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Once more again with feeling!

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Ok so I’m back? I dunno, the fact that I never gave up this blog maybe means I was eventually come back to it. I still have “blogger” on my business bio so there: validation.
I deleted a lot of posts. Some of it was whiny, some was incomprehensible. I might take down the poems because I would like to release them as a book. And there is a lot of content I never posted in the first place. Most of that will likely stay hidden. If it wasn’t worth it at the time, do I really expect it’s improved with aging?
I am also playing with my writer website. Right now this feeds there, and I’d like to think I’ll start posting more book news here among my other rumblings. We’ll see how that goes. I was 5 minutes from starting a Substack but oh, how I do not wish to start over again. I don’t have the hustle to turn a Substack into a great paying venture (at least not yet) so I’ll just burble away here for now. This is a year of pruning my orchard, of getting rid of dead wood i.e. poorly performing components of my system. Yeah there’s a system. It’s not great but it’s there.
Maybe this time I’ll stick to it.

Colorado

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Thank god it was news

And not something you learned of later

A sidenote in someone else’s history

Thank god that it breaks hearts

That we call it what it is

A crime, a tragedy

Thank god we know it happened

And we don’t call it a joke

Pretend it doesn’t matter

Once, nobody cried when our lives were cut short

Once, daring to live your life meant you 

Deserved such a death

Destroyed in the act of acceptance

Immolated by a false fear

This underhanded belief 

masking itself as love

Yet our lives still matter less

Yet still we mourn

We rage

We do not deserve this

This death

These denials

Here, we stand

Here and now

No defeat

No erasure

No surrender

It is you who made this a war

It is you who are defeated

When all we ever wanted was peace

(June 2023)

This is not the most sophisticated poem, in that it makes its claims more overtly than others I have written.  The power of poetry is its ability to sidestep a facet of society and/or the human experience, not to avoid it but to observe it differently. 

Black and white divisions are for chessboards, not for people.   The natural world is characterized by permeable membranes.  Things must pass into you, out of you, through you, in order for you to be alive.  Parts of you are always dying and other parts being reborn and the idea that anything is static is simply that, an idea which says nothing about how reality actually behaves. 

The opposite of freedom isn’t imprisonment, it’s surveillance.

A Mantra for the Terrified

~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment 

"I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
-Frank Herbert

The Bene Gesserit litany against fear is one of the strongest examples of a clever, spiritual-sounding concept from a piece of fiction being turned into a near-religious text.  It sounds magnificent, and it echoes many sentiments of Western thought. Perhaps it’s less meaningful to people whose religious cultures make death part of an infinitely iterating cycle and not the end point of a linear process (see: apocalypse, Christian obsession with.)

But the litany, along with the existence of the Bene Gesserit and the rest of the Dune universe, is a fictional proposition. Frank Herbert wrote fiction. He made it all up. That it sounds like a real religion is simply because he did a good job of it.  By way of comparison, consider The Force, which is essential Qi in a British accent. Good old Ether if you like, if it was real and semi-sentient. Lucas didn’t invent that out of thin air (*laughs in alchemist*) but patched it together from established texts. He got away with it because his audience of pre-adolescent North Americans had by and large never heard of Taoism.

We’re meant to overcome our fears, but I have a very different attitude these days. I don’t need to ‘conquer’ my fears before doing The Big Things. I’ve tried and tried to make myself fearless before doing something, and it’s a waste of time.  Go ahead and have the fear, but do the thing anyway. Doing The Thing is maybe the only way to get rid of the fear.

As Space Mom said, “stay afraid, but do it anyway.” If anyone was ever Strong with the Force, it was Carrie Fisher.

So grab your maker hooks and let’s ride this sandbitch into tomorrow. Enjoy this you-failed-witch-school-but-yay-now-you-don’t-have-to-fuck-a-Harkonnen litany against giving a shit about being afraid.

And if anyone mentions that these are two different sci-fi franchises, I will literally scream.

I can’t do shit about the fear
It can kill me if I let it, but I don’t think it will
Besides, there is no such thing as total obliteration
I will face my fear
I will let it walk along with me
It will not keep me from taking another step
The fear will probably never go away. Regardless, I remain