Thanks for the support on yesterday's post.  After putting it up, I felt a bit naked and vulnerable (and, no, the irony is not lost on me that looking at women's naked bodies is what prompted the thinking that left me feeling naked).  I'm quite honest and forthcoming by nature, but some topics are harder than others.

If I weren't participating in NaBloPoMo, I would probably skip writing a blog post today.  After yesterday's post, I wrote an even more personal piece that I'm proud of but saving for myself (or for my book one day, ha).  I also read what probably amounts to hundreds of posts about SELF magazine's photographic manipulation of Kelly Clarkson and a lot of posts about Cintra Wilson's classist and sizeist NY Times piece about the J.C. Penney's in Herald Square.  (I can't even link to the myriad of articles about these two pieces, especially the SELF magazine/Kelly Clarkson dust-up.  Click here to read SELF magazine's editor's response to the photo manipulation and see if you are not totally infuriated.  You can Google "Self magazine Kelly Clarkson" and come across the nearly 200,000 sites talking about it.)

So what to do when your brain is a-swirl and fuzzy, and right after you spend some hard time trying to love yourself, you're bombarded by the same-old "You're not a size four so you suck" thinking?  I turn to art.  Namely, Rilke.

I wrote about this poem on December 30th when my blog was only a few days old, but I'm thinking about it again today because this poem pops into my head when I feel like I'm facing something new and can either hide or take the challenge.

~~~

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translation by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

~~~

My favorite living poet said this about it:

MARK DOTY: It's interesting that it's an experience of standing before a figure of a god, but in the 20th century. This god is broken, this god's head isn't there. The speaker tries to make a connection. Attempts to link himself to that source, even broken or lost, of authority, power, vision.

~~~

Authority, power, vision - broken, lost.  Yes.

You must change your life.