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Amazingly, when I wrote this post about the freedom I have experienced in my conversion from political person to poet and ended with a Neruda poem I had not known about Pablo’s  The Book of Questions. Completed just a few months before his death, Neruda embodies the celebrated role of the poet, to ask questions only, and not engage in a pretense of having answers. From the translator’s introduction:

 These poems remind us that living in a state of visionary surrender to the elemental questions, free of the quiet desperation of clinging too tightly to answers, may be our greatest act of faith.

I have been contemplating quietly what faith is, or rather, in which direction and at what object I am supposed to blast my laser beam of faith. But perhaps faith doesn’t need an object. Maybe it just means chilling the fuck out. (more…)