Corpoetry Wrisk Mmmmmgmnt

Prevention is the obedient son of fear. Doing whatever it can to keep its father satisfied. Most humans have a bit of this parent in them. Whether they’re daydreaming (and writing) about a machine that could predict everything and prevent the downfall of society (a dominant fear-category during the cold war, resurgent) or a university student scared that they might not be able to access every piece of information ever created in their own lifetime (with predictable results), there’s a primary bugaboo that leads people to want to predict and prevent. Or, if you work for an insurance company, it’s the whole purpose of the organization (though to be fair, they mostly do prediction and hoard the extra money). Are there alternatives to living like this? To fanning the flames of fear into a blaze and using that blaze to forge swords and Doomsday Machines? Perhaps. Perhaps there’s a way to get to the bottom of the fears instead of riding the steam out the smokestack, and stop the fire. There might be ways to listen carefully to what one fears, trying to understand what pain or pain stories created it, and change the beliefs that have spread up to become zero percent contained fear-wildfires. I suggest poetry and writing as options, one a bit more rhythmic and sideways-confounding, the other a way to put the learnings from poetry into sentences that can be learned from more directly. A third route, more direct, is to feel what’s happening without words. To let go of words entirely in some activity (meditation, dancing, yoga, playing the zither) and get in closer touch with the parts of one that have no expression in words. Such an activity might feed more deeply-felt poetry, leading to compelling written insights. Or it might go in some other order in some other medium. But I think it might be time to dig to the roots, rather than swinging in the wind on the upper branches on this tree of fear (metaphors remain one of the manifestations of my fear of being direct, from the pain of feeling unfairly directed & misunderstood).