The word crisis is all the rage these days. You can't read a newspaper article without finding it repeated throughout like a sickening mantra, not to mention the rather worn-out rhetoric equating 'crisis' with 'opportunity', blah-blah-blah, on the basis of some misinterpretation of ancient Chinese wisdom (or so it seems). As if life itself hasn't always been pervaded by crises; as if poetry itself wasn't, as the Portuguese poet Luiza Neto Jorge put it, "the sense(s) of crisis".
I know of no other woman writer who has so movingly reminded us of the original - and more hopeful - sense of the word, from the Greek: krinen, 'decide'; krisis, 'decision'... Here it goes:
In time of crisis, we summon up our strength.
Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: it depends on the long preparation of the self to be used.
In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for our selves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And we turn; for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act. The time of the turning may be very long. It may hardly exist.
(Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry.)
3 comments:
Lovely post, i enjoyed it. Decision really gives crisis its true hopeful meaning.
There's a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes: "If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I would not pass it round. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't embrace trouble; that's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it."
"Porque é que se fala tanto de crise? Em grego, krísis significa decisão. E decisão vem de cisão [scission]. As cisões aparecem associadas ao caos e à instabilidade, gerando indecisão. A crise é um momento de indecisão que apela à decisão. A crise deve ser entendida no sentido em que os paradigmas emergentes da contemporaneidade são os da indecisão. Tudo é instável."
José Machado Pais, 2001, Ganchos, tachos e biscates: Jovens, trabalho e futuro. Porto: Âmbar., p. 20
Thanks for the comment and the quote, thinker. What else can I add? Couldn't agree more.
PJ, long time no hear. ":o)
Agradeço-te imenso a referência, que, no contexto em que é feita - jovens, trabalho e futuro... - faz na verdade todo o sentido. Só não consigo é vislumbrar, hélas, as de-cisões que poderão daí decorrer. Parece que estamos todos paralisados ou encurralados no momento da in-decisão...
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