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

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 it
were your favorite syllables. The absolute, you said, is where and what all
science comes from. It took me many hard lessons to come to terms with that and
to answer, as was so often called for: "Absolutely."

But I began with: Ab, baa, baa, ab, ab, baa, and after those first bits I got
myself the drink, but then my cage was tipped up over a puddle and I fell out
and landed in the mud. Unwashed, just as I was, I was tied to a pole and carried
to the poets palace and taken in through a. small back door. Hooded poets came.
"Sing," they said. All I knew was my, "Ab, baa, baa," but now it wasn't enough.
I tried: "Cha, poo, tut," and was told to go back to ab and yet ab was wrong. I
was pinched and pulled and slapped at until, three days later, I could answer
properly with: "Ab-so-lu-la-la," and when I could answer with the "word" for
poet in all its syllables as we, in my homeland might say: "Po-et-ti-ca-la-la"
--when I could say these two, I was taken to the president,
Humble-Master-of-the-Poem, he who is called The-Uncertained-Among-the-Certained,
and also sometimes The-Certained-Among-the-Uncertained. Not as I was, all muddy
and red, but washed and dressed in a backless robe of your form of silk, with
the worms that made it still attached here and there so that all could see what
it was woven of and marvel. I didn't know then why it had no back to it.

I was not allowed...of course not allowed to actually see the president of poems