| Am I Alone in This? Bill Bottrell in the January 2001 New Settler |
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plays, poetry. I haven't done it nearly enough, really. But it's hard to keep the house up when you have 150 people coming and going. You, that old school, now your house, has become the center of a revival . . . BILL: I didn't know that . . . Activism, any lifeway needs a lodgehouse, a roofed place to celebrate itself outside of, devoid of the consumerist realm-we have a hairy heritage of resistance here. We've had for many years, but lacking that venerable center where we could revel as Mendonesians, members of the Albion Nation . . . Do you know anything about the works of Sharon Doubiago? No. It is too bad you were not both here at the same time. Sharon is a Daughter of |
Albion, in the future will be known as the most compelling of the Pacific Rim poet narrators. Over the decade her own son grew into a man she wrote a epic poem she called Oedipus Drowned: the excruciation suffered by the edge-of-a-continent people when they lose a child to the sea. -Every mother's warning: Stay away from the ocean. I'm going to read you two passages-the first the entry into the poem. . . ."The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain . . . " It doesn't seem as if your sorrows have delved that way . . . BILL: Oh, no, they have. That is so true. It's the Taoist thing: for joy to exist, sorrow must precede it. Deep sorrow must exist, I think, for real celebration to happen. |