>I simply don't understand Alison's quotation of Alice Walker's
>definition: "Work is love made visible". I mean that literally. I have
>no idea what it is supposed to mean.
I read that quote (in I think In Search of our Mother's Gardens) at a
rather tricky juncture of my life, and I remember it with a concomitant
luminosity...
I had become a mother for the first time, and it had struck me with the
force of revelation that this job, motherhood, was the hardest thing I
had ever done. Much harder than the various paid jobs I had done, much
more demanding, much more important; also, more interesting. But with
this very hard job went an instant devaluation of my social status. What
I did counted for nothing; it was dull, my brain had apparently
dissolved, etc etc etc. I realised I had suddenly become invisible.
It was at this time that I started writing poetry seriously. I had
always written it, always thought of it seriously, but now it became a
necessary question. To me, not to anyone else. (Does it have to matter
to anyone else?) And I began thinking of it as _work_, in the same way
that looking after a colicky baby was _work_. If it wasn't work, what
was it?
Both of these activities stemmed from love, a genesis which I understood
then only vaguely, and now only slightly less vaguely. The way towards
love was through this labour: it was a painful and continuing
understanding of relatedness to someone, something, that wasn't me. For
me, this was necessary; accidents of biography ensured that. Others have
different biographies and don't need this way of stones, but I did. The
work I did was a manifestation of my love in my world; nothing more,
nothing less. And it seemed to me that it deserved dignity, and that if
I did not somehow confer dignity on it, no one else would. What gave it
dignity was love. I don't know how to say this without sounding
sentimental; I mean nothing sentimental about it.
Dignity is a profound human need; the best way to disempower a person or
a people is to deprive them of dignity (it's one of the aims of torture,
for example). Dignity is generally treated with contempt only by those
who have not been deprived of it. Poetry, however it is approached (the
ways are myriad), deserves dignity; perhaps the more so because poets
know more than anyone how marginalised it is, how brushed aside in the
interests of more commercially satisfying literatures. If we don't give
it dignity, who will? If we don't love it, who will?
Money enters into this equation in the most vexed of ways. But it is for
me the least satisfactory and most imprisoning definition of work.
Best
Alison
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