Failure Validates Faith

The heart of thinking:
             drawing distinctions
The heart of academics:
             arguing them out.
The heart of liberal art:
             relating them.

   “Talent of the Room” *
 
Crossing the rubric con parting
red sees into the wildness toward
promised lands & frontiers yet
unknown: nothing better  than
waiting for Gödel to finish my
consistency & completeness
theorems.  
 
Flannery sat stunned studious
every morning: even if nothing’s
happening, it’s important  I be
present when some news comes in.
 
Bly says ideas are flocks of birds
roosting in his skull after flying by
everyone else to where there’s
room in the inn.
 
     Success confirms Belief.
     Failure validates Faith.
     I’m not spiritual worth a
     damn but religious as hell
     Religion is so far beyond
     my Good & Evil damned
     moral sense, it’ s not
     even  funny.
 
             
* Michael Ventura
http://kelleyeskridge.com/other-things/the-talent-of-the-room/
 
Most people can blame their sellouts on the institutions they work for, or on
the way everybody else does business, or on the political climate, or whatever.
The vast majority of us are simply hired to do a job and then ordered to cut
corners, and we feel we have little choice. But nobody orders anybody to
become a writer. And nobody becomes a writer without dreams of glory and
art. Writers do their selling out consciously, alone in their rooms, where they
can’t help but know what they’re doing, adjusting sentence after sentence to
what’s saleable, to what the publishers or the editors or the studios want. It
takes a while for those adjustments to become reflexes — a long while of
whittling away what’s best in yourself.