Tree Talks

Episode Fifty: Tree Talks.
In which the Soap Strip folks are Far Field-ing it.

1 comment:

  1. Yet another opportunity to internalize employment failure: an employer once again turns another benefits cut into an example of employee culpability. Ten years with no raise, no c-o-l increase, no bonus, never a review, never shown a job description, never an org chart, refused requests to discuss schedule, each year a trimming on benefits. Always the line, "No complaining."

    It feels shitty, and I slump home wondering what the response is to my internalizing of this lifetime of impotence and failure on my part.

    For whatever reason, this image of Theodore Roethke comes to me: a young college professor at 27, having the first of many manic episodes, in Michigan. He wanders into the woods in winter, under dressed, and, after learning from a tree "the secret of Nijinski", removes his shoe and tosses it away. This image of him lumbering back, shivering, sopping wet sock. And what did everyone make of him?

    And the next day, still under dressed, he soberly returns to the woods, and retrieves his shoe.

    I don't know what inside this story is so striking to me.

    This image of the suffering artist, the idea that he paid for his gift; this image now seen as bullshit. But, too, Campbell: our myths are indeed dragged up at a cost.

    But, anyway, crappy censure; feeling of suffocating and being stuck; a life measured by what is not; the acceptance that, in the end, what we are cannot be fathomed.

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