I spent last night talking to (primarily) homeless people with a fantastic group that exchanges a hot dog for a story. Any story. Preferably, true, but they will listen regardless. It is amazing the secrets that people will tell. Many of them like to start at the beginning and tell us how they got to where they are. Now, the human condition is all I can see and hear and feel. Too many ladies walking the same streets over and over. Too many men medicating. Too many people without hope and direction and any idea that it doesn't have to be this way. So many lonely, lonely people.
As usual, there is no easy solution or cure for the human condition; and it is this weight that is going to spare my bit of virtual space from more philosophizing about home and context as I get ready to head to Montana for a spell.
and we come back to the human condition, since I cannot escape. I went to a small time poetry slam downtown a week or two ago. It was fascinating. I am convinced I will never find more exquisite people watching if I search over and through half the globe.
I swear, nobody feels comfortable until they are the most outrageous form of weird here. You would think that abnormal people would feel at home in such a crowd, but I think they felt like they've been displaced, one-upped, and turned out. It is not a gathering of idiosyncrasies but a parade that somehow became a pageant of sorts. Oh, Portland. Competitive over quirks. Brazen and bold but not yet confidant. Everybody has to keep moving before you see too much of them.
And the poetry. Oh yes. I was surprised to find two categories: sex and questions. Sex, sure. It's Portland. Questions. Really? But it is the questioning and the uncertainty and the doubts and the... lost feeling that everyone connects with, writes about, shares in. I guess. And words are apparently the answers. The very words that may or may not have any meaning to begin with are the tools that the slammers go about looking for answers.
And I get it. Of course the poets will go to their art, their trade, their comfort for the answers. But I don't get how time after time words themselves were said to be the answers. Go no further. Are words it? Is there a language so universal that it actually fills the holes that beg questions of honesty? Have I been making all of my life entirely too complicated? I need to search the words themselves for my answers. Truly, I am lost here.
Perhaps, it is the feeling of not knowing that is terrifying. If you can describe it, then you have nothing to fear. If you can tack words to it, stuff it full... If you find the right words... If the words fit and fall and paint a picture bright enough... the terrifying unknown becomes familiar and is tamed. Then the feeling of falling finally goes away. Maybe. Ug. I wish. But it will take more than words to fill the heart of man, to make it knowable, and to give us hope.
Our emotions and our fear keep us honest enough to keep looking... but I do not like them today. I want to bind up the hurt and the hopelessness and carry it to the sun. Maybe that is a fire hot enough to consume them.
This almost makes me want to come back to Portland, if only to listen to people who are unafraid to express themselves.
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