"Carol Emshwiller - Acceptance Speech (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

fat
state I'm in now. It is by them that I have been raised up to this point. Now
it
will be my poems that will fly from your mastheads, hang over your doorways,
be
carried through your streets on banners, and worn across the tops of your
caps.
You hadn't noticed my curls at first, but they grew long in my captivity, so
that after a few months you knew that I must be a creature to be reckoned
with.
(I paid for a cool, perfumy drink -- my first taste of such things as you
drink
every day -- with my first poem, not knowing, then, its true value. Not even
knowing that it was a poem.)

Suddenly you started with different sorts of tests, though whether tests or
initiation, I'm still not sure. You don't speak to me of that other time
before
I wore the robes and ribbons of my station. Perhaps it's beneath my dignity to
speak about it now, but now you'll not fault me for it because I have already
had a poet's full share of punishment.

You began the new stage by throwing mud and rocks at me. I couldn't guess why.
Sometimes it seemed inadvertent -- almost like a tic of some sort. You weren't
even looking toward my cage when you did it. Or I wasn't looking. Once I was
hit
on the head and didn't know it until I came to with a lump behind my ear. Why,
I
wondered, this change from mazes to cruelty?

And you were saying "Confess," over and over. (I knew by then the syllables
for
it.) Confess what? Then there came a series of small annoyances: tacks on the
floor of my cage, crumbs on my pallet, rotten things in my soup, shells in my
nuts, hulls in my grains. "Confess. Admit," is all you would say. I had no
idea
what to confess to, and, as my curls grew yet longer, you became more and more
frantic. I began to be able to tell your moods by the way your ears lay (flat
against your hair if you were angry) and by the way your tails flipped from
side
to side.
Being a poet is knowing when to stop.
Being a poet is knowing when to begin.
(You said these.)

I finally discovered, through dint of your training, that I did, after all,
have
the knack of the contemplation of the absolute. Though, at first, the concept
of
the absolute escaped me utterly, you lived by it every day. The syllables for