lest anyone get the wrong idea and fall into heresy. Art cannot be left to stand on its own. It is too dangerous.

Audre Lorde pushes us into the realm of experience. Life is not "a problem to be solved" (Lorde, 372). It is "a situation to be experienced and interacted with," a mindfully lived life, a centered and bodily act. Poetry is the act of noticing. Noticing centers us. Centering empowers us like Lorde's "Black mother within each of us--the poet--whisper[ing] in our dreams." Art is necessary for the "survival and wholeness of an entire people" (Alice Walker). Not the viewing of art, unless one can truly experience that art in its interaction. But that can be hard. It can be more effective to experience art by making art.

"Poetry is the way we help gives name to the nameless so it can be thought" (Lorde, 372). Poetry enables experience to drive rationality, rather than rationality eclipsing experience. Art pushes a small part of the transcendent into discourse. Art is the foundation of life by which we discover the possible. Along with Judith Butler, possibility is as necessary as bread. Possibility, and poetry, is necessary for life.

Poetry is food. Art is food. Church should be food (but so frequently this food is spoiled by rationality and logocentrism). We talk instead of eating. We are malnourished. A thousand words, none of them imparting nutrition. A thousand words, none chosen with care. And not a single word that could speak a thousand images. Not a single word that centers us in our experience. Only dogmas which alienate, removing one from themself and imparting the reasons of dead white men.

Cameron's line reminds me of Sister Mary Clarence (Whoopi Goldberg) in Sister Act 2. "If you wanna be somebody, if you wanna go somewhere, you better wake up and pay attention."