So we've been asked to blog about epiphanies, and, true to form, I'd experienced one just before Sexson asked us to do so, so here it is. In my creative writing class this semester the professor has told us that if we have a story that we're currently working on, we can use the exercises in her class to further that story instead of trying to develop a new one. Mine has been a story about a group of witches trying to...you guessed it...
Kill off their gods.
What are the chances of that, right? At any rate, I knew that was taking place and didn't really think about it until I sat down to read Stevens one night and found How to Live. What to Do. I was so excited that I decided to memorize it on the spot, even though it has been a few years since I've tried to memorize anything even that long. As I worked on it, though, I found that each time I recited a line it made a little bit more sense to me.
Here's a tip for memorizing longer poems: go backwards. Start with the last stanza and memorize it, because people tend to remember the first few lines really well and then the further they go the harder things are to remember.
Anyway, I was doing that and suddenly realized that the poem begins right where my story is set to end, and the depth of what these people are trying to do, and it hits me so hard that all I can do is mutter to myself. They're killing the gods. I thought, once, that when they did that the world would just crumble around them, without the gods that they once knew to hold it together, but now I know that's not true. They are just going to create a new world, a Lucretian world. A world a little better than the one they are in right now.
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