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authorCase Duckworth2015-04-18 13:59:29 -0700
committerCase Duckworth2015-04-18 13:59:29 -0700
commitbccfb001ad3c250c2fd7c11b92c247abefe8233e (patch)
treea1ca5693c9d350bfd1d38ddf503539633b508607 /front-matter/words-meaning.txt
parentRevise abstract & add to index.html (diff)
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Move frontmatter to front-matter; add colophon
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1---
2title: Words and meaning
3genre: prose
4
5id: words-meaning
6toc: "Words and meaning"
7
8project:
9 title: Elegies for alternate selves
10 class: elegies
11 order: 4
12 prev:
13 - title: And
14 link: and
15 next:
16 - title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
17 link: apollo11
18...
19
20"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening that it does not quite," Jack Gilbert opens his poem "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart."
21In a similar vein, Hass's "Meditation at Legunitas" states, "A word is elegy to what it signifies."
22These poems get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.
23
24Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind.
25Humans are constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals, people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories.
26A favorite saying of mine is that "Everything is everything," a tautology that I like, because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because every time I say it people think I'm being [disingenuous][].
27But what I mean by "everything is everything" is that there is a continuity to existence that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it through language.
28Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is not a stone, a leaf, a door.
29Most of the time I think of language as limiting, as defining a thing as the [inverse of everything][] is not.
30
31In this way, "everything is everything" becomes "everything is nothing," which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people off.
32To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the same point on the circle---of numbers, of the universe, whatever.
33Maybe it's because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is cyclical, or maybe it's some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it is that's how I see the world, because I'm working against the limitations that language sets upon us.
34I think that's the role of the poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around, at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and cannot get to it.
35A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can't get all the way there, and never will.
36A poem is doing this and coming back and showing what happened as it happened.
37Exegesis is hard because a really good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to say what it's saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will fail.
38A poem is a kernel of existence.
39It is a description of the kernel. [It is][].
40
41[disingenuous]: likingthings.html
42[inverse of everything]: i-am.html
43[It is]: arspoetica.html