What would we be without our problems?

Over at The Obvious? blog, Euan posts:

What would we be without our problems?"

Steven harrison in The Question to Life's Answers

Well, I think that’s the question to the answer that Stephen Dunn writes in his poem "Sisyphus and the Sudden Lightness." I found this the other day in the Poetry Daily Newsletter (a "poem from last year" - think that means they remove it from their archives):

SISYPHUS AND THE SUDDEN LIGHTNESS

It was as if he had wings, and the wind
behind him. Even uphill the rock
seemed to move of its own accord.

Every road felt like a shortcut.

Sisyphus, of course, was worried;
he'd come to depend on his burden,
wasn't sure who he was without it.

His hands free, he peeled an orange.
He stopped to pet a dog.
Yet he kept going forward, afraid
of the consequences of standing still.

He no longer felt inclined to smile.

It was then that Sisyphus realized
the gods must be gone, that his wings
were nothing more than a perception
of their absence.

He dared to raise his fist to the sky.
Nothing, gloriously, happened.

Then a different terror overtook him.


Stephen Dunn
Local Visitations
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Copyright (c) 2003 by Stephen Dunn.

6:19:02 PM      trackback [] 

Hoarded Ordinaries

One of the interesting observations in the article, “Banal retentive,” that I posted about a couple of days ago was about the web as a new place for people to present their ordinary lives:

(T)he Web turns people into curators of sorts: It provides them with an opportunity to showcase whatever it is that pops into their heads. “There is a lot going on culturally that is concerned with ordinariness,” says Schaffer. “Web journals are a good example, diaries that people put up that say: ‘This is my life, and yes, today may be entirely boring, but here’s how it’s boring and I'm sure you can connect with that.”

The article also points out that “It's worth noting that embracing the prosaic is not new. People have collected ephemera such as old postcards for eons. And the Dadaists of the World War I era stoked the ire of more than one art snob by exalting everyday objects.”

This morning (via commonbeauty) I found Lorianne Schaub’s blog, Hoarded Ordinaries, where she posts her writing and photos. Today she writes:

I post pictures not because I fancy myself a Photographer. Nope, I'm just as the tagline says: a collector of the quotidian. If you enjoy these photos, it isn't because they are artful. Instead, you probably enjoy these photos because you too are curious, intent on noticing, a connoisseur of the random. Like a bottlecap collector or hoarder of old dusty bottles, I keep images because I love them. Our world is, after all, a huge found poem in search of a poet, any finder, who will notice and love it. This noticing isn't Art; it's Ordinary.

It also reminded me of a comment made on commonbeauty’s post about Mel Gibson’s “Passion” movie. Dave of Via Negativa said he was struck by the number of people who left the movie commenting on how “realistic” it seemed, and he asked, “what is it about people's perceptions of realism that leads them to favor extreme violence over (say) the thousand odd, beautiful and inscrutable moments that make "ordinary" reality bearable?”

Thanks to Lorianne. I’ll take her beautiful “ordinaries” any day.

1:15:21 PM      trackback []