“Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later.”
~ Richard Diebenkorn ~
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“One doesn’t arrive… by necessarily knowing where one is going… In every work of art something appears that does not previously exist, and so, by default, you work from what you know to what you don’t know.”
~Ann Hamilton~
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the poetics of not knowing
it’s still the moon of awakened april, national poetry month, so i continue with celebrating poets by posting some of the great Polish poet’s, Wislawa Szymborska, acceptance speech when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996…
Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”
…I value that little phrase “I don’t know” so highly. It’s small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself “I don’t know,” the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself “I don’t know”, she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying “I don’t know,” and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize…
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yes, it is the surrender to not knowing that seeds astonishment, awe and wandering in wonder… happy trails, beloveds!
