about summary refs log tree commit diff stats
path: root/words-meaning.txt
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'words-meaning.txt')
-rw-r--r--words-meaning.txt60
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 60 deletions
diff --git a/words-meaning.txt b/words-meaning.txt deleted file mode 100644 index ee87ad0..0000000 --- a/words-meaning.txt +++ /dev/null
@@ -1,60 +0,0 @@
1---
2title: Words and meaning
3genre: prose
4
5project:
6 title: Elegies for alternate selves
7 css: elegies
8 order: 4
9 prev:
10 title: And
11 link: and
12 next:
13 title: On seeing the panorama of the Apollo 11 landing site
14 link: apollo11
15...
16
17"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, / and frightening
18that it does not quite," Jack Gilbert opens his poem "The Forgotten
19Dialect of the Heart." In a similar vein, Hass's "Meditation at
20Legunitas" states, "A word is elegy to what it signifies." These poems
21get to the heart of language, and express the old duality of thought: by
22giving a word to an entity, it is both tethered and made meaningful.
23
24Words are the inevitable byproduct of an analytic mind. Humans are
25constantly classifying and reclassifying ideas, objects, animals,
26people, into ten thousand arbitrary categories. A favorite saying of
27mine is that "Everything is everything," a tautology that I like,
28because it gets to the core of the human linguistic machine, and because
29every time I say it people think I'm being [disingenuous][]. But what I mean
30by "everything is everything" is that there is a continuity to existence
31that works beyond, or rather underneath, our capacity to understand it
32through language. Language by definition compartmentalizes reality, sets
33this bit apart from that bit, sets up boundaries as to what is and is
34not a stone, a leaf, a door. Most of the time I think of language as
35limiting, as defining a thing as the [inverse of everything][] is not.
36
37In this way, "everything is everything" becomes "everything is nothing,"
38which is another thing I like to say and something that pisses people
39off. To me, infinity and zero are the same, two ways of looking at the
40same point on the circle–of numbers, of the universe, whatever. Maybe
41it's because I wear an analogue watch, and so my view of time is
42cyclical, or maybe it's some brain trauma I had in vitro, but whatever it
43is that's how I see the world, because I'm working against the
44limitations that language sets upon us. I think that's the role of the
45poet, or of any artist: to take the over-expansive experience of
46existing and to boil it down, boil and boil away until there is the
47ultimate concentrate at the center that is what the poem talks around,
48at, etc., but never of, because it is ultimately made of language and
49cannot get to it. A poem is getting as close as possible to the speed of
50light, to absolute zero, to God, while knowing that it can't get all the
51way there, and never will. A poem is doing this and coming back and
52showing what happened as it happened. Exegesis is hard because a really
53good poem will be just that, it will be the most basic and best way to
54say what it's saying, so attempts to say the same thing differently will
55fail. A poem is a kernel of existence. It is a description of the
56kernel. [It is][].
57
58[disingenuous]: likingthings.html
59[inverse of everything]: i-am.html
60[It is]: arspoetica.html