Building from scratch

I used to memorize poetry when I was very young and performing Shakespeare on the stage. I tend to remember the verses in strange moments. Sometimes, a line strikes me as apropos and I am stunned. St. Vincent Millay was one: "There are a hundred places where I fear to go, so with his memory they brim..." And then, when I cannot sleep because I have nightmares of Sjors and my heart races, I feel Teasedale at my fingertips, "You are the rarest soul I ever knew: lover of beauty, Knightliest and best". But he wasn't the Knightliest and best unless you count the Knightly actions of the famous betrayers of that order: Sir Brian De Bois Guilbert or Lancelot. But he was the rarest soul I ever knew, and he was a lover of beauty and he read historical tomes like they were a pornography addiction.  So that attribution is accurate.

But Kipling has my vote these days:
"If  you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
Or see the things you gave your life to broken
And stoop, and build 'em up with worn out tools..."

 "If" was geared towards manhood but this distillation makes me think that there must be a linkage between false testimony and the loss of life's work. Under what circumstances do people give false testimony? For personal gain? To destroy someone else? Possibly both. What sort of people do this? What sort of people have this done to them?  Clearly only people who have something they are passionate about - else why would they 'give their life' to it?

I have spent days and weeks with my worn out tools, hammering away at projects and programs that will survive (Inshallah!) in spite of this nasty period of lies. I fucking hate what they did to me; I hate that Sjors lied about me; but I try not to think about it. I'm too busy adjusting the bolts and referring to my blueprints.