In a message dated 05/30/2002 4:26:45 PM Central Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<<  Fragrant indeed, Ann.  Does anyone have any thoughts about magic and
 > writing?  Any examples of predictive poems, spells working etc.?

 bw
 christina >>  I think Willliam Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
gives the best answer to your question.  Here 'tis:
      I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work--a
life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and
least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human
spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in
trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it
commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would
like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle
from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already
dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who
will some day stand where I am standing.

      Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long
sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of
the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of
this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the
human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because
only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must
learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to
be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in
his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the
universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and
honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he
labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which
nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all,
without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving
no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

      Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among
and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy
enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last
ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still
be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I
refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an
inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of
compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to
write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting
his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and
compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The
poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the
props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.



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